Alternate Forms, and Racial Templates

[Tigrah2k]

I have a few questions here...
I'm creating a Weredragon - humanoid form, not typical.
The first question regards the template. The math for it, and the character in general appear circular. Alter anything in the Template (had to create a custom template), it results in a considerable cost change in the overall Alt Form. Altering anything in the base character causes a notable increase in the total cost of the alt form, AND base form, making calculations kind of difficult. What's the trick?!

Also... when improving the character, what's the typical method of handling alterations to the template - IE, if I want my dragon character to develop a breath weapon, or a terrifying aura...

More questions will undoubtedly follow feedback.

[Refplace]

Shapechange can be a complicated advantage, here is a quick review. The advantage has two parts, the base cost Alternate Form or Morph and the form or pool cost. Modifiers that affect when and how you can change apply to the base cost. No modifiers may be applied to the form or pool cost which acts as the cap on the most expensive template you can change into (pool cost plus characters race template).

Your weredragon template is built the way you and the GM agree on.
Unless you have Once On Stays on you pay 15 (apply modifiers) + the template cost *.90.
If you add personal abilities, such as raising skills or attributes of the base form they carry over to the weredragon form and have no effect on the template to its cost.
If you add abilities to the template than you pay an increased cost to the Alternate Form advantage.
EDIT: That first paragraph I copied from an upcoming project. I think and hope it explains AF pretty clearly but if not please let me know.

[Nedorus]

Originally Posted by Tigrah2k

I have a few questions here...
I'm creating a Weredragon - humanoid form, not typical.
The first question regards the template. The math for it, and the character in general appear circular. Alter anything in the Template (had to create a custom template), it results in a considerable cost change in the overall Alt Form. Altering anything in the base character causes a notable increase in the total cost of the alt form, AND base form, making calculations kind of difficult. What's the trick?!

Also... when improving the character, what's the typical method of handling alterations to the template - IE, if I want my dragon character to develop a breath weapon, or a terrifying aura...

More questions will undoubtedly follow feedback.

If I understood your current challenge with Shapeshifting (Alternate Form) correctly it seems you are making a similar mistake as I did when first using this advantage.

Make sure that you do not calculate the cost of the character in dragon form with all skills etc. but only calculate the Dragon Racial Template (p. 260 ff.). This could include racial skills (the Flight skill comes to mind), some traits (innate attack fire breath and flight seem plausible) and of course an attribute profile. Everything that the average dragon has (average as in normal for the race of dragons). But it shouldn't include any of the skills, abilities or attribute changes of the character in his base form.
Two thing are important here:

Originally Posted by B83 Shapeshifting

[The alternate form's] racial template replaces your native racial template.

Note how it speaks of templates of both forms. E.g. your character will have different attributes than that given in the base form's racial template (human in your case).

then observe:

Originally Posted by B83 Shapeshifting

Personal traits (including all attribute levels, advantages, disadvantages, and skills bought over and above racial norms) remain intact

So if the human form has ST 12 (+2 above the racial template for humans) and knows how to scuba dive then the Dragon-Form will have ST +2 above the racial template for dragons and will also know how to scuba dive (though actually doing it may prove fatal).

You only pay once for the ST+2 and the scuba dive skill, not twice.

Maybe this helps?

[Tigrah2k]

Here's the sheet I worked up. It's probably got some serious errors in the spreadsheet math, but I "think" it's fairly correct.

I actually went with Once On, Stays On, and Reduced Time 1, to make it a lil faster to transform, along with Super - as that's the theme of the world we're playing in.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

Hopefully, you guys will see what (if anything) needs to be changed for this to make sense and the points to finally tally fully. lol

[Inky]

It looks like, this sheet is set to "private", it won't display for me.

Altering anything in the base character causes a notable increase in the total cost of the alt form, AND base form, making calculations kind of difficult.

It seems like, as Nedorus said, the cost of Alternate Form is calculated only from the difference between the point values of your two forms - for instance, if you have a human character who can turn into a bird, and then you buy the human character Luck, both the human form and the bird form will have Luck unless you specifically put "Doesn't have Luck [-15]" on the bird form's template, so the difference in point value between the human form and the bird form remains the same and thus the cost of Alternate Form remains the same. It seems like, you only write down what's different in the Alternate Form compared to the usual form, and that's what the cost of Alternate Form is calculated from.

[Anthony]

In general the math for alternate form assumes that it's not part of a racial template, and doing so causes the recursive effects you've noticed.

[Donny Brook]

It might be simplest to think of the alternate form as a switchable meta-trait with special rules for switching and point cost.

[Tigrah2k]

I think I fixed the permissions.

[Nedorus]

I just took a look at the file (now I can open it).
I'm not sure that I understand what you are trying to do, but I think there is a BIG confusion in your approach.
Why would the Weredragon have Alternate Form: Weredragon?
You have two possibilities:

1. The natural form is Human, then that takes the Alternate Form: Weredragon
2. The natural form is the Dragon then that take Alternate Form: Human

I'll try and throw together something simple to make it more transparent.

P.S.: You should be able to find 3 PDFs here
P.P.S.: I just added the GCS files that I used ...

[dataweaver]

To clarify, hopefully: the Advantage is “Alternate Form”, not “Alternate Race”. Your Race is Weredragon; your Form is either Human or Dragon, and usually represents the physical properties of that Form. Pick one of your friends as the default (that's usually Human, but doesn't have to be) and pay for it normally. Then pay for one Alternate Form (15 points, IIRC) along with the appropriate modifiers; and if the other Form is more expensive than your native form, pay the difference as well. (Technically, 90% of the difference; but since you took Once On, Stays On, you don't get that discount. I don't think you should get it anyway; but that's a different debate.)