Hi guys, I'm starting a campaign and I need some help with the rules. A player in my group is torn between playing a Human or a Clawdite. The character would be a Sentinel Shadow. The Human has more starting XP but the Clawdite is a changeling. The rule reads: "At a cost of 2 strain, a Clawdite can choose to upgrade their Deception check to convey a false appearance etc...

The rule doesn't say what kind of upgrade so I need some advice there. If he takes another form what kind of check should he need to pass it?

I only have the 3 core rulebooks and the FaD GM book. He used OggDude's app to create a Clawdite, so if there is a rule in another book I would appreciate someone letting me know.

You already answered the question:

The rule reads: "At a cost of 2 strain, a Clawdite can choose to upgrade their Deception check to convey a false appearance etc...

The Clawdite can Upgrade a deception check once, while pretending he is someone else by suffering 2 Strain.

e.g. The cladwite has cunning 3 and deception 1 and he wants to make a swoopbiker believe that he is also a biker.

That would be YGG vs the perception of the biker (2) PP

when he now suffer 2 strain to look more like one of the bikers around he may upgrade to

YYG vs PP

Hello,

the way I understand it, is that the changeling's ability to change their apperance is handled through the Deception Skill. For this, changelings start with one rank in deception and can effectively add another rank to deception or cunning (whichever is lower) for those checks where they try to convey a false apperance.

This Deception check would then normally be opposed by the enemies perception.

Example: A clawdite with agility 3 and only his one rank in deception he starts with: In order to convey a human apperance and pass a minion group of stormtroopers the clawdite would suffer two strain to change his apperance and then has to roll his deception, upgraded once due to his species ability, resulting in a dice pool of 2 Yellow, 1 Green, with the stormtroopers perception as purple/red dice. If he fails the deception check, the stormtroopers somehow recognise that he is not human.

If the changeling tries to change his appearence to a specific person (e.g. the stormtroopers superior), I would throw in setback dice, depending on how well the opposed party knows this person, and/or boost dice if the changeling had time to research the person (e.g. had access to a holographic picture).

This means, in order to get really good in changing their apperance, the Clawdite should try to get deception as a carrer skill, and increase their cunning as well. They will therefore also be real good in deception in general when their apperance is not involved, e.g. when they lie to someone, but on those normal deception checks they don't get their specie's ability upgrade.

Just my € 0.02.

P.S.: Or what Nightone said, who ninjaed me, because I took too long and used too many words....Oh, well....

Upgrading a check is covered in Chapter 1 of each core rule book. Upgrading a check refers to improving the positive dice by (generally) changing a Green (Ability) dice to a Yellow (Proficiency) dice. If all the dice have been upgraded to Proficiency then a further upgrade adds an additional Ability dice to the pool.

Upgrading the Difficulty refers to making the check harder by changing Purple (Difficulty) dice to Red (Challenge) dice.

Yeah, the idea when Cyril did the stats on the Clawdites was that you'd upgrade the Deception check the PC is making to convince others that they're somebody else.

That being said, if nobody is questioning that your Clawdite just happens to look Human (such as was the case with Zam Wessel in AotC), then no Deception check is needed; it's just "flavor text" that your PC happens to look a certain way. It'd only be if somebody was trying to ascertain if your character was indeed a Human (or Wookiee or Gungan or Duros or whatever other species they're trying to pass themselves off as) that the Deception would come into play.

To be honest, if there were to be any further updates to the USM, that's one of the things that would be re-considered now that we've got a lot more official species stats to work from as opposed to the initial eight from the EotE Beta.

Thanks for the input.