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Necroticplague
2017-07-23, 09:55 PM
Hello there. When trying to come up with ideas for races to populate a setting with, I tried to look for real life for some inspiration beyond the 'standard tolkein rip-off, add arbitrary weirdness'. One thing that seemed like an interesting possibility would be for an eusocial sapient, race. However, one thing struck me as a complicated possibility: the intelligence of the queen compared to an average member of the race. Googling questions about the real-life inspirations has really only got me papers on swarm intelligence, not quite what I'm looking for. So I now ask you guys for any information on how a 'queen' of a eusocial race is, at least mentally, compared to the rest. I've come to a few possibilities that go in basically opposite directions, and not sure which is more accurate:

1. Queen as, well, a leader. Since their the most well-taken care of member of the group, their enhanced diet helps promote their developement. This is helped by increased intelligence allowing them to more effectively avoid tainted food, as well as make decisions to keep themselves healthier. So, evolutionary processes end up selecting for more intelligent queens. Their enhanced mental abilities as well as importance to the group makes them the default leader.
2. Queen as livestock. A queen has one role withing the group: reproduction. To this end, intelligence is a waste of calories that could be spent producing more brood. In fact, similar could be said about most of their body. As a result, they are of limited intelligence and mobility, even if they are still vital to the group. Since other specialized castes have the job of taking care of them, that they may not be able to is of limited consequence. Their important, and cared for, but cuddled and rather slow. Actual leadership position would likely fall to 'scouts', who need to process new situations all the time.
3. Homogenous intelligence. Extrapolating from possibility two to include other members of the group, none particularly need intelligence. They do one fairly specific job, and only need be capable of performing it. A generalized ability to figure things out is rarely needed. As a result, they're all fairly dense by default. However, because of their incredibly cooperative nature with each others , they can make significantly better decisions when they can form committees and cooperate, especially across castes (who have different views on things). Thus, leadership is uncentralized, as the group as a whole makes decisions, not individuals. Forcing them on their own leaves them lost and confused, especially if it's something outside their caste's job.

Honest Tiefling
2017-07-23, 10:13 PM
Have you read on the theory of multiple intelligences? I personally don't agree with all of it, but it could give you a solution to this issue. Each caste has logic/mental abilities tied to their job. Workers? Better sense of smell and ability to discern color. Warriors score high on Bodily-kinesthetic and visual spatial scale.

Queeny-pants could be high on interpersonal skills (she might be helping to take care of 300 young, after all!). Or she could be a historian of sorts. Since she probably has lived the longest and is the only one to remember their former hive, she could be a storyteller who passes along stories and important values to younger generations. Obviously, she'd be scoring high on the musical/rhythm/interpersonal side of things to be able to recite tales well enough for people to actually want to absorb.

Mechalich
2017-07-24, 12:50 AM
Combining eusocial with sapience is going to be kind of strange no matter how you slice it. Most eusocial animals are insects and operate primarily via overriding chemical cues - to the point that a large percentage of ant species have at least one other parasitic species that has only queens and survives by assassinating the queen of the colony, pheromone-controlling the remaining workers, and making them care for a new generation of parasite queen offspring. The most intelligent eusocial species known is probably the naked mole-rat, which has sterile workers. Interestingly the anime series From the New World (http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=14089) took the idea of sapient naked moles and ran with it, and has a number of interesting, and sometimes unsettling, ideas on this subject.

A lot of this is probably going to depend on precisely how your eusocial society is setup. For example, is there simply one sterile phenotype of largely identical individuals who perform essentially all societal roles - which is common in many ants, with individual jobs often varying by worker age - or are there a widely variety of sterile phenotypes with vast physiological variation (which might include specialized 'soldiers') all performing a wide range of different tasks? Is there a genetic imperative that reinforces eusociality as haplodiploid chromosomes do in Hymenoptera or not? Is there just a queen or are there dominant male reproductive as wheel? Are colonies monogyne or polygyne (meaning do they have one or more queens)? Do you have inherently sterile phenotypes - as in ants - or does the current queen suppress the reproduction of other daughters hornmonally as in certain wasps? You get the point, there are a lot of variables.

Generally, in an RPG context, sapient hive species are usually posited as having a roughly three point setup. You have the queen/king as primary reproductive who whether intelligent or not are 'monsters' and unable to function as PCs. Then you have a set of not-entirely sapient menials serving as the base of the population and doing all the basic physical labor and also unable to function as PCs, leaving you with a small 'elite worker' group in the middle that has specialized knowledge and can go on adventures and stuff. This is probably most similar to the system found in certain termite colonies, that have secondary reproductives who may be relatively close in size to the workers.

Segev
2017-07-24, 11:14 AM
Though it's common to depict the Queen as being a ruler, or even the sole intelligent entity in a "smart bugs" colony, possibly with the other bugs serving as her arms, legs, hands, etc., it's not really an accurate representation of how, say, an ant colony or a bee hive would most likely develop into full sapience. The whole reason we have "Ant Colony Optimization" algorithms in the study of swarm intelligence is that the colony already acts with greater directed intelligence than any individual ant.

It is possible to conceive of the colony burrow as a part of the intelligent creature, even. Much of human sapience is derived from the physical structure of the brain on a cellular level, as connections between neurons form time-delayed and weighted transmissions of pulses, such that myriad "thoughts" can be garnered from similar sets of neurons. Our thoughts fire down cascades of neural activity which are reinforced and degrade in a fashion similar to the way pheromone trails are reinforced and degrade as ants move through their paces. (These pheromone trails are why you see chains and lines of ants taking the same seemingly unmarked paths.)

A hive intelligence would not be a "collective" any more than humans are "collectives" of individual neurons. It would be a singular mind, if it became self-aware, but its 'thoughts' would be mediated by the motions and actions of its individual bodies - the ants in this analogy - and its "brain" would actually be both the physical structure of the colony (enabling more extensive structures to "think" with) and the pheromone trails laid around it and outside of it. The queen, in this analogy, is more akin to its genitals and reproductive system than anything else. Whether it would culturally have a "nudity taboo" equivalent regarding display or discussion of it is a matter for the writer's invention.

LibraryOgre
2017-07-24, 11:41 AM
Another possibility would simply be colonial intelligence benefits.

Say, you have a single individual, who is as smart as they are.

When you get 3 of them together, though, they all get a little smarter.

6 is smarter than 3, 10 is smarter than 6, 15 is smarter than 10, 21 is smarter than 15, etc.

What you might do is make this an assignable bonus, and account for different types of intelligence by using the different stats. Your "Queen" wouldn't be smarter than everyone, per se, but would be the leader who assigned the bonus.

***
To term this in the d20-based lingua franca around here...

At each threshold, Neemers (NMRs, or Naked Mole Rats) get a +1 to apply to checks of one type, that increases the more Neemers they have around them. Whoever has the highest level + charisma is the leader of any group of Neemers, and decides how the cumulative bonuses are allocated... but that bonus must be split among the group (preventing them from becoming weirdly powerful in large groups, with everyone becoming super-intelligent, hyper-observant, powerful personalities).

Number of Neemers/Bonus to be allocated
3/+1
6/+2
10/+3
15/+4
21/+5
28/+6
36/+7
45/+8
55/+9
usw

So, if 3 Neemers get together, whoever is in charge can say "Bonnie, you're going to negotiate for us, and so you get a +1 to Charisma checks." Later, when it's time for watches to be set, "Adam, you're on watch tonight, so I'll give you a +1 to Wisdom checks to keep us safer." The next day, Charlie might say "I've got to decide what's best for us, so I'll take the +1 bonus and apply it to Intelligence tests."

If they meet up with 3 more Neemers, and Charlie remains in charge, he might give Dale and Ernie a +1 a piece on night watch, or Franny a +2 for her history (Intelligence) check to figure out what's going on.

I'd set a range limit (no more than 30' from another Neemer in the cluster) to keep things from getting too crazy, and the law of diminishing returns would keep the bonus from climbing too high, but you'd still have Neemer clusters capable of incredible feats, without making "I'm a Neemer with leadership" the key to taking over the game. I'd also set a limit on how often the bonuses can be reassigned, though even a fairly non-tactical limit (10 minutes or so) won't cause too much trouble.

CharonsHelper
2017-07-24, 11:52 AM
Another possibility would simply be colonial intelligence benefits.

Say, you have a single individual, who is as smart as they are.

When you get 3 of them together, though, they all get a little smarter.

6 is smarter than 3, 10 is smarter than 6, 15 is smarter than 10, 21 is smarter than 15, etc.


Wasn't that basically the premise of the geth in Mass Effect? (I think it was how they explained them getting true AI accidently, because individually they weren't smart enough.)

Frankly - from a game perspective if you want them to be an intelligent species rather than just an enemy, I'd make them all intelligent.

If they communicate telepathically (a common trope) then have the queen be a master of multi-tasking to coordinate them, but not actually have more raw intelligence. She has advisors who tell her what the best courses of action are from their expertise, she just sees about getting it coordinated & done ASAP.

If they don't have telepathy, I'd have the queen be a master socializer, but especially amongst her own kind through both reading and putting off various pheromones in ways that others can't. Also, non-queens would have an extreme reluctance to go against a queen in a sort of inherent subservience (the closest real-world example I can think of would be dogs & humans - but not a great comparison due to the intelligence difference). When nations fight, it might end up where in order to a kill a queen, the opposing queen has to do it personally, or at least be present in order to cancel her enemy's pheromones and override her troops' inherent loathness to kill a queen. (so no assassinations possible from one of their own species)

Bohandas
2017-07-24, 12:44 PM
I would see the queen as likely intelligent but not leader; chosen for transformation into a queen on the basis of superior traits (in game terms probably very high on at least one base stat, thus at least a one in six chxnce (probably much higher) or genius level intelligence). Tgey're not going to waste royal jelly on some schlub

Aliquid
2017-07-24, 01:22 PM
I've come to a few possibilities that go in basically opposite directions, and not sure which is more accurate: I prefer option #3



Another possibility would simply be colonial intelligence benefits.

Say, you have a single individual, who is as smart as they are.

When you get 3 of them together, though, they all get a little smarter.

6 is smarter than 3, 10 is smarter than 6, 15 is smarter than 10, 21 is smarter than 15, etc.Like Cranium Rats from Planescape. The more you come across as a group, the more dangerous each individual is.

LibraryOgre
2017-07-25, 12:59 PM
Wasn't that basically the premise of the geth in Mass Effect? (I think it was how they explained them getting true AI accidently, because individually they weren't smart enough.)

Pretty much. I'm picturing every Neemer being close to human average, simply because it makes it easier for an individual to be a PC, and the conglomerations being super-intelligent, but it could also work if you start lower.


Like Cranium Rats from Planescape. The more you come across as a group, the more dangerous each individual is.

Not quite. This doesn't posit that EVERY Neemer gets better by being around other Neemers, but rather that the group can make some individuals within their group exceptional by devoting communal resources to them.