In reference to one of Charlie's recent posts, Lindevi over at Triple Crit mentioned that not many folks would be up for getting their character pregnant in a game. The fact that I've never seen a PC get knocked up certainly lends credence to that. This got me thinking though.

It's a given that the adventuring life isn't exactly the safest environment for a pregnant lady. My wife was wary of merely walking on ice, much less wading into battle. Similarly, pregnancy isn't conducive to adventuring either. It'd be a lot more difficult to leave camp and continue your epic journey when you're contending with morning sickness.

What I realized, however, was that I've also never seen a pregnant NPC in a game. They don't have to be adventurers. They're just living their normal lives.

In a fantasy setting, you're dealing with a period that bore a 50% mortality rate by the age of five. That means that a baby has only a coin flip of a chance of surviving to reach that age. It also means that people must have been having children in large enough quantities to maintain the population despite that high mortality rate. Given this data, a good proportion of women of child-bearing age that players meet in a medieval setting should be with child. Yet I've never seen it.

There's simply a lot of sensitive stuff orbiting around this subject. In RPGs we become kind of inured to stories that include violence. Throw in a pregnant woman, however, and a lot of people become uncomfortable with that same violence. This is far from the only such subject too. This is just one example of a topic around which we must tread lightly.

Heavy Subjects

With just a few minutes, I can think of several subjects that could be cringe-worthy under the wrong circumstances. Here's a small selection.

Violence Against Animals

As I mentioned, most gamers can face horrific in-game carnage without batting an eye. This is not always the case when the violence involves animals. I've heard several stories of groups that couldn't include wolves or attack dogs as a threat to the party, because one of the players just couldn't handle it.

Violence Against Children

Even more prevalently, a lot of people don't even want to hear about bad things happening to children. When this is included in games, it's often in a very vague form. You might hear of the foul deeds, enough at least to prove the evilness of the enemy, and to trigger the protective instincts of the players. You don't often include graphic details though.

Crime

This isn't a topic that I would even have thought twice about until one of our recent Shadowrun games. The characters were doing what runners do, most of it illegal, when they got into a conflict with the law. In that game, the law is made up of private security forces, but my players generally referred to them as "cops". In the middle of the fight, we realized one of the player's sons was in the room, and the window was open facing that player's neighbor, who happened to have been a cop. All that talk about shooting at "cops" sounded a bit different in retrospect.

Torture

Having been in a game where a party of paladins and other supposedly "good" PCs resorted to torture, I can say that I was uncomfortable. Not so much at the event itself, but that the characters were doing it in the name of "good." The justification at the time, of course, was that the enemy was "evil". Is anything a good character does made kosher as long as it's done to an evil character?

Sexual Violence

Most of us don't want to touch this one with a ten foot pole. I've included it in a game exactly once when a group of PCs saved an NPC cousin from the evil intentions of some thugs. The heroes arrived before the implied events occurred, but I was very careful not to go into details. Still, I as GM was a little uncomfortable with just the implications.

In Stories

Do subjects like these have any place in our stories? If they reflect the world we live in, we probably have to include both the good and the bad. Fiction in general should be able to touch on these things to tell a story, and to reflect on our world.

Can we use these topics in the stories we tell in games specifically? How bad are the subjects we're willing to cover? Do we use them for the right reasons? Can we include them tastefully?

In Games

When the players in my game saved the NPC from implied sexual violence, I knew it was something they could handle. I had included it for several reasons: to demonstrate the locals' animosity toward the PC's ethnicity, to trigger a conflict between the PCs and the locals, and to very intentionally ratchet up the seriousness of the game. It's not something I would do often, both because it would become less effective, and because it would belittle the seriousness of the subject itself.

Of course, your own answers to those questions depend on everyone involved. I can't speak on the comfort level of your group. Maybe they're okay with violence against animals, but not children. Maybe they're alright with romance (in a throwback to one of Bryan's posts), but not adultery.

One caveat is that I wouldn't aim these sort of things at the PCs themselves. It's one thing to depict violence against children, and another to depict it against a PC's children. If the player is at all emotionally invested in the character, that's going to get really bad really fast.

In Summary

As usual with games, it mostly boils down to knowing your group. Will they be comfortable? Can they treat these subjects like adults? If so, using more mature topics can add an edge of grittiness and realism that's hard to get otherwise. Even so, use them sparingly. Most of us game for fun and escapism, after all,and not to be beaten over the head with horrible stuff- no matter how gritty and realistic the campaign setting.

Have you included mature topics in your games? Have they resulted in cringe-worthy incidents? Do you think these topics have a place in our hobby? Let us know in the comments!