[Molly]

Please don't take this a personal attack on anyone, but my general feeling is that hardcore roleplayers often take roleplay far to serious and tend to forget the 'play' part of it. Don't forget that roleplay, like most other aspects of a game is there to entertain the players. Just as some people object to slaughtering hoards of innocent creatures, some object to anything that has even the remotest connection with sex. Yet there are other players that immensely enjoy one or the other - or both. To me one is as good as the other, so why not cater for all, as long as it can be done within the limits of good taste? And why would you demand realism of one aspect, when so much else in fantasy games are so totally unrealistic?

In in our game we have a mix of hardcoded, imm run and roleplayed 'family affairs', and it is actually one of the most popular of our many features - with all the flaws most of the players love it.

We don't have hardcoded 'mudsex' - (although I believe 'emoted' cybersex is fairly popular among some players) - but we do have a 'Romance' code, that allows players to date, get engaged, get married, break up and get a divorce, which all is displayed in their player info. It also allows them to have children, but you don't have to be married for it, and it is the female's choice whether she wants to. SHE seduces the male, and he consents - or not - to father the baby. After a rather long and partly tedious pregnancy - (it affects your movepoints negatively) - the woman goes into labour, and finally a coded stork delivers the baby (boy or girl is random).

After this certainly some females dump there newborns in a bag or a house and go hunting as if nothing happened. But for the onces that like to carry it out in roleplay, we provide the imm-run option to 'buy' a personalized desc and script for the brat, together with a place in our Daycare. After a while they can switch the baby object to a toddler mob, that follows you around when wanted. And after that, the ones that want to carry the roleplay out to its fullest potential get some other player to create an alt with the name of their brat, and then roleplay it into maturity, which often takes several months, since roleplaying kids, and in particular troublesome teenagers, can be pretty fun. For a new player, this can provide a rare chance to get accepted by one of the 'prominent' families, which is an extra bonus.

I 'm the first to admit that our brand of roleplay usually isn't of the highest quality, and probably would make hardcore roleplayers look down their long noses at us in contempt, since RP isn't enforced in 4D. But over the years some of the most memorable RP events have centred around the coded babies and families; dynasties have been formed, jealousy outbreaks have shaken the community, babies have been kidnapped from the daycare with demands for ransom, teenagers have run away from home and formed unwanted relationships with partners that their 'parents' disapproved of immensely. And when one player happened to get twins due to a code bug, it led to a long intrigue, where her estranged former husband kidnapped one of the twins to raise it within a rivalring clan. The mother's elaborate plans to get the girl back, which involved a proposed 'switch' to give the father custom of the boy instead, a baby doll look-alike provided by the imms, and a daring escape with both the babies, held the entire mud engaged and entertained for weeks.

As long as something is fun, and the players like it, who are we to scoff?