 February 11, 2014 - 11:18pm | Talking with my brother tonight we came across an odd behavior of dralasites and this got me thinking that each race would have behaviors that the others thought were weird, rude, odd, funny, what-not. I'll start with the odd dralasite behavior my brother came up with. Dralasites have no sexual taboos for touching. Their method of reproduction and how they experience gender sets this. Dralasites will absently touch each other and think little of the location they choose to touch. They often massage or groom each other as a common courtesy. In a steam bath this is expected as a part of conversation. Thus a dralasite might absently pick at a mole on a humans back without warning or invitation. Or a dralasite might push a woman directly on the breast. Dralasites from mixed worlds learn from a young age to not touch other non-drals. Dralasites from dralasite worlds have to learn by experience. -iggy |
 February 12, 2014 - 2:38pm | Since Dralasites are supposed to have very rough surfaces the touching could be rather painful. Now odor and movement are part of the Dralasite language so possibly the "outspoken" Dralasite might touch others as part of what it thinks is a regular conversation. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
February 12, 2014 - 6:37pm | I can see the touching part, but how is odor part of the language? How do they produce a significant variety of smells for a workable micro vocabulary? -iggy |
 February 12, 2014 - 6:57pm | I dont see odor production opperating fast enough to be a direct part of communication. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
February 12, 2014 - 7:03pm | First since every square centimeter of their bodies is an odor detecting organ they have "nasal" capacity far in advance of even Blood Hounds. Second their native language well here's what the rules say: Speech Dralasites have a voice box, but it works like a bellows because they have no lungs. A Dralasite's voice can vary from a soft whisper to a thundering roar and from a bass rumble to a piercing screech. Among themselves, they also use shapes, odors and touch to communicate. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
February 12, 2014 - 7:49pm | Alright. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
February 13, 2014 - 1:07am | OK, I get how they can smell very well. I'm puzzling on how they would produce smells for others. My gut says this is how they might make the equivelent of facial expressions for humans. Thus a dral may say, "you smell happy" to another dral. Or should I say that as, "you smell smilely". The first implies that a drals emotions manifest in odor which could be too much of a give away. No dral that smelled nervious would get away with hiding from another dral in a fight. This reminded me of pheromones. We all make them. I gotta read up on them. I suppose that they are more usefull to drals and a natural biological development to the full body nose they have. Maybe this is how dral lie detection works. The dral can smell the odors the person is releasing by pheromones and deduce when the subject is lieing. So after reading about pheromones, I am wondering how much drals sweat? This would likely be the method of odor production. Also I am thinking that dral odor communication is subconscious. They don't actually speak by odor but they pick up on the odors that associate with mood and state of mind. Now it you can detect this in others you can likely smell yourself so they learn to control their moods better and their state of mind as they grow and socialize. Thus they can acscent their speach with odor. An angry dral could push his mood so that an appropriate odor acscents his yelling. Or he could restrain his mood so that his yelling is tempered with a calming odor. Wow, this is alot to explore. Also makes the steam baths much more important. -iggy |
February 13, 2014 - 5:34am | I would say this is not completely how lie detection works but certainly a singificant piece of it. since dogs are not being used to detect bio-chemical changes in humans like the imminent onset of a siezure or skin cancer we should consider giving a dralasite trained in the medical field a +10% bonus to diagnosis skill checks except that under AD rules this subskill has a 100% of succeeding, probably on the strength of the medical scanner. That makes it redundant. I treat diagnosis under Skilled Frontier rules as being a trivial action which carries a +90% modifier for being trivial which makes it redundant. I suppose in situations where a medically trained dralasite lacks his med scanner I would allow a bonus for his abiltiy to smell while doing a diagnosis. I think Iggy's onto something with the smelling of emotional states. This dovetails with the walking mood rings of Inner Reach, they paint themselves to represent their mood for the day but yet everyone can smell their emotional state anyway sort of like what I've come to associate as the "Texas smile" in humans: I had a friend in college from Texas who was notorious for giving you a smile the size of Texas but the smile never reached his eyes, once you were used to seeing it you were never fooled. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
February 14, 2014 - 9:09pm | I like the medical skill bonus but I feel it should not be an automatic bonus to a dral medic. This is a case of applying a racial ability to gain a specific skill. This should be a skill that drals and other races could purchase for an XP and training. Other races would also be able to gain the skill to various degrees. A humma would be the exception, their smell ability is a wreck. However in increasing order of ability it would be humans, ifshnit, yazirians, vrusk, osakar, then dralasites. Each would be able to go to a progressivley higher level or would have a progressivily higher bonus multiplier per skill level. The mechanic in AD rules skill could be:
These numbers are not realy thought out other than to get the example of how I would weight the races and their ofactory ability. However I would likely bump the osakar up. This would be a skill where the medic can diagnose a medical condition 90% of the time. The benefit of this skill over using a medical scanner would be that no tool is required and the subconscious can be doing it all the time. Thus a dral medic could be walking down the street and absently notice that a person has cancer. Or the GM could secretly roll that the trained medic detects the scent of a corpse infected with a disease. Another idea. The statement that drals dye themselves a color to express their mood has always bothered me because they are color blind. The source of this practice could be rooted in common dralasite practice of scenting themselves to the smell of the mood they want to express. They do not need clothes so this could be a long developed custom of self expression from their early history. When they learned that some humans associate the colors of their colthes with moods the drals started to add colored dyes for us ofactory impaired creatures who could not understand what they had been trying to teach us about their race. I can imagine a dral in mourning scenting it's steam bath to a sad mood scent and then having trouble with his human friends joking with him and getting angery because it doesn't joke back all because they can't smell that it is wearing a mourning scent. I can also imagine human purfume makers trying to play on this and making mood perfumes for humans that drals pick up as really strong purfumes. The drals would likely respond like we do to a person who dumps a whole bottle on themselves. -iggy |
February 28, 2014 - 2:24am | So the original thread was about odd behavior in the core four races. So jumping into the Vrusk we came up with this: The Vrusk have a very very complicated social rituals with much depending on status and position. One of the more unusual ones is when a Vrusk meets a child of someone who works in the same Trade House as themselves for the first. To show respect and that they will care for the child just like their own the Vrusk takes some food and using their mandibles cut it into a size the child can eat. Then they give it to the child. This was a little disturbing to the Humans and Yazirians when they first started working for Vrusk although Dralasites thought it a nice gesture for their buds. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
February 28, 2014 - 3:28am | So the original thread was about odd behavior in the core four races. So jumping into the Vrusk we came up with this: The Vrusk have a very very complicated social rituals with much depending on status and position. One of the more unusual ones is when a Vrusk meets a child of someone who works in the same Trade House as themselves for the first. To show respect and that they will care for the child just like their own the Vrusk takes some food and using their mandibles cut it into a size the child can eat. Then they give it to the child. This was a little disturbing to the Humans and Yazirians when they first started working for Vrusk although Dralasites thought it a nice gesture for their buds. I'm guessing that its less important that the child actually eat it but rather that the gesture is made, from the vrusk point of view that is. The way children can get freaked out over santa clause I can just imagine what would happen with a vrusk. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 February 28, 2014 - 6:27am | I can totally see a Dralasite grabbing a (human) woman's boob as a way of saying "We're friends", or to make her tits bounce to say "You're funny!".  In my games, only a young Sprouts seeing a human or Yasarian naked for the first time would laugh at (do to their shape humor) or touch male genitalia or female memories -- both of which they find realy funny. Like any race in a mixed racial planet, they are usually instructed on the habits, customs and taboos of the other races. If not, they learn quickly with a good smack to the... psudo-head? psudo-face? Dralasite in my game do experience a form of sexual stimulation. The reason they enjoy bad jokes is their basic understanding of human speech and the way we use it in absurd ways -- puns, euphemisms, etc -- and mentally analyzing it stimulate their minds almost like how we, as humans, derive pleasure from experiencing new things. Even an otherwise normal statement, that only they would get, would be enough to set them off. Where the sense of humor in humans, at its basic level, is based on the braking of expectation, usually through fear or irony. The humor of Dralasite, on its basic level, is based on paradoxical logic and absurdity. You can make a Dralasite reach sexual climax by bombarding them with a series of bad jokes, with the use of assorted props, that is done in a way where the jokes, statements and props play off each other. Timing is also required for them to take-in the jokes. Anyone can make a Dralasit laugh, but it takes a truly talented wordsmith to turn them into quivering, yelping mounds of orgasmic jello! Unfortunately, that would mean Carrot Top and Dana Carvey would both be classified as "comedic geniuses" in my Frontier!  |
March 4, 2014 - 8:36pm | Can't leave out the Yazirians, they have the walk out. You see not all Yazirians can control their battle rage as well as others (especially around Dralasites). In order to stop themselves from wildly beating a being a Yazirian will sometimes just leave a scene or room. The reason this gets to be truly odd behavior by the other races is that they often fail to understand the Yazirian Honor Code. Since the Yazirian does not want to kill the silly members of the other races they just walk away. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
