Question: Animal Feature Questions! Can you choose an Animal Feature that adds to your Soaks or DVs? If so, do you add your full Animal Boons total? On a related note, if you have, say, 10 Boons in Animal (Giraffe) and 5 Boons in Animal (Armadillo), and use AF to make an armadillo's armor, would the bonus be 5 or 15? Lastly, could an animal's hide or other feature add to soak or DVs even if that animal isn't particularly known for dodging or taking hits?
Animal Feature answers!
Yes, you can add soak or DV directly with an Animal Feature! (In fact it's the only way to, since adding Athletics doesn't count toward DV.) It adds half your Animal boons instead of all of them, but if you dedicate two features to the stat, you can get the full amount. So if you have ten Animal boons for Bull, you can have a leathery hide that grants you +5 soak, or a leathery hide and thick bull-bones that grant you the full +10.
No, you can't add more than one animal's boons to your Animal Feature; that doesn't make any sense. Your giraffeyness, cool though it may be, has nothing to do with you growing an armadillo shell. The bonus comes only from your Animal (Armadillo) boons (though you could theoretically also use Animal Feature for Giraffe and add another feature that stacked another bonus; you'd simply have to pay for both boons in order to be a hybrid giraffe-armadillo monster).
While we always try to fudge a bit for PCs' hopes and dreams when it comes to deciding what Animal Aspect and Animal Feature grant, they need to be related to the animal in some way, and if you can't make a convincing case why even to yourself, you probably need to rethink your choices. Sometimes it's just a matter of looking at the situation creatively; while I wouldn't normally think of a salamander's smushy little limbs as providing a Fortitude bonus, for example, a savvy player might point out that some are able to regenerate those if they're lost and sway me. It's not too hard to see animals' hides as adding to sturdiness, since a lot of them, even if not particularly well-known as being robust, are thicker or stronger than human skin (but then again, there are some that aren't); sometimes all you need is to point out that that animal is better at that stat than you would be as a human, even though there are other animals out there who are better. But if you can't justify the creature giving a particular bonus, or it's such a shaky justification that the Storyteller can't follow you, then it sounds like you're reaching for a mechanical benefit, not trying to do cool stuff with your totem animal, and we probably wouldn't allow it.
Animal Feature thanks!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I thought that DV and soak bonuses for AF were simultaneously kind of obvious and a tad overpowered. Particularly in those cases such as me where the player buys Animal Boons like they're going out of business. And if I used your nahualli rules and added Itztli to my Aztec Scions' use of AF... Well, you can see where this can get excessive.
The last two of these questions I had do basically translate to "No shit, Sherlock." I just wanted to be sure.
Of course, you COULD get the benefit of both your totems' full Animal Boons... but you'd need to use AF twice, requiring a minimum of 2W and 4L to get the full benefit for, say, soak (8L for Soak and DV). And you'd have to make sure the features weren't mutually exclusive...
Animal Feature welcome!
DeleteYeah, we figured just cutting the bonus in half took care of most of the overpowering; you can still get it if you want to, but it requires more dedication of resources, which is reasonable for a big old scenelong bonus that other people would be popping things like Earth Armor to get.