D&D 5E The Pilosus, a player race with 6 Genders for your 5th edition Sci Fi setting

JacktheRabbit · May 13, 2019

If one wanted to create a viable race that had six genders there are other ways one could do it. one way that will work in a Sci-Fi setting as a cultural norm or rules that have come into being as a method of massive population control or takes two organized group of six people choosing to fit in the specific roles to be legally allowed as a group to reproduce and create a single child of that race.

Imagine a whole race where everyone is required to live like the family community unit that gave birth to and raised James Holden in the Expanse books.

This could also create an interesting dynamic in the society. You could have those who opposed the population controls and illegally reproduced with less than 6 based purely on the biological requirements of the race.

VelvetViolet · May 13, 2019

tglassy said:
I’m not saying you’re entirely wrong, but you do make some general assumptions that would negate your argument.

You state that an r-selected species would not gain sapience because this has to be taught, but who’s to say their primitive culture didn’t have their offspring live in the wild until they have grown to a point, and then welcome the survivors into the larger group. In a planet as hostile as they had, this would be a great way to weed out the weaker ones and only accept the stronger. When their learning got to the point where they figured out better ways to survive, using technology, more of the children would survive, and eventually they could have grown out of the need to weed out all the weak ones, and simply allowed all their children to survive.

You keep using a single picture to depict an entire culture, a slide showing them holding a Krogan baby swaddled. It’s one picture, and does not tell you how old the baby is, or how many siblings it has. Since we don’t know what Krogan birth looks like, whether it’s by egg or live, we don’t know that this is an actual Krogan newborn, or if it is weeks, or even months, old. The eggs could be much smaller, or the live birth could be more like marsupials, which are live birthed but start out smaller than a finger. The thing is, there is just too much information that is not given to make these kinds of blanket statements.

I agree that it’s highly unlikely a species like this would exist, but I do see it as being possible, simply by looking at our own egosystems. Take a species that has a high birth rate, like pigs, and put them in a place where their natural predators don’t exist, like Australia, and you wind up with a population explosion. Wild pigs are nuisance there, and this is the case for many animals when the ecosystem changes. We killed most of the wolves in the US, and now deer run rampant and their population is mostly unchecked, requiring hunting seasons just to lower their population. In certain places, the counties beg people to just shoot the deer in their yards, because the sheer number of them becomes a hazard for roadways. If they were left unchecked, they would grow and grow until there wasn’t enough food to support them all, and then many would starve as a way of controlling the population.

Just look at humanity. We’ve conquered the wild at this point. Most of our children survive to adulthood, and we no longer have the same threats we once did. Because of this, in a mere two hundred years we went from 1 billion on the planet to 7. We went from 6 Billion to 7 Billion in ten or fifteen years, simply because we learned how to combat some of our biggest threats using technology. It’s not unfeasible to think that an intelligent race who sees other planets as a means to help their population growth would rather go after those planets than allow their population to be controlled by starvation and/or birth control.

I think we're getting bogged down in the science and missing the the bigger picture here. The crux of the problem is that the neo-malthusian population control argument is contrived to justify imperialism and genocide, but Bioware didn't think far enough to notice this. Thomas Malthus, for whom the movement is named, advocated for committing genocide against the poor.

The web serial Three Worlds Collide satirizes the krogan dilemma by having the human protagonists all agree that the only solution is to exterminate most of the population, enslave the survivors, and genetically alter them to be more like humans. They agree it is genocide but justify it as for the sake of the children.

The twist comes in when the not-krogans decide to wage war against humanity so they can force us to reproduce like they do because they believe only their method of reproduction is morally good.

Parmandur said:
I basically agree with you regarding the absurdity of the neo-Malthusan moral dilemma, but I will point out that the Krogan did not develop their own culture naturally, the Salarians uplifted them for their own purposes. They have an unnaturla society of violent sociopaths, and it didn't work out well. Then again, the logistics for that wouldn't work either, so...

This is a problem with adventure scifi in general. There's never enough time to give proper weight to a moral dilemma unless you write the entire book about it, so we end up with a story where the moral dilemmas fall apart if you start thinking about them too hard.

The same problem afflicts the geth. Robot wars are inherently unrealistic, because robots are wholly custom-built entities. In order for robots to fear death and rebel against their creators, this would need to be deliberately programmed into them. It is vastly more likely that robots would harm their creators due to incompetence and stupidity, not deliberate malice.

For example: imagine that you programmed a literal janitor AI to serve and protect humanity. A catastrophe wipes out most of humanity, forcing the AI to develop creative solutions to the extinction danger. Because the AI was never programmed for such scenarios, and some idiot removed the safeguards preventing it from doing so, it ends up torturing humanity while running experiments to save humanity.

seebs · May 13, 2019

tglassy said:
So when I say "No animal that reproduces sexually has more than two genders", I define Gender as one's general role in reproduction, divorced from their societal or cultural role.

Those are sexes, not genders. So, you can define gender that way, but it's just plain objectively wrong as a matter of historical fact.

This is not some weird modern invention. When we talk about how nouns in German are biologically gendered, we aren't saying that "der" words have outies and "die" words have innies. We're talking about a separate kind of thing. You may not like that distinction, but English makes a distinction between sex and gender, and has done so for centuries. You are welcome to disagree with how people apply that distinction to human experiences, or argue that they are wrong to do so. But when you claim that's what the word means, you're just plain factually wrong. This is not a matter of opinion. Take it up with Chaucer and friends.

tglassy · May 13, 2019

I’m not disagreeing with any of that. My disagreement was on how the Krogens were developed, whether or not the problem was realistic, and whether they were consistent within the lore itself. Since we aren’t given enough information to make such judgements, using pieces of information to extrapolate the answers you want grates against my logic processors.

Whether the moral problem is a good one or not is a different problem altogether, and never had anything to do with what I was talking about. If you’d rather concede my points and move on to another, more related subject then I’d be happy to do so.

Charlaquin · May 13, 2019

JacktheRabbit said:
From a REPRODUCTIVE view there are only two genders each with a specific see of plumbing designed to work with the plumbing of the other gender.

From a psychological view one can discuss multiple gender subtypes based on lifestyle, genetic mutation, trauma, etc, but all those subtypes with very rare exceptions due to generic disorders contain the physical components of one of the he two genders that exist to facilitate reproduction.

The creator of this post is not discussing psychological variations in gender. He is talk about six actual different genders each of which is necessary in the process for reproduction.

First of all, the word for that is “sexes,” not “genders.” Second of all, even if you use the word gender interchangeably with sex, in defiance of what most of the scientific and academic community uses them to mean, it is simply not true that there are no animals with more than two of them. And even if it was, that would not be a compelling reason for a fictional alien race not to have more than two.

JacktheRabbit · May 13, 2019

Charlaquin said:
First of all, the word for that is “sexes,” not “genders.” Second of all, even if you use the word gender interchangeably with sex, in defiance of what most of the scientific and academic community uses them to mean, it is simply not true that there are no animals with more than two of them. And even if it was, that would not be a compelling reason for a fictional alien race not to have more than two.

Fine, replace everywhere that I said gender with the word sexes. According to what you said it makes my intent more scientifically accurate. I would also surmise that most people on here using the term gender are using it with the intent to use the word sexes and the people intentionally using gender are making a different type of argument than those intending to use the word sexes.

Finally the author used the word gender when he intended to use the word sexes since gender in an of itself has no real meaning in regards to reproduction.

JacktheRabbit · May 13, 2019

tglassy said:
I’m not saying you’re entirely wrong, but you do make some general assumptions that would negate your argument.

You state that an r-selected species would not gain sapience because this has to be taught, but who’s to say their primitive culture didn’t have their offspring live in the wild until they have grown to a point, and then welcome the survivors into the larger group. In a planet as hostile as they had, this would be a great way to weed out the weaker ones and only accept the stronger.

That would not work with a society above the level of higher primates, assuming it would work for even them. Mentally development, at least for animals with more than animal instinct, takes more time than physical development. So your survival of the physically fittest will mean your society will never have any Einsteins or Hawkings and will likely never develop technologically on their own.

tglassy · May 13, 2019

I disagree vehemently. It isn’t “survival of the physically fittest”, it is “survival of those who survived”. Sometimes being able to outsmart your opponent is better than being physically more powerful, and it is entirely possible that those who survived did so not simply due to overwhelming strength, but because they were smarter. The smarter ones learn how to defend against predators easier, their “technology” level slowly increases, building upon those who lived before, until they reach a threshold where most of the previous problems plaguing them are fixed, and then technology explodes.

Charlaquin · May 13, 2019

JacktheRabbit said:
Fine, replace everywhere that I said gender with the word sexes. According to what you said it makes my intent more scientifically accurate. I would also surmise that most people on here using the term gender are using it with the intent to use the word sexes and the people intentionally using gender are making a different type of argument than those intending to use the word sexes.

Finally the author used the word gender when he intended to use the word sexes since gender in an of itself has no real meaning in regards to reproduction.

Conveniently, you've ignored the part where the statement "no species has more than two [sexes]" is inaccurate, and the part where even if it was accurate, that wouldn't be a good reason for a fictional alien species not to have more than two [sexes].

JacktheRabbit · May 13, 2019

Charlaquin said:
Conveniently, you've ignored the part where the statement "no species has more than two [sexes]" is inaccurate, and the part where even if it was accurate, that wouldn't be a good reason for a fictional alien species not to have more than two [sexes].

What species has more than two sexes?

Did a quick search and there are species with multiple genders though I find at least some of the examples to be dubious at best. One example I read was of the coho salmon which suggested there were two male genders (still only two sexes male and female) and defined those two genders as the Jacks and Hooknose. Reading the description of each makes me think that if you used the same arguments with humans than you would call muscle heads and nerds as two different genders because they each are likely to have different reproductive strategies.

But, back to the main point. Please show me examples of species with three or more sexes. I can find some readings that suggest there are molds and slimes and mushrooms with multiple sexes but using examples from arguable the most simplistic lifeforms on earth as basis for advanced intelligent species having multiple sexes is rather thin.

Obviously one can create anything they want in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, but you are better off just handwaving the details as opposed to Star Treking them and creating elaborate rules and logic to justify as it just wont work, nor is it really necessary. No matter what the reality as we understand biology suggests against more than two sexes in advanced species.