Bushido, which was set in the mediaeval Japan of legends, myths, and movies, had a system for a PC to get a wife (bribes to the matchmaker were highly advisable) and raise a family. I never used it, but I understand that it came with a time management system in which a PC had to devote at least one week (ten days) to “matrimony” — to the exclusion of adventuring, war, study or training, or discharging duties — for a chance of getting a child. I think there was a notion of raising an heir to be one’s next PC, but I never saw it used. Ten days seems like a long time to keep it up for, but at least you didn’t have to account for every fuck.
In HindSight (the fantasy supplement to ForeSight there was a rule that gave a chance of conception to each sexual juncture for which such was possible. The probability depended of the “races” (human, elf, orc, boggie etc.) of the participants. Each “race” had a conception number (humans’ was 2), you multiplied the participant’s conception numbers together, and divided the product by two if they were of different “races”. The result was a percentage chance of conceiving. The magic system, system for “divine interventions” and rules for “herbalism” all dealt with spells, interventions, and potions to suppress or increase fertility, terminate pregnancy or transfer it to someone else, and promote safe childbirth, but there weren’t any rules for the risks and chances of pregnancy or labour.
I did use those rules in some of my Gehennum campaigns, usually when PCs were involved with dynastic intrigue at one level or another.
Back when I ran my Zimiamvian campaign (based on E.R. Eddison’s novels), where all the PCs were avatars of Zeus and Aphrodite, one of the latter became involved with one of the former (after turning down another). Eddison had made up a magical house that existed in a gulf between the worlds, where lovers could retreat to have private time together, and the woman playing the avatar of Aphrodite figured out that as it was a place of perfect wish fulfillment, her character could be sexually active there and not become pregnant. That lasted through most of the campaign. Then there was an episode where she and her paramour had an intense disagreement, which led to their retiring to their tent for intense makeup sex—and since that wasn’t in the magical house, and since they were both in perfect health, I let her know a couple of sessions later that her character had conceived. So in the final session of the campaign the two characters got engaged.
I think that was the only time pregnancy was part of the storyline in one of my campaigns. Except in my current campaign, where two of the PCs (both male, both played by women) got married in their respective home towns and wanted to know if their wives had become pregnant while they were sailing to distant shores.
I’ve encountered hardly any players who opposed abortion, at least when I lived in San Diego. I don’t recall much in the way of moral or political arguments arising out of in-game events of any kind; my players mostly took the view that the moral assumptions of the game world might be different from theirs. I do recall arguments over health care and over the Citizens United decision, but we set those aside when we started gaming.
I did observe that my women players were somewhat less likely to choose campaigns in premodern settings, and somewhat more likely to play cross-gender if they did choose such campaigns (I ran chi-squared analyses to test both results). But on the other hand, I had women players whose women characters in premodern settings pretended to be male, or avoided sexual activity, or preferred oral and/or anal to vaginal intercourse; one of them made up a backstory for her character that involved having had an abortion and choosing to minimize the risk of another pregnancy after that. It rather seemed to me that my women players were interested in sexual content, but liked it that I approached it in a way that took the real hazards into account; maybe they liked that it addressed issues that they actually had thought about.
I think the larger category that this falls under is “When Bad Things Happen to Player Characters.” Consider, for example, going into combat. Obviously no one wants their character to die! But if combat carries an actual risk of death—not death that the player planned as a dramatic scene, but death through misadventure—then on one hand players are more cautious about entering into combat, and don’t do it casually, or without motivation. But on the other hand, if they decide that whatever goal or cause or relationship they have is important enough to make it worth taking the risk, then they’re in real suspense during the fight, because they know it might go wrong. And that intensity of involvement isn’t as easy to get if the characters can’t die because they’re the heroes. And I think that same “skin in the game” effect arises from involvement in sexual relationships if the hazards are taken seriously.
My knowledge on the ‘greater sphere’ of RPGs is rather shallow; so the following are very novice observations.
A couple of things I have noticed as I have kept reading and have re-read some of the posts here.
I think a lot of this depends on what you want out of an RPG system. I think some of these things are in the books to have something for the GM/group ‘just in case it comes up’. That is why I think some of these percentages are wonky. I also think that is why some systems have aspects to them which might be a bit much. I think the accuracy of the statistics is indicative of how much thought the creator put into it. Crap statistics likely is a ‘well, I think this might come up… so I will put something in there’ situation; were more accurate statistics/morbidly realistic situations is possibly an ‘if this comes up, I want the GM to have something accurate, so they don’t have to come up with it by themself and think much on this potentially rough subject’ scenario. Now, this is a very naive thought and might not likely be the case, but could be something to consider. It seems that these things are also in games which having a dynasty is part of the experience or to have children or ancestry could be part of the game if desired? I also am seeing a trend in which they are included in games which are more… ‘adult’(?) in nature, or are grittier/edgy(?)
Also, I think this is a matter of what you want out of a game system. In my limited RPG experience, I would say I have come across two types of GMs/GM viewpoints. On one side, the ‘everything should be by the book, no exceptions, everything needs to be used from the rules exactly as written’ GM (a group I think is vanishing more and more); and the other, ‘the system is a framework to create a story. We pick and choose what best fits the group. We can strike what we want and keep what works and agree as a group to terms to keep things fair’. Now, that is a massively huge generalization. I believe there are shades between, but this is a trend I have noticed.
It is late and I should have gone to bed, so hopefully, this is not sloppily written dribble, but I think I tend to fall in the second group. I don’t think the inclusion of these rules are inherently bad, but when done poorly it makes you think ‘why did you even bother’, where if the creators put a lot of thought and effort we end up saying ‘why on earth would you put rules for something so horrible?’… Just because they put those rules and tables in the book, it does not mean you need to use or should use them.
I think this is exceptionally valid, and as someone who came to KAP rather recently, it was exceptionally confusing trying to figure out what was new, old, out of date, meta. I got lucky that I was able to buy most of the books as part of a bundle for stupid cheap and can parse through all the tomes at leisure. It looked like right before his passing (to me at least), he was scrabbling to try and go back to get things ironed out.
One last thing before I go to bed, could we put a ‘CW: reproductive mortality’ on this thread somehow? There is some rather heavy talk which could potentially cause some unintentional harm to some if they walked in unknowingly. I think the content is valid for the conversation, I just don’t want to cause anyone any undue stress considering the global situation.
I’m going to say that I totally don’t use the approach where “We pick and choose what best fits the group.” There’s no “we” involved in it. If I’m the GM, the game world is my creation, and if players agree to a campaign set in that world, adjudicating how things happen in that setting is my responsibility, and my players are trusting me to perform it when they agree to play in that campaign. There is no preexisting “group” that the campaign has to fit; rather, the group comes to be because those particular people are interested in that proposed campaign. And on one hand, this approach gave me the freedom to run a wide variety of campaigns; but on the other, it gave me a circle of more than a dozen players who kept coming back for more campaigns, which I think is rather a vote of confidence in my GMing.
I think perhaps you don’t entirely get the point of a simulationist approach to RPGs. It’s not to have rules for the sake of rules. On one hand, it’s to have verisimilitude: to have a world that feels real. Getting the details right contributes to that feeling. And If I’m planning a campaign, I’m prepared to do some research to find out those details. But it may help me if someone else has already done that research, and written up a set of game rules that describe what the world is like. Of course I have to trust them, but that’s why, when I’m writing a game supplement, I do huge amounts of research to find out about biophysics, or history, or electronic technology, or whatever that supplement is about, so that my work can be trusted. And on the other hand, I want the game world to have logical consistency—so that if things happen once in such and such a way, the players can count on their happening that way the next time. And I could do this by counting on my memory, or by taking elaborate notes; but if I’m going by rules that are already written in a book, those rules are still going to be there the next time I look at that book. Rules are a tool for world modeling.
And why do I want world modeling? Well, let me propose my own polarity. On one hand, you have “Here is the story we want to tell about these people,” and the world changes in whatever way is needed to enable that story to be told; we know in advance that we’re going to be doing the Myth of the Birth of the Hero, or a five-act plot structure, and the setting has to accommodate that narrative. But on the other hand, you have “Here is the world these people find themselves in,” and the story emerges from those people’s attempt to cope with that situation in that world, and isn’t known in advance. And for the most part I strongly prefer that second approach. But I have to have a model of the world to use it.
I think I should have waited until morning when my mind was sharper, as I feel I did not express my thoughts properly. I agree with several of the points you made.
To get this back on topic, are we looking to make something to replace crappy systems not based on science? Or are we just here to complain about shoddy game construction?
If there is interest in a homebrew based on science and fits in a stone-age world theme, I thought of a rough idea while making my espresso this morning. But, I would appriciate others help in fleshing it out if there is interest.
Oh, I’m totally sympathetic to that sort of project. My current fantasy campaign (run as play-by-videoconferencing since the start of this year) is set in a mixed Stone Age/Bronze Age world. And I’ve written rules for Stone Age settings, including the pregnancy rules that JGD cited, rules on contraception and abortion, and rules on surgery with stone tools. GURPS Low-Tech and its three Companions have a fair bit of material for Stone Age campaigns, actually.
I’m not sure how much I can contribute to a homebrew in terms of game design; I abandoned homebrews for my own campaigns back in the 1990s, and I’m currently finishing up one project for GURPS and about to start another. But I certainly can comment on the technological and ecological content, if that will be helpful.
This might just be two things working together in a weird way:
The default modern take on the stone age “theme” is about the survival of the human race in a harsh environment over many generations. So reproduction and child-rearing are core activities.
Perceived odds in RPGs are often unrealistic. Critical success and failure rolls often imply weird things like 5% of plane trips end in crashes, not because that’s even close, but because the game wants plane crashes to be a possibility and uses a 1 on a d20 to represent critical failure.
So I think you’re just noticing that baby making is a theme and that the game is fudging the odds to make it come up easily.
I seem to remember PBM games with population growth rates implying every woman was constantly pregnant with octuplets; there’s at least one such in Murphy’s Rules. That’s certainly raising the numbers to make things happen in interesting numbers of turns (like, well, every RTS game, which lets you build units on a timescale not entirely unlike the combat timescale).
GURPS Ice Age (granted, for GURPS 3e) has a bit on the role of women but nothing about pregnancy.
I don’t think it’s always a defect in an RPG when its probabilities don’t match the probabilities of events in the real world. For some things, of course, they should. But if you think of an RPG as an alternative rendition of an action/adventure novel or film—what are the probabilities of things like an airplane crash, or a fight, or happening across a crime in progress, in an adventure story? Way higher than they are in real life. I think you have to figure that (a) the hero of the story is at an extreme end of the bell curve and (b) the scenes that are shown on camera are the small percentage of moments when something interesting is happening, and not the much larger percentage of dull routine. So if the dice give you a high probability of exciting or dangerous events, that’s an accurate rendition of the odds in the small sample of human experience that gets into adventure stories.
I’m thinking, for example, of the old joke that when you look at the protagonist of a particular mystery series, when you consider how often she just happens to be on the scene when someone is murdered, the obvious conclusion is that she’s a serial killer, and the police ought to be investigating her.
One problem with game mechanics rendering the exciting bits of stories is that the exciting bits of stories don’t happen at random. Rules that produce pregnancies, fights, and plane crashes at dozens to millions of times a realistic rate, but without regard to dramatic need, fail both simulationism and narrativism. 5% chance of a plane crash is too little when the GM needs one as the initiating incident of a man-v-wild survival trek. It is too much in a race-against-the-clock thriller in which the delay it produced would be an automatic failure for the protagonists and an abrupt anticlimax to all the issues that the player-as-audience had been brought be care and effort to feel strongly about.
At least the “too little” issue doesn’t seem to me to be unavoidable. Dice rolls are for outcomes of the actions of characters, especially player characters. But if a beautiful woman walks into a detective’s office and asks him to help her clear her husband’s name, or find a missing art object, it isn’t because the GM has rolled “dame walks in” on a table; it’s because that’s how the situation is going to be presented to the PCs, to begin the exposition.
That depends on the game design. The random encounter system in James Bond 007 does have “Beautiful Foil” encounters, which according to the PCs’ situation might well be “a dame walks in”. And that system is designed to produce significant plot developments.
But basically, yes, exactly: narrativist games get narrative elements from the narrative, not the game mechanics. So mechanics that produce in all stories air disasters with the frequency of air disasters in stories about surviving air disasters fail both at simulation and at emulation.
It occurs to me to wonder whether pregnancies are common events in this source material. There were several significant ones in the Earth’s Children series including at least one for the protagonist. In The Animal Wife there are two very important ones. Seem to recall hat there were significant pregnancies and births in Reindeer Moon too.
Could it be that stone age RPGs have made pregnancies common because a good deal of the source material consists of stories about sex and family?
I don’t see that you ever need that high a frequency. If the story is going to be about the survivors of an air disaster, you don’t need to roll for an air disaster; it’s part of the opening situation, which you announce at the start of the first session, or maybe after a prologue. So there’s no need to get to it by settiing the probability extremely high (and taking the risk that you won’t roll the needed disaster).
On the other hand, if the characters are going into a fight, and there’s a zero probability of their being defeated or seriously hurt, then it’s an essentially boring scene; the best way to handle it is as “after you defeat the goblins . . .” At a certain point it comes down to killing the baby orcs in their mothers’ dens. It’s not heroic, and it’s not going to have the players on the edges of their seats.
And, yes, this is going to be random. But the alternatives seem worse: on one hand, that nothing bad happens unless the players consciously choose to have their characters fail badly; on the other, that bad things happen because the GM has decided that the narrative requires a bad thing to happen, and the players’ choices don’t make a difference.
You seem to be missing an obvious possibility: that the players have agency over whether, how, and why they overcome a challenge, but must incur some loss of some kind if they do, which will impact their ability to handle future challenges. I know of at least one RPG that handles conflict in this way.
“Blades in the Dark” uses this as foundational to their conflict resolution, I believe. If you roll a 6 on a pool of d6 you succeed without hitch, but a roll of 3-5 succeeds with conditions. Something gets worse somewhere…