[TML] How long can you survive in the vacuum of space?

[Tom Naro]

Jerry W Barrington jerry.barrington at gmail.com wrote:
On 6/28/08 8:15 PM, "Tom Naro" <tomnaro at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Go ahead - make some freak human that can survive unprotected for minutes
>> (heck you may as well make it hours) in space - but the rest of us will not be
>> able to relate to him.

>Uh... By that logic, I shouldn't have been able to "relate to" my Vargr
>character.  And Hiver and K'kree are right out.  Yet we still play them.

No, no not at all.  (Unless you actually have no imagination.)

The *normal human* is the benchmark against which the player can gage the *alieness* of his alien persona.  That is the part that makes the game fun. The GM cannot afford to tamper with the benchmark.  The challenge for the player is not to play the alien as a guy in a rubber suite.  Vargr and Hivers are not too hard to play.  K'kree are the major bad guys in my game so playing them would be quite a challenge in one of my games.

If you are playing a Vargr you well know that you are not playing a *normal* human.  You adjust your playing style appropriately.  You also relate the actions of your Vargr in terms of how the *normal* human would react.  In fact, you judge the character actions against how your real-life self would react.  The nature of role-playing is that you put yourself into the game.  The *normal human* is you.  You expect that the normal human would respond and react just as you would in the given situation.  You are everyman.

(The following sample is in no way an endorsement of any play-style or imply that Vargr characters should be played a certain way.  They are your aliens - play them any way you want.)

Suppose you want your Vargr to express anger at another character in a crowed bar setting.  You have many choices, but since you want to express a strong emotion you choose to have the Vargr actually bare teeth and growl loudly at the other character.  Now as a player you are expecting that this action will get your character noticed - that all the *normal humans* in the crowd will respond in some way (at least they should get out of your reach.)    Imagine your surprise (and disappointment) when absolutely no one in the crowd responds at all.  Slightly upset that your action did not generate the result you were looking for - you point it out to the GM.  The GM responds with "Oh, everybody, even humans, growl at each other on this planet."  Your attempt to make your Vargr character stand out was diminished because your expectations did not match the situation set up by the GM. (And the GM held *secret knowledge* that you should have had
 before hand.)   Was it fun for you when your attempt at role-playing was shot down in flames?

In this case, the GM simply miss-read the intention of the player and made a bad *cover-your-butt* explanation. (He could have said something intelligent like *the music is too loud and no one heard you.* or *this is a Vargr bar and that kind of thing happens all the time* - but that is not what he did.) In retaliation for this bad bit of GMing, my Vargr pulled out his sawed-off shotgun and shot the other character in the head.  (The character failed to appreciate that a Vargr might not like certain jokes about puppies, burlap sacks, and piers.)  Finally, the bar crowd noticed.  The other players and I laughed while the GM scrambled to regain control of his game.  With his character dead on the floor, the player simply pulled out a new character   My Vargr was arrested and hauled off for a lengthy trial, so I pulled out a new character as well.  (What is the point in being an alien if the GM won't let you exploit your alieness.)

One of the primary jobs of the GM is to manage (or play to) the expectations of the players.  The *normal human* needs to seem normal to them. If the *normal human* is very much different than the players, the GM is going to have to spend a lot of game time explaining (and re-explaining) the differences.

If the *normal human* is just as alien as the aliens, it diminishes both and the game becomes frustrating and decidedly un-fun  (or worse it becomes farce.)
 
Here is another way to look at it.  My character is a *normal* human with all the expected human weaknesses.  During the course of the adventure, my character has an opportunity to save the rest of the party by sealing himself on the wrong side of a broken airlock during some dire emergency. I as a player, do this knowing the full consequences of such actions - my character will die.  I think that the self-sacrifice is worth it - high drama indeed - I still feel satisfied.  But in the crazy campaign where humans are superhuman freaks, the GM tells me that my character can survive several hours in the vacuum.  (And this is the first time this superhuman nature has been mentioned.  And we just spent Cr 80000 on vacc suits?)  Not only has the GM robbed me of my glorious dramatic death, he has also broken my vision of reality.  I now have to question EVERYTHING in his universe.