Sure it does. The mechanical value is that it allows you to use the Deceit skill to hide a Weapon:2 weapon, when you ordinarily can't... The mechanical value is that the character will still be armed (or more heavily armed) in situations where the other characters might not be.
Wrong.
If the non-retractable nature of your Claws causes a problem, that's a compel. So in any situation where you benefit from retracting your Claws, you would have been compensated for not having that ability.
(Oh, and you can definitely use Deceit to hide a weapon: 2 weapon. This is not even a question, it's certain.)
Additionally, Sanc, I'm curious: Have you ever looked into GURPS? To me, it seems like it would suit your style more than the DFRPG. More granular cost structures, more guides for homebrewing content.
It's way to big a beast for me, but I know some guys who write for it.
Also, where was that Natural Weaponry power you mentioned? I looked in the Wiki link in your sig and didn't see it.
Looked into it briefly once. Wasn't impressed, but maybe I'll give it another go sometime.
And believe me, it would be very hard for any game to suit me better than DFRPG does. It's got a fun, balanced, and interesting system that can cover literally anything. You don't have to have any narrative in DFRPG if you don't want to, you can reduce it to pure mechanics. Which is not the case with, say, D&D.
(Aspects can do literally anything, and they are a mechanical construct. If you push the tag-declare-invoke thing far enough, you need never do anything else. Playing that way would be kind of painful, though, at least for me.)
Oh, and the wiki is in a shameful state right now. Look
here.
While I'm sure the "Is Claws woefully underpowered AND comes with built-in drawbacks to boot" talk will surely come to a consensus soon, I was hoping the original topic could be addressed 
I've just started a campaign set in the 12th century. We've started out in Frankfurt, Germany and I was wondering if anyone had any particular ideas for that?
Currently, we've established that the Black Court has a clear presence in the area, fae and spirits haunt the wilderness and we've decided that Hexenwulfen need to make some appearances... having a German name and all. 
Ideas?
My apologies. Thought the original topic was over and done. Would you like us to ship out?
[EDIT:] Ah, after a re-read, I think I see the difference. You're arguing that people are already making things illogically, and you'd rather they didn't. My argument is that you are making things illogically and everyone else understands and subconsciously substitues the piece that you're missing.
That just ain't true.
See, the powers I write are pretty decent. Not perfect, but certainly usable. And I do my best to avoid dictating narrative to the people who use them. If you want to use my Telekinesis power to represent the assistance of a bunch of tiny minions, you can. Or you can use it for telekinesis. Whatever.
When people write with narrative mechanics, they generally produce crap. This is not just me, this is universal.
I've previously proven that retractable-ness does have a mechanical value in a separate post. Retractable claws have the added ability to be concealed if desired while retaining the ability to be always-out. They are simply better. If you want to ignore this fact, feel free, but don't keep bringing it up.
You proved nothing, Orladdin. I tried to point this out already. When your Claws are retractable, you can't choose to receive the compels that a guy with non-retractable compels would have gotten. So you miss out on both the benefits and the drawbacks of obvious claws.
Also, it sounds like you're losing your temper. If something I do is pissing you off, I'm sorry.
What this quote tells me, though, is that rather than analyze what a power is and what it represents, you'd rather simply remake it your own way. If you do this, you have to go ahead and remake every power presented in the book. If you make a version of claws that is the same cost as the one in the book, and the one you make is retractable, no one will take the one in the book. This should give you the hint that your new one is "better" or "more powerful".
That's libel!
Okay, not really. But I don't appreciate being told that I don't analyse powers. I do, and I do it a lot. More than pretty much anyone else, actually.
It's just that when my analysis finds a flaw, I fix that flaw.
Natural Weaponry can be retractable or non-retractable or whatever. Judging by people's willingness to take obvious Breath Weapons and refund-less inhuman features, people will still take non-retractable Natural Weaponry. And they'll not be made weaker by that decision.
The reason I keep harping about narrative-mechanical separation is my dislike for the problem you bring up. If you assign a mechanical value to a narrative decision, then everyone ought to make that decision. So you don't do that, ever, unless you're trying to force people in a certain direction for some reason.
You are creating this problem with your insistence that retractable weapons are better.
I know that you think that it's a fact, that you have no choice about it, but you're wrong. There's nothing in the rules that makes it so. It's your choice whether narrative has mechanical value, and you can choose between a correct answer and an incorrect one.
Not sure what would force me to rewrite every other power. Are you saying that they'd need to be improved to match Claws? Because believe me, Claws is in no danger of overpowering anything. And I didn't make it stronger, though I did buff Breath Weapon.
No they're not. The entire chapter on aspects in the book says exactly the opposite. They even rate columns of example aspects as "Boring," "Hot," and "Fuego!" from poorer to better aspects. As an aspect, "Strong" is less good than "Ogre Thews" is less good than "Beefiest Thews in the Summer Court." You have to stretch less to make it apply to more things. How flavorful an aspect is, how many situations it can apply to and how much it adds to your character all affect the quality of an aspect. If it can apply to more things, it can be used more-- both to compel and to invoke; making it better.
Good aspects =/= powerful aspects.
Suppose I gave a character the aspect OMNIPOTENT GOD. Would that make them more powerful?
No it wouldn't. Because aspects have no mechanical value.
Good thing too, or everyone would be an omnipotent god. And what an aspect can be applied to is entirely dependent on the GM's whims. It's not something you can measure or compare.
Generally, you want something that in your GM's opinion applies to most of what you'd want to use it for. Which can't be defined beyond a single moment at a single table.
Really? This is your response to that example? In a world where people can either buy a vanilla sword or enchant one as a character feature you can't accept an equipment example? Ok, fine; so liken it to something that is part of the character then. My point is that things don't exist in a vacuum where all you have to consider is their abilities or their functions. There are outside (see: narrative) influences, too. These are often nebulous and hard to take into account, but they exist.
These are what make game balance so hard.
My point is that, in an ideal world, you would be able to divide narrative and mechanics: it would make balance easier. But we don't live in an ideal world. Narrative and mechanical properties do have an effect on each other.
Look at D&D 4th edition as an example. They (initially, before expansion bloat) went to great lengths to balance the combat system mechanically so that it could not be abused. What was the result? Powers that explicitly specified that you could only target characters or powers that behaved in really weird ways and didn't feel right ("What? My ring of the ram can't be used on doors in this edition? Why not?" "Because the power says the target is 'One character'"). With the exception of a few, isolated bugs, you couldn't break the system. That didn't mean it was a good system. Many of the powers were boring. Many were simply more powerful, higher level counterparts of the lower-level powers.
Lots of people complained.
Is it as a result? Or is it a secondary and unrelated event? Just because there are a lot of broken games that happen to balance narratively (like D&D 3rd ed. prestige class pre-reqs) that doesn't mean they are broken because of that. It only means they are broken in addition to that.
I would argue that 3rd ed. D&D isn't broken because of the prestige class pre-reqs being narrative, it's broken because they didn't balance those class features against other, similar class features. It's a design problem that's entirely separate from the other design elements, which can each be evaluated based on their own merits.
Likewise with our discussion on claws. Retractable claws are not broken by themselves. They are broken compared to the non-retractable version. Likewise ACAEBG isn't broken by itself, it's broken when you strip it down to 3-refresh and a FP to use.
You are asserting that a broken game ('G') logically follows from a narrative design ('N'), or:
N → G
I am asserting that there is no logical relation between narrative design and a broken game, and that your experience with broken games that have narrative design is simply a coincidence. There are plenty of broken games without narrative design (G ^ ¬N). More importantly, there are plenty of games with narrative design that are not broken (¬G ^ N). This second one disproves your implication, thus:
For N to imply G, the following must evaluate to true:
N → G ⇔ ¬N v G (Material Implication)
Given that (¬G ^ N) is true,
N is true,
G is false,
¬N is false
G is false
¬N v G is false,
Therefore, N -/-> G
A narrative game is not broken by its nature as a narrative game (though this does not preclude it from being broken in addition to it's nature as a narrative game).
...
Is that more clear?
Ugh, formal logic. What a waste of time. You could have said the same thing in six words with much more clarity.
I've never seen narrative-mechanical-integration that wasn't either at least slightly unbalanced or pure GM fiat. Sometimes it wasn't bad enough to screw the game up though.
Not sure why you object to my response to the tank thing. A tank is a construct of narrative, a free thing, not a thing that can be balanced.
Never played 4th edition, but I've heard good things about it. Can't comment much.
If the Ring's fluff makes it sound like it works in a way that it doesn't work, that's just bad fluff-writing.
Now, it's hard for me to follow your argument, but I think it goes something like this:
"In game, all kinds of stuff happens. This stuff won't all be part of the game's mechanics, and some of it will be important. So non-mechanical stuff affects mechanics."
This is actually mostly true.
But it's not relevant to how you should write, because what people choose to do with the rules is up to them. All you can do when writing rules is make them work in a vacuum. You don't have air to work with, and if you get some it'll be different from all the other airs. So you have to write in a vacuum, whether you like it or not.
Rules do exist in a vacuum, even if they're taken out of that vacuum when they're used.
Fortunately, this rarely causes problems. Because while groups often break the rules or insert narrative into them, the effects tend to push in no particular direction. So they mostly cancel each other out. And you end up with something similar to what you had in a vacuum.
