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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SpiralBound" data-source="post: 3019097" data-attributes="member: 8396">There have been a lot of really interesting points brought up in this thtread and I'm grateful to everyone how has been posting - on both sides of the discussion.  It's given me lots to think on.I especially like the ideas surrounding just what traits are and aren't unique to "human" versus what are common to all sentient beings.  Another interesing idea is just how "human-like" must one's "aliens" be in order to be playable by humans.  I'm intrigued by the statements surrounding the idea that biology influences mentality, and that some traits are possibly shared by all thinking beings who exist in the same universe as us.The ideas regarding having "gateway" races which, while not human, do share enough commonalities to allow us to share their perspective so that they may allow us, through them to become familar with the other, presumably more alien races are interesting as well.  Just how "'human" would they need to be?  Are there any "alien" traits that they couldn't possess and still be capable of serving as a gateway race?I would be rather disappointed if we were limited to only playing non-humans that were no more different from humans than a Dwarf or a Klingon.  As has been pointed out, this style of "alien" is really only a re-shaped human with a different culture, and sometimes not even that.  However, I also agree that an alien with no similarities to humans or humanistic thinking or traits would be equally disappointing.These are two ends of a rather long spectrum though.  Surely there is room within for a human-playable alien which isn't just a human with "bumpy forehead" disease, yet is still different enough that there are aspects of their mindset which don't match our own.  Surely it isn't inconceivable to play a character who has some different mental hardwiring than humans - not EVERYTHING need be different, just enough that you can "feel" that you're not playing a human.  Again, I'm not avocating that we all play crystalline trees from Pluto, but are we as humans so rigid and inflexible in our thinking that we're literally incapable of portaying a mindset that doesn't merely mirror or distort our own?  Surely we aren't that limited in scope.I personally find that playing the standard non-human races in most rpgs really doesn't feel any different than playing a human.  You're just a different shape, or larger, smaller, faster, stronger, whatever.  Humans with a couple of stat levels set differently.  I like Nellisir's literary example of the Atevi aliens with the emotion(?) of manchi instead of love.  Yes, this is strange and would take time to get used to accurately protraying.  However, I don't think that such a creature would be innately unplayable by humans simply because in RL we have love not manchi.  No one says it's impossible to play a centaur even though humans only have two legs instead of four, but start suggesting an innately different mindset and some people start saying that it's impossible...I also find it interesting that many of the posters who were the most against "aliens and no humans" settings were also those who held the "all or nothing" view on what an "alien" must be like in comparison to humans.  The viewpoint that a "real" alien must of course be completely different from us so as to be innately inconceivable to our human minds is amusing to me.  Of course as a species we have yet to encounter a non-human sentience, so we can not truly know for sure what parts of our own minds are innately "human" and which are merely because we are sentient.  I personally suspect that not everything we hold near and dear as human traits are ours alone.  I also find it somewhat of a tautology to state that we can not conceive of a truely alien creature because anything a human can conceive must therefore not be alien by virtue of having been understood by a human... It's a bit of a cop-out if you ask me.  It's also not very charitable of our own abilities to imagine, and is somewhat insulting to any potential aliens which may exist.  "They're alien, so by default they will share no commonalities with us, they are truly beyond our ken"...  I can see some alien who, while mentally quite different from us in a lot of ways, is still capable of personal pride and feelings of protection and affection towards a significant other being rather insulted by such a humanocentric view.  "What to do you mean I'm incapable of love simply because I'm not human?" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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