Shifter Affinity is one of the many beta sets you can find on the Dragon Storm RPG Beta Page. Which, if you have not looked in a while, you can follow this link to take a look.
Shifter Affinity represents the Character learning more about themselves and the body they have acquired. Characters who do not bother to do the research on their shifting abilities will live a happy and fulfilled life without it. However, some character concepts require special abilities not shared by every Tom, Dick and Sandy around the table. It is something you use to personalize a character and build in skills not common to all shifters.
When building a memorable character you will want to look carefully at the cards and consider which ones will enhance your characters.
The first is the Adopted Form. This card allows a character to use forms not normally available to them. For instance, you may be running an Elven Unicorn. The Unicorn can shift into Farilan Elf. You may envision an Elf character who can shift into any Elven form. You would "Adopt" the Haskalad Elf from the Griffon and, with a second Adoption, pick up the Dragons Ebony Elf. Now you have an elf shifter who is different than the other elves.
The second card is Mind-to-Minds. If you have the concept of a versatile leader who deals with many different groups, you can use Mind-to-Minds instead of sharing a Link with the Vermite beggar on the corner. While most characters are not going to consider such an act, your character just might want to. The problem is that you need to know yourself, by having Shifter Affinity, to get this ability.
The third character intensive card is Gender Switch. We have left this a little vague so that players can mold it to their character concept. I have seen characters who switch due to external events that the player envision, just a fun character idea. I have a character who learned this because he is a wanted man in several places and gets recognized. Therefore he has places where he is a she. How, and why, you use such a card is up to you.
Next we have the Form Affinity. With this one the character becomes a quick shifter. In the blink of an eye they can flash to a new form. run into the alley and poof, you are new. If you are wearing common farmers garb and little distinguishing equipment. Well, you just might get away with it.
Affinity Defense is going to be a little more difficult to explain why the character took it. This is something that you may see the blustering tough guy using, another idea is playing in my mind, but I do not see it clearly enough to explain it right now.
Affinity Cloud is something you would look at for characters that spend time scouting out neutral and Jikadell territories where the bad guys would be looking for fresh meat on a regular basis.
This set is still short a couple of cards. So, we will keep our minds and eyes out for more cards that work here.
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I am going to add a small piece of historical information here that is only slightly involved with these cards. In ancient dragon clans a couple would expect to have two children. One as the father and one as the mother. They would switch genders to trade places. The other problem is that a pregnant dragon can not shift until after the birth. That means 30 months locked in to a single form.
The child is born live and after six months is forced in to a Stone Sleep to grow up and be taught by spirit teachers. Depending on the child they will be out of the Stone Sleep in just 50 years as a young adult ready to go. Many mortal scholars have mistaken the Stone Sleep for eggs. Now that the ancient dragon society is gone many mistaken myths have grown up, and there are few dragons around to correct the mistakes. Even fewer care if the mortals get it wrong. Now I find myself wondering why the spirit who told me this keeps laughing. Could this be wrong? We may never have absolute certainty. The chaos unleashed by the Deathday Massacre is a plague to historians.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Shifter Affinity, a beta talk.
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If it is of any help, way back when I first submitted the card idea you split up and transformed into the classic Form Affinity set, my idea was to give the shifters a defense against those awful Skin Stalkers. Those warpspawn absolutely terrified me when they first came out, with their ability to ignore the DEF of shifters in form.
ReplyDeleteOh, and by the way, I still think that Gender Switch should be ACT/F, and require playing the card again to change gender back. To my way of thinking, the current timing makes this a shifter version of transvestism by form rather than a true change of gender. Seems like this would fit better with the idea presented above that dragons would change sex to share the gestation chore when they made their two offspring, one as father and one as mother. Just my persistant two gp worth of opinion... ;-)
ReplyDeleteThis would be a different mechanic than the "F" as it currently exists. It happens in a Flash and is done, drained. Could be hard to explain.
ReplyDeleteIt is also different than "V" which is a variable time period that can be dropped at anytime.
So, it would require a new mechanic, or a second card.
However, I see no reason why you could not play the cards as you propose as a character flaw, made as a Proxy.
Gender Switch Flaw. -2 CP, 0/P (L1)
Character may not voluntarily drain Gender Switch. They may switch genders only by playing Gender Switch cards. The character will always have a Gender Switch card in play.
The flaw idea is interesting. May well consider it. But I don't see how it is a different mechanic. F means it happens and is done. The gender change would happen and would be done with an ACT/F or IND/F timing. It would not be something that is maintained or dropped. It is a physical change that does not change back on its own, but must be done again to change again. Seems more like the real thing to me. The other seems more like mimicry than actually changing sex. Dropping it makes it something that is maintained, even if it doesn't have a maintainance cost. It has a different effect on a PCs sexual identity, if one gets into the psychology of one's PCs for roleplaying. The proposed IND/V suggests one has a primary gender identity that one always reverts to. The ?/F timing means that one is whichever gender one is, not primarily one or the other. And if one doesn't recall what one started as...well, I think it has more roleplay potential as an actual sex change rather than as mimicking the form of the opposite gender, no matter how physically complete the mimickry is. Doesn't have the same effect on gender identity. I know I'm kinda going professional here but it is a big part of how I think about the personalities I construct for my characters, and how I approach constructing characters is the biggest part of how I approach critiquing cards.
ReplyDeleteDidn't mean to get so long winded...sorry. I already have options to adapt my PC Pygar, whose rp is built around gender switch, including simply grandfathering the classic cards. But the flaw idea is neat and another way to maintain his rp persona(s). I shall think on it...probably too much as usual. ;-) My comments are not specifically to defend a PC construction...I already got ways to do that. They are how I feel about the concept of the card itself and roleplaying it.