Let's see... I want to touch on two things:
But we're talking about games that have no GM. In that case, it is very possible to have conflicting interests that must be resolved, and if you can't settle for an arbitrator then you exclude an entire class of players from your RP. Is that what you want?
Traditionally, the way many of us handled this decentralized play is when one player attempted to do something to another, then one who is acted upon decides if the action was successful and if so, how effective it was. The idea behind this is it eliminates the effects of god modding, but it requires honor. Without that honor, you run into problems. The most obvious problem in the case of god modding via invulnerability.
Dice can be used as an arbiter, but not everyone likes dice. I sometimes just discuss doing a die roll with the other player and go with it. Some players are more inclined to go with judgment or whatever.
The problem with using game mechanics to decide is that there's a huge disparity in stats among players - so much so that pairing players of such different stats makes no sense at all. We're talking gods and ants. Yes, you could make skill tiers but even that is hard to do fairly and that kills the fun of players randomly joining in if they notice that you are playing near them. What some of us do is to ignore stats completely and role play having some basic area of proficiency. Again, honor/trust is needed here. For a player who has an obsession with being overpowered, this does not work well.
When the majority of players play one way, and then another consistently tries to defy that system with a way that the majority of players disagree with, that player effectively excludes themselves via their choice to not adapt.
Re: Playing a Kran.
It's funny that Cairn said that playing a kran was hard. I made one or two attempts at it and found it to be rather awkward. I think the mistake that I made was playing into the strong, moronic stereotype. Also, krans look huge and powerful and like they are made of stone, but the settings and game mechanics kind of at odds with this.
To which I ask one question: is that power disparity something that is, or should be for that matter, in-character observable?
Because that seems to be the crux of our problems -- I play Kaerli as powerful as she is partly because to do otherwise would contradict her observed abilities in the game mechanics (i.e. that power disparity is observable/IC because the mechanics are the only data provider). However, most RPers seem to ignore the magnitude of that power disparity in favor of some notion of "believability", as if said power disparity was an OOC artifact slated to go away completely as soon™ as the game is rebalanced properly (which will likely require a top-to-bottom overhaul of skills and stats, but that's a topic I've already broached in another thread). Or in other words -- should the ability of some characters to do things like slay Ulbers in (armored) hand-to-hand be treated as a legitimate in-character capability, or something that's simply an artifact of the game?
Ignoring stats and skills altogether, of course, raises the spectre of mob interference/lack of hunting capability as a problem, as well...(while
some characters are in metagame positions where they can hunt and defend themselves from aggressive mobs effectively without having highly developed stats/skills, this is by no means universal, and isn't going to be impacted positively by whatever balance changes come down the pike, because vertical balancing doesn't give you the opportunity to fix the problems that ail PS' combat system)
Kran are only hard to play when your kran doesn't identify as male or female and you gotta use the kranouns all the time.
One of my suggestions to making the unsociability of kran more interesting and interactive is to either force them into a situation with some sort of backstory (I've been sent here to do ___, ___ stole something from me and now I'm searching for them, my friend ___ is causing trouble and I should probably do something about it, etc). That, or take inspiration from antisocial behavioral disorders. Just partially though, since they're good natured or come from a place where they don't see the wrong in what they're doing. When you throw a certain cultural background into a melting pot like Hydlaa, there's going to be mixed reactions and it's great to focus on the bad reactions your character gets ICly, because that's where conflict grows from.
At the end of the day, with kran or any of the races for that matter, the amount you're able to do with your character comes from the amount you're able to interpret from established lore, rather than just taking it for face value and not deviating (...deviating reasonably).
The lore could do with a major overhaul and restructuring -- whoever thinks that the lore of a sandbox world should be told in the form of stories should be dropped on their head a few times to reboot it. More precisely, the PS lore, in addition to not being well-fleshed-out (which is a different story), is not designed to be referenceable...there is still far too much that is only spoken of in quests, which doesn't work for a game that really should be centered around interactions between player characters.