Is Higher Bias Always Good?

I was just thinking about biases. I recall an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, where Beverly Crusher had to tell a member of her medical team what a splint was, and how to make one. The guy used his bone regeneration device so much that he didn't know any of the basic stuff. Now he doesn't have the bone regeneration device. "What am I going to do?" I on other other hand, would have a much lower bias in first aid, however, I know what a splint is. Which of us would be more useful? I bet there would be a lot more worlds where a splint would work, but a bone regeneration device wouldn't. Lower biases are the way to go.

This should be a motto of Multiverser: No solution is optimal for every problem...of course, expressed more kewly.

There is a picture at the beginning of the Tech bias section in your Multiverser rulebook of two crashed starship pilots trying to start a fire with sticks.

One of my former players, in the Huntsville game, pointed out that a knife was the optimal weapon. It was useful as a tool, you could train up to do significant amounts of damage with it, and it was not going to be biased out.

At that point, he had not experienced negative tech bias worlds, but his larger point still stands. Such worlds are rare. A knife is going to be useful in almost any world as a tool with a thousand uses or as a weapon.

On the downside, you can't do as much damage. With some skill, and a Fusion Torch Rifle, I might be able to Obliterate a target. I might be able to attack the Mother Ship, and with skill and good target choices on the Mother Ship's hull, I might be able to destroy it. Harder to next to impossible to do that with a knife.

However, the downside of the FTR is that there are a LOT of worlds in which it does not work at all. And then there are a LOT of other worlds where you might be able to fire it, but you can't recharge it, you can't exchange ammo, and you can't fix the laser sight on the top of it.

Daniel Boone said something about a rifle being an awkward club.

So, I'm going to nominate the Working Knife as the best all-around device for a verser.

Best all-around weapon: short stout stick.

S.M. Stirling in his Dies the Fire trilogy had his hero say....in the high mountain in winter you absolutely need two things to survive, a rabbit throwing stick, and a working knife. And you can make the stick with the knife.

I was going to answer this, but then I didn't, because the thread twisted in a different direction. But on reflection I thought I would answer it.

These are the advantages to being in high bias worlds:

• Most of your skills in that area will work.
• Even the ones that will work in most worlds will work better--easier, more reliably, more effectively, more efficiently--in a high bias world.
• You are much less likely to botch.
• You are more likely to be able to get help--in the form of equipment (energy packs, ammo), advice, or whatever.

These are the disadvantages:

• There are probably people in this world whose skills and devices are at the top of the bias, and they might be against you.
• If you aren't at the top of the bias, you are at a disadvantage.
• If you've not been in a lot of worlds with high bias in this area, you probably have not had as much practice on the high-bias skills as some of the indigs, and so are again at a disadvantage.

These are the advantages of high biased skills:

• They are usually more effective in some ways than lower bias skills attempting to achieve the same result. We use hydraulics instead of pulleys where we can because hydraulics work better. It is much easier to resupply the ammunition for an energy gun than to find the right sized bullets for a slug projector.
• Being good at them means that if you find yourself in a situation where someone is using those skills, you've got a better chance of knowing what he's doing and how to deal with it. If you've never flown a spaceship and you're the only guy who can do it, that's a bad thing; if you've done it before, you're in a much better position to do it now.
• Having the high biased skills means that you also have the high bias, which in turn means that you're better with the low biased skills in that bias area.

These are the disadvantages:

• They do not always work, because of bias.
• They are often much more dangerous when they go wrong. You will never get a universal explosion from trying to flick a penny; you might from trying to shift an atom.

Now, here are some advantages of low-biased worlds:

• You probably have and can perform skills that are above the level, giving you an advantage.
• The indigs are not likely to surprise you with something within that bias that you do not understand.

And the disadvantages:

• Everything in that bias area is more difficult.
• There are going to be a lot of things you think ought to be simple that wind up being impossible, and you have to adjust.

Advantages of low biased skills:

• They almost always work, even if they're difficult. A sword or knife is considerably more reliable even than a pistol, and a club or staff or hammer more so than that.
• You can practice them in almost any world, so it's a lot easier to get good at them.
• You are not likely to be burned for a witch because what you're doing is incomprehensibile to the indigs.

Disadvantages:

• They are less effective, less flexible, in worlds where higher biased skills work--the deal of taking a knife to a gunfight.
• In such worlds, they make you look primitive.

The example from Star Trek (and it was that other doctor, not Beverly Crusher, who served for a season or two) is not all that good. The young doctor was actually a fool, and it is unlikely that his medical training would not have included some basic instruction in how bones heal and how to splint them, even with the bone regrowth technology available. We don't do exploratory surgery as much now that we have computer tomography and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and laproscopy, but we still do it, and we still teach it, and doctors understand that the high tech approaches are better ways of achieving what can be achieved the other way. Particularly for medics who are going to be aboard starships and might find themselves working in emergency situations, field medicine is going to be a significant part of their training. It was a funny exchange (particularly when he said he couldn't do medicine like this because it was too primitive), but it really was unlikely.

Generally, the one with the higher tech skill understands the process involved in the lower tech skill as well, and can adapt to it much more readily than the reverse. Looked at in terms of your example, even were we to assume that that doctor did not understand splints, you can bet that he would have a much better chance of properly splinting a broken leg than you would have of properly fixing it with a bone regenerator.

Hope this helps.

--M. J. Young