On the spectrum of rubber forehead aliens to complete starfish aliens that are made out of silica and breathe methane, where are YOU specificially comfortable with. Does there come a point where an alien becomes too weird for you to "relate" to in order to include them in your games as playable races?Personally I am fond of aliens that look plausibly like they could have evolved in a different world and have no distinguishable lineage to earth life, even if they share some superficial features.
>>97240164I've actually grown to really hate the "I want truly alien aliens!" mostly because I don't honestly believe they would be so radically different from ourselves, especially if they are intelligent.Everything seems to exist on this spectrum of being barely sapient in a way that can be measured to transcended god and I'm more interested in the idea of some aliens dealing with cheating spouses and stupid stories you see humans dealing with every day.
>>97240231The whole "truly alien aliens" when it goes into the "I want colonies of crystals that communicate via electromagnetic waves" or "sapient clouds of gass from the upper atmosphere of Jupiter" etc is pretty fucking ridicilous.The birrin to me are a good example of the decent middle ground of alien design. They are still clearly some sort of animal/creature, with even some resemblance to creatures we might find on our world, while still remaining clearly something that has no genetic lineage to anything that evolved on Earth.
>>97240164>On the spectrum of rubber forehead aliens to complete starfish aliens that are made out of silica and breathe methane, where are YOU specificially comfortable with.STARTING with the starfish aliens and going off the scale in the "multi-dimensional anomaly" direction.
>>97240164I like truly alien aliens in novels and such, but fairly human likes in games. A book can take its time pondering on nonhuman psychology, but games should move along, let players be the active party driving the events and give them actionable information they can grasp in a reasonable amount of time. I don't mean that games shouldn't have any weird or complicated concepts in them, of course, but there's a limit. I don't like funn-on rubber forhead aliens, either, but aliens who have some specific, notable psychological and behavioral quirk whose implications are given some thought but who otherwise share much of their drives and desires and instincts with humans are about right.
>>97240304The other aspect of it is the question of what do you even do with them? If they are soooo alien, then they become a set-piece within a story that exists and every other character exists around it because it can't interact in a way a typical character can or should, let alone in a table top game because I'm sure you sapient crystal hive mind character that has to be carried around is really going to spice up the game a great deal.
>>97240164Yes. There's room for a sci fi setting to have both.
>>97240164Which system?
>>97240164Rubber forehead.The pool of people able to come up with something that's weird but still makes sense is pretty small. The pool of those that can make a half decent story out of those ideas is miniscule. Those that can do so on the fly in a game while engaging other people are probably non-existent.Decent rubber forehead aliens should have some sort of distinct psychology and history rather than just, "+1 to DEX and the guy is blue", but they still have to be playable by a regular human.
>>97240348Even besides just gameplay constrains trying to "play" as some sort of super weird ayylmao that doesn't operate like anything we'd recognize as alive etc, there is also the whole roleplaying aspect. It is already bit difficult for most people to roleplay as nonhumans, so the stranger you make an alien the more difficult/outright impossible it would be to roleplay as an ayylmao even to the extent it is possible to roleplay as something that has nonhuman psychology.Most aliens in fiction, even nonhuman looking ones tend to be pretty humanlike in their behavior and thinking, especially when we look at more popular scifi, just for relatability reasons. The elites from Halo for example map quite well to basic "honorable warrior culture" tropes we already have.
>>97240388I don't think that an alien race needs to necessarily be explicitly just rubber forehead/star trek style alien in appearance for it to be possible to roleplay as one. The question imo is far more to do with how weird/strange the behavior and psychology of the alien is as long as there also remains some commonalities in morphology in terms that we can still understand how they move around and manipulate stuff on pretty intuitive level. As in, as long as the alien has some sort of manipulation appenages and means of locomotion that are understandable to us, I doubt the ayylmao being different from our bodyplan in itself is that big of an issue. Essentially, I think that it is the roleplay/psychological aspect of trying to play as some sort of sapient ayylmao octopi that would be the real challenge as opposed to what the ayylmao in question actually looks like.
>>97240355Based and star control pilled.
>>97240456Okay but if your alien has a radically different physiology to humans but still acts like a human then I think you've failed at depicting anything alien even harder than the laziest rubber forehead cliche.Also unless everyone is playing the same kind of aliens then anything noticeably different is liable to be a pain in the arse.
>>97240587You are strawmanning my position and you know it. Even a rubber forehead alien that acts exactly like human is lazy as fuck in terms of roleplay. My point was that with aliens in general, regardless of the appearance (as long as it remains within the confines of what we can still understand physically, as in, I am discounting sapient clouds of gass and what not), the difficulty is in trying to "live up" to the non human psychology of the thing rather than the physical form. Especially in a roleplaying game where shit like extra limbs etc can be abstracted to movement speeds, being able to wield more weapons and other such gameplay features.
>>97240628No, I can't tell what your position is because>the difficulty is in trying to "live up" to the non human psychologywas already my point.If the alien physiology just means you drink kerosene instead of alcohol then of course it's not a big deal. But who gives a fuck if that's all you're doing?
>>97240164
>>97240659No, my point is that the aliens being physically just humans but recolored vs looking like picture related or like >>97240409 or >>97240304 doesn't make any real difference in terms of roleplaying them unless there is a drastic psychological differences between them and humans. You can easily roleplay as a Shanhgeili/elite because their behavior and psychology is basically muh honorable warrior culture but in spesh even though they don't really look like humans.The physical appearance and capabilities of aliens in a roleplaying game are far less important than their actual behavior in terms of roleplaying if you want to actually try to roleplay as an alien.
>>97240164For player characters I prefer mostly humanoid species because having roughly similar build would make it easier for the PCs to use the same kind of equipment, instead of having to deal with half the party's guns being designed for a species with tentacles instead of hands and some party members not being able to breathe in the same atmosphere as the rest. Though I also include less humanoid aliens in my setting as well.>>97240231Birrin are a great example of non-humanoid alien characters because despite them being completely different from humans in terms of appearance, the way the artist draws them in mundane situations that would be familiar to humans still makes you able to relate to them. They're anatomically different but still mentally and technologically similar to humans that they could function as a PC race and humans wouldn't have difficulties interacting with them, unlike sentient minerals that eat radiation and communicate by giving you seizures, or whatever.
>>97240711Another picture of these ayylmaos because I find their design cute.
>>97240231Dude, even on earth intelligent animals ARE weird as fuck.
>>97240711But if their physical capabilities are significantly different from a human then their psychology should also surely be different.
>>97240723That's what I love about his art. Everything about this image makes sense and makes sense with their physiology and yet you can relate to a pilot dad taking his kid with them on a plane and having a moment.>>97240752Yeah, and there are parts of the Earth we still haven't explore and can't because of the technology and the physical barriers of doing so.
>>97240756True, but even rubber forehead aliens ought to be psychologically different from humans, because why else would you even make them aliens in the first place if they are just human in appearance (but wrong color) and also behave exactly like humans as well. Even star trek tried to make the lazy aliens in that series behave a bit differently from humans from time to time.
>>97240793Again, that's my point. So I still don't know what yours is.Okay, let me put it this way. On one side you have weird organic crystal aliens that only interact by firing exotic matter beams at things. Those are unplayable. On the other you have humans with blue skin, +1 DEX, and can metabolise hydrazine. They're entirely playable but not actually particularly alien.I don't think there's any middle ground between the two that's actually useful for games. Significant deviations from humanity will very quickly make them unplayable. That the issue is likely to be psychology rather than physiology is true, but irrelevant.
>>97240902>I don't think there's any middle ground between the two that's actually useful for games. I do, which was entirely my point. Also, from worldbuilding perspective for your scifi setting, the aliens being in the middle ground rather than in the rubber forehead category makes all the difference for the tone of the setting you wish to get across. Rubber forehead aliens inevetably make the setting itself lean far more on softer/pulpy side of scifi just because of the inherent implausability of every alien in the setting being just humans but different color and/or extra shit on their faces. If that's what you want for your setting/game then it's fine but if you want to lean more on the aliens being actually you know, alien rather than just expies of human cultures in space, you can't just make them into recolored humans.
>>97240938That also relies on the player's ability to portray that alien nature which, let's be real, 90%+ of players simply can't least of all to satisfaction if its your donut-steel setting.
>>97240938>I do, which was entirely my point.I've yet to see you suggest any.Besides which I also think being on the pulpy end of genre fiction is almost universally desirable for a game anyway. Partly just because it's more popular and thus far more likely to get the group on common ground. And partly because the sort of larger than life characters and events are massively helpful in giving the players exciting shit they can actually affect.
I think the mental aspect is always leaned a bit too far in some cases, like how an intelligent spacefaring being would ultimately still have common thought processes to humans not because they are like humans necessarily but that humans are just a step up from common behaviors of other animals.
>>97240987>>97240996You both do have good points. In general playing as non humans that drastically differ from humans is already niche be it in scifi or fantasy. I simply don't think that it is impossible for someone to roleplay as some non humanoid alien just as I don't think it is impossible for someone to roleplay as a thri-kreen. It is just that most people propably don't have the desire or skill to try to play as such weird character. Humans, elves and dwarves are staple of fantasy games for a reason after all, and while scifi doesn't have as clear "cliche" groups in terms of distinct races most people probably would still lean on the more human like aliens than the weirder aliens if given the options. Or just play as humans of course.My only real objection is that personally, I don't really see a point of even including aliens if they end up being just recolored humans with slightly different cultures. Might as well just have only humans as playable characters and make the ayys all ncps.
>>97241025You can certainly think ways to have intelligent spiders living on Titan-like moons to trade with humans on a regular basis, but I assume here we're talking more on the side of "having NPCs directly in scenes"
>>97241056>Might as well just have only humans as playable characters and make the ayys all ncps.I don't disagree with you. At the end of the day, the prime archetypes of all fantasy are just Humans in all but name so there shouldn't be any quibble about how they look unless it actually affects gameplay in a significant way.
>>97240164My preferred autism is that most aliens look recognizable to us, mostly distinctly not-eartlike but with the occasional feature that is so earthlike that it throws us (example: hulking, four-armed creatures with heads that look *exactly* like those of a frog) due to convergent evolution. Certain patterns are just successful for a reason, there's only so many ways that you can design an airplane and still have it fly, airplanes are the shape that they are because that's what works. However, even for the aliens that LOOK similar to life from Earth, we have zero compatible habitable conditions. There is no neutral atmosphere in which both humans and any other alien can survive at the same time, one or both of us always needs to be wearing space suits or somebody is getting poisoned or suffocating.
>>97241056Well "impossible" would be the wrong word. You can of course do a low effort roleplay of a silicon based spider dinosaur by just playing it as a human with a bunch of special powers and restrictions. I think anyone that bothered to have this argument would agree that doesn't really count, though finding the distinction between that and doing it "properly" is hard.>I don't really see a pointI understand but don't agree, though that will have to wait.
