Judgement Call: New Creature Ability

[Erik Filean]

I'm trying to put together Coda creature stats for the neural parasites from "Operation: Annhilate!" and I want to create a new special ability, Colony Intelligence, to simulate the enhanced collective Intellect of a large group of the parasites. What I have in mind is an ability that grants +1 to Intellect per 10 creatures in a colony, to a maximum Intellect of 13 or maybe 15 (depending on how nasty one wants to be). To make the ability more generally applicable, perhaps it should be possible to reduce the number of creatures required for the bonus.

I'm thinking of this as a fairly nasty ability, because more creatures are already harder to deal with, and if run properly the Intellect enhancement is going to make for very tough going for a group of player characters. I'm considering a cost of something like 10 or 12 advancement picks for the ability, +3 or +5 for each 2 fewer participant creatures required to gain the +1 Int bonus.

Does that cost seem reasonable, or perhaps even a bit too low--or am I overestimating the value of the ability?

An opinion from one of the Coda Crew would be invaluable to me, but I would like to hear what anybody has to say.

[Lancer]

Originally posted by Erik Filean
I'm thinking of this as a fairly nasty ability, because more creatures are already harder to deal with, and if run properly the Intellect enhancement is going to make for very tough going for a group of player characters. I'm considering a cost of something like 10 or 12 advancement picks for the ability, +3 or +5 for each 2 fewer participant creatures required to gain the +1 Int bonus.

Does that cost seem reasonable, or perhaps even a bit too low--or am I overestimating the value of the ability?

How tough this ability really is would depend a lot on the abilities of the individual creatures. That is, if they get a high intellect from this ability but have otherwise only limited capacity to present a danger (no natural weapons, no extremities that allow fine manipulation like hands, limited perception, etc.) it's not very impressive. If OTOH (like the neural parasites) they can pose a real danger things look different.
While it doesn't exactly fit the Coda system IMHO the best way to deal with this would be to make the cost a multiplier (or other modifier) to the 'base cost' of the creature.

Another thing to consider is the range of this ability (i.e. do creatures loose this enhancement if separated by larger distances) and how the link is established (psionics, weird radiation, etc.). The later could be important if your crew tries to interfere with the mind-link between the creatures, disrupting their colony intelligence.
Both could play a role in figuring out the final cost of this ability.

[Erik Filean]

Originally posted by Lancer


How tough this ability really is would depend a lot on the abilities of the individual creatures. That is, if they get a high intellect from this ability but have otherwise only limited capacity to present a danger (no natural weapons, no extremities that allow fine manipulation like hands, limited perception, etc.) it's not very impressive. If OTOH (like the neural parasites) they can pose a real danger things look different.
While it doesn't exactly fit the Coda system IMHO the best way to deal with this would be to make the cost a multiplier (or other modifier) to the 'base cost' of the creature.

It's exactly because nothing else in Coda uses that arrangement that I hesitate to do so here. The system is new enough and its potential unexplored enough that I hesitate to depart from precedent, especially if I'm developing an ability that I want to be more generally applicable than the creature or species I'm doodling with at the moment.

The other point, about the ability's effect relative to other capabilities, is a good one. I agree that in the case of the neural parasites it only enhances an already nasty little package (Highly agile, flying creatures that use a Natural Weapon attack to latch into your nervous system and control your body through torture, feed on neurochemical impulses, and can't be extracted without killing the host unless you UV-irradiate them and on top of that have a collective intelligence to coordinate them? That's not an easy day at the office!). Again, though, I want to go for compatibility, and where Coda species/creature rules account for that kind of thing is in the number of advancement picks it takes to produce the little nightmares.

Another thing to consider is the range of this ability (i.e. do creatures loose this enhancement if separated by larger distances) and how the link is established (psionics, weird radiation, etc.). The later could be important if your crew tries to interfere with the mind-link between the creatures, disrupting their colony intelligence.
Both could play a role in figuring out the final cost of this ability.

That's the easier part; the episode established pretty much that the link is telepathic in nature, so my parasites will have Psionic as a bonus edge and some free levels in Telepathy that only apply to the intracolony link (Spock could sense their telepathic strength, even "read" them to some extent, but not really use his own telepathic abilities to communicate even with a parasite infesting his nervous system). It wasn't clear to me what the range might be, but I find the idea of a more limited range that has separate colonies fissioning, fusioning, and establishing themselves as independent threats to be more interesting from a story perspective than an undivided Borglike collective.