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Trying to come up with a list of vague words for different "kinds of animals". Help? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm fiddling with a card game concept, and a very important part of it is creatures interacting with other specific kinds of creatures. This necessarily means I need to come up with lots of type names that are descriptive but vague enough to shove literally anything in them. Here's some good examples: "bug" containing ants, shrimps, pillbugs, bees, and literally anything that could be called a creepy crawly; "fish" containing everything from salmon to sharks to eels to octopi; "trees" containing all the stuff you are thinking of as well as those precambrian 6-foot fungi pillars; and "cats" including housecats, big cats, cheetah, and carcals.

And that's everything I can think of that would be useful. You see my problem? I know there are other casual-usage words for big categories of critters, but my grasp of the Enlgish language is fickle and leaves me whenever it is most inconvenient. If there is a list I could work from, that would be very helpful. Otherwise, volunteer as many words as you think would be useful.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The biggest difficulty with answering this question I think is that I don't know how broad the categories should be. Do you have an estimate of how many categories you're looking for?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Honestly, my main motivation here is to pick all of your brains to see how many different category-words there are, then change my game plan to react to the natural language words. For example, if we didn't have words more specific than Animal, Plant, Fungus, and Bacteria, I could slap a four-color mana system on that and call it a day. Obviously that's not the case, but in the unlikely system that I can describe all of creation using only 20ish names i could imitate Cardfight Vanguard and make them into a sort of clan system and do lots of clan-exclusive comboing off each other. Any more than that, I imitate Magic instead: certain cards care a whole lot about types (e.g.: Kavu you control are red in addition to their other colors, Red creatures you control have haste) while others pay more attention to subtypes (e.g.: Tap 12 Allies you control: draw a card) and other just don't discriminate, affecting everything or nothing.