Quote:
Originally Posted by Pragmatic
I'm a "daydreamer"/collector. I've never played GURPS, but then, I've barely played ANY roleplaying game. When I moved, I had about 12 document boxes of RPGs, and that doesn't include all the PDFs I have on my hard drive.
For me, the ur-species system is great for generating aliens that have actually evolutionary reasons for their behavior. Aside from that, it's just fun to see the statistics for the species I read about in the GURPS series. (And have you read the two free Uplift short stories on Brin's website?)
It's great for "idea mining." I like to create ur-species, and combine that with GURPS Space's star system creation, and have different human colonies discover promising ur-species and show how they react to them.
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Heh, I'm almost as bad as you, outside of a bunch of GURPS books, I have tons of D&D source books (including the Dragon Magazine Archive on CD), and a few others from White Wolf. Despite that I live very far from anyone even remotely interested in table games. (And yes, I have, Brin's dolphins and Uplift themes had a heavy hand in how I regulate my dolphins in game-play, it makes for much more interesting writing, I'll tell you that, when the dolphins can just as easily drown sailors as save them.)
Ooh, cool. I like that, I use the ur-species system the same way. Lately, I've been applying it to an PbeM-RP wiki resource I have, based on a book series on an alien planet that never sufficiently fleshed out any of it's fauna to my taste (and when GURPS comes out with a PLANTS! sourcebook, I'm sure I'll find things to desire in the flora too). There were only about two or three "hard" rules about the animal life there, and basically none of it past that was ever described. I thought it a pity, because there was a lot of room for interaction with the local wildlife. The ur-species system is wonderful for filling up the niches, just yesterday I rolled out a mole-like, hive-minded, tropical jungle burrowing species. The fun part now, will be turning the numbers/results into "real" details.