Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Author Topic: Variant Creature Types and Intelligence Variance  (Read 846 times)

BugbearSpearFighter

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Variant Creature Types and Intelligence Variance
« on: April 03, 2021, 01:44:37 pm »

For the next update, I think that as part of working myths and magic into the world, there should be possibilities for the pre-defined races to sometimes show different characteristics in different worlds. On the basic level, this could be attributes like elves being taller in one world than another, or Dwarves having less aptitude for magic than humans in one world, but being magical geniuses in another. Also, I think that intelligent megabeast variants should be worked into the myths. Creatures like Dragons and Titans should have a chance to be intelligent rather than showing animalistic behavior (Dragons as a whole, but Titans likely by the individual basis). Also, it would be interesting if in very magical worlds more mundane animals could be more intelligent and sometimes capable of speech. This could also be done in reverse, with some of the fictional creatures capable of speech in the current game (such as minotaurs and trolls) having a chance to be created as less intelligent.
Logged

Azerty

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Variant Creature Types and Intelligence Variance
« Reply #1 on: April 03, 2021, 05:00:23 pm »

For the next update, I think that as part of working myths and magic into the world, there should be possibilities for the pre-defined races to sometimes show different characteristics in different worlds. On the basic level, this could be attributes like elves being taller in one world than another, or Dwarves having less aptitude for magic than humans in one world, but being magical geniuses in another. Also, I think that intelligent megabeast variants should be worked into the myths. Creatures like Dragons and Titans should have a chance to be intelligent rather than showing animalistic behavior (Dragons as a whole, but Titans likely by the individual basis). Also, it would be interesting if in very magical worlds more mundane animals could be more intelligent and sometimes capable of speech. This could also be done in reverse, with some of the fictional creatures capable of speech in the current game (such as minotaurs and trolls) having a chance to be created as less intelligent.

Maybe, if the simulation run long enough, such variances could also occur among races: well-fed dwarves could become taller while humans living in a very magic place could become innate mages.
Logged
"Just tell me about the bits with the forest-defending part, the sociopath part is pretty normal dwarf behavior."

Nordlicht

  • Bay Watcher
  • Wuschelig & Wunderlich
    • View Profile
Re: Variant Creature Types and Intelligence Variance
« Reply #2 on: April 04, 2021, 11:30:31 am »

Everything that makes world more different from each other and so more fun to explore is great. Maybe add plants in some worlds to be able to speak, and/or trees in magical biomes being able to cast spells. Even stones and minerals in magical biomes could develop intelligence. 
Logged

NW_Kohaku

  • Bay Watcher
  • [ETHIC:SCIENCE_FOR_FUN: REQUIRED]
    • View Profile
Re: Variant Creature Types and Intelligence Variance
« Reply #3 on: April 05, 2021, 08:45:05 pm »

Keep in mind that there needs to be at least a base-line familiarity with the objects in the world for a player to have any ability to grasp what is going on.  Having absolutely everything randomized and procedurally stitched together so that players need to farm schlorps and fight sclolps while schleping schups with shoplups and slelpos will wind up making a player unable to tell up from down.

It takes some time to learn that plump helmets are food and make dwarven wine, for example, and when there were fantasy plants only in the game, there were only a few.  Adding tons of crops came only with adding real-world crops so that players can just use their real-world knowledge of those things.  If you randomize all the plants and still have tons of plants (including magic plant variants for different magic spheres), that's creating a ton of new things that a player has to learn (including which plants are edible and which are useless or poisonous or just used for making cloth) that also becomes useless knowledge in the very next game they play.

Add to this all the randomized animals and civilizations, as well, and you're setting up players to be barraged by tons of same-y sounding but very different new vocabulary they have to study before they can even start to enjoy the game.

This is more aimed at the direction this thread is taking than what the OP itself suggests, mind.  Having a world where horses are still horses but they speak in this world isn't that hard to grasp when everything else is the same.  But there's more reason than just lazy writing why a lot of sci-fi has "space rabbits" or "smeerps" rather than stopping the whole show to explain why actually the life from Omicron Persei 8 is silicon-based and evolved from starfish-like ancestors, so all creatures are pentapeds for every damn side location a story passes through.  Just saying it's basically an alien equivalent to a rabbit is enough for the amount of narrative use it provides, because it kills the pacing to do this explation a thousand times to populate an entirely procedural ecosystem.  (At least, unless you were doing a story explicitly on exploring what alien ecosystems would be like, but even that would need giving analogues to the Earth equivalents of things just so people have a frame of reference.)
Logged
Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

Improved Farming
Class Warfare

YK_81

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Variant Creature Types and Intelligence Variance
« Reply #4 on: April 06, 2021, 11:51:48 am »

I like the idea of variances amongst the races with every world, although I think it should be an option that can be turned off. And there should also be some way for you to restore certain qualities to a race, for example, if a world has elves being magically inept, you could do something to make them more proficient, likewise you could do something to make them even more inept. Also, no race should not be able just not do something, all races should always be able to practice magic, but their proficiencies change.
Logged