Going beyond humans in funny clothes?

[Mercule]

The most alien I've ever been able to play was an elven wizard/druid (in 2E, so very potent and lots of spells).

I always liked the blurb in an early Dragon that said that elves don't have souls. They have spirits and are reincarnated. Because of this, they have no fear of death -- they know they'll be right back. I always tried to play him very serene about most things. Between the long life and the absolute knowledge of his own rebirth, he actually thought things through and made decisions that a human might not.

The most interesting bit, though, was when we needed to make a side-trip to Hell. My character was totally freaked out. Being an outer plane, he figured his spirit would either not reincarnate or would reincarnate in Hell. The whole time, he jumped at shadows, made stupid mistakes, etc. Meanwhile, the humans thought I was nuts.

Of course, the same thing could probably have been done if I was a human following a different religion.

 

[Gold Roger]

Now, I'll completely ignore the interesting philosophyl, literature and culture discussions going on and take a purely gamist standpoint.

The whole discussion pretty much becomes moot when we are talking about PC races in a RPG.

And considering this is all about elves and dwarfes and we are in general RPG discussion, I'll decree by my own arrogance that this is the case.

Unless you are playing with people that play the game to explore the meaning of humanity, it's almost impossible to enforce the standpoint of alien nonhumans on a player. Heck, even in deep gaming groups it's often impossible to keep the cultures among PC's streight, because it's just not part of the game for which people come to the table.

PC races are a bunch of stereotypes, mechanical stats and, yes, funny suits, people use to enhance their joy in the game. Whatever that means to an individual gamer, I've yet to meet the one for which that means an actual alienation of mind.


Now, if where talking about monsters and other nonplayer entities, the thought of an alien mindset becomes more interesting. And in the light of a recent quote from the OP downright exiting from a gaming standpoint:

In short: if it comes time for the DM to add some element to the game, and it's not a problem, threat, resource, or reward, it's a waste.

Incorporating the alien mindset of a Dragon, Demon or even Orc into the defining parts of the game allow us to explore the interesting discussions I ignored here as well as the gaming world, but more importantly allow for unique and new game situations that directly involve the PC's.

And that without frustrating them with (equally frustrated) DMs that demand from them Elves that are just not humans with pointy ears and instead of windowdressing that will bore many players to death.

 

[Aholibamah]

Col. Hardison as well as Wiki have made excellent points both from a sci fi perspective and an anthropological one. I'd also suggest fairy tales and myths.

However another suggestion I have is by way of reactions. You can shape a character a lot by how others react to him. For instance if a dwarf is constantly expected to know about caches of treasure, to be able to fix things in remarkable time and to be ready to drop everything at a moment's notice to fight the 'hated orcs' then in some way that has to be responded to.

 

[green slime]

A lot of comparissons here are drawing parrallels to the depth and breadth of human languages.

One thing to remember, is that there is no concept in any language, that cannot be expressed in another language.

For instance, there is a language (I forget which) which has no words for colours. They only express "light" or "dark". However, they can still express green (for instance) with "Light as grass".

Secondly, no matter how foreign a human culture is, we can achieve understanding of that culture. Why wouldn't be able to understand another alien culture? They only reason we wouldn't be able to, would be if there was some hidden sense, with which we couldn't even access to even via technology, something beyond both logic (reason) and emotion. Existing beyond three dimensions, and experiencing something beyond what we could even comprehend.

 

[Varianor Abroad]

Yes. I created a race of lizards with a complex social structure. One player took up the challenge and portrayed a Ruash very believably. Her PC's actions followed the goals of one of them very strictly. What we discovered though was that the player had to be able to invent social concepts on the fly to keep roleplaying going intact.

 

[Baron Opal]

I think the best portrayal of a different race would be Troll Pak from Chaosium. In it were described trolls, their myth, history, biology and culture. It was very interesting in and of itself, and allowed you to play trolls as truly different beings. Not alien, but different; they still had the basic biological desires of comfort, food, sex, &c. But it did show how a different race could "mythically evolve" and co-exist with humans, et.al.

The problem was that it was highly unlikely that humans and trolls would ever be in the same party together. You could run a troll-only party, and we did, but it was difficult to come up with long term reasons of adventuring. To be fair, in Glorantha you rarely had more than humans in your group.

 

[coyote6]

I knew a GM who used a deck of cards for something like that - he'd just draw a card, and the result indicated how the NPC might behave (heart meant friendly, or favouring allies; diamonds meant the NPC was self-motivated; Spades was a devious action, and clubs meant violence... the number from 1 to 10 indicated the severity of the action, and face cards meant something else entirely that I can't remember).

Sounds like a system used for NPCs in Twilight: 2000.

 

[Moon_Goddess]

It would require a cooperative effort and a lot of intense description on the part of the DM.

For example: if the creature in question was say an amphibian that communicated more through colour and posture than by speech it might see humans as rarely saying much of importance though they chatter like birds often. It might find clothing unpleasant or even disturbing since it means that humans are avoiding communication. Its morals might be entirely different--it might see its young as being totally nonsentient and good for food unless they show promise. It might regard sex as a seasonal and utterly unsentimental thing and find human mating bizarre and incomprehensible.

Imagine really roleplaying something as alien as this. A story like "The Iliad" would be incomprehensible. Because it partly communicates by shifting skin pigments books would be useless to it unless it acquired a feat in order to read them, say.

So anyway, example aside, why do you want this?

Mind if I steal these for the Sci-Fi game I'm running?

 

[Phlebas]

..............
I had one player who I locked horns with a few times because of the way his played his dwarf. I tried to explain to him the general dwarven outlook and let him know that the further he drifted from that the more other dwarves would think of him as strange, and even disdain him as "humanized". It was not that I was telling him how to play his character, I was just explaining the consequences in-game of playing a character a certain way, but 'the player' would get annoyed when NPC dwarves balked at his ideas and way of presenting himself. He just did not have the ability to think of 'dwarven culture' as anything other some abstract thing that shouldn't have an effect on him, and sometimes would complain that the reactions to his ideas were irrational, and I would reply, "What does rationality have to do with culture attitudes?"

This is how i generally ref non-humans. Explain the stereotype, and then let the player work with it in his own way. A player who doesn't accept that his decisions will have consequences isn't really thinking things through (especially someone who decides to ignore the awkward bits). like others have said, its simple enough to come up with a few bullet point descriptors and let the PC run with it. Most interesting sometimes is watching people play half-creatures (even a half-elf) where the decision on which parent they take after sets up personality conflicts quite nicely

I've played an obsidiman (Skin as rock, un-sexed communal living giants) in Earthdawn and that took a little getting my head around. One of the other characters was an semi-aquatic lizard (i forget the name) swashbuckler type who had an eye for the ladies (and an inflatable frill... but no concept of marriage), something my obsidiman could never understand (no concept of sex). It made for a lot of interesting discussions, and definitely gave us a unique flavour without messing up the fun for the others

 

[fuindordm]

I've played an obsidiman (Skin as rock, un-sexed communal living giants) in Earthdawn and that took a little getting my head around. One of the other characters was an semi-aquatic lizard (i forget the name) swashbuckler type who had an eye for the ladies (and an inflatable frill... but no concept of marriage), something my obsidiman could never understand (no concept of sex). It made for a lot of interesting discussions, and definitely gave us a unique flavour without messing up the fun for the others

I'll second that... anyone who wants an example of really good cultural definition for the standard fantasy races should look at the 1st edition "denizens of earthdawn" books. That game had some great writers.

Ben