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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5436197" data-attributes="member: 4937">It is precisely because of that that I phrased it as carefully as I did.  Maybe there is some one out there who can not only characterize the hill giant were-orca but absolutely needs the unique attributes of the hill giant were-orca to fully bring out the character he or she has imagined.  (Hereafter, keep in mind that by "hill giant were-orca" I mean some arbitrarily alien character, and not merely a tall cetacian loving brute with lunar controlled cycle.)Such a person IMO would have a pretty unique combination of imagination, knowledge, and acting ability, given that in my experience probably only 1 player in 4 is actually capable of playing any other character but themselves and in typical groups that player has taken up the mantle of Game Master and uses the talent to run memorable NPC's.  The vast majority of people can't even play a character whose ethical beliefs or social background markedly departs from their own to any convincing degree.  This isn't to say that they are bad RPers, because the real self that informs their characterization is often far more complex and interesting than anything that people tend to imagine up.  In fact, many of the best RPers are good because however much talent they lack at getting into other peoples heads, they are really good at getting into their own head and mining it.  Some of the more memorable role-playing I've ever seen was a brother and sister essentially playing themselves as little children engaging in natural imaginative play.And to a certain extent, I'm actually being generous in this description, because in my experience not every group actually pays significant attention to roleplaying at all because thats not the part of the game that they really enjoy. I would be estatic to find a player that could actually play a hill giant were-orca, not necessarily because of my great desire to have hill giant were-orca's a part of our collective story, but because of what it would mean for that players general RP talent.  I say these things as someone whose played with probably a dozen groups and 50 or so gamers in person, numerous others is one-shots, and numerous more online.  The number of people out there that can be convincing elves and vampires is pretty small, much less things that are even further removed from human mentality.  But they are out there and if one of them made an alien character I'd probably look forward to the experience.But I'm also certain it would look nothing like what we've been discussing here.  I however will refrain from calling my ancedotal experience 'fact'.  I will however note that my observations about the commonality of RPers with actual skill at method acting an alien, pretty much equates both with the relative paucity of well realized aliens in science fiction despite the fact that science fiction writers are what you might call experts in imagination and speculation and the relative paucity of Hollywood actors with true range despite often having remarkable sceen presence.  Sure, there are a small number of RPers out there who are Gordon R. Dickenson meets Dustin Hoffman but there aren't a lot of them.  And in my experience, they don't need "hill giant were-orcas" to play something memorable.All of this is tangental, however.  Even supposing that we want to play a truly wierd game, perhaps something similar to China Meiville's creepy world of a thousand bizarrely and improbably alien species, it doesn't perforce follow that late 3.5's 600+ unbalanced prestige classes (many too weak, many too powerful) and dozens of narrowly defined inflexible base classes is remotely good way to get there.   But, and again, I think I'm perfectly within my rights as a DM to say, "We aren't playing in a creepy world of 1000 bizarre and improbable aliens.  We are playing in a world of dark faerie tales and high fantasy - HP Lovecraft meets the Brothers Grimm meet Tolkien.  Come up with a concept and we'll talk about implementation, or look to the mechanics for inspiration."</blockquote>

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