Mechanics of Velociraptors - Or, A Game of Hide and Seek With Doyouthinkhesaurus RexSo Mr. Chen here is an experiment into one of my favorite kind of characters - the player character who actually isn't the business end of things. At heart he is a general support character, sort of a dashing, less-good-in-a-fight Indiana Jones with a bit more biology and a bit less gunplay and whips. The main meat of the character is the ability to summon up velociraptors from thin air.
Richard Chen only actually has the use of two abilities -
Leader of the Pack, which is a miracle summoning or replacing raptors, and a hyperskill called
Pack Alpha. Minions, as listed in the book, gives you your number of dice in a minion pool to do stuff with. Since we're using hard dice, we get 'expert minions', but even that isn't quite what I was going for with this, so we're modifying the hell out of it with the remaining powers. Essentially, when this power is activated, the delayed effect goes off and takes a couple of rounds, and then suddenly six velociraptors appear seemingly out of nowhere. The subtle extra means they simply appear and can't be detected until already there, reduced range means they have to appear relatively close to Chen. Minions as written are capable of acting on their own recognizance, however we've flawed their intellect to puppy-level and taken a Command hyperskill in
Pack Alpha to be able to control our chirping, feathered death machines. Finally, the weird if/then flaw about number of dice. This power gives Chen six velociraptors, and no more. They are always the same velociraptors - if one is killed, the next time the power is activated they will appear alive once again. If the power is used again while the raptors are still present, any killed or incapacitated raptors reappear, up to the normal limit. Slow means that if he is taking regular losses he can't just have a steady stream of reinforcements, and the delayed effect again means that dismissing the raptors takes time.
Here's where the 'attached' flaw comes in. Anything attached to
Leader of the Pack means that it can only be used by or affects the velociraptors, not Chen himself.
We want our raptors to fight like raptors, not like goons, so we gave them
Big Freakin' Claws, which is pretty gruesome to watch, and since I like the idea of adorable chirping turkey-sized dinosaurs disabling someone by trying to give hugs, we also gave them
Tiny Dino Pileup. Both have an if/then flaw limiting their dice pools to the current number of raptors only - if we only have two left standing, this power only rolls two dice.
Itty Bitty Little Carnivores defends our buddies with LAR 4 and a small size, allowing them do get into places larger creatures couldn't. Minions normally drop one die per 1 killing damage or 3 shock, so this extends the staying power of our fine feathered friends.
Finally, expert minions normally get special rules for certain skills based on their numbers. I didn't want to mess around with that, so I flat-out gave them three hyperskills to work with - the raptors roll their own pool of 8 dice for Athletics, Stealth, and Perception, and these are not simply based on remaining raptors, but work with any number.
Also, so we're clear, they look like
this with
these colors for their feathers. The stealth hyperskill would represent either a duller undercoat of feathers or some limited chameleon-like ability.
I love this system!
