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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cleon" data-source="post: 5025856" data-attributes="member: 57383">Welcome aboard, Steinhauser! I agree with most of what you say. If I was homebrewing a realistic Deinonychus from scratch I'd make it around a leopard in power (although I might have to tone the leopard down first - big cats have been damage dealing mincing machines since they days of 1st edition, what with their claw/claw/bite/rake/rake routines. Five attacks a round sure adds up!).That said, I was wanting to keep at least some of the rather exaggerated nature of the 3E Deinonychus, if only because a lot of people are likely to expect them to be pretty tough combatants having watched too many Jurassic Park rip-offs. So, I'm going to leave them 4 Hit Dice.As for the talon-stabbing, I've already renamed "rake" to "talon-stab" in my conversion.I think just giving them a racial bonus on grapple for their grasping claws and talons is far easier. Besides, their high speed gives Maniraptors a jolly high Jump check.After long deliberation I've switched their primary attack to bite. Mainly because making it their foreclaws gives them 2 primary attacks when full-attacking, which gives them two primary attack bonuses, which adds up to a lot of damage for a big Dromaeosaur.I've cut the skill bonuses to +4 as well, except I've added a couple more skills (e.g. Balance, Climb). I agree about the Int 2 being rather inappropriate but I'm not going to change it, mainly because it's the only way to differentiate between a "smart croc" level animal like Velociraptor and a "dumb lizard" like a sauropod. I'd have much preferred 3E animal intelligence to be more like AD&D, where the smarter ones (e.g. bears, gorillas) could have Intelligence 3-5. Trying to cram everything into either 1 or 2 doesn't leave much room for subtle gradiations!My current thinking is I'll just drop Run from the feats of the standard Medium to Large raptor. Then they'd have to sneak within charge distance of the Ornithomimus conversion (which has speed 60 and the Run feat) I've already done to have any chance of catching it. Any further and the Ostrich-mimic would take a Run action and outdistance it by 25% per round.</blockquote>

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