@Imperor @dndhomebrew @[email protected] @[email protected] @askgamemasters @worldbuilding @ttrpgs

The question makes one really huge assumption: that "couples" mostly want to reproduce and breed.

That's not really the case. In the real world, there's a lot of cultural pressures that push people to reproduce, but a lot of them end up being systems of oppression: someone who is pregnant or raising children suddenly has a lot less upward social mobility, and less time to do things like organize and protest

@Imperor @dndhomebrew @[email protected] @[email protected] @askgamemasters @worldbuilding @ttrpgs

Procreation and biological children are generally not seen as inherently superior to adoptive children. As long as inheritances are solved most of the time it doesn't matter that much. Unless you have titles (or other stuff) passed down "by blood". So there is no shame in adopting, no accusation of being "lesser" parents.

Let the loving parents, no matter the biology, adopt and have that happy core family.

Or do magic.

@Imperor @dndhomebrew @[email protected] @[email protected] @askgamemasters @worldbuilding @ttrpgs

In D&D I assume that most species just don't cross. The half-somethings are the weird exceptions, which is why we have stats for those.

This is entirely a practical decision, though. If I were running a fantasy game in a more flexible system I'd entertain all kinds of interesting character origins. I'm just not willing to try and fit the square peg of D&D into the round hole of stuff that game does poorly.

Generally I tend to say that crossbreeding doesn’t happen without magic (for example, I once ran a draconic sorcerer who wanted to find a way to continue the magic bloodline without running risk of creating chimeric hybrids that suffered from terrible health problems incurred by hybridizing random species, and his eventual solution was to make a potion that would cause him to only pass on his Sorcery, with the children being the exact same species as the mother).

Adoption is a pretty easy way around that though. A lot of couples DO want kids and that’s fine (especially in fantasy settings where having a large family might just be a lot more normal). And given the levels of carnage that can happen over course of a campaign, there are probably plenty of orphans around from the latest catastrophic event.

Or you can always just get a surrogate.

Honestly depending on the nature of the relationship, if one member is significantly longer-lived than the other and they want to raise a child, then the adoption/surrogate thing might even be chosen over regular crossbreeding just so that the long-life parent doesn’t have to outlive their child.

And hey, if you can’t conceive naturally, you can fuck as recklessly as you like as often as you like