Continuing from Post your pictures for alien monsters, NPCs, protagonists, and villains.
Question for the thread: How should you play truly alien characters?
Continuing from >>50016221
Noah Barnes
Ian Myers
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Anthony Sullivan
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Jose Nguyen
Some thoughts I had for semi alien creatures, probably not full blown starfish aliens.
Come up with your races biology and how that would factor into day to day life, create cultures, and perhave have your character predict other characters behavior as if they were a member of its species. We tend to anthropomorphosize creatures we deem friendly. An alien may or may not do this but would make for fun roleplaying
Zachary James
>How should you play truly alien characters?
It's very, very difficult to do as a player. It's slightly easier as a GM, but even then, only slightly. I'm going to do a walkthrough, starting with some design tips, and ending with an example creature built from scratch.
(This discussion isn't about bumpy-forehead aliens in Mass Efffect or other soft sci-fi settings. Those are easy enough to play by adapting Earth morals/behaviors. This is for "truly alien" characters.)
Start by thinking about your assumptions. The easiest way is to do a very rapid top-down analysis, then work your way back up.
Let's start with your alien's mind. We can work on the physical parts later.
Emotions are the first to go - love, hate, fear, joy, humour... your alien doesn't have them. Replace them with the core concepts the emotions represent and break them down further. Desire to breed, territory defense, survival instinct, social bonding. Does your creature reproduce - yes or no? Don't worry about the details yet. Does it have an individual competitive/collaborative structure (like humans) or a collective structure (like ants) or something even more strange? Try and figure out how you want this creature's species to work... but think about it like a biologist, not a sociologist.
For example, don't think about "families" - too many Earth connotations. Think about "generational social units".
So we've started to peel back the layers. Next up - thoughts. Does your alien think like we do? Is there an inner monologue? Can it experience empathy (with other members of its species, or with other species), or think ahead, or remember past events? Is its mind a collaboration or a competition or is it "conscious" at all?
This bit is very tricky, and requires some good background reading and lots of notes. Whenever you think you've got it, take a step back and look for shortcuts - human or Earth elements you added in out of habit to make things easier or more relatable.
Gavin Campbell
>Come up with your races biology and how that would factor into day to day life
What are some good examples that first come to mind?
Colton Hill
You're probably starting to see the problem. How the hell are you supposed to play as a creature who thinks in a way you can barely describe, let alone roleplay?
No easy answer.
But start by deciding what your alien has for needs. Nothing as specific as "oxygen" or "sunlight."
Something like a bent Maslow's hierarchy of needs works well.
Most creatures have physiological needs; start defining them in general terms. For humans, they would be something like "Resource Intake, Environmental Control, Rest Time" instead of "Food, Water, Air, Shelter, Clothing, and Sleep"
After that, what does your creature need? Is "Physical Security" a concern? is "Contact with Others?" What about "Reproduction?" How urgent is it?
Moving up, we can have things like "Control of Social Structure" or "Esoteric Creations" (music, art, hedonistic sex, things that hit a weird part of the mind that didn't evolve to /do/ much of anything).
But you can add in more "alien" concepts here too, things that don't really exist in the real world. "Resource Hoarding" could be far more vital to an alien creature than it is to a human. "Consumption of Inferior Others" is also not really done - warfare might fit under "Security", but devouring your less-weighty broodmates to fuel your own metamorphosis isn't something we really have to deal with here on Earth.
Nicholas Wilson
Daniel Rogers
Now, let's work from the bottom up.
As far as we can tell, life started when a few strings of chemicals inside of a spontaneously-formed bubble figured out how to make more of themselves. For most of the time that life has existed on Earth - and it showed up almost immediately - that was it. Single bubbles just became more and more refined. Some of them figured out how to eat other bubbles. Some of them ate other bubbles but worked together.
The basic ingredients for life seem to be:
=A solvent (water, ethanol, hexane)
-at a temperature that allows chemistry to occur on a useful scale (not solid, but not hot enough to break down the solvent or the compounds in it)
-and some reactive compounds. Carbon compounds are handy. Sunlight can break them and recombine them fairly easily. Carbon is abundant in the universe and binds to other abundant elements. It can be formed into gasses or solids or liquids. It's not the only option by far, but if your life /doesn't/ use carbon somewhere in it, there had better be a reason why.
-An energy source (the sun, geothermal vents) to stir it all
-And time
And then, we assume, you get life... of a sort.
Jayden Bailey
There are relatively few elements that life could use as structural building blocks. An element needs to be able to form a variety of bonds - just one won't do. It needs to be abundant in the universe. It can't be very stable in ionic form - the bonds need to be convalent for your creature to get any useful chemistry done. Feel free to have your alien be 30% iron by weight, but that iron has to be supported by some kind of non-metallic chemistry.*
From the top, you've got: Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Silicon, Phosphorous, and Sulphur. That's it - any other element can be present in rich abundance, but as far as spontaneously organized chemistry is concerned, the workhorses are on this list.
Boron-nitrogen pairs act like carbon in a lot of ways. Carbon is, as we've discussed, quite versatile. Silicon /can/ form bonds like carbon, but has fewer options, and bonds with silicon are generally harder to form and harder to break. In the real world, silicon chemistry involves all kinds of hideous acids and strong UV light. Phosphorous and Sulphur both form structures all on their own. Phosphorous-oxygen bonds are also useful energy storage devices here on earth - ATP is ubiquitous. There's no guarantee alien life will use anything similar (and certainly, it won't involve something as unique as adenosine, but it's still worth mentioning.)
So assuming you're not a chemist and the previous paragraphs were pretty much greek to you.. what does all this mean?
Life on your alien world will involve alien chemical pathways. Your creature's ancient cellular** might split nitrogen using focused UV radiation. They might scavenge sulphur from tectonic vents in a boiling sea of pitch-black goop.
*If you want to deal with self-replicating crystal aliens or intelligent alloys or sentient magnetic fields... we can talk about it later.
**Ditto for non-cellular life. Celluar assembly makes a lot of sense as a way to start life off - other options may exist.