[Space] Interactions between species

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by WingedKagouti

The books featuring Point Central shows it as a massive place with separate sealed environments, and characters usually wear pressurized space suits when going into a potentially dangerous environment to talk with aliens living there.

The Sector General books use the same premise. (Sorry to keep bringing up the franchise, but it gets into some of the details of how a society which deliberately tries to foster multi-cultural contacts handles life support needs for very different species.)

Assume that species with very different life support needs will have their own dedicated ships, space stations, etc. with sealed habitats on "hostile" worlds or areas. When they leave those sealed habitats, they wear some sort of protective gear equivalent to an NBC or Vacc Suit, or use small, sealed vehicles to get around.

If you want a slightly more "cyberpunk" feel to the game, assume that there are online virtual reality environments where different species can interact on a more meaningful level without complications due to life support needs.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Different nutritional requirements, at least, are typically going to be easy - characters carry different rations, restaurants and the like often have "xeno-friendly" menu items, etc. The bigger concern here may be cultural. Delicacies for one alien species may be absolutely revolting to another, while herbivorous species in general may well object to the consumption of meat. PC's who are working together are probably cosmopolitan enough to accept this, so you won't have the herbivore PC throwing a fit every time the obligate carnivore PC orders a steak (or when the omnivore PC does the same, although they may get a bit of side-eye) - but that obligate carnivore PC may have trouble finding food in a cantina in the herbivore district, and may not be able to bring his/her own (although the herbivores might be alright with insect-based foods, like the carnivores eat in Beastars).

Anyone recall Babylon 5? They were mostly type 4) with a few noted issues (ethanol being dangerously psychoactive to Mimbari, Pa'k'mra would only eat decaying foodstuffs) ... and for some reason (probably to do with the Vorlons) every sapient species seemed to have an equivalent of Swedish Meatballs... On the other hand, they did acknowledge that there were whole sectors of the station that had variant atmospheres in them ... it just seems that those species weren't all that relevant (except, once again, the Vorlons, who may well have passed beyond breathing anyway and just messed with the atmosphere to make it hard for people to come and bother them - after all, on the few occasions on which they were seen without their suits, Vorlons appeared to have no issues with a human standard atmosphere).

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

It's going to involve questions of both 'kind' and 'degree'. You'll need to ask yourself what sort of general interactions you want to have happening, and build out from there.

A sapient who evolved from a heavily predated species might be very agoraphobic, by human standards, esp. if the predators were flying creatures. Imagine having a friend or associate who has to make a Will roll every time he goes out in the street in a human city, because the street is unroofed. A city with a lot of members of that species, or a neighborhood with a lot of them, might end up roofing their streets because of that.

It occurs to me that The Expanse managed this with humans - even if a Belter could tolerate 1G the idea of walking about with a open horizon and "nothing overhead to keep the air in except gravity" could panic them. Even Martians, far more used to living in domes and occasionally wandering about on their planet's surface are prone to panic attacks on Earth if they look up suddenly...

As to variant biology more generally, I did pencil into a setting that the majority of habitable worlds appeared to have a DNA based biota with L-amino acid and d-sugars, like Earth. By contrast, several of the small number of other sapient species weren't - it was a plot point with deep lore implications.