GURPS Aliens: what's most interesting?

[nondescript handle]

Originally Posted by Archangel Beth

[...]
• Something that could easily go in a "humans with funny foreheads" setting as well as a more nuanced setting.
• Real Weirdies.
[...]

To me this isn't really about weirdness itself, but about more generalized roleplaying challenges. And helping GMs and players to deal with them.

E.g. the stuff I'd like to see would be a Mmm book with a chapter about playing and running hive minded characters, that could also be used in secret psi games or with mind flayers. Or a Traders book that had a chapter about dealing with characters with a lot of secret lore. That would also be handy when dealing with e.g. High Elves.

Originally Posted by Archangel Beth

[...]
• Stuff I Came Up With Myself. (...okay, I'm eyeing this file here and making the ;_; face at it...)
[...]

I would love GURPS:Kintarans!

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

They were the ones that made me tear out my hair. First, they have IQ +2 [20], which is one of those 3e things that make you pause. Does this mean they should have IQ +1 [20], or IQ +2 [40]?

You do realize that attribute costs were different in 3e? It means that their base IQ was 12.

[lwcamp]

Me, I like stuff that is weird enough to be believably alien, but not so weird that people can't relate to them. Stepping away from the GURPS line for examples, things like Star Frontiers' Dralasites and Vrusk and Sathar, 2300 AD's just about everything, and anything painted by Alex Ries http://abiogenisis.deviantart.com/. Here you've got bizarre morphologies, and (at least with the RPGs) often quirky or unique psychologies, but people can still talk and interact with them and figure out what angles the aliens are coming from. Funny forehead aliens from the Planet of Hats have no interest for me, nor do transcended energy beings.

Luke

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Archangel Beth

And if I do, should I focus my limited and often hijacked attention on...

• Something that could easily go in a "humans with funny foreheads" setting as well as a more nuanced setting.

• Real Weirdies.

And then subset each into into:

• Species From GURPS Aliens

• Stuff I Came Up With Myself. (...okay, I'm eyeing this file here and making the ;_; face at it...)

I'm open to all of the above, but particularly partial to Real Weirdies. I have no opinion regarding "preexisting" vs "new", s'all cool, and I'm not really familiar with Aliens. I might have a copy of it in a box somewhere, but if so, I only read it once or twice a long time ago.

[acrosome]

I'll vote for weird. I just have such a problem with suspension of disbelief for humans-in-rubber-suits. I was very disappointed with 3e GURPS: Aliens.

The 2300AD aliens were weird enough to be alien, yet still understandable.

Traveller's Hivers were good. For me, the Aslan and Vargr just killed the setting, though. (Along with the 2D starmaps, of course.)

The Qax and the Squeem would even be interesting, if very alien. So, I guess that a few that were nearly incomprehensible would at least be interesting. They'd need decent writeups for the GM to understand their motivations, though, so that they would at least be consistent.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Traveller's Hivers were good

Yes! Forgot about them in my post.

Originally Posted by acrosome

The Qax and the Squeem would even be interesting, if very alien. So, I guess that a few that were nearly incomprehensible would at least be interesting. They'd need decent writeups for the GM to understand their motivations, though, so that they would at least be consistent.

I definitely agree that some aliens should be difficult to talk to and figure out. But for starters it would be best to focus on the ones that the players can relate to - either as PCs or as NPCs they can interact with in meaningful ways. Something like a sapient octopus (deaf, and communicating by color changes), or a sapient elephant (most communication at sonic wavelengths that humans can't even hear, and which can't meaningfully reproduce human sounds) might be realistic, but not really useful for most games and rather frustrating to try to talk to.

Luke

[acrosome]

One thing to avoid is "this one is an intelligent crab" and "this one is an intelligent aardvark", etc.

[weby]

Originally Posted by acrosome

The 2300AD aliens were weird enough to be alien, yet still understandable.

They were indeed very memorable and among the best alien races I have seen anywhere.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Traveller's Hivers were good. .

Not Hivers. I might believe they were real but I wouldn't bother dealing with them. After a few attempted manipulations and the odd abandoned infant or two I'd just tell them to go away and don't come back.

Hivers also violate the cantina/aircar rule. If you can't share space in an entertainment establishment or ride in the same small vehicle the PCs ability to interact with the aliens in question is too limited. A whole empire of them might be as realistic as anything else but the PCs wouldn't do repeat business with any individual npc.

You can't even have a war with the Hivers directly. They'd just send those big lizard guys (who I like much better) in their place.

You get to that stage and they might as well breath Hydrogen Sulfide and only communicate with humans via text messages with weirdly scrambled syntax.

Realistic as a setting feature and useful as detailed npcs just aren't the same thing.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Þorkell

You do realize that attribute costs were different in 3e? It means that their base IQ was 12.

Of course. But 3e's values and costs mean something slightly different. Is the reason they're IQ 12 because the writer wanted them to actually be IQ 12, or because he was taking advantage of the cheap cost of low attributes? Is the important thing the fact that he spent 20 points on IQ, or that the author wanted an IQ of 12?

In a lot of ways, it's not enough to just look at the template and translate it directly across the board. Some things don't translate well, some traits now exist that didn't before, or some traits existed that no longer exist. You need to look at the intent of the alien and essentially build it from scratch.

This is actually what Beth did with the Sparriels. For example, she removed the Acute Taste/Smell and replaced it with Discriminatory Smell (Emotion Sense +50%), and she replaced Gluttony with Increased Consumption, and she added perks like Fur. I think this is the right approach, but it requires considerable research and understanding of the race, because there's a lot more you need to do than just a one-to-one 4eUpdate translation.

That's what I mean by "a mess." It can be done, certainly. I'm sure I could do it. I'm not saying it's impossible or even ridiculously hard, it's just work, and it was work I didn't feel like doing. I wanted some aliens that I could just point a 4e player to and say "Look, just grab these races, these templates, these spaceships, and go and play!" But I couldn't do that.

Now, at least with Sparriels, I can. That's a huge step forward.

That was my intent with that post. Irari were an example of that.