Pregnancy rules

[Heavy Arms]

The reason why there aren't pregnancy rules is actually pretty simple:

Simplifying pregnancy enough to be a fun gameable element without making it so abstract that you lose important parts of pregnancy (and probably end up with a highly idealized version of it that is biased in various ways) as a narrative element.

Maybe you can import the Conditions from the CofD, you can do something that's a bit better (esp. the concept of sequential Conditions where you lose one and gain a new one), and the opt-in dramatic failure rules make sure players have a say in whether or not certain things don't come up if they don't want to deal with those for their character. But even then it's probably only going to suit a fraction of people that would want it, and you'd need a couple of them to cover a significant number of people's desires.

[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, starvation, and the effects of more or less any drug, disease, or other human affliction. And look, I get that these are conditions that can be brought about with magic, and deployed offensively in dramatic situations, so it makes sense to cover them--that's fine. But even by those standards, it's weird that there's no pregnancy rules.

None of this is going to be new information for anyone: pregnancy is something that that more or less half of the people on the planet will have, have, or have had the biological capacity to experience first-hand. It is an integral part to how our species propagates itself, which means that every single person alive today, or that has ever been alive, was the result of a pregnancy. So it's certainly more common than any one of number of conditions we have rules for in the WoD. That said, it obviously has great dramatic potential for telling stories (even without magic, monsters, the supernatural, etc.,) which is only heightened by the supernatural, myth, and magic, when you consider that pregnancy is at the center of any one of a number of religious and cultural rituals. As for why we might need rules for it, well, it is a literally transformative process, both biologically and psychologically. Pregnancy lasts on average for 3/4 of a year; it changes the pregnant person's body/morphology not-insignificant ways, to say nothing of the changes to one's brain chemistry; and then there's weirder stuff like the fact that pregnant people's immune system do not function with the same efficacy as non-pregnant peoples'. All of this to say that it is something A LOT of people go through; it's not shameful; and it's ripe for good roleplay and very cool dramatic situations... so it's the sort of thing you might want your character to experience, but it's also a complicated enough phenomenon that you're not going to do it any kind of real or dramatic justice by reducing it to one or two rolls, or just declaring the character is pregnant, and never worrying about it or having it affect them in any material way.

So let's talk nuts and bolts: what does this actually look like from a mechanical sense? At a minimum we're looking at an ever increasing series of some combination of Attribute debuffs, and difficulty penalties. These would only increase as the pregnancy progressed (and let's not even get into all the postpartum shit.) Then you'd need rolls to reflect the chance of losing the pregnancy in response to more or less any even remotely significant trauma--I don't know whether it would basically amount to saving throw whenever the person took a certain amount of damage, or whether bashing damage to different parts of the body might convert to Lethal. And you may also need figure out some pretty dicey shit like whether you wanna wade into the socio-political minefield of determining at what point the fetus gets its own health level, and if so, how many, and for that matter, whether to give HLs to embryos or zygotes (probably depends on the kind of table you're at, the sort of people you're playing with.) As an afterthought disclaimer, let me just say that I'm spitballing here based on what I've read, and what my wife (who trained as an OB/gyn before moving to family medicine,) has told me; so for all I know, these proto-rules I just kneejerk came up in this paragraph with might be horribly offensive and inaccurate; regardless, the best people to figure out what these rules should be should probably be people with the biological capacity to become pregnant (if not people who have in fact actually been pregnant!)

Having said all that, and though I support having pregnancy rules, I also very much understand why some stuff that would probably be very useful and relevant in certain WoD games would nevertheless not be covered in the books (even amongst other rules like the ones I outline above,) because shit can get very heated and ugly very fast depending on who is at your table. For instance, if you're a pregnant shifter, or a pregnant Mage (particularly one with Spirit, Prime, or Mind,) I can see why it would be incredibly relevant to ask and have answered the question of when a fetus (or embryo, or zygote) gets its capital-S "Spirit" or an (Unawakened) Avatar or whatever other intrinsic metaphysical essence any particular WoD game happens to have (the soul by any other name).

Mind you, I'm not trying to get into those very fraught sorts of discussions in this thread, or even in these forums. I'm simply making a case for there being value in portraying pregnancy through roleplaying and in games, and a case for having rules that do justice to what pregnancy does, how it changes someone and how it operates--but at the same time, I'm also trying to acknowledge that there are practical and potentially political difficulties to fleshing out pregnancy in every every way that would make sense in these games, which makes the entire undertaking an exercising in needle-threading. But, you know, probably worth it.

Apologies for the wall of text--this sort of thing has never occurred to me, and the moment I read the thread name, I immediately has a thousand thoughts about this.

[HorizonParty2021]

I can't remember which book I read this in. It may even have been an Onyx Path YouTube discussion. It was talking about storytelling awakenings or a player and ST coming up with awakening backstory for a female character. It advised Against using the character's experience of being pregnant as a trigger for awakening.

The differentiation went something like:

"Awakening is suddenly realizing that the *World Around You* is not what it seems. Being pregnant is an experience of connection between an expectant mother and the life *Inside* her."

That only pertains to awakenings.

[monteparnas]

Why would you need that?

Not a rhetorical question, it will be easier to give some feedback knowing what you want out of it.

[Heavy Arms]

Nope. There aren't really pregnancy rules for Garou. There's some rules that apply to pregnant Garou (like the impact of shifting in late pregnancy), but the WoD games don't bother with rules for getting pregnant, or rules for the potential complications of pregnancy, or any of that.

[LastCourier]

Is there, in any cWOD book rules for pregnancy?
I have seen some regarding garou, but those unusable for normal humans