Re: [SGII] Alien seed

--- Brian Burger <yh728@victoria.tc.ca> wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Laserlight wrote:
> >
> > I'm never happy with a "hive mind" but I'd also been
> > thinking about a race that starts Y / G and then goes 
> > through B / O / R as the shooting continues -- ie they 
> > start out dumb and happy but their "adrenaline" also acts 
> > as a mental stimulant.  Could be "QD goes up when 
> > Confidence goes down" or "test for QD increase whenever 
> > they're Suppressed"; it would go down again after a while 
> > if no one shot at them, although that'd be beyond the scope 
> > of the usual SG game.  You might also have a "Leader" 
> > variant who is, so to speak, on a permanent adrenaline 
> > high.  They'd be fast and smart but would have to make a 
> > real effort to communicate with their "normal" cousins.
> 
> Isn't this more or less how the aliens in 2300AD work? (is it
> actually called 'Traveller 2300AD'?). I think they're called 
> the 'Kafir' or something; I've never played the RPG but have 
> read some of the fluff & online sources.
> 
> One piece of fluff I read concerned *not* assualting into the
> remains of a Kafir column after it's been ambushed, because 
> you'll have angry, 'smart' survivors hiding in the wreckage.
> 
> I'm not sure of the biology of this, but it would feel 'alien'
> all right!
> 
> Brian.

What Laserlight described is almost exactly the Kafers from
2300AD (started off as Traveller:2300, then GDW dropped the
'Traveller' part as it had absolutely nothing to do with their
Traveller universe; the history of the game was actually
projected forward from Twilight:2000!).

The Kafers were generally 'dumb' but got 'smart' when
threatened.  I forget the exact reasons GDW presented for their
development in this way, but they did go into the history and
evolution of the Kafers in soucebooks.	The Kafer leaders are
the ones who, as LL said, are permanently 'smart' and thus able
to keep long-term objectives in mind -- the overall leaders are
'smarter' than squad leaders, so while your squad may start at
Y/G, the leader might only be one step above, if even that...
but the reason they may be leader could also be that they
respond to danger more quickly!

In 2300AD, when ambusing a Kafer column, you would generally
have a couple of turns of 'target range' fire before the Kafers
got smart about things... then, assuming the GM ran the game
well, you were in deep doodoo. ^_-  The Kafer had a fairly heavy
emphasis on defensive structures and redundant systems (e.g., in
vehicles), partially so equipment would survive enemy attack,
also so that dumb Kafers who tried to 'make their equipment
smart' (e.g., beat it up) would not destroy it.

It's a great alien race and psycology, though of course I've no
idea how realistic it would be.

'Til later,
			   Aaron

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html