The Zero Template Race Challenge

...(A race) which has culture and “common advantages/disadvantages” and maybe unique technology…but without having a template at all. That would also solve the weird situation with humans being the only “normal” race, without a template, when all races in the setting are different, but not all have enough biological difference to require different templates... The point is that a race can have no template and not be just humans-with-a-different-paint-job, but be meaningfully different. -- Lord Buss

I've had to butcher and stitch together the quote a bit, as it was scattered across a conversation and in a specific, Psi-Wars context, so my apologies if some of the meaning is lost, but it inspired me, and I wanted to share my thoughts on it.  First, I want to talk about what I think Lord Buss is asking for and where there are problems with it, but after establishing those constraints, I want to attempt to explore the surprisingly interesting puzzle that his request poses.

First, let's narrow down the request itself, and the intent of the request.  First, the core idea here is to have an alien race that is alien but has no defined template, as none is needed. I don't believe the idea is to just ignore the requirements of a template.  The idea here is to create a race that doesn't need a template, despite obviously being alien.  He proposes to get around this constraint by offering up associated elements that aren't part of the template itself. For example, a faerie race might all have Magery, but some might have the option of buying Wild Mana Generator.  Similarly, a race might have access to language and culture and technology that the rest of the galaxy doesn't (or, at least, doesn't commonly use).  Finally, you could associate them with "mechanically irrelevant features" such as wildly coloration, hairlessness, three genders, etc.

This request is not for a zero-point template.  A zero-point template might allow for, for example, DX+4 and IQ-4, which certainly a violation of the spirit of the request.  Zero-point templates can be quite complex!  It's not asking for low complexity, or low absolute cost zero-point templates: a race that all has a perk and a quirk would violate the request too.  Finally, they can't even have features. Features require a template too, they're just the most extreme example of "low absolute cost zero-point templates." The request is for a race that has no template, but is clearly alien.

The intent of the request seems aimed at normalizing humanity.  The point is that the races of Psi-Wars tend to be positive in cost, often quite expensive, and humans are not.  This creates a weird situation where the galactic average ST or IQ or HT is higher than the human norm. By having at least a few races that are mechanically identical to humans out of the gate, you bring that average back closer to humanity. It might also be about reducing mechanical complexity. After all, what Lord Buss describes isn't really that far from a zabrak or a twi'lek: the humanoid races of Star Wars mostly amount to "person-with-a-paint-job." There's no reason to make every race a deep investment in system mechanics.  Finally, it would also simplify the race creation process, making the race design a lot cheaper for the GM, which would allow a proliferation of races.

So, can it be done?

Can You Make Races Without Templates?

No, it cannot be done.

The problem here is how exacting GURPS demands Race Templates be. A lot of what Lord Buss is describing as "things you can do without a template" are, in fact, things you need a template to do.  For example, if you made blue skinned, black-eyed, digitigrade, hairless humanoids with tails who were able to withstand the deep cold of their native arctic environment, then they have some degree of temperature tolerance.  You could set their native temperature at a lower level, so they're fine in arctic weather, but dying of the heat at room temperature, but that, along with hairlessness, tails, inky black eyes, night-adapted vision, etc, are all features. By definition, if the race is different from humanity at all, in any way, they need to have a template, even if that template has only features.

There is, in fact, one templateless race that I can find: the Vithaani, from GURPS: Tales of the Solar Patrol, Page 18.  But if you read their entry, it's obvious why they have no template:

The humans of Mars are genetically identical to Earth humans, and interbreeding is possible.

They don't need a racial template because they're not a race; they're human.

Having humans with unique technology, language and culture is not a race, it's a culture. So if we have templateless, humanoid "aliens" with a strange set of technology, what you really have is a different human subgroup, not a different race.

But what about unique traits that the race can buy? Well, that sort of kicks the mechanical requirements down the road a bit: you're still a member of a mechanically complex race, you just get to pick and choose from a menu that dictates the specific nature of how weird you are.  But while this might actually go a long way to making a race feel fairly unique, it's not actually an example of templateless design.  What you've really done is given them Racial Gifts as a feature. From GURPS Power-Ups 2: Perks, page 12

Racial Gifts

This is strictly a racial perk.

You can buy a specific set of exotic and/or supernatural advantages that are allowed but not mandatory for your race, but off-limits for most other races in your setting... The GM lists the optional advantages  and  decides whether you can buy them in play. He might waive this perk for a race whose extra options aren’t all that remarkable – or require one perk per advantage for powerful, rare abilities.

I tend not to bother with a Racial Gifts perk often, though perhaps I should, but most of the powers races can access in the setting can be accessed via other means.  Keleni Telepathy or Ranathim Blood-Sense are just fairly specific and flavorful examples of psychic powers that any character in the setting can by after hopping over some extraordinarily low hurdles. But they're still features. 

So this sounds like something of a definitional argument, but it is true: you can't define a race without a template, because races by definition have templates, and any substantial biological and psychological differences would necessarily be defined by traits, even if they happened to be zero-point traits.

It's a Bad Idea Anyway

Furthermore, I wouldn't design a race this way even if I had the option, though optional traits later down the line do address some of my complaints about it.

First, I don't really accept the need to "normalize humanity." In a realistic sci-fi setting, I get it.  In G-Verse, I tried to find ways to make humans seem especially dextrous, playful and enduring compared to most other races, as these do seem to be some major differences we have from the rest of the biological kingdom: if we met a race of sapient velociraptors or cetaceans, our fine manual dexterity, tendency to turn everything into a joke, and the ability to engage in persistence hunting would set us apart.  This prevents all the other races with "all races are cooler than humanity." It creates an environment in which humans are somewhere in the middle of the evolutionary bellcurve, rather than in a weirdly low spot compared to all the totally cool races running around.

But there's a few problems with this approach in Psi-Wars. First, it assumes racial templates and and do go negative, which I've generally avoided. I've noticed that even in DF, there are no negative templates. I think campaign framework designers have tended to avoid this because it raises ugly questions about disadvantage limits and how they'd interact with templates.  I've followed this practice in Psi-Wars.  This, of course, isn't a showstopper for normalizing: if people are interested in seeing negative-cost races in Psi-Wars, I'll see what I can do! But it is a reason I haven't done it.

Second, Psi-Wars is Space Opera, and the point of Space Opera is to go "Lookit how cool that is."  If you meet an alien space princess, the fact that she's alien is cool, and we traditionally express that coolness in positive cost: her race is magical, or her race are all beautiful, or they're immortal, etc.  "Coolness" doesn't have to necessarily be advantageous, but in the brutal heroic-adventuring-logic of space opera, it usually is. "Your species is capable of parthenogenesis, but only during the winter seasons of your world? That's so cool!" is the sort of thing one utters in scifi rooted in xenobiology, not one rooted in punching alien warlords in the jaw to rescue the alien space princess from his evil clutches.

Finally, players who choose a race are going to want to see that race impact their play. I tend to prefer races that act like a theme atop a mode.  I don't like it when, say, all elves are wizards and all wizards (who are twinky) are elves.  But if you have a game where elves, dwarves and orcs are all viable as fighter, wizard and thief, that's great, provided they each play differently, and that difference is going to be a mechanical one that's going to need details in a template that explains those differences. And chances are that will affect point cost.

But Let's Do It Anyway!

You knew this was coming, right? Obviously, I wasn't just going to write a post to rag on one of my readers.  I'm writing this because the puzzle intrigues me.  If you're like me, it intrigues you too, and you're thinking "But actually you could X or maybe you could Y" and make this work.  Shouldn't it be possible to create some sort of thematically interesting race with at least a minimal sort of traits? How much can you do with as little as possible? It's a bit like a haiku: while the actual, literal request is by definition impossible, the spirit of the request creates intriguing constraints that might make for an interesting mental exercise.

So allow me to create an amended version of it: how alien can you make a race without resorting to large, absolute costs? Let's set some ground rules. We must be able to include Features. For convenience, let's allow Perks and Quirks too, but let's set a hard limit of no more than 5, and a soft limit of no more than one of each: you can do more but we'll squint at you. The most elegant version has no quirks or perks at all. This means the template is no more complex than a generic character who already has a template: it's just setting up to 5 quirks and perks for you.  You might even say being a member of such a race is a quirk or perk (In the spirit of that, I think we can allow a +1 or -1 point cost).  There can be no advantages, disadvantages, nor any attribute or secondary characteristic changes.  Everything is only features, perks and quirks, and the latter too are highly restricted.

Can you make an alien race this way? I think you can!  I think it'd be a lot of fun.

Let's lay some additional ground rules.

Lord Buss also requested that the race be of "minor importance." This caused some discussion about whether it's permissible to add a "major race" into the setting "so late." I think, of course, that it is. We can make major changes at any time.  But I think it's also beside the point, because a Game Master who likes Psi-Wars isn't going to want to introduce major, setting-sweeping changes. They're going to want to introduce a new world, or a new constellation, or maybe even a new fringe cluster, but they're not going to want to redefine the Empire, right? So they're probably going to want to make a minor race, so it's more interesting, in this experiment, to do what they'd do. So, they must not be of galaxy-shaking importance. They should be minor races that can be pretty easily isolated.

I also don't want a boring race.  I still want to see them as a theme over the mode of the character. If you want to play one of these guys as a bounty hunter or a space knight, I want it to feel different from playing a human somehow.  I don't think the original request was ever really about "the race shouldn't be different" just that it shouldn't have a wildly different template, that it should extract its distinctness from a minimalistic set of design considerations.

I've also had a lot of requests for moar alienz! Psi-Wars is an Aliens Everywhere setting, and yet everyone keeps playing the same races.  That's fine in the sense that most D&D people play elves, dwarves and orcs and rarely catfolk or coleopterans, but a Space Port bar should be brimming with high weirdness.  What is some of that weirdness like?  Certain parts of the galaxy beg for additional races, like the fantasy-esque Umbral Rim, or the intriguing biologies of the Sylvan Spiral, or the Arkhaian which should have at least some aliens in it, but is very sparsely detailed because I've been focused on other things.

So, let's see if I can cobble together a few of these minimalist aliens and stick them in the Psi-Wars setting.

A Toolkit

Oh, you want to try too? Well here's some tips and tools to get you started, beyond the obvious GURPS Space.

For perks and quirks, I recommend using GURPS Power-Ups 2: Perks and GURPS Power-Ups 6: Quirks as good, go-to resources for those to elements.

For features, I recommend the GURPS Repository Page on Features and the GURPS Wiki also has a Features Page.

GURPS Template Toolkits 2: Races has a depth of detail that only Bill Stoddard can achieve, and that makes it especially useful for us, as most of our work won't actually be in the template, but thinking about everything around the template, so it will be a useful book for us to explore (especially for thinking about alien mindsets and quirks). But it also has an extensive discussion on Features on page 12, and a few new features, including Gracile and Robust on page 14. Hit the index if you want more, though note that the "Metatrait Like" section lists zero-point metatraits, which might go beyond what we're looking for here and verge into "high absolute cost zero-point templates." Winged Hexapod, for example, might violate the spirit of this challenge.

Pyramid #3/35: Aliens has a rich variety of resources to play with.

• Alien Disadvantages will give you too much difference for the constraints of this experiment, but might be a good source of quirks, if you're looking for a more subtle version of these.
• Making Something Alien and Alien Starting Conditions might offer inspiration for how to think about your race.  After all, the first problem will be trying to come up with a way to make your race unique and different for nearly zero points.

And you might think about what sort of power-ups or technologies that might make your minor alien race interesting. In particular, I recommend talents as power-ups, as saying "this race tends to be good at X" is a good way of pushing someone in a particular direction: not all dwarves are miners, but dwarves tend to be good at mining, so Pickax Penchant might be common, but not required.  So, consider looking at GURPS Power-Ups 3: Talents, not as part of the template, but one of the things to put as an optional trait that might offer a lot of firm definition.

The Zero Template Race Challenge

It's a catchy name, even if it isn't the most accurate name (The Feature Creature Feature?), but I wouldn't start this unless I had some material already outlined.  This will be a short, self-contained series of "Zero Template Races" with an eye towards Psi-Wars.

Haven't spent a few days working on this already, let me just say upfront that my experience with it is that you shouldn't build races this way.  You'll quickly see that we run into interesting ideas that would be a lot more interesting with at least one advantage or disadvantage tossed into the mix, especially physiological advantages (like "Hoof" or "Flexible").  The second thing I notice is that some contortions I have to go through to make such a race interesting would often be simpler with just a single trait.  There's also a broad collection of really neat ideas that become arbitrarily limited.

I've also discovered Features can be far, far more sweeping in their changes to a character than perks or quirks typically are, which is interesting.

That said, this was a great experience for me, and I highly recommend it. It forces you to think about races in a minimalistic way, which is a nice way of thinking of them for Psi-Wars, as the result is almost invariably extremely human, and I strongly advocate looking for ways to make a race more interesting than +X to stat A and +Y to stat B, and this forces you to think about how your race is different in a way that's not just slapping a couple of advantages or trait modifiers on a human chassis and calling it creative.

I've got three races to show. They'll be rough mechanical sketches, on par with Iteration 5 races, rather than the fully realized races of Iteration 7.  Should they generate enough interest, I'll clean them up (they might move away from their zero-template origins) and make them "Psi-Wars official."