The right way to do it depends on your players. Seriously. Different tables will require different approaches. Different players will be comfortable with different things.
Ironically, this is one of those situations where borrowing from sexual BDSM roleplay makes your game less uncomfortable.
You see, those wacky doms, subs, sadists, and masochists have put a great deal of effort into finding safe and fun ways to roleplay things that should be horribly traumatic.
1)Your entire group needs to sit down and have a very frank discussion about your comfort zones, limits, and boundaries and what everyone wants to get out of the game. This is a good idea even if you don't intend to do anything squicky, as it ensures that everyone is on the same page.
2)Safewords. They're extremely useful. They don't need to be actual safewords unless you're LARPing or something, but every player needs the ability to stop the game at any time, and safewords are a tried and true mechanism. The important thing is that the players have control and can just say no at any time. The ability to just throw your dice away and stop playing is, of course, assumed in any tabletop game. But it helps if its codified in some way, and easy to implement without hard feelings.
Um, no. Really. As a gameplay element, it's not terrible but can be uncomfortable. As a narrative device it's absolutely horrible. And treating rape as shorthand for ultimate evil really is insensitive as all fuck.Cyberzombie wrote: Finding raped NPCs is fine though, I think it's a great way to set up a villain as being evil. D&D players tend to be desensitized to mass murder, so having something more personal like rape is a good way to freshen up the evil in your game.
If you're going to include rape as a narrative device, then you really should do some research and treat it with the gravity and nuance it deserves. Including it just to prove that Rapey McEvilrapist is a bad guy isn't that.
As for playing it for laughs, fuck no. That trivializes.
False allegations of rape, while not terrible narrative devices, perpetuate an unfortunate stereotype and potentially make things uncomfortable. It's probably better to use something less hot button to allege unless you're doing an Aesop about the presumption of innocence.
Edit:
This is rather unfortunate because it's wholly unnecessary.the article wrote: Dungeons & Dragons: Why do orcs rape women and create so many half-orcs that they’re a separate and distinct race in the D&D universe? Because they’re EVIL. DUH.
I do remember an article written by Ed Greenwood what basically said that most half-orcs in the forgotten realms are the product of consensual relations. Because, really, when you have a bunch of humans and a bunch of orcs living near each other on an untamed frontier, then it's sort of inevitable that some of them will shack up.
And while Greenwood's article did hit some unfortunate button from the other side by mentioning mother-daughter polygamy (because if you're shacking up with a widow who has adult daughters, they might want some living, too, apparantly) the general gist of it was good. You can totally have half-orcs without rape. And most human-orc liaisons will be romantic, not violent.