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

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 7/2/08 3:18 PM, "Tom Naro" <tomnaro at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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.

Hmm.  I'd say all of your issues there are with bad GMing.  I can think of
many situations where *our* (modern "1st world" humans') expectations of
behavior would be wrong.  Sure, the basic drives of humans remain the same,
but just across history & cultures, expectations vary.

I've seen interesting incidents where people right here now (ok, it was in
the 80's) demonstrated this.  I forget the specific cultures, but different
people have different boundaries of "personal space".  So, when somebody
from a culture that expects 2 ordinary people will stand a few inches apart
while talking talks to somebody from a culture that expects a couple feet,
you'll see what looks like one chasing the other around.  P steps closer, Q
steps back.  Repeat ad absurdum.

Certainly, a player should be given a good idea about his own racial
abilities, although there's room for the character being surprised by his
abilities, with the appropriate setup.  But again, that's a GM quality
issue. 

And Traveller has plenty of variant humans with different capabilities.
This can be very interesting.  Generally, they aren't the "baseline", but
they could be.  Imagine a game dominated by the human variant in Leguin's
"Left Hand of Darkness"!

Personally, I *like* the idea of a game where we aren't the baseline.  I
find it a *flaw* in Traveller that it's really all about the humans, and the
aliens (even the variant humans) are just SF window-dressing.  I don't think
aliens should be measured by "here's how they differ from us".  What about
how they differ from each other?

Jorune (never played it) took this to the extreme with no humans at all, and
has a fanbase similarly rabid to ours.  And I've seen SF games (and stories)
where humans are *not* in the position they are in Traveller.  These are all
good things.