Quote:
Originally Posted by Daigoro
No, maybe not, but you would need to know the damage for each attack mode, instead of having to figure it out from being given basic info like "a boar has ST 15, Bite, and uses Slams" then having to look it all up.
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I might not have expressed myself clearly. What you stated above
is in the stat block. And I was saying that stat blocks suffice for most purposes. However that with some frequency I didn't even use the stat blocks - not that they're not useful - because parts of it were not particularly relevant.
Mind you, it's probably because animals aren't at all common as foes in my games. 99% of the time the foes are humans or something
else. Supernatural "animals" are there, but then I can be almost as arbitrary as I like, since there's not so much worrying about realism with unreal creatures.
Quote:
Originally Posted by roguebfl
Actually you DO need to know the IQ of a wolf. however the wolf is as an example of why the bestiary is important, because you already know how smart a wolf is, so the wolf is one of the entries that give meaning to the IQ stat for animals because you know what it means because you know how smart a wolf really is. but because you have that entry you know what a Worg is like by comparing them.
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Again, I came across wrong. I said I don't need to know it
most of the time. I meant to say that I don't need to recall or look up all the stats in the stat block in order to play out a simple combat. I do need to know the stats for creatures at one point, or at least some creature like it, in order to build my knowledge and references from which to "eyeball" things.
In any case, I'm not saying we don't need stats at all. I'm just saying that if I had to choose between a book with 200 of the most common animals and 70 fully stated animals with point costs, worked out advantages and disadvantages, descriptions of behaviour and whatnot... I'd probably find the first more useful. But YMMV for sure. And I'm talking strictly about realistic animals I can look up, not about monsters and fantastic beasts.