The Republic of Heaven

This idea was kicked around awhile ago, but never came to fruition. We really ought to have a super-awesome 'what is your daemon' quiz on the site; it's such an obvious feature and one that should be easy to design. Who here is up for helping out? That's right, you all are, or you're banned! What we need is first a list of attributes: say 10 or so; things like bravery, intelligence etc. Then we think of twenty-odd animals and assign to them a ranking in each of the attributes, from 1-5. Then you congratulate yourselves on a job well done and I go struggle over the algorithm for another fortnight.

Also nice would be some copyright free images of the animals in question - preferably nice and large. Let's go!

Sounds like fun! I would break Intelligence down into Wisdom, Cunning
and Resourcefulness. Courage is good. I would also add Determination.
Animal personalities differ - there are those who use Charm to attract, and Fierceness to intimidate, and Affection to form relationships, and soothe and console. Physically, there is Agility, Dexterity, and Strength.

Now observe as Will steals my idea, spiffifies it and brings it to life! Well done Will, I'll be glad to help of course.
If you need descriptions of personalities at some point I'd write some up, but I guess that'll be after their values are figured out.

Also nice would be some copyright free images of the animals in question - preferably nice and large. Let's go!

How big a panda do you want?

http://www.bigfoto.com/themes/nature/animals/

That has a lot of huge royalty-free animal photos.

Yeah that will be awesome... but it will have to be a good quiz and not one of those really lame ones that you find almost anywhere on the internet.

Just a thought though... isn't 20 animals a tad limited - wouldn't it be awsome(er) if there were hundreds.
Of course i realise that would take a lot more time and effort to do...

http://www.bigfoto.com/themes/nature/animals/

That has a lot of huge royalty-free animal photos.

Ta; handy list.

Too many animals and it gets hard to think of how they'd score in the various attributes.

I can think of..

dog
cat
lion
elephant
duck
pig
squirrel
fox
horse
badger
pigeon
hawk
monkey
chicken
parrot
penguin
snake
swan
panda
wolf


That's 20; which is probably enough to be going along with. Do they seem archetypical (that is to say, with clearly defined characteristics) enough?

I think you can get rid of things like penguin and elephant and replace them with some more english countryside animals, like ferret or pine marten. If you know anything about D&D, I made a giant list of daemons for my HDM campaign setting - maybe it'll interest you?

You forgot dolphin.

You've only got one rodent in the list. I think mouse or rat should be in there. And... what else? Stoat.

And for characteristics, what about introversion and extroversion? Or passive, passive-aggressive and aggressive. These would be quite easy to attribute to animals.

I believe some daemon choices here, such as penguins and pandas, are a bit loaded.

I think the elephant should stay, it has a very distinct personality. I would add on the dolphin (you don't have marine animals) and some weasely creature like a stoat or ferret, as suggested, and maybe some kind of insect?

I'll help assign attributes. You could draw the attributes out of the altheiometer itself, that might make the test closer to home.

This is such a fantastic idea! I've seen a bunch of really simple daemon quizzes (ones that only have things like cat, dog, mouse and bird. Lame!) I realize that making a quiz must be really complicated and difficult though, so thats understandable

Anyway, it might be easier to use daemons commonly seen in the books - pine marten, cat, monkey, leopard, goose, snake, raven, cheetah, wolf, dog, rabbit, butterfly, rat, etc. These more common and familiar daemons might be easier simply because we've already seen them in action and can list their attributes and understand what they say about their human's personality. But its just a thought

Oh, and I'm sure this has been discussed elsewhere already but, can people have daemons like elephants and horses? I guess I just assumed daemons would usually be something smaller and more condusive to human life. But I guess just because we never met anyone with a daemon that size doesn't mean they don't exist in Lyra's world!

I think the general consensus last time was that people's daemons were made out of a.. certain amount of Dust, or something. You're welcome to make another thread on it; there's plenty of leeway for discussion.

So the thought here is to switch the more rare daemons for some common Anglo ones? Yet other people want a fish.

Domestic
dog
cat
rabbit
pine marten
pig

Insects
butterfly

Birds
raven
swan
hawk

Pests
rat
squirrel
fox
stoat

Strong
lion
wolf

Exotic
monkey
parrot
snake
panda
koala



That's 20 again; I've split them into categories to show there's a good mix.

YOU FORGOT DOLPHIN!

You might want to take a look at the Big Five for an empirically grounded set of personality factors to consider. The matching would then just be a 5-dimensional distance comparison between the points representing the forms and the point in 5-space that their test answers give.

If you wanted to do this the right way, you'd do a data collection phase where you'd get people to say what their daemon was and take a Big5 test. Then you could get mean/sttdev data for each form and each factor. At that point you could just have people take the same Big5 test and get a p-value for their likelihood of having each form. The major problem is sample size in the first phase (or disbelief in the existence of a sample, as the case may be).

If you wanted to do this the right way, you'd do a data collection phase where you'd get people to say what their dæmon was and take a Big5 test. Then you could get mean/sttdev data for each form and each factor.

Isn't the point of the quiz to find out what your daemon is? I imagine most people would just choose their favorite animal on the list...

You really must put in a dolphin, Will. How annoying this must be for you.

But you could easily replace the koala with the dolphin. Whatever function the panda is supposed to serve can cover the koala too, can't it?

You really must put in a dolphin, Will. How annoying this must be for you.

But you could easily replace the koala with the dolphin. Whatever function the panda is supposed to serve can cover the koala too, can't it?

I always thought pandas were quite different to koalas?

Dolphins are impractical daemons that aren't really common. I think the person would have to have an affiliation to the sea as well as the dolphin's clever, inquisitive and friendly nature. BUt there's a paradox because if one has to stay constantly at sea then he can hardly be hte most social of people and dolphins, in their natural habitat, are extremely social creatures. The contradictions make for extremely dodgy ground when saying "yours would be a dolphin". The person's very nature, ie dolphin like, would cause a lot of pain and upset by having a dolphin daemon because it would alienate them from land and society and prevent them from being who they are.

There are other animals that can take the dolphin's place. Ravens are extremely intelligent, for example. So are pigs, despite their reputation.

Such a quiz should take into account the extent to which a human's daemon is like its human but also how it complements him or her.

For example a naturally extroverted human might be balanced by an introverted daemon. Or a very social person might have a very solitary daemon, like our good friend the giant panda. Or the other way round, as with the dolphin.

However, in the case of an unbalanced personality, you might well expect the human and the daemon to have large quantities of the same traits. A salesman, for example, would have only outgoing qualities in both the human and the daemon component of his composite human/daemon character.

Dolphins should be in the list, they're in the book, and there are no other sea creatures on the list at the moment. And most other sea creatures are crap because they're not that intelligent so can't have any personality attributes.

I don't see why we need koala and panda either. They basically do the same thing. Don't wake up much and bum around eating only want type of plant.

Deffinately keep the rat because they're the coolest friend a girl can have

...pokemon daemon?