Advice for Building Corvid Race Traits

[ChrisBradford]

I'm starting a PBP game over at Sufficient Velocity, and the PCs are uplifted corvids. I'd like some advice on the racial Advantages/Disadvantages package.

SM: -1 (These birds stand at about a meter tall when in a relaxed posture, and just under 4ft when stretching upwards)

Advantages

Acute Vision lvl 2: 4pts
Claws (Talons): 8pts
Extra Arm (Two arms(20pts), Foot Manipulators(-30%), Short(-50%)): 4pts
Feathers (Sunburn Protection(1pt), DR +1(5pts), Temperature Tolerance lvl 1(1pt)): 7pts
Flight (Base Cost(40pts), Cannot Hover(-15%), Winged(-25%)): 24pts
Teeth (Sharp Beak): 1pt

Total Cost of Advantages(CoA): 48pts


Disadvantages

Ham-Fisted lvl 1: -5pts (Ham-Fisted applies only to the wing fingers. This is to simulate the flight feathers' tendency to get in the way.)
Night Blindness: -10pts
Curious: -5pts
Fearfulness lvl 1: -2pts

Total Cost of Disadvantages(CoD): -22pts

CoA +CoD = 26 pts

There's a limitation that I'd like to add to Flight. When encumbrance exceeds Normal, the limitation Controlled Gliding is applied. How much would this be worth?

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by ChrisBradford

There's a limitation that I'd like to add to Flight. When encumbrance exceeds Normal, the limitation Controlled Gliding is applied. How much would this be worth?

I'd apply the "Limited Enhancements" optional rule from the sidebox on p.B111. You're limiting a limitation, which lowers the price of the limitation; in this case, you'll need to figure out how often they'll be flying encumbered.

For example: "Controlled Gliding (Accessibility: Only When Encumbered, -10%), -41%".

This help?

[chandley]

Do you mean these guys to have two humanoid-like arms, two legs with prehensile feet, AND two (butterfly) wings? Because thats pretty much what you have right now.

For two wings and two legs that can be used as arms, you want:

Dextrous Legs without other arms (like on a bird): Arms (Change built in arms to Foot Manipulators -30%; Short -50%) [-16], and add a Feature: No Arm or Hand hit locations.

If you want them to be able to bludgeon things with their wings (when not using them to fly):
Flight (Winged -25%; Temp Disad: No Strikers -6%) [28] + 2x Strikers (Crushing; Long +100%; Cannot Parry -40%; Weak -50%; Limb -20%; Damaged on Parry by Weapon -30%) [6].

Alternately, without the house ruled "Damaged on Parry by Weapon" (and presumably just making that a campaign switch or assuming it is rolled into Cannot Parry):
Flight (Winged -25%; Temp Disad: No Strikers -2%) [30] + 2x Strikers (Crushing; Cannot Parry -40%; Weak -50%; Limb -20%; ) [2].

Edit: Ah, Hamfisted hands on the wings. Flight (Winged -25%, Temp Disad: 2 less arms -20%) [22] might be the better way to go about it.

[ChrisBradford]

Originally Posted by chandley

Do you mean these guys to have two humanoid-like arms, two legs with prehensile feet, AND two (butterfly) wings? Because thats pretty much what you have right now.

Edit: Ah, Hamfisted hands on the wings. Flight (Winged -25%, Temp Disad: 2 less arms -20%) [22] might be the better way to go about it.

Okay, so we might have something like Flight (Cannot hover -15%, Controlled Gliding (when enc > Normal) -20%, Loses use of two hands when in flight -20%, Winged -25%): 8pts, and Ham-Fisted lvl 1 (wing hands only -20%): -4pts. This changes the CoA to 32pts and CoD to -21pts

Total combined cost is changed to 11pts.

[chandley]

For dropping into gliding after a certain encumbrance, Bio-Tech uses "Requires Low Gravity", which does a lot of gyrations with body weight and such. Short answer is, it is -5% per 0.1 G under 1G you need to fly, and I would halve that if it only reduces you to gliding. But that is a real pain in the patookus. I invert the relationship to make it weight independent, borrowing from Warp's Extra-Capacity. So if you can only Fly with No Enc, but can Glide with anything from Light to Extra-Heavy, I would call that a -25% (-50% "Only fly with no enc", times -50% "Gliding Only" = -25% Fly but Glide with more than No Enc).

So, Fly with No Enc is -50%, Light is -30%, Medium is -20%, Heavy is -10%, Extra-Heavy is of course no limitation (since thats just normal Flight). Fly, but Glide with more than No Enc is -25%, no more than Light is -15%, Medium is -10%, Heavy is -5%, and doesnt make sense for Extra-heavy :)

And I would stick with "Two less arms", not just two less hands. You dont want them throwing elbow strikes with their wings while flying. The rest looks pretty good to me.

[Wavefunction]

The way I'd do it is that I'd make their 'default' limbs the claws, since those are their most dexterous appendages. To limit normal (not Extra) arms you apply a disadvantage equal to the reduction in cost you'd get for applying the limitation to Extra Arms. So for Foot Manipulators it's -3 per limb, for short it's -5 per limb. I'd then buy the wing-arms as an Alternate Ability to Flight.

So this is what I'd do:

Corvidian [20]

Attributes [10]
ST -1 [10]; DX +1 [20]

Advantages [44]
Acute Vision 2 [4]
Claws (Talons) [8]
Damage Resistance 1 [5]
Extra Arms 2 (Alternate Ability, x1/5th cost; Temporary Disadvantage, Ham-Fisted 1, -5%) [4]
Feathers [1]
Flight (Cannot Carry Objects, No Encumbrance or Controlled Gliding, -10%; Cannot Hover, -15%; Winged, -25%) [20]
Teeth (Sharp Beak) [1]
Temperature Tolerance 1 [1]

Disadvantages [-34]
Curious (12) [-5]
Fearfulness 1 [-2]
Foot Manipulators 2 [-6]
Likes (Shiny Things) [-1]
Night Blindness [-10]
Short Arms 2 [-10]

EDIT: Forgot to talk about limitations on flight. Whilst annoying, not being able to carry any more than No Encumbrance isn't that much of a limitation, I'd consider it -20%. From there this is a case of an Either/Or limitation, you can either have Cannot Carry Objects, No Encumbrance, or Controlled Gliding. So to find the value of the limitation we multiply them together to get -20% x -45% = -9%. We're allowed to fudge things a little with Either/Or limitations to make them feel right, so I'd just call it -10%.

[chandley]

You dont want to use AA on morphology. It doesnt make a heck of a lot of sense to have to spend a ready maneuver to reconfigure things. The canonical way (from places like Bio-Tech) is to use a Temporary Disadvantage that removes the alternate morphology (e.g.: Winged, no arms).

[Wavefunction]

Originally Posted by chandley

You dont want to use AA on morphology. It doesnt make a heck of a lot of sense to have to spend a ready maneuver to reconfigure things. The canonical way (from places like Bio-Tech) is to use a Temporary Disadvantage that removes the alternate morphology (e.g.: Winged, no arms).

Not really, there's no reason why you shouldn't use Alternate Ability, and it is entirely canonical. In fact it makes perfect sense to me that a bird person wouldn't be able to drop what he's doing, get his wings into position, and take off all in one second.

If you don't want to do it like that then it'd be Backlash, Negated Advantage, Extra Arms 2, -20% as a limitation on Flight.

[Humabout]

You might raid the bejesus out of the Tengu template in CR Rice's rather good L5R-esque Eastern Adventures article in Pyramid 3/89 - Alternate Dungeons II.

[Flyndaran]

I like how OP included poor night vision. I only recently learned of that fact. Ravens seemed so spooky semi-nocturnal.