Can anyone tell me how some Scotsmen have a higher physical attribute than a taller, broader and overall stockier alien in a power armor (looking at you Suryat)?
Because PHIS is a measure of strength, physical endurance, and reflexes (among others). That means the Morat are quite comfy in their highly technological power armors, while the scotsmen are quite likely drunk, drugged, or suffering of ADD, if not all three and more! Also, the Morat relish in getting hit (they do not dodge as happily as a scotsman), while the drunkards retain enough sense to know that a kilt won't protect them from bullets, so the best way to pummel some alien ass is to dodge until they find some common ground, that being the reach of their melee weapons :p
Then why does the sogarat have 15 PH? Just for the Automedikit? That's not fluffy at all, just rules for balancing the game :(
He is young, and on edge, trying to probe himself worthy of the more compact Suryat suit! Also, the medikit would include combat drugs, so... XD
I like xagroth's approach :p He doesn't try to make sense of some of the rules/profiles; he accepts them and then gives them a fluff-reason to be that way.
Piffle! I demand absolute realistic everything in my elfgames and in my space werewolf games. And everyone else must demand it too. Otherwise, All is ruined. Drat. forgot to to use the caps lock again. :*( How am I ever going to pass my Master Troll exams. The term is verisimilitude. (a fun word to pronounce too.) As long as one can create some sort of plausibility, a la Xagroth, things will work, in-universe. One must seek reasons why a thing is realistic/believable, not why it is not realistic/believable, in games like this. "A wizard did it." Gets a bit boring after a while. Use your imagination, mi gente, that's what games like Infinity are for.
In Campaign Paradiso there was a Medevac table to see if characters that ended the game unconscious survived to be used or not. IIRC Ariadna and Morats used the same table and had the highest chance to survive without a doctor or paramedic, Haqqislam had the best odds if there was a doctor on the field though. Basically they just breed them tough and hardy on Dawn.
Nope, it's called Natural Selection. Only the toughest survive to adulthood, something that usually levels itself with the medical treatments avaiable (less people, less reaching the oldest bracket, more pre-20's dying due to illnesses). This gets heavily eschewed if you suddenly inject better medical care: in this case, Dawn hasn't been "discovered" more than 2-3 generations.
I see you don't appreciate the glorious art of complaining so I have to complain about that! How else would things improve without our complaints? One doesn't have to find reasons to make everything believable. I find it best to understand that CB doesn't make everything right. Not every rule/stat will be perfect in a game as complex as Infinity and there is always room for improvement. I can enjoy the game despite those and I find my imagination powers better spent elsewhere. And back on topic, I think I've read somewhere that this point of PH on Suryats got lost as a balancing act, maybe even a relic of a previous edition when Suryats were unique, faster HI. Someone playing at that time could maybe confirm this. I wouldn't search for a deeper meaning, there is a lot of stuff like that in this game. It would be nice to get them up to PH 14 someday. Probably not happening anytime soon.
That's not Natural Selection at all, Humans have never been so tall, strong or energetic since the advent of modern medicine that allows strong individuals to stay strong or stable food to feed energy into muscles that hardship of nature previously punished us for. Natural Selection means being adaptive to change, be it losing melanin to stave off depression in an environment with less sunshine or grow smaller and breed faster to literally out-breed any predator. No, a more likely explanation for Ariadna is literally space wizards did it. Or more specifically, space Tohaa and their broken planet-seed or exposure to Antipodes or whatever it is did it. Ariadnans just aren't quite human any more.
Don't be silly. It's the Tesseum. It replaces iron, and maybe other minerals, in the blood, in the body. Builds stronger bones and bigger muscles.
Not really my point. It's quite simple, really: hardship during a few generations prune the genetic tree, so only those able to survive with the current medicine level reach adult age and then old age. Introduce one or two levels of medicine improvement suddenly, and you will improve the amount of young people surviving to adult and old age... but those who were already the best of the best will reach new heights, because the medicine will support them. Isn't there a "law" that states the older you can get, the even older the medicine helps you to get?
I don't remember the exact stat changes but Campaign Paradiso had a rework of the Suryats, it was fluffed as them trading in their heavier battle armour for an older lightweight model better suited to the jungles of Paradiso. I think it was something like dropping from PH14 to PH13, swap CCW for knife, and increase BTS from 3 to 6 (a big boost as BTS was a penalty to hacking attacks). They were also one of the very few 4-4 Move HI before 3rd edition which gave them a definite niche they've lost since then.
Don't think so, I think the max age a human can get to has been found to be roughly 115 years (verified age, mileage may vary per individual below this) and that it's been constant for about as long as we've been Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Good food and good medicine only aids you in not going to the grave prematurely. I'm still saying that natural selection prunes individuals based on stuff other than what makes Herculean bodies. Mainly your ability to starve without dying which probably means small muscles mass to begin with. But you have to admit, the Tohaa device going rogue on human biology would fill in literally all the blanks (including how the Ariadnan population even at 10M is an order of magnitude larger than it would have been under ideal conditions) @Red Harvest : I don't even...
Nah, it's within limits. The point is that the medical advancements cure and/or compensate illnesses, thus allowing people to get older, with a small progression in said medical advancements during that extended lifetime. For example, let's say you live without medicine until your 50's (to have somewhat round numbers). When you reach 50, medical advancements allow you to reach 70... but when you reach 70, medicine has had another 20 years to improve, thus giving you let's say another 10 years. When you reach your 80's, medicine has advanced again, allowing you to reach 85... At which point medical advancements allow you the endure another 3 years, and weh you reach 88m yet again medicine let's you reach a year a half more... and when you get to 89 years and six months, you get yet new medical advancements and reach 90, but you die before your 91'st birthday. As I said, made up numbers, but that's the idea.
I think it's just lots of anabolic steroids. Same reason Yuan Yuans are PH 14 despite living in ships without even artificial gravity a lot of the time. What I want to know is why the Batroid TAGs have such low PH. Seriously? Ph 13 on the Xeos? Super lame. I have a sneaking suspicion that they were originally supposed to be HI Batroids who got changed to TAGs without being rebalanced.
They are slow and bulking masses of muscle, devoting all of their power to the Super-Jump and carrying around all that masses of armor...