Minor Alter Self tweak for flavor.

[Humanophile]

One of the things that bugs me about alter self is that if you have an uncommon type, it does funny things with your ability to change. Yes, I'm looking especially at familiars and elan here, but some of the human form outsiders get crunched here, too. So here's a quick fix, wondering if it looks good to other board members.

In short, if your character is a type X (augmented type Y), you can alter self not into a creature of type X, but into a creature of type Y with whatever template applies still in existence. (This includes "templates" not in the MM, like animal companion and familiar, as well as some whiz-bang handwaving I'm going to apply to elans.) E.G: your toad familiar can be turned into a cat (while keeping its familiar bennies) but not a shocker lizard, and similarly your fiendish human can turn into a fiendish elf, but not a dretch. Sound like a good thing for the spell, flavor and/or powerwise?

Alternately, would it be good to have it both ways, chosing between "proper" type or templated original type at the time of casting?

 

[Ferret]

Also you could add a new sub set of types like shape, Humanoid, giant, quadraped etc....

 

[Humanophile]

I was thinking about doing something similar, but do remember that this only applies to one spell. There'd be little point to making extra rules that only apply to an miniscule part of the game. As is, I'm just trying to get the spell to more closely approximate what it was in pre 3.5 (super disguise skill) and less "polymorph humanoid".