I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
So!
Here's the stab at making a 4e-able aarakocra PC race.
This doesn't address the other side of the question, really (about aarakocra being NPCs who aren't typically violent), but it does, I think, address the concerns about flying PCs. It does this by ensuring that a newbie or flight-phobic DM who decides to allow an aarakocra PC knows how to handle their flight. It also puts some pretty hard limits on that flight: it can only be used where there's room to spread the wings, and, when used, it makes the PC more vulnerable (as a six-foot flying bird-man is hardly a small, agile target). I didn't want to penalize their attack rolls, since part of their schtick is good vision, but I think especially the requirements that adjacent spaces be free helps with enforce the claustrophobia with a rules element.
Let me know what you think! Especially those of you who have had trouble with flight -- do you think you could theoretically use this version of the aarakocra as a race? If you saw the aarakocra presented like this in a WotC book released tomorrow, what would your big complaints be?
ed: [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] ! I can't say I really dispute your central thrust. The trick, though, is to help teach these skills to more DMs who maybe don't have them, without overwhelming them. Something like flight dropped into a newbie's first DMing experience, or into a game where the DM might not be a great tactical thinker, might go really, really poorly because they might not have those skills, and even old hats don't always remember the lessons they once knew by heart. If the best way to help a DM deal with flight is to teach them good encounter design, I'd like to bundle the two together: you can opt into having flying PCs, and, if you do, here's some practical advice on how to keep the game interesting while you do it. It certainly seems like a pretty "advanced" technique, though -- you could probably run dungeon crawls with elves and dwarves in the first 10 levels of the game your whole life and never worry about the problems flight can present, but I think it would sort of suck if the game didn't allow you to have a flying PC if you wanted, simply because it wasn't sure if you could handle one. If the game is a toolset to build fun times out of, I'd like to give the DM the instruction manual to the more advanced tools when he gets them, rather than just handing the DM the game-rule equivalent of an industrial lathe and saying "HAVE FUN!"
Here's the stab at making a 4e-able aarakocra PC race.
This doesn't address the other side of the question, really (about aarakocra being NPCs who aren't typically violent), but it does, I think, address the concerns about flying PCs. It does this by ensuring that a newbie or flight-phobic DM who decides to allow an aarakocra PC knows how to handle their flight. It also puts some pretty hard limits on that flight: it can only be used where there's room to spread the wings, and, when used, it makes the PC more vulnerable (as a six-foot flying bird-man is hardly a small, agile target). I didn't want to penalize their attack rolls, since part of their schtick is good vision, but I think especially the requirements that adjacent spaces be free helps with enforce the claustrophobia with a rules element.
Let me know what you think! Especially those of you who have had trouble with flight -- do you think you could theoretically use this version of the aarakocra as a race? If you saw the aarakocra presented like this in a WotC book released tomorrow, what would your big complaints be?
ed: [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] ! I can't say I really dispute your central thrust. The trick, though, is to help teach these skills to more DMs who maybe don't have them, without overwhelming them. Something like flight dropped into a newbie's first DMing experience, or into a game where the DM might not be a great tactical thinker, might go really, really poorly because they might not have those skills, and even old hats don't always remember the lessons they once knew by heart. If the best way to help a DM deal with flight is to teach them good encounter design, I'd like to bundle the two together: you can opt into having flying PCs, and, if you do, here's some practical advice on how to keep the game interesting while you do it. It certainly seems like a pretty "advanced" technique, though -- you could probably run dungeon crawls with elves and dwarves in the first 10 levels of the game your whole life and never worry about the problems flight can present, but I think it would sort of suck if the game didn't allow you to have a flying PC if you wanted, simply because it wasn't sure if you could handle one. If the game is a toolset to build fun times out of, I'd like to give the DM the instruction manual to the more advanced tools when he gets them, rather than just handing the DM the game-rule equivalent of an industrial lathe and saying "HAVE FUN!"
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