Manless

[Citizen Keen]

First off, I'm going to cross-post this to the Star HERO forum, so if I reference aliens, et cetera, know why.

 

I am curious if anybody here on the boards has run a campaign with no humans in it, and what kind of effects it had. What are the implications of a game where every race is an alien?

 

Arguably humans are the backdrop against which a game occurs. It does not require a package deal to be human - the rules assume as much when you sit down. The blank slate against which we craft our characters is a blank, human slate.

 

Obviously, we don't lose that barrometer when we play with all aliens. We are still human. I mean, I assume so. Everything is still relative to us. Elves still have nightsight, which we don't. Centauri still have tentacle genitalia, which we don't.

 

But at the same time, having no humans in the campaign certainly changes the tone. This can be played out in one of two ways:

 

New Backdrop - In a world dominated by Elves of different types, with small pockets of Dwarves, Giants, and Orks, Elves become the new backdrop. Characters operate from the assumption that most people are Elves, and that everybody else deviates from a normal, Elven standard. You could go so far as to make Elves the default player point starting. For 0 Character points, you have a STR of 8, and Nightvision and Longevity. Everyman powers and altered starting characteristics.

 

Or...

 

Cosmopolitan Backdrop - In a galaxy modeled on a humanless version of the Star Trek world, then there's a little bit of everything. You have your major players (the Klingons, Cardassians, Romulans, the Vulcan/Trill/Bajoran dominated Federation), the minor players (and by minor I mean less frequently occuring) and everyone mixes and everyone's different, and no one race is the default. There is no backdrop. You have to buy a racial package deal to play.

 

I'm sure there are other implications that I haven't tought of. Any thoughts?

[Labrat]

Re: Manless

 

First, it would change nothing since all the other races are 'humanized' anyway as written. All of our experiences are tied into the 'other races' and so when we go for the bizarre or alien we must still stay within the realm of what we can understand... otherwise it would take way too long to create even mundane characters and phenomena due to constant definition and cross-referencing.

 

Making such games with no humans should be a Zero Phase Action (yes, I'm a humungous dork), but it would mostly be just a cosmetic change if you didn't want to overburden your players with more detail than necessary for smooth, enjoyable roleplaying.

[Blue Jogger]

Re: Manless

 

There are other implications.

 

Suppose the default race is a long-lived race. You might let more gametime pass, since if they are living hundreds of years, then you can have a campagn that spans multiple decades. "See you next decade" instead of "next year".

 

If everyone is an elf and has nightvision. Do they need lanterns, do they work at night when it is cooler than then in the noonday sun?

 

Think about Klingons who prefer to eat food while it is alive as much as we like to eat cooked meat. It becomes much harder to store food. Iron Rations? Are you tring to poison me?

[Killer Shrike]

Re: Manless

 

As a side note, not commenting on the main premise of the post, personally I require a Race Package deal for Humans in any campaign that uses Race Packages; I make no assumptions about Humans being the "baseline".

[LeftWingPenguin]

Re: Manless

 

In mechanical terms, I'd probably stick with humanity as the absent standard--i.e. average 0-point characteristic values are all 10, etc. This is more for ease of reference than anything else: we're all familiar with what humans can and cannot do, so it's easier to define alien species by how they differ from humanity than strictly on their own terms.

 

In terms of the gameworld, neither approach seems inherently more or less plausible to me, though I think I'd go with the second approach, wherein there is no single clearly-defined dominant race, simply because it seems to me that if you're going to have a single race be the accepted "norm" it might as well be humans--you're not really doing anything different.

 

EDIT: And am I the only one who saw the title of this thread and assumed it would be about a world populated solely by females?

[Labrat]

Re: Manless

 

As a side note' date=' not commenting on the main premise of the post, personally I require a Race Package deal for Humans in any campaign that uses Race Packages; I make no assumptions about Humans being the "baseline".[/quote']

 

Disclaimer: This may seem like I'm being a smartarse, but I'm not. I repeat, I am not... well not this time anyway.

 

So, KS, I've always wondered about this. Do you assume physical abilities to be 'basic' like two arms, two legs, sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, breathing, eating, sleeping, bipedal locomotion, inference, reasoning, vocal ability... etc.? Or do you slot out each 'ability' into a point-based structure to create a new character all the way from the ground up? How much groundwork do you use to start with, and is the groundwork template point-based?

 

Maybe you can show us a 'human package deal' if you want to save the time.

 

...boy that didn't come off as smartarsey as I initially thought.

[Citizen Keen]

Re: Manless

 

Disclaimer: This may seem like I'm being a smartarse, but I'm not. I repeat, I am not... well not this time anyway.

 

So, KS, I've always wondered about this. Do you assume physical abilities to be 'basic' like two arms, two legs, sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, breathing, eating, sleeping, bipedal locomotion, inference, reasoning, vocal ability... etc.? Or do you slot out each 'ability' into a point-based structure to create a new character all the way from the ground up? How much groundwork do you use to start with, and is the groundwork template point-based?

 

Maybe you can show us a 'human package deal' if you want to save the time.

 

...boy that didn't come off as smartarsey as I initially thought.

 

Well, I can see it being something like the Valdorian Age "races," in which you can't buy an "Elf" package, instead you buy a "Wood Elf" or a "High Elf" or whatever, and you can't assume you're a human, but instead buy a "Northerner" or "Westerner" package.

 

Am I right or am I right?

[Jkeown]

Re: Manless

 

Well, I can see it being something like the Valdorian Age "races," in which you can't buy an "Elf" package, instead you buy a "Wood Elf" or a "High Elf" or whatever, and you can't assume you're a human, but instead buy a "Northerner" or "Westerner" package.

 

Am I right or am I right?

 

I have 16 human "races" in my Caleon and Exodus games... and in my (never completed) Galactice Empire game, Humanity was long extinct, and I still used them as the baseline. The PC races were all quite odd, just to prevent folks from playing a Guys In Suits campaign.

[Duke Bushido]

Re: Manless

 

So, KS, I've always wondered about this. Do you assume physical abilities to be 'basic' like two arms, two legs, sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, breathing, eating, sleeping, bipedal locomotion, inference, reasoning, vocal ability... etc.? Or do you slot out each 'ability' into a point-based structure to create a new character all the way from the ground up? How much groundwork do you use to start with, and is the groundwork template

 

 

I actually tried something like that, years ago--

right down to varying points costs for different Characteristics based on race, and what Stats would cypher into Figured Characteristics, and the points awarded for the costs of 'standard sense group---etc.

 

First, it was really, really, really, not worth it.

 

Second, it never really worked out right. You either ended up having to build each and every power of the 'base human'-- which adds up to hundreds of points, if the granularity is carried far enough, or about 200 if you just refund everything and some movement---- and give that to the players to build a 'base form' alien and then let them go and build characters on top of it with additional stats, etc....

 

Thirdly---

it was a _great_ way to really shake out the system. It showed a lot of bugs, but it also gave some pretty convincing arguments for accepting them.

 

I suppose, had I opted to drop the granularity a great deal and do away with the idea of 'costing' stat advancement rates and 'costing' formulas for figured stats (and we even tried just disconnecting figureds into stand-alones), we might could have gotten something playable.

 

But by then, the fun was well gone from the idea.

 

We still do baseline alien templates, but we cost them against the 'standard' blanks.