I recently thought it would be fun to create a character who was a (magical) animal who shifts into other animal forms, and human form, rather than shifting from human to animal. I rather quickly ran into a couple of problems, one in character generation and one in play.
First, the Bjornaer chapter of Mystery Cults includes a system for converting the Characteristics of a human shapeshifter into the characteristics of her animal form: when the character's original Characteristic and the default for the animal in question are different, you use the greater of the two if they're both positive, the lesser if they're both negative, or otherwise the sum of the two. That's kind of an inelegant kludge, but it works reasonably well.
However, it breaks when an animal shifts into another animal form, or into human form. It's particularly obvious for human form: since the default for a human is 0 in all Characteristics, the human form will have exactly the same Characteristics as the animal form. It's actually not much better for switching from one animal to another with very different Characteristics, especially if there's a big difference in Size--try it with a couple of examples and you'll see what I mean.
At a minimum, you should probably remove the Size adjustments to Str and Qik before figuring the new stats (this rule wasn't around when Mystery Cults was written), then add them back in afterwards. That doesn't fix all of the problems, though.
Pre, incidentally, is the hardest problem, because animal Pre and human Pre mean two different things (see Mystery Cults, pg. 38).
You might do it this way:
Int: doesn't change.
Pre: subtract the default for the species from the character's Pre, and add that number to the default for the new species.
Everything else: take the average, after modifying Str and Qik for Size.
What this does is to allow the new form to be influenced by both the default Characteristics of the old form and the ways in which the particular character's Characteristics differ from the defaults, except for Int, which shouldn't change at all, and Pre, which is implicitly linked to Size, and thus suffers from the same problem you get if you take an average of Str or Qik (that is, you're in effect averaging the Sizes of the two forms).
Another possibility, though, for everything except Int, is to do the same thing as I'm suggesting for Pre (this would automatically account for the Size mods to Str and Qik). That has the advantage of making the new Characteristics depend more on the ways in which the particular character differs from the species defaults, and the disadvantage that the species defaults no longer influence the new Characteristics.
Oh...also note that RoP: Magic makes the defaults for animals are minimums, at least if you're using character guides (see the section thereon in the "Characters"; sometimes, in RoP: Magic, it's hard to tell if a rule is intended for general usage, or one specific type of character), which rather complicates things (and also makes some Bjornaer have at least one Characteristic that's worse than every single other member of their heartbeast species). I guess that makes sense if you're using the Magic Animal rules mostly to create Beasts of Virtue, which are by definition above average, but it seems silly for other animals. The upshot, in any case, is that using the second method above, a shapechanging animal would always have Characteristics that were the default or better for the new form, meaning, for example, human Characteristics all 0 or positive. Maybe we should use the default as guidelines and let animals take lower? Or even just let them take Characteristics the normal way, and then add the defaults to the purchased stats? (Either would also obviate the need for so many purchases of Improved Characteristics.)
Which one of the two options you favor depends on whether you think it's more "realistic" for an average cat, changed into human form, to be more dextrous and alert than an average human. I'd lean toward the latter, though.
The second problem I ran into was an apparent contradiction between the "Ringing the Changes" sidebar in Mystery Cults and a spell in Societates. The former says that a character who uses the Shapeshifter Virtue has an innate ability to change shape, the upshot of which is that he's considered as being under a magical effect only during the time of the change, which makes detection of the true shape impossible at other times. That would also imply, I would think, that the shapeshifter would be immune from spells that tried to reverse the change by destroying the effect (that is, PeVi spells--a MuAn[Co] spell would still work). However, the PeVi spell The Heathen Witch Reborn, Societates specifically applies to targets that have changed shape using Shapeshifter. Any ideas how this seeming conflict should be resolved?
Scott
In your example, Size would not be modified unless the character had Giant Blood or was a Dwarf.
I can see how it produces the same result--but I don't really see how that result makes sense.
) but after reading that I think I prefer the old 3rd and 4th edition rules for shapeshifting. Havin the trasnformed falcon "your falcon" rise 2 points of stamina "just because" is rather extreme, don't you think? I would still take the natural shape, asign stat modifiers for that (using the 7 point scale we all know) and then use that same 7 point scale to modify the stats of other creatures at a cost of +1 for each 2 points of stat variation (as posted above). The changes will not be as extreme as in the cases presented in MC. This worked well for (at least) 2 editions of the game, so I do jnot understand why it was changed...