Characteristic Inheretance

Lkynmbr24

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Oct 30, 2016
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A Note on Breeding
For the sake of writing/coding sanity, the PC's microsurgeon enhanced immune system effectively maintains his ability to produce human seed and eggs, even if the surrounding ejaculate is transformed into something else. Because not being able to have pure alien babies when you're 100% alien is gay, it's plausible that 100% morphed PCs could have this temporarily fail or become overwhelmed during copulation with the same species.

This was taken from the TiTs story bible doc, but basically yeah, having offspring based off of post-morph anatomy would be a literal nightmare for coders to code, so canonically, any of Steele's offspring will come out primarily with their human traits as well as the father's traits.
 

Hammarschmied

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Feb 26, 2017
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A Note on Breeding
For the sake of writing/coding sanity, the PC's microsurgeon enhanced immune system effectively maintains his ability to produce human seed and eggs, even if the surrounding ejaculate is transformed into something else. Because not being able to have pure alien babies when you're 100% alien is gay, it's plausible that 100% morphed PCs could have this temporarily fail or become overwhelmed during copulation with the same species.

This was taken from the TiTs story bible doc, but basically yeah, having offspring based off of post-morph anatomy would be a literal nightmare for coders to code, so canonically, any of Steele's offspring will come out primarily with their human traits as well as the father's traits.
Dangit.
 

Noob Salad

Captain Shitpost
Aug 26, 2015
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Isn't it more accurate to say babies will come out with whatever traits their authors gave them that they can get from their parents? Like eye color, for example, which must then be referenced as [baby.eyeColor]. And even then it would be the eye color you made at creation, and not your current one.
 

Hammarschmied

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Feb 26, 2017
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Isn't it more accurate to say babies will come out with whatever traits their authors gave them that they can get from their parents? Like eye color, for example, which must then be referenced as [baby.eyeColor]. And even then it would be the eye color you made at creation, and not your current one.
It just kinda bugs me that some traits don't transfer.
 

Noob Salad

Captain Shitpost
Aug 26, 2015
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We barely have pregnancies as it is. :c
 

Magic Ted

Forum God
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Aug 26, 2015
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There's no reason that the various transformatives would alter your genetic/reproductive code, that's DNA 101.
 

Noob Salad

Captain Shitpost
Aug 26, 2015
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No it's not. I mean, if mods existed in real life, they would have to change your DNA. Like if you modded your hair to blonde, your body would need a way of knowing that from then on it should only grow blonde hair, even when every single hair cell inevitable gets replaced.

Not sure exactly how TiTS handles it lore wise, but obviously it's not like this. A better implementation would have been that the nanobots saved a copy of your original DNA.
 
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Couch

Scientist
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Aug 26, 2015
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Not sure exactly how TiTS handles it lore wise, but obviously it's not like this. A better implementation would have been that the nanobots saved a copy of your original DNA.

It is in fact the explanation that I offer:

If you talk to Dr. Lessau he'll have said:
"More importantly, they house within them a full transcript of your original genome from birth. No matter how you alter yourself, no matter what mutations you undergo, you will always be able to return to what you once were."

It's also the one that the code supports by keeping a copy of the player's starting values as PC_BABY.

Of course, then we run into issues of other characters inheriting transformatives from their parents, or rather the fact that they aren't supposed to. Kelly does, but Fen has explicitly stated that this clashes with the lore. The more generally-displayed result is that inheriting a transformation requires several consecutive generations to use the same transformation, and it will eventually imprint on the great-great-great-offspring. This has happened with the New Texans and is in the process of being done deliberately with the huskar.

There are several different methods of resolving this conundrum, but the headcanon I write by is as follows: most people in the future do have some form of publicly available immune-boosting technology, which is why nobody has actual STDs in the sex-crazed future and regular illness doesn't seem to be much of a concern either. Captain Steele's microsurgeons are a cut above the rest, akin to a smartphone versus an older-model cell phone, but the average person has their basic healthcare needs taken care of.

These public immune boosters are also what make people compatible with officially licensed transformatives. Again, Captain Steele has an advantage in that he/she can just pick things up off the ground and put them in their mouth to transform, but something like Ausar Treats are designed with certain standards in mind to let the user's immune boosters know that this is an approved change. The user's DNA is rewritten and a bit of science mumbo jumbo accelerates the time needed to produce the changes into something sexy.

What the immune boosters don't allow most transformatives to change are the user's germ cells, the cells that will undergo meiosis to produce sperm and eggs. These are specifically prevented from having their DNA changed, so the user will still produce children that look like what they originally looked like. Every now and then, a small change slips through into the germ cells by accident, but it requires several consecutive generations using the same transformative over and over in order to brute-force it past the protection in this manner.

Again, this is only my headcanon until/unless it gets written into the game or explicitly contradicted, but it makes the most sense as to how transformatives would practically function.
 

Lashcharge

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Aug 27, 2015
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No it's not. I mean, if mods existed in real life, they would have to change your DNA. Like if you modded your hair to blonde, your body would need a way of knowing that from then on it should only grow blonde hair, even when every single hair cell inevitable gets replaced.

Not sure exactly how TiTS handles it lore wise, but obviously it's not like this. A better implementation would have been that the nanobots saved a copy of your original DNA.

People don't have universal genetic code, each indiviual cell has a copy of their genetic code that decays with time. There is no reason that modding your hair blond will change the DNA in the pc's testicles/ovaries.
 

Ormael

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Aug 27, 2015
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Well I suspect for some TF's only body cells in region of change is with altered DNA and thus for most cased cells produced by ovaries or testicles are unaffected.
 

Noob Salad

Captain Shitpost
Aug 26, 2015
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People don't have universal genetic code, each indiviual cell has a copy of their genetic code that decays with time. There is no reason that modding your hair blond will change the DNA in the pc's testicles/ovaries.
Yeah of course, your testicles in real life (hypothetically) and in game wouldn't change, no. But skin cells near the penis are the exact same as skin cells on your head. And naturally sperm cells and brain cells are drastically different from skin cells. So what exactly are you talking about when you say DNA in one body part versus another?

I mean, if you modded your hair blonde it's not like it would affect the currently oldest living cell in your body.

...We've gotten off track. I'm not sure what the big deal is. A writer would choose whether or not they want to give their NPC's babies that inherit a certain trait from the PC.

@Couch: Eh, I feel like we were too preoccupied with whether or not we could that we didn't stop to think if we should. We could have easily just set child traits (as applicable by the writer) to the PC's current traits, but no we had to worry about lore and stuff. If anything needed handwaving the most it's pregnancy.
 

Hammarschmied

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Feb 26, 2017
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Some of the microsurgeons from the most recent transformatives could cross the mother/child barrier, or a few slip into the ejaculate of the pc.
 

Ormael

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Aug 27, 2015
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For sure it wil be not made common for such microsurgeons of Fen will bring ban hammer to make purge to save his precious lore if all tf and their mother-tf's will be able to pass by on next generations -_-'
 

Gedan

BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS
Staff member
Aug 26, 2015
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The reason we do that is because of the implications a few of the mods in TiTS would have if they were passed on to babies. Throbb, Gush, Dumbfuck, ClearYu, the more defining parts of the Treatment...

Actually the main reason we don't is because nobody wants to write (and thus code) Bess levels of potential variation for every pregnancy. The limitation is more born out of technical limitation than it is out of lore reasoning... at least it was, prior to Throbb and Gush and the treatment etc, which now also serve as extra sticks to beat the point home.

There is kind of sketchy support to kind of do it; that is to say, the child age tracking stuff has a subsystem for dealing with more complex potential children (with various potentials for escaping the current rules regarding trait inheritance) on a case-by-case basis.

As it is, I think we have a far more important system that we've all agreed on; the Nursery. We went to a lot of trouble to provide the capability to have long term interactions with offspring as they grow up in a somewhat generic sense, and now we need to start filling it in with new, more specific things. This has I think been the sticking point. We've accepted we can't take the CoC easy route out of just rapid-aging the kids out and hoofing them out of the camp in a matter of hours/days, and similarly we can't just throw the kids into some blackhole for you to never, ever see again, mainly because of the kind of person that would make PC Steele and the lack of choice involved on the part of the player.
 

Noob Salad

Captain Shitpost
Aug 26, 2015
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No yeah that's what I said. I mean, if a writer decided to write a baby for their NPC and made blurbs for whether or not the PC was, say, Treated beforehand...I mean, that's on them, come on.

But we can assume if your content is good enough to get in-game, you're competent enough to not do this. Therefore, your modded blonde hair should totes pass down.
 

Galgano

Well-Known Member
Aug 28, 2015
363
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So wait, why did Vic need to take TFs to get close to his original form if
1) anybody can revert back to their original form no matter how spliced they are, and
2) he could still be an eldritch abomination in the first place and still create human babies

I guess we could just hand wave it as the baby gene being a recent scientific discovery and Vic only did what he did because he thought he needed to
 

Noob Salad

Captain Shitpost
Aug 26, 2015
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I think things were different in Vic's time or something.

Like first you had to buy a girl dinner first before impregnating her.