Pak Protecters in GURPS

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Yes. Even a baseline Pak Protector was so intelligent that he could, simply by examining the engine of Brennan's ship for an hour or two, reach the point where he could have duplicated it if he had had the necessary raw materials.

I don't think that feat is necessarily explained by high overall IQ, though. Pthssspok wasn't "baseline" when it came to starship engine maintenance. They were not only involved in the construction of their own ship in the first place, but they had also controlled the ship's drive manually through their entire voyage, at least using far less automation than a human would be comfortable with. Pthssspok's point levels in Mechanic (Fusion Drive) must have been enormous, simply from on-the-job training! And even if they didn't have any levels at all in Engineer (Fusion Drive), their default from Mechanic would have still have been quite good.

To judge Pthssspok's overall IQ, you also have to look at where, and how, he failed. And Pthssspok makes a couple notable errors in IQ-based skills that suggest, to me, that their IQ can't be absurdly high. First, of course, is the fact that they clearly rolled more poorly than Brennan did on Psychology, to work out the probable human reaction to Tree of Life, allowing Brennan to get the drop on Pthssspok. In fact, Brennan speculated that Pthssspok still thought Brennan was just behaving like a "normal" Protector, killing a competitor to ensure his own bloodline's monopoly on the transformation.

Second, though, and much more hugely, is Pthssspok's flub of a roll in the first place, putting Brennan into his cargo hold with inadequately secured Tree of Life. Pthssspok looked at Brennan and, knowing what an untransformed breeder looked like, decided that Brennan wasn't related, to the point where they were surprised that Brennan had eaten the root and undergone the change. That, to me, is a major failure, if not a critical failure, on Biology, or Physiology, or something. I doubt very much that anyone trained in even TL 8 levels of those skills, when presented with an example of Homo sapiens next to one of Homo habilis, wouldn't instantly conclude they were closely related. Pthssspok doesn't even have the excuse of living in a universe where "parallel evolution" turns up humanoids on every world, because Niven was always pretty careful about having aliens be alien in Known Space, with very clearly different body plans.

So, my feeling is that Pthssspok must have been rolling their Biology or Physiology at default there, and must have had an effective skill level lower than 10, and probably notably lower, for that kind of failure to be probable.


In any case, I'm not arguing that Protectors in general don't have higher IQ than baseline humans. They clearly do. However, I'm arguing that you don't really need to give them IQs at the stratospheric levels that the +10 the template has suggests. Much of their intelligence is better portrayed by giving them other "smart" traits, such as the list I suggested, and assuming that they frequently have a lot of points sunk into skills as well.

That's enormously greater than human intelligence.

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Of course, that's not as impressive as the magic drive the original Pak used to come to the Solar System in the first place...

Which magic drive was that? The original drive was actually described as quite a bit less effective than Pthssspok's, with the trip taking far longer than Pthssspok's ramjet design allowed. I believe it was described as an ion drive, actually, though a real-world ion drive probably wouldn't produce even the performance they got. Remember, though, that their trip took so long that some of the Protectors actually died of old age, which wasn't thought possible up until then.