The Pregnant PC: Handling Odd Character Creation Requests in Dungeons and Dragons and Other RPGs

3 Wise DMs

Would you allow a player to bring a pregnant PC into your game? That’s the question listener Joel brings to us for this episode. And while at first, it caught us off-guard, we realized this doesn’t need to be a deal-breaker. In fact, not many PC backstory requests need to be a deal-breaker. It all depends on how you implement them in your fantasy game.

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave take a deeper look at how to DM a pregnant character without ruining their game. We also look at the starting character requests we’ve gotten and how we made them work in our campaigns.

1:00 A listener question: A new PC wants to start with a 2-month pregnant character, is this a veto situation?

5:00 A few important questions: Who wants to play the character, why, and how does it fit the table?

10:00 As long as the character isn’t disruptive to the table, why veto it? Talk to the player about their expectations of how it plays out in the game

15:00 Look at how books and TV shows handle pregnant characters – is the baby supernatural itself?

19:00 When would we veto a character concept?

26:00 How DM Tony’s upgraded Wand of Wonder faired in field testing

33:00 Wild PC requests we’ve gotten, from doomed nobles to ghost PCs, and how we handled them

41:00 Old-Timers: DMing PCs that want to start the game as older, experienced characters

49:00 Final Thoughts