Is shape shifting an inherently impossible to balance mechanic?

Is shape shifting an inherently impossible to balance mechanic?

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No. Just limit what they can and cannot shapeshift into at character creation and you're golden.

Nah, just balance it.

Use Animorphs rules.

That just makes it more OP for any character with enough money to travel.

>splitting the party

>Not bringing everyone on your tropical vacation
Filthy pleb. Bet you'd turn it into a slice of life RP.

You can only shapeshift into creatures of equivalent mass. This means anything from another person, to giant ants to tiny elephants.

Also means that, generally, you're too heavy to fly unless you go full Pteranodon, which probably takes practice to get right seeing as you have no live samples to use as reference.

Do falcons and hawks eat eggs and chicks of other type of birds?

Giant ant seems OP as shit.

I don't believe it would be typical behaviour. I mean, there might be a specialist species somewhere but small raptors are evolved to hunt small birds, small mammals and small reptiles.

Keep in mind a giant ant would be horribly optimized for the scale. Ants are only strong relative to their mass; upscale an ant that far and it's probably no stronger than a human. You do get access to ant pheremones and whatnot, though.

For combat purposes, you'd probably be turning into a small gorilla or a crocodile, most of the time.

Or a flea and kick people to death.

That's actually an interesting thread derailment.

In a world of magic, steel, or guns, is there even an animal worth turning into for the purpose of combat?

I was actually having a conversation the other day about the possibility of a live-action Teen Titans show, and concluded with the other person that in a "realistic world" Beast Boy is rather weak, considering even a T-Rex isn't bullet proof.

I wonder what the acoustics of a giant cricket would sound like.

Underwater, you'd probably have a bigger advantage due to the lack of man-portable firearms and a general lack of human mobility relative to lifeforms adapted specifically to the environment. Same goes for shapeshifting into creatures with natural camouflage: a gun isn't worth much when that vine you just brushed aside turns out to be a giant python which crushes your trachea.

And that's only assuming you have the mass requirements. If you can turn into creatures of any mass, then you have enormous combat potential. Turn into a fly, land on someone's head, then turn into an elephant and crush them with the sudden mass. By the time anyone else notices you've already shifted back into something too small to shoot.

Also, I believe Beastboy was shown to be capable of turning into a bacteria in the animated series. There's some serious fuckery you could pull going from bacteria to, say, anything else while inside somebody's body.

> Beastboy gets anally penetrated by a macrophage

You know the sound that two tree's make when rubbing up against each other? That sound.

>Turn into a bacteria
>Forget everything and get eaten by a white blood cell.

For reasons that make no scientific sense, he keeps his memories when in different forms, but ya- you're half right.

Well, there are some birds of prey who can dive incredibly fast and hit with pinpoint accuracy, while pulling back up to avoid hitting the ground. The Peregrine Falcon can reach speeds of 200mph in their hunting swoop. Fastest recorded speed was 242 mph. Imagine that, but going for your eyes.
You would have to be very good with a gun to even stand a chance of hitting that, since you most likely wouldn't even be able to see it coming.
On the topic of birds, Great Horned owls have talons that are around 20cm long. Since all owls fly silently, an owl with human intelligence could easily make use of their natural abilities if they had to take out some enemies silently. They would be more subtle than some of the more obvious choices of sneaky animals.

You just need to think a little unconventionally. Don't think straight up fight, think of an animal that has an extraordinary ability, and think how that could be utilised in combat.

I now need a TV episode or movie about a sentient owl that picks people off one by one in the dead of night by ripping their jugulars.

That sounds genuinely terrifying.

>There's some serious fuckery you could pull going from bacteria to, say, anything else while inside somebody's body.
Turning into a earwig and then turning into a tortoise delivers the same results without the risks.

Find a flaw.

Owls in general are terrifying as fuck. The little ones look all cuddly, but we are lucky the big ones are not smart enough to love murder, since they would absolutely fuck us up.

Their feathers produce a down, and overlap in a way that not only reduces vibration in flight (so they produce no sound), but dampens the sound of air travelling over them, which is how they can fly quietly enough to hunt bats.

Their eyes are actually shaped more like rods than balls, so they can't turn them (hence why they can turn their heads around so much), and this shape lets them see detail INCREDIBLY far away. However, it is really shitty for up close.

Not that it matters though, since up close their hearing is how they do shit. Their ears are right beside their eyes, and the reason the feathers around their eyes look like little radar dishes is because it helps them pick up sound more clearly. The "ears" at the top of their heads are actually more like eyebrows.

One ear is slightly higher than the other (seeing as they are normally above their prey), so they can use their hearing much like we use two eyes for depth perception. An owl can hear a mouse making tiny movements under half a foot of snow, and catch it without even landing.
Also, again, this is useful for hunting bats, since bats rely on sonar (which has trouble finding owls because again, their feathers absorb and dampen the sound), and owls can hear the bats cry out when they are using echolocation to navigate, and are capable of echolocation themselves.

To sum it up: Owls are basically natures F-22. Also it sucks being a bat.

Are all GURPS rules so painful to read through?

They improved it greatly from the earlier editions.

Fuck, that's essentially weaponized rules.
You could really hurt someone with that if you're not careful.

I think he was referring to the "If you stay shifted for more than an hour, that shift becomes permanent and irreversible."

My film teacher back in high school wrote a really pulpy screenplay which was exactly that but with a large group of condors and people trapped on an island.

Sauce?

Comic book inconsistency. IIRC, in the Morrison run on JLA in the 90's he specifically mentions the Martian Manhunter shapeshifting his brain to allow him to think more like a human (or rather, mentioms him shapeshifting it back to Martian default, since he almost always has it humanized to interact with the rest of the team).

Owls, like most hardwired predators, do have their quirks though...

You try being approached by a tropical fruit the size of yourself and see how calm younare.

>younare
you are

>MFW the US beats Canada in hockey.

Like a lot of GURPS rules, in play it's pretty straightforward - you just use the template you bought - but requires a bit more work at the start.

Shapeshifting is something that can easily be wildly unbalanced, so it makes sense that they'd be pretty careful with it.

>we are lucky the big ones are not smart enough to love murder
I am now replacing the owlbear with the owlhousecat should I ever have the chance.

>you are
no u

Peregrine Falcons only have a 5% success rate when hunting.

>Gamemaster Guide
That's not GURPS. It kind of looks like Alternity.

well a large animal like an elephant requires specialized weaponry to take down because there is just so much meat that can get shot non leathally, also while large pachaderms cant run, they can walk at somewhere between 30-50 mph

basically once you have access to the equivalent of artillery and stuff like that there aren't many real animals that you can shape shift into that are unbalanced, but it still is a cool and useful toolbox power.

You just need to get creative: transform into a really fast flying insect and turn into an elephant before you hit the fucker, assuming you keep momentum. If it's a world of magic, steel AND guns you can transform into a gelatinous cube to mitigate bullet damage. If the transformations can be partial that opens up even more possibilities, flea's feet give huge mobility and there's no one to stop you from using guns too.

Beast boys powers are he can shift into anything that exists naturally on the planet he's on and the planet he's from. In a realistic word that makes no sense but in the DC world that means he can turn into a dragon or during a Trigon invasion which is pretty much all the time he can turn into a demon. I think he once transformed into a deep sea horror because Atlantis, and a Pheonix because those exist.

4e druids could shapechange all day without there being balance issues.

Depends on the system, but while it's possible it is a challenge.

The problem is that shapeshifting is wishing for more wishes-- a power that grants a long list of other powers. That's especially true in D&D 3.5 where every time a new monster was released, people would pour through its Ex and Su abilities to see how the Shapeshift spell had been indirectly buffed.

So you either end up costing Shapeshift as a kind of improvisational magic that can do anything, or you tack on a bunch of limitations to what you can turn into or what you can do while shapeshifted.

Either way it's an iconic but pain in the ass power. No getting around it.

No, but shapeshifting is because balancing the ability is hard and they needed a lot of text to accomplish that. Also because at least a third of those rules are to cover permutations that may or may not be in effect in a given campaign.

Like most GURPS rules, once character creation is over it plays pretty fast and clean. So you deal with the complexity once, at the beginning.

So basically they have to roll a 20?

Nope, there's plenty of ways to balance it.

That doesn't look like a GURPS rulebook.

>Shifters can shapeshift
>They're actually pretty balanced
Nah, only druids and changelings are OP as fuck

No? Shapeshifting takes a bunch of diffrent forms. You mean mystique or beast boy or martion manhunter or alex mercer or what?

>younare
your

Owls are also the most retarded of all raptors.

Harpy Eagles would be a brutal form if you wanted to do hit and run attacks

youtube.com/watch?v=oGMmQBiU1Ls

No. The simplest way to look at it is a fluff for having different character sheets. You could then switch to an appropriate sheet for the encounter the same a fighter could change equipment or a caster could prepare different spells.

The trick is to give that a drawback. A fighter who specializes in equipment swaps has to pay more IC and OOC attention to inventory and proficiency management, casters can only change their spells at certain times and in certain ways. You could do a lot of things to bring it into balance.

Personally, I think the easiest are either to limit how often a shift can be used, requiring a shift to be maintained for a period of time before a new one can be selected, or allow shifting for free anytime but none of the shift-able builds are as good as a "real" build of that type would be.

depends. Steel? absolutely. Even crossbows and lances might not do much to a charging rhino. Basic firearms are certainly better, but even then it's no sure thing, and if you fail don't expect to have a chance to reload.

Also shit like silverback gorillas. Even if I was in plate mail I'd be scared shitless of fighting one.

Yeah. Even bears and shit are pretty resistant to both small arms fire and even hunting rifles. I vaguely recall some story of park rangers finding a bear with evidence of bullets from like a dozen different sources lodged in its underside, implying that a lot of people had died trying to shoot it while being mauled.

Yes it is. You need to take too much things in consideration, the first being: "do you want this as plausible as possible" or "fuck it, let's do it"?

The shape is irrelevant, the only question is: how fast can you do the shape? How fast do you go from human mass to any other mass? A second? A second seens to fucking fast, but anything more than that is useless. If you take more then five seconds to become an armored rhino, it is five seconds too much as you would get shot to death in less than two seconds in mid tranformation.

Yes, the DM made our first boss fight a ridiculously OP homebrew gardrake that nearly wiped out party twice. forgot I was playing a druid and picked circle of the moon as soon as i dinged level 2. Now I just go godzilla mode every single encounter.