Doppelganger Copying Others Appearance

[*KingLeoric]

I do not have that much time to be spending hours to make a matching armor. But not having such an option leads to godmodding and even more disturbing play because if you already spent an hour on your armor and it will affect the way you enforce your roleplay.

Scripting that is easy but a DM team already decided to remove it. There is nothing much I can do about that.

[*Skuld]

Man, someone is gonna be pissed when I copy them manually without asking permission.

[*Mr_Otyugh]

It's a terrible feature that promotes lazy roleplay directly pushing it to be an issue of someone else as well, directly putting them into collision course. Even anarchists who are typical infiltrators don't involve other specific players to their issues, they need to push an effort to actually act like someone else or face consequences on their own, because they are acting to be a fake member, not faking to be another member.

They already had an ability to infiltrate by making whatever identities they prefered, they didn't need to involve other players for mandatory fact checking or increasing amounts of true seeing, "hey do you remember that thing we did yesterday? No? Who are you, what did you do with <name>!?" or badge checkings.

There's like 3 things this feature allows:
1) infiltration
2) mischief
3) fake bait

Out of these only the #3 doesn't put you into the path of direct conflict RP with other players. This feature does absolutely nothing against NPCs unless they are controlled after all. It's only effect is aimed at the players, and both #1 and #2 will inevitably lead to nothing but conflict. Now sure even the mundane shapechanging allows #1 and #2 to be true, but the key difference is that they aren't simultaneously pinning all of the consequences on someone else as well.

And pretty much the one reason why doppelgangers were declined the first time over too, they are one dimensional race which function mainly as plot tools for the one case of "Oh crap!", but poorly in PW environment where the consequences of their character vs character actions aren't good enough to really consent all the probable drama they will inevitably put forth.

[*Itikar]

Well, a doppelganger can also be played as a character with 2-3 identities. Or even more. I find it a bit reductive to see them only as someone's copycat. I tend to see them first as the incarnation of the concept that "everybody is a mask", and a doppelganger very well represents this translated in game, while the "let's take someone's else identity" is just a plus.

Just to make an example of a similar character in fiction Mystique, an enemy of the X-men, is not infiltrating the X-men taking their apperances all the time. Sometimes she just infiltrates with a random apperance she had invented herself. And some other times she just takes another random appearance to keep a low-profile and protect herself from who is going after her.

Also, last but not least, I don't see how a doppelganger is really any different from anybody else who can use change apperance at will. In the end a succubus and a brachina could probably do the same thing.

[*Embersworn]

I think that dopplegangers should simply have their Change Self ability removed. Problem solved.

After all, if True Seeing can be removed from a race on a similar reason, is only honest to keep this policy for doppelgangers. :X