I see that building bodies in play works basically like burning tech, but does it all the way work that way? As long as the character doesn’t inhabit the body (at which point it would have to have all the features it’s ever going to have) can the cost of the traits be spread over multiple eugenics/resources tests? Could you build an Ob 60 body over 6 Ob 10 tests, as long as the traits being introduced were color first?
Now that I think of it, could a Vaylen add features to a body he was already inside? There are obviously ways this would be ridiculous/not work, but I’m thinking of something like having the body’s water breathing ability be color until submerged activity was going to be called for, and then taking a building scene to add that to the body. Or is the intent behind the rules different fundamentally from the tech burning rules, in a “once it’s made it’s made” kind of way?
The Ob 60 body I had in mind was basically a living Hammer craft. I was basically seeing what it would take to, instead of putting Ksatriyen Vaylen inside a spacecraft, grow Ksatriyen Vaylen some bodies they could use for space battle.
The other thing I thought of was a special body for an Encoder that was its own Eugenics facility. Basically a big creepy body that “ate” genetic material and then laid various types of eggs to hatch an army. Really, there’s a lot of creepy places you can go with this eugenics stuff.
My mind is going in this direction because it looks like a lot of the conflict in the game I’m about to start is going to revolve around the introduction of various technologies that one of the players is going to try to introduce into her society, and I thought an effective foil to that would be really creepy eugenics stuff.
Also another question: It looks like per the rules that Natural Disadvantages increase the cost of the body, which is the opposite from how it works with tech. Anyone know if this is the case?
If the disadvantages are traits, then the the characters can earn Artha for bringing them into play. That might explain why they have a positive cost.
If everyone is on board to create big tech and counter it with Vaylen eugenics then what I think I would do is give both sides a big resource pool that can be spent like at character creation - maybe 30 to 50 points? You still have to bring everything in through scenes, but you don’t have to worry about failing a bunch of resources checks. Agree on rules as to what the tech pools can be used for before play - just big, planet changing stuff, not personal tech to make up for lacking skills (the normal BE use for tech).