Sophont Review: Droyne

[robject]

WHAT THIS IS. This thread is to discuss sophont creation data for a major "race". Your input will help me fine-tine and correct the draft sophont cards. In turn, I'll then refresh the cards on this forum, and also submit them to Marc et al for consideration.

[FONT=&quot]The Droyne Character Creation Card i[FONT=&quot]s attached.
[/FONT][/FONT]
Ojno's suggestion about using CT characteristic mods for Vargr also applies here.

Hemdian and Whulorigan's feedback as of Dec 18 1630hrs CST is included in the current attachment.

 

[robject]

NEXT STEPS:

(1) I'll attach the most current sophont creation card to the Original Post.
(2) I'll bundle the Aslan, Bwap, Droyne, Hiver, K'Kree, and Vargr cards and send them to Marc.

Office hours are posted on my door...

 

[Hemdian]

What source was used in defining the caste selection? I was looking at the CT alien module for the Droyne and it doesn't seem to line up probability wise. There even seems to be a comment to that effect on the card. And the subcastes don't make sense. Also, and more importantly, gender is (or was) based on caste, not rolled seperately.

 

[whulorigan]

. . . Also, and more importantly, gender is (or was) based on caste, not rolled seperately.

Which do you think would be a better procedure:

1) Roll for Gender, and then roll for gender-based caste; or
2) Roll for Caste, and then assign gender based on it
​

IIRC, Droyne youth do not manifest gender characteristics until after the coyne-casting ceremony. But Chirpers on their own eventually develop gender (although I do not know if it has been specified whether Chirpers have 2 or 3 genders after adolescence ensues). Logic would suggest three, but then again we do not know how much (or what kind of) tinkering Yaskoydray did with the descendants of his own species.

 

[robject]

T5 has gender-caste relationship text; I'll use that.

As for castes. I tried to integrate the subcastes into the list, instead of just having 'base' castes.

 

[maksimsmelchak]

I think they look really good, Rob. Although something seems a little off about the Droyne card and I still haven't put my finger on it yet...

I still miss Don, and this has been a very eventful year for me... Probably more in the Chinese sense of having had an interesting year from which I can grow and learn...

Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.

 

[robject]

On Droyne Castes

First some errata: I've updated the card to set gender based on the rolled caste, and fixed them so that the genders correspond to the castes from AM05.

When mapping the Droyne into T5 castes, I decided their caste system looks more military than anything else. Thus there is a partial mapping of Droyne castes to the T5 "military" caste rankings.

Worker. These are nearly generic, manual-labor critters, subcastes notwithstanding. As a result I only have one Worker entry in the caste table.

Warrior. Again, the sub-castes tend to not be very distinctive, unless the "Voyaging Warrior"'s auxiliary skills are truly distinctive. To support this, I have one generic Warrior, one "Pilot" warrior, and one "Guard" warrior.

Tech. Once again, sub-castes are essentially role-based, not skill-based. As a result, there is only one entry on the caste table.

Drone. One Drone sub-caste has one potentially distinctive skill: Admin. Nevertheless, I figured that "Medic" would be a good function for a Drone, so that option is there, along with the general case.

Leader. I see two sub-caste distinctives: a military general in one, and the "Archon" unique caste, representing the Leader of Leaders.

Sport. Some skill diversification. I split it up into a general case, and the "Speaker".


Note that the caste distribution for characters won't be even, but that's okay.


Updated the card in the OP.

 

[Hemdian]

In the legacy rules (CT and GT) we have the following:

The six castes occur evenly. Each caste is tied to a specific gender, and has three specific subcastes. (Actually, the text say there are many subcastes but that they can be grouped into three divisions.) Once set, caste is permanent.

The three subcastes divisions in each caste is labeled ‘positive’, ‘neutral’, and ‘negative’. The positive occurs 8 times out of 36, the neutral occurs 20 times out of 36, and the negative occurs 8 times out of 36. Subcaste can be changed with the appropriate ceremony.

Combining this, each of the six neutral subcastes occur 9% of the time, and each of the other twelve subcastes occur 4% of the time.

	Caste	Gender	'Positive' subcaste 8/36​	'Neutral' subcaste 20/36​	'Negative' subcaste 8/36​
1/6	Worker	Beta Male	Building	Laboring	Farming
1/6	Warrior	Alpha Male	Voyaging	Guarding	Battling
1/6	Drone	Female	Social	Priestly	Family
1/6	Technician	Beta Male	Dreaming	Artificer	Fixing
1/6	Sport	Alpha Male	Finding	Speaker	Seeking
1/6	Leader	Alpha Male	Leader (of)	Priestly	Military

As for gender definitions, originally a Beta Male generates facilitating pheromones, a Female ovulates, and an Alpha Male fertilizes.



For T5, if we are trying to keep as close as possible to legacy ...

For gender I suppose Egg Layer = Female, and Activator = Alpha Male, but Bearer = Beta Male? Seems a bit of a stretch.

And as for putting all this onto the Sophont cards ...
- A 1D roll will set the caste/gender (which I'd put in the gender panel).
- On a 2D roll for subcaste division, 4 and 6 are 'negative', 8 and 10 are 'positive', everything else is 'neutral' (which could go in the caste panel if subcaste division modifiers are the same regardless of caste).

All that's missing is the translation of caste and subcaste division to get the actual subcaste. (Basically the table I made above.)


.

 

[robject]

Thank you for doing a caste analysis - I've learned something new.

The six castes occur evenly.

And that won't change. Similarly with subcaste distribution. The reason I changed the distribution on the Character Card, was because if I were generating a Droyne as a Player Character, I'd want him to be ... well I wanted travellers -- characters who will travel. Alongside that is the desire to get "all you need" onto the character card, without needing another page.

I know players are adept enough to make anything work. But if the text strongly implies that certain Droyne aren't travellers, then...

As for gender definitions, originally a Beta Male generates facilitating pheromones, a Female ovulates, and an Alpha Male fertilizes.

I have no problem at all changing the names of the genders to Female, Alpha male, and Beta male.

 

[Hemdian]

The reason I changed the distribution on the Character Card, was because if I were generating a Droyne as a Player Character, I'd want him to be ... well I wanted travellers -- characters who will travel.

Ah, I was looking at them from the POV of a Referee. I'd want to know the actual distribution when creating potential encounters (whether with an oytrip or a Droyne starship crew). When generating a PC, unless the whole group are going to be Droyne, they are pretty much going to have to be a Sport.

Alongside that is the desire to get "all you need" onto the character card, without needing another.

I think it should be do-able if you can have a variant back page, and there are no characteristic mods for subcastes. (I'll have to play around with it to know for sure.)

 

[whulorigan]

. . . if I were generating a Droyne as a Player Character, I'd want him to be ... well I wanted travellers -- characters who will travel. Alongside that is the desire to get "all you need" onto the character card, without needing another page.

I know players are adept enough to make anything work. But if the text strongly implies that certain Droyne aren't travellers, then...

When generating a PC, unless the whole group are going to be Droyne, they are pretty much going to have to be a Sport.

Another possibility using the T5.09 rules:

Yes, under normal circumstances, unless the campaign is centered on a Droyne Oytrip, Droyne characters are going to be Sports, as other Castes are tied to their communities with specific duties.

However, what if there were also rules for PC-Droyne from other castes who are members of the Deathless (i.e. Droyne who did not auto-suicide when their Oytrip was destroyed or they otherwise became non-useful? Such Droyne could be generated as independent Travellers during CharGen with an initial Sanity-score, perhaps:

CS = [2D] + [BAD FLUX]
​

I have no problem at all changing the names of the genders to Female, Alpha male, and Beta male.

Under GT, the genders were:

Female = Female
Alpha male = Male
Beta male = Enabler
​

 

[Hemdian]

However, what if there were also rules for PC-Droyne from other castes who are members of the Deathless (i.e. Droyne who did not auto-suicide when their Oytrip was destroyed or they otherwise became non-useful? Such Droyne could be generated as independent Travellers during CharGen with an initial Sanity-score, perhaps:

CS = [2D] + [BAD FLUX]
​

Ooo. I like it. That actually rather neatly fills in a plot hole in one of my campaigns: I inadvertently had a female 'Sport' with psychotic tendencies. Sports are supposed to be Alpha Males. This could be explained away as a Deathless Drone with a low CS who now identifies as a Sport. Thanks whulorigan.

 

[robject]

Ah, I was looking at them from the POV of a Referee. I'd want to know the actual distribution when creating potential encounters (whether with an oytrip or a Droyne starship crew).

That's a good point. I *think* that the material required for referees to generate Droyne encounters would require expanded material, much as you have provided, within a (currently non-existent) Droyne For Traveller5 supplement. On which content we can of course freely muse (for example, for the sake of brevity it could omit separate career tables).

Another possibility using the T5.09 rules:

Yes, under normal circumstances, unless the campaign is centered on a Droyne Oytrip, Droyne characters are going to be Sports, as other Castes are tied to their communities with specific duties.

However, what if there were also rules for PC-Droyne from other castes who are members of the Deathless (i.e. Droyne who did not auto-suicide when their Oytrip was destroyed or they otherwise became non-useful? Such Droyne could be generated as independent Travellers during CharGen with an initial Sanity-score, perhaps:

CS = [2D] + [BAD FLUX]
​

Interesting, and doable. Done.


OK, I've fixed the gender names, changed the text above the Caste Table, and juggled the table a bit so that Sports show up quite a bit more frequently, but there's still a strong mix of others. BUT, tell me your preferences on the caste table, and if you think it's reasonable to bias this card towards "travelling" Droyne.

 

[Hemdian]

OK, I've fixed the gender names, changed the text above the Caste Table, and juggled the table a bit so that Sports show up quite a bit more frequently, but there's still a strong mix of others. BUT, tell me your preferences on the caste table, and if you think it's reasonable to bias this card towards "travelling" Droyne.

Just taking a brief break from work, so I haven't gotten around to playing with the Sophont card properly yet. When I do, that will inform how I feel about the different approaches.

In the meantime, sticking with the current direction, how about ...

	Current	Proposed
2	Drone (Medic)	Drone (Social)
3	Worker	Worker (any)
4	Warrior	Warrior (Voyaging or Battling)
5	Tech (Specialist)	Technician (any)
6	Sport	Sport (Finding)
7	Sport	Sport (Seeking)
8	Sport (Speaker)	Sport (Speaker)
9	Drone (Staff)	Drone (Priestly or Family)
10	Warrior (Guard)	Warrior (Guard)
11	Leader (General)	Leader (Priestly or Military)
12	Archon	Leader of Leaders

This covers all the subcastes. Though there is still an assumption that on those lines that list multiple subcastes, the characteristic mods will be the same (though I haven't looked at them at all). I also haven't looked at the probabilities of these lines closely yet but intuitively it feels about right.

FYI: In CT Droyne basic character generation rules, Medical skill is only possible for Warrior (Guarding), Drone (Social), and Sport (Finding). Though just because, for example, a Drone (Social) can get medical skill, doesn't mean that all Drone (Social)s are medics.

.

 

[robject]

I've adjusted the caste names per your suggestions, with one exception: I've retained the "Archon" label as it is a T5-ism synonymous to "leader of leaders".

 

[robject]

OK, let me ask a different question then.

How about if we made six Droyne character generation cards, one for each caste, and worked it so we could faithfully represent the Oytrip distribution as presented in CT AM05?

Six (or three, or two) cards is easy. Let's do that.

 

[Hemdian]

Definitely not finished everything (but just to see what it would look like if we went in a Referee-centric rather than Player-centric direction) the sophont card could be laid out like this:

Note 1: Missing caste-specific characteristic mods (which would be merged in with the gender-specific ones).

Note 2: Assumes no subcaste-specific characteristic mods.

Note 3: According to the T5 rules, Infancy is always 0.5 terms.

 

[Hemdian]

Thread necromancy. I've been tweaking this variant card:

Now has a simple 1D roll to generate the caste (and thus also the gender) ... but I had to add a +1 mod when I noticed that Cas 1 = Outcaste (as per p35 of the T5.09 rules).

Alternatively, this could be changed to 1D x 2 (and the caste table values changed accordingly) if we want the upper castes to have a higher Cas value.​

Outstanding problem: Iskyar (the casting ceremony) occurs at age 12 ... which doesn't align with standard aging periods (2 years as an infant, then multiples of 4 years).

.