10-11-2019, 09:23 AM | #11 |
Join Date: Nov 2015
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Re: [Space] How alien are your aliens?
I don't see why NOT killing every alien that shares a room with you would be a disadvantage.
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10-11-2019, 10:31 AM | #12 |
Untagged
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: [Space] How alien are your aliens?
Allergies are immune system glitches that are easily corrected in most ultra tech societies. Though one episode of Enterprise mentioned a character taking injections to deal with one of his many food allergies.
Though neither Star Trek nor any other popular sci fi show I can think of has problems with humans and non-humans just chowing down on each others food.
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Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check. |
10-11-2019, 10:41 AM | #13 | |
Join Date: Mar 2016
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Re: [Space] How alien are your aliens?
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10-11-2019, 11:02 AM | #14 |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: [Space] How alien are your aliens?
I like alien aliens. When I look through all my accumulated ideas for games, there is a large pile of physiologically distinct aliens intended for use as player characters. They have radial symmetry, live in trees, breathe with gills and swim, or even live in tunnels. They may use different senses. One species is the equivalent of an entire anthill. I generally like the emphasize different physiology and let the psychology differences flow from that.
Despite all this, I never seem to actually use them as Player Characters in games I run. Many of the space games I've run have been extremely human eccentric. Boarders from Earth threw TL8 human recruits into a space opera war. Space Merchant was about reconnecting the remnants of humanity after aliens (who never appeared on screen) tried to wipe them out. Lawmen of Borlo had the only known alien artifacts in the galaxy as a recurring form of McGuffin. Lost in Dreams has had episodes in space or on alien worlds, (we have one right now), but the characters are very much modern earthlings. So I'm in a weird spot, liking the idea of alien aliens, but almost never setting up games where the Players actually have the option of playing them. A lot of player-intended aliens do show up in games I run, the players just never got the option of running them because of the game setup. I suspect that in many cases players if given the option to play very alien aliens they'd come up with requests. I'd probably do that in game, and when I tried to run with genetic engineering in a game the most popular template was the Tiger people one player requested and two more players used. To be fair, gaming is a joint creation effort, and it was a very fun template.
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10-11-2019, 12:17 PM | #15 |
Join Date: Sep 2018
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Re: [Space] How alien are your aliens?
My players are ruthless starfish hunters. They will kill you in a hot second if you can't write with a pen or flip a bird at someone. If you want to have a civilized interaction with my players you need to be at least 80% forehead and that last 20% better be weird anatomy because if you don't speak fluent Allied Planets English they will torpedo you just as soon as try the translator software. I'm not sure where they got the massive distrust of weird aliens from but it is fierce. Two-arms-two-legs-English-accent you're A-ok for a cat-alien-person. If they see a tentacle or have to figure out how your gender works, you are clearly evil.
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10-11-2019, 01:23 PM | #16 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: [Space] How alien are your aliens?
How alien an alien can be depends on how much the GM intends to do with it.
If the alien is only going to wander in, do something inexplicable and then wander away again the sky's the limit for alieness but actual interaction with near-human PCs is limited to near nothing. If the alien is intended to interact with PCs (or even NPCs) it needs to be aircar and cantina compatible. If it can't ride in the same vehicle as the PCs it proabably can't go on the adventure. If it can't socialize with the PCs while eating, drinking or playing cards that pretty much torpedoes non-adventure interation. The alen might as well stay onboard it's own ship and send the PCs text messages with fractured syntax that show how alien its' ming is.
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Fred Brackin |
10-11-2019, 03:26 PM | #17 | |
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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Re: [Space] How alien are your aliens?
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As for my games, PC aliens are pretty much just humans in costumes with a few personality dial settings tweaked up or down. NPC aliens can be wildly inhumane, but then my favorite two alien races to date were the Memer and Saret from 2e GURPS Aliens and the Polyglot from a friends homebrew game, which is a sentient/sapient memetic language. But if a Player really wants a completely alien alien, and I think they can rp it well, I'll let them go to town. My favorite alien to play to date was a homebrew parasitic alien, they look vaguely like moray eels and they interact by boring through the skull of another creature, eating the 'unnecessary' parts of the brain, and then using the remaining brain bits to puppet the host body. In the two games that I played it in the GM (two different GMs at that) liked to joke that at some point my current host would "need to be killed so the party would have the dilemma of which other PC needed to be trepanned so my character wouldn't die". My answer was always, "I don't need to eat their brain, but really, removal of the lesser personality is usually a vast improvement..." |
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10-11-2019, 03:40 PM | #18 | |
Join Date: Mar 2010
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Re: [Space] How alien are your aliens?
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10-11-2019, 07:18 PM | #19 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: [Space] How alien are your aliens?
The Chanur series of C.J. Cherryh has some really interesting aliens, ranging from humanoid animals to things that make starfish seem human by comparison. The Mahendo'sat are humanoid apes while the Knnn, for example, are completely alien.
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10-11-2019, 09:04 PM | #20 |
Untagged
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: [Space] How alien are your aliens?
Personally, I like the irony of a vaguely humanoid alien being psychologically less human like than another less human looking species.
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Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check. |
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