random GURPS maths
Feb. 20th, 2012 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethToday my goal was to stay awake and not bite anything inappropriate.
Thus far I am winning.
I cannot go to bed before 10pm. Experience suggests I cannot get to sleep after 10pm. But I woke up for the middle bit with the cleaner, so that's okay.
Today I read some short stories. I'm meant to be reading them with an eye to genre features, borders crossed or not crossed, outsiders, and epiphanies, plus figuring out how to write them. I'm... mostly just reading them. Am not sure I'm learning how to write short at all. There was one called Snow about how the past gets full of snow even in films. It's poetic but stupids. There was also one by William Gibson, which had the usual effect of making me feel all wowed while I was reading it and then turning sort of tissue paper when I try and do anything with it in my head. Great language, but the ideas are kind of done. There were two other short stories; the one about time travellers from the future being totally amoral reductio ad absurdum...s of current American trends was kind of bollocks, as was the one about business people getting themselves turned into animals to get ahead and biting each others heads off for real. I mean, it's one possible use of technology, but it's a boring one that doesn't even tell you much about the here and now, let alone where it could go. Blah blah, we're all rubbish, blah blah. I don't like those stories. Show us what we can do that doesn't involve total destruction of humanity.
ANYway, then I got cranky. More cranky. One of those things.
So I've been playing with GURPS stats all afternoon instead.
A goa'uld is a seriously kick arse being. Even without the high tech knowledge and all that. The parasitic possession that lets them learn from the host and doesn't necessarily kill them when the host dies? That's 120 points, at least. Learning from the host isn't really inside the GURPS rules, because you'd get all the skills ever just by jumping around a bit, in GURPS you have to forget some things to make room, and there's no evidence of that in Stargate. Racial memory is 40 points on its own. Being basically unaging is another 15. And I couldn't even model their capacity to heal their hosts, though I had a go by putting the same modifiers on Healing as went with Possession, so Healing (Parasitic) comes out at 12 points. That isn't quite right though. Add their known ability to heal themselves rapidly, Regeneration, at 25 points, and you're up to 212 points of basic advantages before you try and model their hosts. I can't figure, with possession, if you have to count a long term host as an Alternate Form. If a goa'uld can boost the strength of the host then I think that's the only way to figure it. But the alternate is likely to only cost them 15 points, since really, what is going to cost more than 212?
However, there are some serious disadvantages to being a stupid tiny wormy thing, and I haven't added up the disads yet, so that might bring it down to more reasonable levels.
Capertillers, who still need a new name, I had added a few more refinements to. Instead of spawning bazillions of goa'uld, who all know what their ancestors knew, the Capertiller only makes one. I thought that sounded like Duplicate, but there's nothing in those rules about a duplicate going on to duplicate, and in fact over thousands of years becoming a whole species. I'm reasonably sure that breaks the rules big time. But the Dupes are not all under the control of one player, they're more like Digital Possession, where every new copy becomes an NPC. Or just a weird method of reproduction. Tillers can also merge, join up again, so both the parts know everything either part knew. That's like Duplicate too, they can split and merge. But in so doing they take two seperate free willed beings and make a third instead. That's not Duplicate. That third might want to split into two copies again. Or it might not. So duplicating oneself is like deciding one is working so very well there should be two, but merging is like both parts declaring they aren't doing so well as they are. BUT they can split and then half of them merge. That turns two beings into three. And the new one knows everything both the old ones knew put together. So their kids really can be smarter than the olds, or to be precise more knowledgeable and skilled, since they need a host brain to have any smart at all.
Basically, it gets complicated.
Capertillers grow and then split, like segmented worms where the ends can just walk away from each other. To Possess something they have to have a smaller size modifier than the something. Fair enough. But that means merging makes it hard to take a host, since they're too big for some of the animals. But I decided that since they are entirely made of brain their IQ and most importantly their Will depends on how big they are. I want them to have animal IQ on their own but some very stubborn boosted Will that keeps growing, and then with their Will conquer the brains of animals that they can use to have host's IQ. No GURPS rule works that way. But I still know precisely how it would work, so that's close enough. It would be absolutely kick arse that way. It is probably covered in Alternate Form though, since werewolves and critters and humans can all be alternate forms of each other. The only problem is using Will instead of IQ for the Possession check. *waves hand* I say so! All done. So, large size symbiote beings can possess large IQ beings, if they can fit inside them.
To conquer the very smart, and use their brain, you need a very big capertiller. But it will keep growing, and eventually get too big. Then it has to split into two pieces. Those two will both have independent minds and both remember owning this host and probably both think they still should. There could be fights. Which could kill both. On the whole it's better to climb out, go for a sea swim, split up, and wait for two new hosts to come along, one each. But even if their host waits at the water for them, they still have to make a Will based Possession roll to get back in. And if they fail, the host is immune to them, and they can either climb out or ride around with no control. The host resists with the higher of Will and Health. What if they don't want to resist? Outside of games, you can decide not to resist with willpower, but health will just resist for you. Maybe the strong willed can just over rule their bodies and let a capertiller take control. But the split up capertiller will have a lower will than they did when they climbed out, possibly even lower than when they first took that host. They might not be strong enough to take a smart host any more. And once they know what being smart is like, it must be frustrating to go back to dogs and horses. Of course, some of them might decide it's more relaxing to be dogs and horses. They could do that much easier. Lower IQ means easier to possess.
So growing bigger means they can take smarter hosts, but might not fit in them. Splitting up means they have two chances to take a smart host, but both are weaker than they were a minute ago. Splitting and merging with a whole different symbiote makes a whole new Will added together from the parent parts. It could be stronger, it could be weaker, depends who you merge with. And then there's three of them, all looking for hosts, all with a chance.
I think the merging part might make it too complicated. Totally too complicated. Buuuut... they can merge with a host mind. One could climb out and another climb in. Having both merged with the same host mind, have they effectively merged with each other anyway?
Capertillers were biotechnology, biogadgets, like hard drives. They were invented to be personality backups, boxes for uploads. That means the big one was probably first. The little ones, the internal ones, they're hard to lose, portable, always on, constantly backing up their hosts. If you got a clean empty one, put them in a single host, had the host die of something, cloned the host, and reinstalled the capertiller, you'd have what looks like the host still alive. Upload personality, download it again, and between times keep it in a handy box that has self preservation instincts and can crawl away from major damage.
Unfortunately, they had not anticipated what happens when you interface the box with two different minds. Or more. Of different species. And those crawl away boxes, they found nice warm host bodies to crawl into. And things got complicated.
That's why such unlikely beings exist. They were someone's idea of immortality, gone rather chaotic.
Also, they develop independent personalities through repeated exposure to other minds. It's an emergent property of all that backed up data. With only one mind copied into it, they don't seem to be independent, because they match. But put two or more in and they swirl them together in unpredictable ways. But they were never meant to do thinking on their own, so they don't have much IQ at all, can't think without a brain. That's where the download it into a new clone feature goes a bit wrong, because plug them into an inhabited mind and they still try and do it, and a new personality is born. And then they make a backup of that new personality, and it doesn't all have to fit into the brain memory, they have symbiote memory to spare, and it feels like they're driving a host body, full of memories since the dawn of time, and wow, fun! Or oops, if you meant to make yourself immortal. Plug them into lots of minds at the same time, say in the big version that can just keep growing and stay outside a host... the will rolls would get really easy if they got huge, they could possess all of the plugged in brains, and they could only continue to be smart while those brains were plugged in. They'd have to let them go to let them move though, so it's all your basic shared dream instead. It might take really quite some persuasion to let you out once you got in there. But a version of that healing ability would get spectacularly strong with all the extra fatigue a huge version would have. Hence the way putting people in the boxes heals them right up. But you're never quite sure what comes out of the box is the same mind as what went in. They will have left a copy in the Matrix, all backed up tidy, but it may not be the familiar mind that climbs out, if someone inside decides a new host body would be nice to have. There's GURPS mechanisms for that too, contests for control that leave you body swapped. Or swapped into a box.
There would be a mechanism for getting capertillers out of bodies cleanly, so you could retrieve them, even if only from a corpse. Maybe a chemical that makes the tiller curl itself up and detach, maybe even makes it run from that host. If it were only meant to be used on the dead then it wouldn't have to leave the host alive. But why would they need to prompt a symbiote to climb out of a dead dude? They'd already have gone looking for a nicer house. Meant for alive people then, so the host is meant to survive. ... 'tillers wouldn't want that chemical formula to be widely known. They really, really wouldn't want that. It would be dangerous knowledge to have.
So, anyway, inventing alien whatsits is fun, and now I know with more precision what they can do, I can... go on to ignore it completely if I have a better idea while actually writing, obviously.
In other news, my GURPS Characters book is disintegrating rapidly. I should just get a ring binder and transfer it all across. Or use the pdf versions I also own. But sometimes I don't want to be on the computer. ... not very often at all, but sometimes. The other GURPS books stay in one piece nicely, but then I mostly use the Characters anyways.
Thus far I am winning.
I cannot go to bed before 10pm. Experience suggests I cannot get to sleep after 10pm. But I woke up for the middle bit with the cleaner, so that's okay.
Today I read some short stories. I'm meant to be reading them with an eye to genre features, borders crossed or not crossed, outsiders, and epiphanies, plus figuring out how to write them. I'm... mostly just reading them. Am not sure I'm learning how to write short at all. There was one called Snow about how the past gets full of snow even in films. It's poetic but stupids. There was also one by William Gibson, which had the usual effect of making me feel all wowed while I was reading it and then turning sort of tissue paper when I try and do anything with it in my head. Great language, but the ideas are kind of done. There were two other short stories; the one about time travellers from the future being totally amoral reductio ad absurdum...s of current American trends was kind of bollocks, as was the one about business people getting themselves turned into animals to get ahead and biting each others heads off for real. I mean, it's one possible use of technology, but it's a boring one that doesn't even tell you much about the here and now, let alone where it could go. Blah blah, we're all rubbish, blah blah. I don't like those stories. Show us what we can do that doesn't involve total destruction of humanity.
ANYway, then I got cranky. More cranky. One of those things.
So I've been playing with GURPS stats all afternoon instead.
A goa'uld is a seriously kick arse being. Even without the high tech knowledge and all that. The parasitic possession that lets them learn from the host and doesn't necessarily kill them when the host dies? That's 120 points, at least. Learning from the host isn't really inside the GURPS rules, because you'd get all the skills ever just by jumping around a bit, in GURPS you have to forget some things to make room, and there's no evidence of that in Stargate. Racial memory is 40 points on its own. Being basically unaging is another 15. And I couldn't even model their capacity to heal their hosts, though I had a go by putting the same modifiers on Healing as went with Possession, so Healing (Parasitic) comes out at 12 points. That isn't quite right though. Add their known ability to heal themselves rapidly, Regeneration, at 25 points, and you're up to 212 points of basic advantages before you try and model their hosts. I can't figure, with possession, if you have to count a long term host as an Alternate Form. If a goa'uld can boost the strength of the host then I think that's the only way to figure it. But the alternate is likely to only cost them 15 points, since really, what is going to cost more than 212?
However, there are some serious disadvantages to being a stupid tiny wormy thing, and I haven't added up the disads yet, so that might bring it down to more reasonable levels.
Capertillers, who still need a new name, I had added a few more refinements to. Instead of spawning bazillions of goa'uld, who all know what their ancestors knew, the Capertiller only makes one. I thought that sounded like Duplicate, but there's nothing in those rules about a duplicate going on to duplicate, and in fact over thousands of years becoming a whole species. I'm reasonably sure that breaks the rules big time. But the Dupes are not all under the control of one player, they're more like Digital Possession, where every new copy becomes an NPC. Or just a weird method of reproduction. Tillers can also merge, join up again, so both the parts know everything either part knew. That's like Duplicate too, they can split and merge. But in so doing they take two seperate free willed beings and make a third instead. That's not Duplicate. That third might want to split into two copies again. Or it might not. So duplicating oneself is like deciding one is working so very well there should be two, but merging is like both parts declaring they aren't doing so well as they are. BUT they can split and then half of them merge. That turns two beings into three. And the new one knows everything both the old ones knew put together. So their kids really can be smarter than the olds, or to be precise more knowledgeable and skilled, since they need a host brain to have any smart at all.
Basically, it gets complicated.
Capertillers grow and then split, like segmented worms where the ends can just walk away from each other. To Possess something they have to have a smaller size modifier than the something. Fair enough. But that means merging makes it hard to take a host, since they're too big for some of the animals. But I decided that since they are entirely made of brain their IQ and most importantly their Will depends on how big they are. I want them to have animal IQ on their own but some very stubborn boosted Will that keeps growing, and then with their Will conquer the brains of animals that they can use to have host's IQ. No GURPS rule works that way. But I still know precisely how it would work, so that's close enough. It would be absolutely kick arse that way. It is probably covered in Alternate Form though, since werewolves and critters and humans can all be alternate forms of each other. The only problem is using Will instead of IQ for the Possession check. *waves hand* I say so! All done. So, large size symbiote beings can possess large IQ beings, if they can fit inside them.
To conquer the very smart, and use their brain, you need a very big capertiller. But it will keep growing, and eventually get too big. Then it has to split into two pieces. Those two will both have independent minds and both remember owning this host and probably both think they still should. There could be fights. Which could kill both. On the whole it's better to climb out, go for a sea swim, split up, and wait for two new hosts to come along, one each. But even if their host waits at the water for them, they still have to make a Will based Possession roll to get back in. And if they fail, the host is immune to them, and they can either climb out or ride around with no control. The host resists with the higher of Will and Health. What if they don't want to resist? Outside of games, you can decide not to resist with willpower, but health will just resist for you. Maybe the strong willed can just over rule their bodies and let a capertiller take control. But the split up capertiller will have a lower will than they did when they climbed out, possibly even lower than when they first took that host. They might not be strong enough to take a smart host any more. And once they know what being smart is like, it must be frustrating to go back to dogs and horses. Of course, some of them might decide it's more relaxing to be dogs and horses. They could do that much easier. Lower IQ means easier to possess.
So growing bigger means they can take smarter hosts, but might not fit in them. Splitting up means they have two chances to take a smart host, but both are weaker than they were a minute ago. Splitting and merging with a whole different symbiote makes a whole new Will added together from the parent parts. It could be stronger, it could be weaker, depends who you merge with. And then there's three of them, all looking for hosts, all with a chance.
I think the merging part might make it too complicated. Totally too complicated. Buuuut... they can merge with a host mind. One could climb out and another climb in. Having both merged with the same host mind, have they effectively merged with each other anyway?
Capertillers were biotechnology, biogadgets, like hard drives. They were invented to be personality backups, boxes for uploads. That means the big one was probably first. The little ones, the internal ones, they're hard to lose, portable, always on, constantly backing up their hosts. If you got a clean empty one, put them in a single host, had the host die of something, cloned the host, and reinstalled the capertiller, you'd have what looks like the host still alive. Upload personality, download it again, and between times keep it in a handy box that has self preservation instincts and can crawl away from major damage.
Unfortunately, they had not anticipated what happens when you interface the box with two different minds. Or more. Of different species. And those crawl away boxes, they found nice warm host bodies to crawl into. And things got complicated.
That's why such unlikely beings exist. They were someone's idea of immortality, gone rather chaotic.
Also, they develop independent personalities through repeated exposure to other minds. It's an emergent property of all that backed up data. With only one mind copied into it, they don't seem to be independent, because they match. But put two or more in and they swirl them together in unpredictable ways. But they were never meant to do thinking on their own, so they don't have much IQ at all, can't think without a brain. That's where the download it into a new clone feature goes a bit wrong, because plug them into an inhabited mind and they still try and do it, and a new personality is born. And then they make a backup of that new personality, and it doesn't all have to fit into the brain memory, they have symbiote memory to spare, and it feels like they're driving a host body, full of memories since the dawn of time, and wow, fun! Or oops, if you meant to make yourself immortal. Plug them into lots of minds at the same time, say in the big version that can just keep growing and stay outside a host... the will rolls would get really easy if they got huge, they could possess all of the plugged in brains, and they could only continue to be smart while those brains were plugged in. They'd have to let them go to let them move though, so it's all your basic shared dream instead. It might take really quite some persuasion to let you out once you got in there. But a version of that healing ability would get spectacularly strong with all the extra fatigue a huge version would have. Hence the way putting people in the boxes heals them right up. But you're never quite sure what comes out of the box is the same mind as what went in. They will have left a copy in the Matrix, all backed up tidy, but it may not be the familiar mind that climbs out, if someone inside decides a new host body would be nice to have. There's GURPS mechanisms for that too, contests for control that leave you body swapped. Or swapped into a box.
There would be a mechanism for getting capertillers out of bodies cleanly, so you could retrieve them, even if only from a corpse. Maybe a chemical that makes the tiller curl itself up and detach, maybe even makes it run from that host. If it were only meant to be used on the dead then it wouldn't have to leave the host alive. But why would they need to prompt a symbiote to climb out of a dead dude? They'd already have gone looking for a nicer house. Meant for alive people then, so the host is meant to survive. ... 'tillers wouldn't want that chemical formula to be widely known. They really, really wouldn't want that. It would be dangerous knowledge to have.
So, anyway, inventing alien whatsits is fun, and now I know with more precision what they can do, I can... go on to ignore it completely if I have a better idea while actually writing, obviously.
In other news, my GURPS Characters book is disintegrating rapidly. I should just get a ring binder and transfer it all across. Or use the pdf versions I also own. But sometimes I don't want to be on the computer. ... not very often at all, but sometimes. The other GURPS books stay in one piece nicely, but then I mostly use the Characters anyways.