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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LeeHammock" data-source="post: 3347955" data-attributes="member: 5823">Initially in developing HR we went more non-humanoid in terms of aliens.  The elgie were originally a species of sentient jellyfish kept aloft by lighter than air gases that relied on changing the color of their skin to communicate, but then someone pointed out very few people want to play color changing jellyfish, or really inhuman races in general, and how hard that character would be to integrate with other species.  From a game design perspective I prefer to give people species that they have some frame of reference on since all my players are human and we are inherently limited to a mostly human point of view.  Also if every species is drastically different in form and mindset, as real aliens are likely to be, party cohesion and equipment becomes a nightmare.  It's hard to have a party when some characters don't breathe the same atmosphere, are completely unable to communicate, or don't even recognize the concepts valued by different species.  It'd be sort of like having the vaasi in a party with other species; the vaasi aren't innately evil, but their mindset is so completely different from that of the other species that they cannot effectively live together.   We could have made the setting such that all the other species were nothing like humans, but in that case I would be inclined to not make them PC races, and in my mind that's just not as fun.  People like playing aliens, but not the real sorts of aliens we're likely to run into in space.  So fun trumps science.  So because of all this we came up with the idea of the Star Confederation genetic seeding program, which was supposed to be something of a "genetic blender" of Star Confederation traits that were then seeded on different worlds.  So the yaom ended up with some reptilian genetic information, some information from the dosai, etc.  Basically each planet was seeded with a combination of genetic traits from the Star Confederation member species that were thought best for its ecosystem.  Desert/barren world = reptiles.  So there is an explanation why all the species have a similar humanoid appearance, mindsets, etc.</blockquote>

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