Chocobo Breeding

[meggido]

Hello everyone. I just started running a campaign, and one of my players wants to be a chocobo breeder. I dont really have an issue with this, but I have no idea how often a Chocobo would lay eggs.
Thoughts?

[Manly Man]

I would just go and base it off of the breeding rates of other large, flightless birds (ostriches, emus, cassowaries, etcetera). Ostriches, for example, have a breeding season that starts in spring and goes until the beginning of autumn (five to six months of the year), and shortly after mating, the hens will start laying eggs, about one every other day. If left alone, they produce twelve to fifteen eggs, but if you keep taking them from the hen, they can produce up to eighty (forty to fifty is more normal) eggs if the bird is in good health and kept well-fed while in favorable conditions.

However, considering that ostriches are not magical chickenhorses, for the sake of balance I'd say that they have a breeding season of three to four months (what time of year depends on what kind of chocobo, seeing as some of them are kind of elementally-aligned), and they produce 2d4-1 eggs over the course of a week, no more than one a day. Taking an egg away has a 50% chance of them producing another one, extending the time that they continue to lay eggs as normal until they fail to produce one that replaces the removed egg, at which point they will no longer lay eggs until they mate again. The time between mating and when they start laying eggs is 1d6 days. After the egg-laying is finished, incubation takes four to six weeks before they hatch, whether the incubation is natural or artificial; the male and female, if left to incubate the eggs naturally, take shifts to sit on them, females during the day and males at night.

This is just some stuff off the top of my head, so make of that what you will.

[What's in the box?]

You know a LOT about the mating habits of ostriches.