The Barbarian and the Baby

(This was written for my Worlds of Design column at ENWorld.org, but was rejected by both outgoing and incoming editors, because they avoid any discussion that might compare genders.)

I read a long discussion recently that started with a GM asking others how to cope with a player who wanted to be a female barbarian fighter who carried her newborn baby along with her at all times, including adventures.

What?!

A major point of RPGs is that they DO relate to the real world - they are not abstract. How does anyone think that a warrior could do this without the baby dying soon? Even if the fighter somehow managed to protect the baby in melee (yeah, right), the first area effect spell that caused damage would kill the baby with its one hit point. (If you’ve ever had the old D&D familiar with its two hit dice, you know that sooner or later as you rise in levels the familiar is going to be turned into a popsicle or a burnt marshmallow. At least you didn’t lose hit points permanently when that happened. My original MU character lost three by ninth level and chose not to have any more.)

Your response depends on whether your campaign is a game or a playground. If it’s the latter, you might want to accommodate extremely unusual requests of players, because there’s no danger of actually losing a game. And “all about me” is part of the package. If it’s a game, then the barbarian’s desire is a nonstarter.

Some players wisely pointed out that the player who wanted to do this was going to be a big problem in general, and would probably be very unhappy when the baby inevitably was killed.

As any student of history knows, female fighters in the world of melee (pre-gunpowder) were vanishingly rare. Even with the “great equalizer” of the gun, they have been extremely rare until quite recently. (Effective bows through most of history required a lot of strength and size for use, no substitute for guns.) This has nothing to do with females lacking courage or killer instinct, as anyone knows who watches some women’s professional boxing or MMA matches. It’s a matter of two things: women are much smaller than men on average, and their hormones don’t produce dense muscle the way men’s do. There’s a reason why there are weight classes in combat sports, because the bigger and inevitably stronger person almost always beats the smaller person if of roughly equal skill. In other words, size matters a lot and brawn wins out in a melee world.

Aside from the problem of physical capability, there’s second reason. Until recently it was difficult for a woman to have sex and consistently avoid pregnancy. A pregnant woman is an easy target for physical violence. Furthermore, after pregnancy someone has to take care of the children, who will depend on women’s milk for a year or even two after birth. The legendary Amazons solved the problem by having no men around and no children. But the Amazons never existed. Moderns solve the problem with contraceptives and baby formula, both fairly recent inventions.

I don’t run “all about me” campaigns, I run games that are semi-military and mission-based. So it would be easy for me to cope with someone like this. I’d tell them first that the baby would certainly die. Second, the barbarian fighter would realize this and refuse to carry a baby along even if the player wanted to (no, players can’t make their characters do “anything”). Third, the other characters (not necessarily players) would realize that the baby would jeopardize the party in many ways (especially if they needed to be stealthy) and refuse to have anything to do with it or its mother. And if those didn’t persuade, I would Just Say No. Every GM has to Just Say No at one point or another or the campaign will become a brain-fever playground as players do whatever they want, however little sense it may make. I draw the line sooner than some people do.

Remarkably enough, some of the respondents actually tried to think of ways to avoid the death of the baby: for example, having the baby and the mother somehow share hit points and armor. You must be kidding! Why make up bogus rules just to accommodate this peculiar (and wholly unrealistic) desire? But if you like “All about Me” campaigns, if you like playgrounds, or if you have some other reason to disagree with me, as always I’m describing what I do, not prescribing what you should do.


For a lengthy discussion of the biological differences between men and women that affect athletic performance, see some of the answers (by both male and female) to this Quora question:
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-we-still-have-separate-men-and-women-categories-in-sports-when-we-both-are-equal.
Equality is legal and social, not physical.