Quote:
Originally Posted by Dragondog
I've just reread the Tracking skill and have a couple of questions.
In an urban setting, you roll at -6 every minute, which is fine. But if you are tracking a group of men, you get a +6 bonus which completely obliterates the penalty for urban tracking. I'm not a tracker, but that seems wrong to me. You still need to roll every minute, but do you use that modifier as is in urban settings?
Secondly, you only get this bonus from tracking men, not animals. What about fantasy settings. Do all sapient races count as people in regards to these rules? What about a shapeshifter in wolf form? Or in other words, what is it that's inherent in people, but not animals, that make them easier to track?
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The Basic Set rules for Tracking are impressively lousy, looking at them.
Certainly, by those rules, there's no reason you
wouldn't get the +6 bonus when doing urban tracking. That
does not obliterate the penalty - the penalty is canceling out the +6 bonus, and you're rolling 5 times as often as the next-worst environment and 15-30 times as often as the more reasonable environments, so you'll lose the trail much sooner.
For some reason, the baseline of tracking appears to be a wild animal native to the environment.
Most such animals are easier to track than most people are. Obviously not all people (especially for extended concepts of 'people') are equally easy to track, nor are all sizes of groups, nor are all animals, and groups of animals are easier to track than single animals. Basic Set doesn't seem to care.
I hoped I'd be able to find some improvement in other books. No success. There are some rules in DF #2 and #16, but they don't really address any of the issues.