When I ran Men of Psience (playtest archived here), I ran it with a Tech bias of 0@3 - that is, nothing higher than wilderness survival and ambush techniques. I'm wondering now if that was the correct call. After all, Graham heard birdsong while he was wandering the forest; presumably, those birds had nests. If we'd played longer and Graham had gone exploring, I might even have made the mistake of including a beaver, complete with beaver dam. Isn't that level two Woodworking? And isn't the bird using level two Weaving skills to build that nest? It's one thing to include finding food and water and knowing enough to sleep in a cave under "unspecified tech skills," but saying that the ability to dam a river falls until T0@1 Survival seems like a stretch to me.
What do you think? Am I right in thinking I was wrong? Should I have excised all nesting birds, beavers, and other tool-using animals from my scenario to preserve the tech bias?
Well, I admit, I know very little about such things, but I do have a thought. In high school, I took Electronics, a friend of mine took Commercial Art. It was an in-joke between us, when asked who was doing harder work. I would say things like "Can you check the resistance of a 3 resistor circuit?" to which he would reply "Draw a tree." Drawing and artwork is certainly a lower tech bias than electronics, but I know I could not do it as well as someone in an art class.
My point is just because an animal can build a nest or a dam doesn't necessarily mean that a person could do it. Perhaps animals are immune to the tech bias, nature over technology, and all of that.
I think Woodworking implies tool use. But you definitely have to check that the bias is high enough for all indigs, including animals. Although, maybe all the birds in that world live in burrows and there are no beavers.
Graeme - At least one of the 2@ weaving skills can be done with no tools more complicated than your fingers (did you ever do basket-weaving in an art class as a child?), so I don't think that a beaver using his teeth and paws to manipulate tree trunks isn't performing a Tech skill. Besides, if it's not T2@x, it has to either be T0@1 (which I really don't want to do; that's like saying building a mud hut is basic wilderness survival) or some kind of Bod skill. Since the only Bod functions involved are chewing and pushing, and the end result is a feat of engineering, I'm uncomfortable with that, too.
I think I like the "no beavers" solution best. It was important to me that that world be flatlined in Tech; it's just that I neglected to consider the non-sentient indigs when I designed the world.
Well, you've asked a tough one--tough enough that I'm tempted to punt.
One thing that strikes me is that tech skills, as used by humans, implicitly suggest understanding the principles behind them. A monkey can push the button that launches the missile; he can even be taught to push that button when the bell rings. He does not know how to launch the missile.
There are wasps who make nests of paper; they make the paper. I treat papermaking as a subset of cloth. The wasp does not "know how to make paper", a tech 2@2 skill; it probably has a highly specialized bod 0@1 manipulate object skill that allows it specifically to turn scraps of wood fiber into a paper nest. Similarly, the bird does not design a nest, and could not decide to use its skill at weaving nests to create a different type--ornithologists can easily identify the type of bird that built any nest by the nest design--but only has a body skill of manipulating environmental objects into this shape that serves as a nest.
The beaver is a tougher one, but then, it is already using body skills to cut the wood and maneuver it into place, and the notion that it is not designing a dam but manipulating objects into a particular internalized pattern is not that far a stretch.
Now, the beavers in Narnia are a different story; Mr. Beaver is quite evidently a dam designer, and proud of his work. On the other hand, Mrs. Beaver bakes decent fresh bread, from what I'm told, so we're not worried about it in that case.
Looked at another way, if the person working the skill has no understanding of how it works, it's an @0 skill, and not only do @0 skills not give bias to the user, they are not limited by the world bias. It is not at all impossible for an indig in a 0@2 Psi world to be taught a Psi 8@0 Posturing skill--it's just extremely difficult for him to learn it. Thus it may well be that our bird has a T2@0 nest weaving skill and our beaver a T5@0 control waterflow skill, neither of which makes any difference to their bias or that of the world.
So those two solutions work for me. I don't see unintelligent animals having tech skills of that sort.
--M. J. Young