Hmmm. I'm AFB. I don't suppose you could help me out with a quote here? Is it a "may" vs. "must" thing?
It will be nice if so. Would be one of only two cases I can think of in 5E where you can use your action in place of a bonus action--the other is the DMG variant rules for Overrun/Evade.
Volo's confirms that natural weapons are unarmed.
As does Alter Form, and the transition between NPC Aarakocra and PC Aarakocra. There is no evidence against them being one and the same, and at least four points of them clearly being defined as the same.False. Volo's gives two new races Unarmed Strikes with their natural weapons.
So what you're saying is despite every single other instance of a PC getting natural weapons resulting in an alteration of Unarmed Strikes, they must all be the exception?
Without clear rules we must go by precident, and the precident has been set.
That's how rules work.
Except that the rules already were clear, and were made more clear by explicit exceptions being added for these new cases.
I understand that you want this to work a certain way, and you're allowed to run it however you like at your tables, but the rules we have don't back up how you want it to work.