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[CaptOtter]

The only thing I'd add as far as comparing the two sets of games, which dovetails a little with what monteparnas said about crossover, is the issue of power balance. It's very important to some groups; less so to others. In short, if you play M:tAw, you can expect the various spheres to do more or less the same thing (within their respective thematic wheelhouses) at whatever level--the first Rank of every sphere is (to my knowledge) going to give you some sensory abilities. In essence, no Rank 1 is going to be vastly more useful than any other Rank 1; ditto Ranks 2s, 3s, etc. However, while there...

[CaptOtter]

The only thing I can think of that hasn't already been covered above is a write-up on Indian Kindred in either Blood Magic or Blood Sacrifice. In one of those two, there's a chapter on the Indian blood magic/Thaumaturgy analogue called "Prapti." Within that write up, they talk about different castes of Kindred, the clans typically found in each caste, what their respective roles are, and who is allowed (or expected) to learn Prapti. In addition to the Ravnos, there are some Ventrue and Tremere branches that feature prominently. Overall, it's not a lot, but it's something.

[CaptOtter]

I don't have a strong opinion on your points numbers 1 and 3; I agree strongly with your numbers 2, 4, and 5 (with a caveat on 5,) and I think I'm mostly on board with your points nos. 6 and 7.

I'm with you on not doing anything against the Players' wills when it comes to reproductive issues (among other things.) I just want to point out that it's entirely possible for Players (and ST obviously,) to agree on the front end--before it ever even comes up in-game--on a set of rules not only for what it's like to be pregnant (mechanically,) but also becoming pregnant. In my Googling around,...

[CaptOtter]

One of the women you've implied I either didn't consult, or made up as a beard for my opinions here, linked me to this article after I showed her the last couple of replies: http://www.dnd.kismetrose.com/DMRomancePregnancy.html It's a blog article by a woman gamer about not only the roleplaying potential of pregnancy, but all sorts of rules (for d20/Pathfinder) for how to run it, and pitfalls to avoid--which I will note include rules for becoming pregnant (which I would have thought was a no-no, though she stipulates that everyone agreed ahead of time that there'd be these rolls to determine whether...

[CaptOtter]

If you think the position is so absurd that you're acquitting yourself well by being deliberate flippant, but rather than just saying that and moving on (and allowing my patently absurd comments to stand as a monument to my inanity or whatever), you instead decide that you're going to engage in the discussion for sole purpose of trying to dunk on people, or otherwise for sport, you're basically going out of your way to waste my time. Stop wasting my time.

Just to be clear, do you think I'm proposing that there should be a rule for determining whether or when a character becomes pregnant?...

[CaptOtter]

You’re moving the goal posts. I’m still going to indulge the exercise this time, but I’m not going continue entertaining ever wackier permutations of this scenario ad infinitum. Either find another way to illustrate your point, explicitly state the point rather than trying to analogize it, or move on. I’m also not going to go through this exercise multiple times for various different editions of various different game lines (I think that would take an unreasonable amount of time and energy,) so I’m going to use the latest edition of Mage, i.e., M20.
Okay, so what you’ve described...

[CaptOtter]

I found explicit rules for swimming in the Systems and Drama Chapters of Mage Rev., Vampire Rev., V20, and M20; I found swimming explicitly mentioned in the write-up for Athletics in W20, Werewolf Revised, Vampire 2nd Ed., and Mage 2d Ed. That said, I didn't look anywhere else because I don't want to spend all afternoon combing through a dozen books. Suffice it to say, the rules for swimming are neither buried nor only found in esoteric books; at a minimum, they're findable in the latest two main books for Mage, and Vampire (the flagship WoD line.)

At least swimming is explicitly...

[CaptOtter]

There are enough 'rules lite' games out there--even diceless RPGs--that I would seriously call into question how much rules or rolls the hobby actually "needs". However, if one is playing or running a game in which the outcome of dramatic conflicts is mediated by rules and rolls, I'd question what the point even is of roleplaying a character being pregnant if there's literally no actual effect on how the pregnant character interacts with, or moves through the world. For example, if a character is an Akashic and typically mixed it up in close combat (with all the athletic pizzaz that...

[CaptOtter]

I understand the desire for rules for pregnancy. There are obviously RPGs out there that go way into the weeds on all sorts of minutiae about stuff that seldom has a material or outcome-determinative effect on dramatic circumstances--Phoenix Command is an extreme example of this (having rules for powder loads and bullet drop is... certainly a choice someone made in 1990s.)

I digress, if you really think about it, it's almost weird that more games don't have rules for pregnancy. WoD has rules for (among other things, and across various books,) electrocution, drowning, sun exposure,...

[CaptOtter]

I echo some of your issues around this--some more semantic than others, such as the fact that literal human beings cannot be "inhuman", and the fact that it's bizarre to suppose that the majority of human beings throughout history (and certainly in ancient or medieval times,) would probably have skewed pretty low on the humanity scale for a number of reasons; but "Humanity" has a little more gravitas than "'Virtuous and Moral' as Framed by the Standards of Modern Westernized Liberal Democracies."

It always seemed weird to me that Call of Cthulhu was...

[CaptOtter]

I can appreciate this interpretation, but given the "gothic punk" aesthetic of the WoD, I've always read something romantic into the Garou's struggle. Yes, it's brutal and short, and generally devoid of peace; and yes, Garou feel everything a lot (Heavy Arms mentioned this upthread: the Garou are people of emotional extremes,) but I think that means they also feel the good stuff (or what I think most people would call 'good') more as well. They probably love harder (when they love,) and their bonds of kinship with their found (albeit ancient,) family are all the more intense. It's a...

[CaptOtter]

I'm interested to find out what Humanity 3 behavior your player considers "perfectly moral" -- I don't want gruesome details, but are we conflating enemy combatants killing each other (even from ambush,) within the ambit of a war or other period of openly declared hostility, to be a Humanity 3 thing?

This absolutely makes sense to me; in fact, it's bizarre to me that there are (that I know of at least,) no prominent examples or mentions in the text of human beings on paths of enlightenment. I'm not sure how one ascends to power in high-level corporate environments, or the...