Quote Originally Posted by willpell View Post
So Urpriest, when building a nonhumanoid creature, is there any method beyond eyeballing it of figuring out which skills they should be barred from using? So far I've done two examples, a dog and a Psicrystal, and I just had to guess and make some dubious judgment calls. I figured the dog could Bluff in the sense of a feint or other tricky hunting maneuver, and the psicrystal has a human intelligence so it can do things like Decipher Script if it gets skill points (assuming it ever does), but fairly obviously it can't do anything which requires a hand, and the dog can't do anything which requires hands or a capacity for speech or abstract thought. Oh, and I've done a toad (actually a Goliath beetle or something similar, but I couldn't find stats on a beetle of any variety so I used the toad as a stand-in of about the same size, with a few fudges like dropping Swim and adding Climb) also, that required some other judgment calls, and I always feel like I'm doing it wrong because there isn't a guideline to keep me realistic. Any thoughts?
Like you say, there aren't any real guidelines. I'd advise being as liberal as possible: chances are there's a way for anything to do anything if it's creative enough. If you feel dubious about something, ask your players to explain how they think it should work: they may surprise you.