Alien design help

[FirstChAoS]

I tried making an alien using alien archive, and it seems way to powerful. I had the idea of a small bird alien with clever abilities to manipulate. The abilities were vocal mimicry, fast learning of languages, a bonus to bluff, perform, intimidate, diplomacy, and disguise checks that involve mimicry, the ability to remember three phrases so exactly that they can fool even machines,, and of course flight. However four special abilities(flight is free) meant a high CR (as did cutting it to three, which was cr 12 at the lowest. With a high melee damage ability. I was wanting a small, weak, bird with dreams of glory and enough tricks to manipulate others and access voice activated ship systems. But it seems by the alien archive a skill critter with an envoy trait needs a high CR to have four special abilities.

[Hithesius]

There is a sidebar that explicitly points out that everything in the monster creation ruleset is optional, and for precisely this reason. If sticking to them exactly as written does not give you the result you want, ignore the parts that are getting in the way and adjust as needed.

Even setting that aside, I wouldn't count fast learning against its ability slots myself. I'm not sure the perfect memorization needs to be distinct either, nor that auto-success should be necessary when combined with vocal mimicry and a skill bonus. Even if you absolutely need it to be guaranteed to succeed on those three exact phrases, just lump that in under vocal mimicry.

Since I haven't spotted "vocal mimicry" as such in the Archive, I presume it's something similar to the blue dragon's sound imitation ability.

Approached like that, the "minimum" CR for 2 special abilities is lowered to 3. If that's still not quite right, note again that you're free to violate the guidelines and adjust its stats to taste.

[Metaphysician]

Also, consider making tradeoffs: if the critter you want to design needs more Special Abilities than is normal for your desired CR, you can balance that by giving them *less* of some other stuff. Maybe they have the hit points and saves of a critter slightly lower in CR. Maybe they do less damage. Stuff like that.