TheSagaContinues

Quote from: RogerWilco on December 05, 2013, 08:49:11 am

I'm not even sure what "you can disguise your appearance as a full-round action at no penalty." actually gives a Clawdite, as the standard Moderate Deception skill already seems to do that.

I think this just means you don’t take the -10 penalty to Deception check when rushing to create a disguise.

I might be starting to get it now. Do you mean that if I would try to impersonate the Emperor, I'd still get the -20 from being Outrageous, but I could create the disguise in a full round without penalty?

Quote from: RogerWilco on December 05, 2013, 08:49:11 am

That's all I have been able to gather from the mechanics of the game. I found one thing that I don't know how to interpret: Scum and Villainy page 190 has the Pol Virten NPC, were in the entry it says he can take 20 on (all?) disguise checks.

I can’t figure out what is giving this NPC this ability.

Thanks for looking at it.

After being mentioned earlier in this thread, I went and looked for information about the clawdite description in earlier versions of d20 Star Wars, someone mentioned the Ultimate Alien Anthology. It seems a lot of the description of the abilities in the wookipedia article is coming from there.

Spoiler (hover to show)

A talented Clawdite can assume the appearance of any Medium-sized humanoid spiecies of similar mass and posture, though the epidermis cannot duplicate the features of a specific individual. The wrinkled skin of a Weequay is easy to match, but no clawdite can assume the posture of a dug or generate the extra flesh needed to create and Ithorian hammerhead. Clothes and jewelry can also be mimicked, provided they lie close to te skin.
...
Shapeshift: A Clawdite can alter his or her appearance as a full round action and grants a +10 species bonus on disguise checks. A Clawdite gains none of the special qualities or species traits of the mimicked species, but the effect lasts as long as the Clawdite wishes. whenever a Clawdite changes form to appear as any species other than Clawdite, he or she must succeed at a Fortitude save (DC 12), or suffer 1 point of Constitution damage immediately after the transformation. A Clawdite can reduce de transformation time to a move action, but doing so raises the save DC to 18. A Clawdite cannot create or conceal heavy clothing as part of the transformation and immediately reverts to his or her natural form when stunned, fatigued, exhausted, unconscious, dying or dead.

But then this version also has a Changeling Prestige Class in the same book, that removes a lot of the restrictions, and gains you the ability to impersonate individuals, natural weapons, exoskeleton, natural armor, languages, removing the Con damage, and making it a move and then a free action to change shape.

It's both similar and different from the SWSE version, I'm not sure what to think of it. Similar differences happened between D&D 3.0 and 3.5 that sometimes gave the impression that the developers didn't really pay attention or things had gone through several development and editing stages and the end result was inconsistent and confusing. I think I'll just discuss with my DM and group how we will interpret things.

Often times the "fluff" has no trouble carrying through between editions but the crunchy parts often change.  The Clawdite is an example of that.

It seems that both the fluff and mechanics did change even though some things were carried over (Clawdite history and +10 to disguise checks). Partially that's because the mechanics changed partially because maybe the Shi'ido are no longer a playable race.

Because of the flexible nature of SAGA's classes I imagine that those things you see in the RCR's Changeling PrC would simply be feat in SAGA and/or a should have been in a talent tree that never materialized.

Looking at that list of things you mention the Changleling class doing I can see Natural Weapons as a combination of the Martial Arts feats which also benefits from that size boosting feat.  The CON damage is already removed.  Shapechanging time would probably have been covered by something else but altering your appearance in a round without a penalty for being rushed already covers that for the most part.

I think that without the combat applications (natural weapons, armor, DR) that the need to be faster than a full round isn't really needed, I wasn't really interested in those any way, but the UAA version seems to focus on those combat improvements. SWSE does have two feats that seem to have the goal of giving a Clawdite more combat ability through shifting: Metamorph and Hideous Visage, but they don't match mechanically what the UAA species/PrC does and I think aren't worth taking even for a martial artist.

The first level of the UAA PrC gives something similar to the SWSE Impersonate feat.

And it seems the Con damage and removal of the Con damage on shifting in the PrC have basically both been removed with the PrC no longer existing.

As far as the fluff, the SWSE version is much less detailed on what the shapeshifting allows a Clawdite to do.

"they can assume the appearance of a similarly size species, even masking their equipment when it's held close to their bodies"

is about the only relevant fluff in SWSE.

My conclusion is that the changes are big enough that I can't assume that fluff from UAA automatically applies in SWSE and the description in wookipedia seems to be largely based on UAA. The description in SWSE is possibly much more vague on purpose, leaving it up to the GM to decide the mechanical limits and fluff much more. The fluff text in SWSE is actually longer than the one in UAA, but focusses almost exclusively on a much more detailed history of the Clawdites. Someone must have decided on a rewrite on purpose. The text from UAA is at best an indication of what an earlier writer thought, but given that it was rewritten, someone must have had different ideas for SWSE.