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Looking for some help here.
I have never played After the Bomb and now my players would like me to run a game for them.
I was reading over the book and I'm still not quite sure how the whole BIO-E thing works during creation.
For example, my one player wants to play a dolphin and it says that their size is 14, which has a 65 listed under BIO-E, and their animal Bio-E is 40.
So does this mean that their starting BIO-E points would be 105? If that is the case then even after spending 10 points for bipedal (full), 10 for hands (full), 10 for speech (full), 5 for looks (partial), 5 for Bite, 5 for Sonar and 5 for Thick Blubber (a total cost of 50) that would still leave the player 50 points and nothing else to spend them on, unless they take Psionics.

Am I missing something here or is it normal for some characters to have unspent points?

Palladium is notorious for recycling content without updating them. Ignore the BIO-E on the table and only use the BIO-E listed on the animal template.

their starting BIO-E is 40.

the BIO-E listing in the chart is a listing of the size steps and related things like weight and bonuses, but the BIO-E entry is deceptive and unrelated to the rest of it really. each step in size is 5 BIO-E gained or lost as per the text alongside the chart, depending on if you go up or down in size. the chart demonstrates what this looks like for a size 1 character. yeah, it is confusing.

so starting at size 14, you have the 40 BIO-E from the species. you may also get some extra from your background (it is often a good idea to determine background before making the mutant, so you know any bonus BIO-E you get, and can also pick features that fit the character's origin and role better)

if you go down to size 11 (which is roughly human size) you would gain 15 Bio-E, giving you 55 total. if you were to go up in size to size 17 (basically doubling your weight and bringing your dolphin up to small whale dimensions), it would cost you 15 from your initial 40, leaving you only 25 to work with.

Thanks to both of you, that makes things much easier to understand.