04-08-2020, 01:35 PM | #11 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: Defining biological taxa with GURPS
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RyanW - Actually one normal sized guy in three tiny trenchcoats. |
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04-08-2020, 01:54 PM | #13 | |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: Defining biological taxa with GURPS
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But maybe it would be better to drop "fish" and "reptiles" from my taxonomy. From a GURPS point of view, "tetrapod" is actually a very useful concept - it means the total number of arms, legs, and wings can't exceed four, not counting any mouths / tails / noses dexterous enough to count as "manipulators" for GURPS purposes. One of the few things I liked about James Cameron's Avatar movie is that it game the animals of the alien planet a genuinely alien feel by violating this rule over and over again. OTOH I'm not sure what the interesting differences are in GURPS terms between jawless fish, cartilaginous fishes, and bony fish. |
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04-08-2020, 04:20 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Apr 2005
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Re: Defining biological taxa with GURPS
If you're trying to do morphology templates for aliens it's probably a better idea to think in terms of ecological niches rather than Terran clades.
Take a look at GURPS Space for "generic" ecological niches. If you want to dig into GURPS 3E, try to find a copy of GURPS Uplift. For fan-made resources, Luke Campbell's Animalia is a very good jumping-off point. There are also a number of different animal templates Chudley's GURPS T.M.N.T. site T. Bone's GURPS Diner GULLIVER rules also include lots of info about designing non-human critters. Last edited by Pursuivant; 04-08-2020 at 04:24 PM. |
04-08-2020, 04:32 PM | #15 | ||
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: Defining biological taxa with GURPS
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04-08-2020, 04:39 PM | #16 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Defining biological taxa with GURPS
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But while in GURPS terms looking only at big animals makes sense, if you delete all the smaller ones from the evolutionary record what remains won't make a lot of sense. Too many gaps! I would want to synthesize the whole phylogenetic tree, including the tiny ones, even if I was only going to do templates for the larger fraction.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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04-09-2020, 03:55 AM | #17 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Defining biological taxa with GURPS
Is that necessarily a problem? Every ST score can be assumed to be rounded up or down from an infinite range of continuous, fractional scores. For teeny worms and what not, you could make a note that the creatures actually have some tiny little fraction of a point of ST, but it's treated as 0 for game purposes.
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