Dinosaur Hunting

[AlexanderHowl]

While characters can hunt smaller dinosaurs, the real interesting ones mass over 5 tons. When you are talking about the large herbivores, that could mean ST/HP of up to 300 for a 100 ton dinosaur (depending on how you design them). In that case, how do you keep them from stomping flat your characters when they go hunting after them?

[Phantasm]

Rocket launcher. :)

First off, most of the big 100-ton dinos are not built for speed; look at a herd of elephants, and scale up accordingly. They may move about 10-15 mph at a run, but that'll be due to their large size than a running body. (I'm thinking Brachiosaurus and Seismosaurus here, not the relatively puny Triceratops or Stegosaurus.)

Second, the best attacks against something that large are done at range rather than in melee, unless you're going all King Kong vs Godzilla on them, using mecha or Growth (w/ subsequent Growth ST) to be large enough to get into a successful melee. A human-sized/strength melee character is likely to be ignored at first, and stomped when he proves to be more than a little annoying. Best to get into the LAV-200 and fire the 90mm main gun ... or pilot a Veritech battloid.

[Kelly Pedersen]

This is a problem already encountered by big-game hunters in the real world. There's a reason why an "elephant gun" is a thing. Sometimes, you just need a really big gun. You'll also want to aim for the skull or vitals, for high wound multipliers, but you'll still probably want ammunition large enough to get pi+ or ++ damage, because if you miss the vitals, those bigger wound multipliers against the torso still help a lot.

For example, a Barret M82A1 does a very comfortable 6dX2 pi+ damage. Hit the skull of your Brontosaurus target with that, and you'll be doing an average of 41 damage. Subtract DR from that, then multiply by four, for final injury. Two or three of those will be bringing down even a 300 HP creature pretty well. Remember, once it's down below 0 HP, it will probably fall unconscious relatively quickly (on a scale of seconds, if not minutes). Most normal animals, even big ones, aren't going to have HT higher than about 12, and it will fail an HT roll eventually.

[Phoenix_Dragon]

Yeah, dinos (Even big dinos) fare pretty poorly against guns.

If you're facing a 100-ton dinosaur, it's a herbivore. The largest carnivorous dinosaurs were more like 10 tons. That's around 50 HP. A single .50 round to the vitals should take down a T-Rex fairly reliably (That's a death check and a HT roll at -5 to avoid stunning). Or you can go the African-poacher method and just open up with an AK (Even if we give it an impressive 5 DR, that's still 13 HP per round; a good burst of 8 rounds is a death check). Even a regular .308 or similar hunting round to the vitals will put it below 0 HP and force a stunning roll.

The 100-ton dinos take a bit more, but a machine gun would wreck them in seconds, especially if you got something serious like a M2.

[Railstar]

The other thing to add is the SM on most of those creatures means attack rolls receive significant bonuses, which does a lot to mitigate range penalties.

Anyone who tries to swordfight a 100 ton dinosaur deserves everything he gets.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

While characters can hunt smaller dinosaurs, the real interesting ones mass over 5 tons. When you are talking about the large herbivores, that could mean ST/HP of up to 300 for a 100 ton dinosaur (depending on how you design them). In that case, how do you keep them from stomping flat your characters when they go hunting after them?

Under the standard rules for strength, a 60 ton Brachiosaurus has about 100 ST (300 ST would be well over a thousand tons), and is actually a kind of trivial fight for TL 8 characters (down in a single round to one skilled guy or a couple of goons with ARs).

[whswhs]

On this subject, if you can track down L. Sprague de Camp's short story "A Gun for Dinosaur," you may find it worth reading.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

On this subject, if you can track down L. Sprague de Camp's short story "A Gun for Dinosaur," you may find it worth reading.

The original magazine version is on archive.org.

[temp]

Originally Posted by whswhs

On this subject, if you can track down L. Sprague de Camp's short story "A Gun for Dinosaur," you may find it worth reading.

There are also several David Drake dinosaur hunting/time travel stories, they have been collected in this :

http://david-drake.com/2013/dinosaurs-and-a-dirigible/

[Bruno]

For a TL 3-ish fantasy-land group planning on hunting dinosaurs, don't follow the example of a player in one of my games, who tried to hide behind the dinosaurs foot from it... having already rushed into melee range and made himself quite obvious.

The T-Rex stepped on him, as they do. So don't do that.

For a TL 3-ish group from fantasy-land, they should stick to the fantasy equivalent of RPGs or elephant rifles. I highly recommend the lightning bolt spell, the stun side effect is awesome and the cost is not affected by SM unlike a direct-target spell. That, or use Grease if you can hit a big enough area, because big animals take big falling damage from big hip heights.

For a TL 3-ish group from mundania, I recommend tackling your dinosaurs the same way giant animals of other kinds have been tackled.

• Use fire, fences, and scary noises to chase them off a cliff. The bigger you are, the more you splat when you hit the ground. This may require TL 2 or 3 technology to produce "musical" instruments that grunt, howl, or roar loud enough to impress the dinosaurs, but really setting a grass fire will probably work anyways.
• Use a whole lotta spears thrown by a whole lotta people, preferably launched via spear-thrower from a safe distance, and then run away and wait for it to bleed, come back and launch a whole lotta more spears, etc.
• Use poison. Either on those spears, or for the more armored dinosaurs, poison the watering hole, or put out poisoned bait.