Let's pull them all here for easy comparison.  We want Human, Elf, Troll, Dwarf, Ork, T'Skrang, and Windling, and expect them to mostly be in the neighborhood of seven Schticks.  A substat bonus is worth a schtick, a stat bonus is worth two.  Seven is **way expensive**.  In Vanilla Feng Shui, a Transformed Dragon is only five schticks.  I think we really want to throw in penalties and such to bring them down to three or so at most.

In Shadowdawn, the race packages appear to be about 1/5 (Human) to 1/3 (Elf) to 1/2 (Troll) of the starting character cost, right?  Hm.  Do we want to keep it being that much of an impression on a character, or should we scale it back to a net of 2 schticks, say?  Opinions?

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I think scaling it down to about 40-50 'build points' would be a good ceiling, and adding schtick picks to the low-cost races to ballance them (more picks probably gives fewer points).  What are the Transformed Dragon's five schticks, and does that include stat mods?

Another possible start point is to try and make races just toned down archetypes, so everybody in effect picks tro archetypes.  Elf would probably be based on Journalist or Theif, Troll on Big Bruser with some Creature schticks, Orks...one of the combat types, windlings are even smaller scrappy kids, stuff like that.  It gives a place to start.

Oh, disgreement from different sources (no suprise there)--High Fantasy gives a stat bonus as worth 2 schticks, and a substat bonus as one.  The pointbuilding nexus thing says a schtick costs 10, a stat increase 10, and a substat 4.  Very different scale, there.

--zebediah<hr>

In Feng Shui, one of the Archetypes is "Transformed Animal": an animal which cheated on the Wheel of Karma to become human.  If exposed to too much magic, they go back to being animals.  The mana level isn't high enough for Dragons, so that particular sort just dies if reverted.  Spiders, Jaguars, and such are alive... but dumb animals.  If you take the Transformed Animal archetype, you have to pick which sort of animal you are, and you get to pick five schticks from that type.  Rhinos get Gore, Armor, and Stand Ground; Monkeys get Caper, Leap, and some Taunt-like thing.  Dragons have to spend all their schticks on Being a Dragon, but after chargen can buy from *any* transformed animal schtick list, and have disgustinly gross stats (+4 across the board).  High Fantasy Schticks are, as you've noticed, not at all the same thing as normal schticks.  They're supposed to be about half as cool as a Fu/Gun/TA schtick, I think.  Either way, this is not not not not not a build point system, and "build your own archetype so you can put all your half point skills into it" is not an option any player will be offered.  If that's going to happen, we might as well stick with what we've got now.  Nexus is a neat system, and we're even sortof in that setting, but not that chargen system.  Gyah.

That said, I very much would like general player input in building the specific race and archetype packages.  What you've written up for Elf and Troll seem to be in about the right direction, but I question whether they're too much. --bts

FSRacesHacking