[TML] Plants, animals and characters

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 4/3/08 5:17 PM, "Knapp" <magick.crow at gmail.com> wrote:

> While thinking about my new game design I found something I had never
> thought about before.
> 
> Seeds are eggs. Plants and animals are the same thing. A chicken egg
> is nothing but a seed for a chicken. Live birth is just hatching the
> egg in a safe place. The only other variable is the amount of care
> given by the parents.

Yes.  Many plants even have "sex".

> Animals live in one of 3 places. Air, water or dirt. Some live on the
> boundaries of these and some live with all three.
>
> Habitat can be broken down a few ways: roughness (flat beach vs rough
> mountains), amount of water (swamp frog VS desert frog vs forest
> frog), Altitude, chemical environment (type of dirt/rock, water or
> air) temperature, ecosystem (some frogs breed only in one plant that
> holds water).
> 
> Eating, I need some help here but the roots of the energy system are:
> the sun, geothermal and ???? After that it is all about eating others
> and how fast, big and or resistant to eating the others are and you
> are.

Solar is by for the primary.  Geothermal is only available in very limited
areas, and those areas can die out over time.  I really don't know over any
other *known* sources.

> All this also showed a big hole in the CT Animal system. There are no
> parasites.

Hadn't noticed that.  But I didn't go over then animal rules in great
detail.

> So then characters are just life forms with a bit more info about them
> and thus don't need much added to make them.
> 
> It would seem you can make a really complex eco system with just these
> bits of data. You would start with a bunch of random one celled life
> forms and what they ate as base eaters and then start making bigger
> and bigger (sometimes smaller eating bigger too) things to eat them
> with each basic habitat. Also some data here about breeding rates,
> speed of running and efficiency of the life form.

At the small end of the size scale, the eaters tend to be bigger than the
eaten.  But of course, there are exceptions.  At the large end, it's a lot
more variable (lions eating bigger buffalo *and* smaller gazelles, etc).

Part of breeding rate lies in how much food (energy) you can take in, versus
how much it takes to produce an offspring.  Although even that has limits
(the best fed women are generally not going to produce a babies in much less
than 9 months average).

> So thoughts anyone? What did I miss?