|
Hello . We are starting a path in 2 weeks and the players have started showing me their characters . 1 of them has made a strix rouge with 9 intellect . so what is the problem ? a strix doesn't speak Common unless he has enough intellect to learn it .. how do i deal with this?? do i just tell him that he wont talk at all? this way he will get bored really fast cause he will not take any role in the role playing . and an other think ... "Your party walks in to the bar and you have a flying demon looking guy with you ...." How do i deal with encounters in villages and cities?? i really doubt that any guard would let this guy in any city and having in mind that i plan on running the rise of the runelords ( in which encounters take a major role ) what should i do .. thank you for taking the time of responding
First of all see if you can get him to put 1 rank into linguistics. That would solve the problem outright. If not, allow him to make intelligence checks to get across basic ideas with gestures and drawing in the dirt.
This is the player's problem, not yours.
If I were the GM, I would do the following:
1. In Golarion, everyone knows basic common knowledge of most, maybe even all, of the races that are normally allowed for PCs. In other words, if it's a "playable" race for PCs, then there are just enough of them wandering around the lands that most people who aren't isolated hermits have probably heard of them.
2. Strix are not demonic even if they look a bit like a "flying demon looking guy". Strix are not even evil (as far as their general racial alignment tendencies - individuals, of course, can vary and be of any alighment).
Based on the above, most town guards, most innkeeps, merchants, etc., will have heard of Strix and not be especially afraid of them.
But...
3. Strix have a deep abiding hatred of humans. This MUST go both ways, so even though humans don't necessarily have to hate strix back, they are generally aware of the strix and know that the strix hate them, so they would be very cautious and suspicious of any strix they meet. Human guards won't trust a strix to wander around in a human town. Human inkeeps and merchants will distrust all strix they meet and possibly refuse them room and board, or raise prices, etc. Maybe think about how the people of, say, Poland, would have viewed a Nazi walking around the streets of Warsaw in 1946 (maybe not quite that bad, but at least, maybe something like that).
4. If the strix PC could speak and communicate with non-strix, he might be able to use diplomacy to change people's attitudes. But this particular strix cannot. So everywhere he goes, as long as there are humans there, he will be mistrusted and probably mistreated and there won't be anything he can do about it. In fact, his silence might be perceived as him being too arrogant to talk to people, and might even provoke their mistrust even more.
For all of the above, this character will be virtually unplayable in an AP that largely takes place in human towns and cities. By "unplayable" I mean he will be left out of just about every RP situation in the human-dominated areas of the AP. Worse, there will be in-town encounters (maybe not life-and-death battles, but still hostile encounters) because of his race and the human prejudice toward it - these encounters could and probably should aggravate the other PCs and hinder their own RP efforts.
Maybe all the players are OK with that. Maybe that kind of PC vs. NPC and even PC vs. PC friction is a fun RP challenge for them.
But many groups in which I have played wouldn't like that and wouldn't tolerate it for long.
As such, I would highly advise the player to rethink his INT or at least to make sure he invests in Linguistics. I would also suggest a higher CHA than the typical strix, so that he might be able to use diplomacy more successfully. And if I were GMing and the player chose to ignore this advice, I would make sure to play it as I described. After a level or two, he'll invest the skill points to fix the problem.
First of all see if you can get him to put 1 rank into linguistics. That would solve the problem outright. If not, allow him to make intelligence checks to get across basic ideas with gestures and drawing in the dirt.
I think that it might be better as a bluff check. That skill does have a bit about sending secret messages (which could be in the body language *wink*)
A giant bird-person who doesn't speak common but does speak his own special bird-language?
"Buk buk, bkaw!"