Stats for a giant beetle?

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I'm working on an elephantine writeup, I'll make it consistent with yours. I plan on posting it to my blog when done - is yours going up on your blog? I'd like to link to it (or, if you prefer, include it in the post).

I wasn't planning on blogging it. At least not soon. I may sometime post my old stats for giant insects. I'll probably want to rework them though, as they were from my first year of gurps. Feel free to include the hippo sized beetle from above in your blog. As a note, its SM+3.

Originally Posted by whswhs

I mostly agree with them, but with a couple of caveats:

Yeah, scaling insects is not as easy as it looks, and you've got some decisions to make. I agree with all of your points for certain contexts, but I'll try an explain my choices. A lot of them have to do with the setting I built the source template for.

I would tend to get rid of the air move; even real beetles commonly do more crawling than flying, and flying at all is incredibly unlikely for anything that weighs more than a ton.

It really depends on the beetle, but yeah, they really don't like to take to the air if they can avoid it. My initial template flies because its designed for a setting where plants float and form tangles of floating islands. If you can't fly, you can't move around, and so the beetles have flying. Though I admit I chose them because they flew, but weren't light and agile like so many other flying creatures.


I hope we're all aware of the square-cube law. I'm ignoring it under the category of "realistic biomechanical issues". Even ignoring that, slapping "Costs FP" on beetle flight is probably not a bad idea. And its not hard to justify a giant beetle that doesn't fly.

IQ 3 is ridiculously high. I don't think any real insect could be given IQ higher than 1, and there's no reason to treat giant insects as being exceptionally smart. IQ 3 is as smart as a not very smart mammal or a nonpasserine bird, and smarter than a reptile; that's really a huge boost in neural organization. I could maybe stretch a point and allow IQ 2, "as smart as a turtle," if you want to postulate somewhat better neural efficiency.

I upgraded the IQ because I needed the beetles to be tamable, and because I was consciously trying to replace cattle and other large herbivores. I find that size, metabolism, and intelligence are connected: look at the kommodo dragon compared to other lizards, and sharks compared to other fish (yes, I know that one is weaker, but still).

Originally Posted by Aldric

I would adjust DR to whatever you need for the setting... Is it going to face bows and arrows or rifles?

Its also worth looking at whether your in a stat-normalized campaign or not, what the power level of the PC's are, and what role you want the beetle to play. Is it a monster to be defeated or local color. Are they war mounts? Are PC's with ST 17 running around?

[newton]

i do have a gm who has used a giant beetle recently but it’s also the size of a dog and with metal plates and a weird diet. also i’m not sure they will part with the stat block.

[Anthony]

A realistic giant beetle dies; the way their muscles and breathing works doesn't scale to giant size. Given that, it's pretty much a case of inventing numbers you like.

An elephant-sized beetle with the strength of an elephant is around ST 50. An elephant-sized beetle with the proportionate strength of a beetle has a ST of several hundred.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

An elephant-sized beetle with the strength of an elephant is around ST 50. An elephant-sized beetle with the proportionate strength of a beetle has a ST of several hundred.

A really large beetle might be ST 1 and weigh a couple of ounces (that's a Goliath beetle, for example). If you use GURPS rules for BL, it has a BL or 0.2 lb. or 3.2 ounces, 1.6x its weight. A ST 50 animal weighs 15,625 lbs. which is a little too heavy for a real elephant; ST 45 would be more accurate, and would give you a weight of 11,390 lbs., and 1.6x that is BL 18,225 lbs. That's almost exactly Lifting ST 300.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That's almost exactly Lifting ST 300.

I chose to be vague because it's a question of 'proportional ST of which beetle'. Note that realistic lifting ability doesn't scale with the 2/3 power of weight (GURPS default rules) because large creatures are structured differently; curve fitting over the range from ant to elephant suggests an exponent of 0.8-0.85.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I might actually go as high as 2 or 3 for a fantasy giant beetle

There's also some evidence that certain insects are slightly smarter than we give them credit for being (not beetles though - they appear to be really stupid, even by insect standards). Also, brainpower does sort of scale with mass.

In any case, I'm with Bruno that the rule of fun/cool dictates that they have at least IQ 2 so that they can be tamed and used as mounts or draft animals.

[Ultraviolet]

Originally Posted by Aldric

Hey... It worked. Ppl woke up and saw the post.

I would adjust DR to whatever you need for the setting... Is it going to face bows and arrows or rifles?

It's for Cliffhangers, so my money is on guns. It may even face the classic H&H Double Express .600 Nitro.

Or more likely: People will try to ride it.

[Bruno]

As a side comment on the back-and-forth about it's-realistic vs it's-not-realistic:

Just like in science fiction, there's the thing about the number of breaks from reality. "A giant beetle, which is like a regular beetle in all ways that we experience beetles in our day-to-day lives except giant", feels like one break from reality, even though it implies a lot of internal differences. We don't see the inside of bugs in any detail, even less than we see the insides of animals. Changing its intelligence is a second break from reality. Giving it a flaming breath weapon would be a third. And so forth.

For people who are sensitive to the number of breaks, the argument that "well, you changed one thing, therefore it doesn't matter what you change" feels somewhere between a bit facetious and a total dismissal of their problem. And of course for people who aren't very sensitive to it, they find the people who are incomprehensibly inflexible and/or boring.

How many and what kind of breaks from reality are tolerable is very much a stylistic thing.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Bruno

As a side comment on the back-and-forth about it's-realistic vs it's-not-realistic:

Just like in science fiction, there's the thing about the number of breaks from reality. "A giant beetle, which is like a regular beetle in all ways that we experience beetles in our day-to-day lives except giant", feels like one break from reality, even though it implies a lot of internal differences. We don't see the inside of bugs in any detail, even less than we see the insides of animals. Changing its intelligence is a second break from reality. Giving it a flaming breath weapon would be a third. And so forth.

Unless it's a bombardier beetle, in which case flaming breath is merely a detail change (flaming breath vs explosive steam from its backside).

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I chose to be vague because it's a question of 'proportional ST of which beetle'. Note that realistic lifting ability doesn't scale with the 2/3 power of weight (GURPS default rules) because large creatures are structured differently; curve fitting over the range from ant to elephant suggests an exponent of 0.8-0.85.

I'm not concerned with strict realism, but with the biomechanical scaling implied by GURPS mechanics. The very large difference in BL between that and letting the beetle lift the same percentage of its body weight strikes me as impressive.