New Race: Birdmen

[Tonguez]

[*] Far Vision: Bird Men can see twice as far as 'normal' in both day and night conditions.
[*] Poor sense of smell: Bird Men have a minus -4 on any check that depends on smell to determine success.

[*] Wingspan: Due to their Wingspan Birdmen find certain cramped areas difficult to manuever in.

Hmmm not sure if I personally like this Far vision.Its generally logical for this race but I would limit it to day conditions only.

I'm not too sure about the smell limitation (it certainly does not 'balance' far vision if that was a purpose) Afterall how many smell checks are made on a regular basis?

Wingspan I like but perhaps it needs to be more clearly defined - what is cramped (less than 5'?) and does difficulty manouvering mean a -2 dex penalty?

PS I was thinking about the -2 str too and think that it should really be -2 con (accounting for the hollow bones etc)
The thing with Str is that although lower body Str might be lower Birdmen are likely to have increased upperbody str (in particular their shoulders are likely to be huge!)

 

[Kichwas]

The penalty is Str and not Con because they are just as healthy as humans, but have a lower carrying capacity and less 'mass' in their bodies for delivering damage and such.

The wingspan issue is intentionally vague. It's a reminder to the player and DM to consider to awkwardness of performing certain actions and poses that a human without wings could perform.

This is also why the swim penalty exists. These are not penguins or 'birds' per se.

They are pointy eared humans with wings. In fact if you look at the two people in my sig; one of them is a member of this race.

Although the smell thing is a 'bird thing'... Real world birds have no sense of smell. I've just tossed it into this race for flavor.

There's no dex penalty because they have no problems with most tasks that involve the use of the dex stat.

As for Far Vision, I couldn't see any logical reasons why it suddenly stop working 'when the sun went down'. This ability is actually something that I as a real life person have: 20/10 vision.

After the beautifully colored aaracokra and the ugly hairy "bat devils" (no more devils than tasmanian devils) from CC, after the avariels, kir-lanans and others, another flying race.

Not familiar with any of these. They're all in Creature Collection?

 

[Gez]

The bat-devils are the only one from CC, and the only new creatures.

Aarakocra in 3e stats are in Monsters of Faerûn. They were in the 2e MM IIRC.

Kir-Lanan looks like gargoyles. They are in the FRCS. Not sure were they appeared before, but I'm pretty sure they are not new.

Avariels are winged elves. They will be present in 3e in the Silver March sourcebook when it will be published. They were introduced in the 2e Complete Handbook of Elves, and there is around 2 threads a month about them on the Wizards.com FR boards, or so it seems.

 

[Kichwas]

Comment I also posted on another thread:

An Avians strength can be largely focused however into the wings and surrounding muscles.

Low strength works well to reflect lower carrying capacities and a lesser ability with the body's remaining muscles due to both bone mass and structural focus.