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Old 12-04-2017, 05:55 AM   #21
Tomsdad
 
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Default Re: Dinosaur Hunting

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Originally Posted by The Colonel View Post
If they've got the same material strength limit problems that stop elephants jumping, a fairly small pit might be effective - break a leg or two and it will die ... sooner or later.
True! maybe even a big trip wire
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Old 12-04-2017, 06:58 AM   #22
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Default Re: Dinosaur Hunting

The Ship and muskets problem applies here, in the favor of the players. Even if the monster has 300 HP (which is an edge case in both terms of size and HP calculation), Shooting it with 30 bullets or so should bring it down. Its the size of a barn's broad side, and unless your stomping around in dense forest, its probably obvious from a long ways away.

Of course its best if you have a team, and if you have proper heavy guns, but even 5d pi (which seems to be quite common at TL 8) will do the job if you start shooting early enough.
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Old 12-04-2017, 09:06 AM   #23
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Default Re: Dinosaur Hunting

Could you design large animals as biological vehicles using a modified version of the Spaceship rules? In that case, a 100 ton dinosaur would function as a biological mecha, and it would benefit from DR 30 except against burning or corrosive damage (which would require the elephant gun) from its natural Organic armor (though it not be pressurized or sealed).
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Old 12-04-2017, 09:31 AM   #24
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Default Re: Dinosaur Hunting

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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
Could you design large animals as biological vehicles using a modified version of the Spaceship rules? In that case, a 100 ton dinosaur would function as a biological mecha, and it would benefit from DR 30 except against burning or corrosive damage (which would require the elephant gun) from its natural Organic armor (though it not be pressurized or sealed).
You could, but I wouldn't expect such designs to have much connection with realistic animals. In particular, I strongly doubt that any but the most heavily-protected animals (Ankylosaurus, that crazy South American giant armadillo, etc.) to devote a full 5% of their mass to just armor. Also, in Spaceships, all armor, even Organic armor, is stuff that's been deliberately designed and tested to be armor, and is, I suspect, rather more effective than most armor animals naturally evolve. Evolution doesn't go for "perfect", remember, it goes for "good enough".
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Old 12-04-2017, 09:50 AM   #25
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Default Re: Dinosaur Hunting

I'd consider TL10 organic armor to have some pretty interesting engineering behind it, and to be designed by people who actually expect their creations to go up against people with bullets and lasers. Or to be that one nastily tough creature out of thousands in the galaxy its size that can take bullets.

That said, I do tend to give massive animals 10th of their HP in DR. It keeps people from nickle-and-dimeing creatures to death. Its more or less justified in that the gurps damage numbers are squared, and with large amounts of damage things get strange. The main problem with the method is it says humans ought to have DR 1. Though arguably we're naked pink creatures that have sold off the DR on our racial templates. Alternatively, the chance to do 0 damage when rolling 1d6-2 happens because of our innate "DR".
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Old 12-04-2017, 09:51 AM   #26
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Default Re: Dinosaur Hunting

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You could, but I wouldn't expect such designs to have much connection with realistic animals. In particular, I strongly doubt that any but the most heavily-protected animals (Ankylosaurus, that crazy South American giant armadillo, etc.) to devote a full 5% of their mass to just armor. Also, in Spaceships, all armor, even Organic armor, is stuff that's been deliberately designed and tested to be armor, and is, I suspect, rather more effective than most armor animals naturally evolve. Evolution doesn't go for "perfect", remember, it goes for "good enough".
Human skin is approx 15% of our body mass, larger animal benefits from scale here, but a hippos very thick skin is 16-18% of body mass.

I think any appreciable armour as part of an animal skin or integument would end up being proportionally heavy.
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Old 12-04-2017, 10:02 AM   #27
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Default Re: Dinosaur Hunting

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That said, I do tend to give massive animals 10th of their HP in DR.
I think I'd recommend 1/20th instead, at least for creatures with "human-like" skin. That lines up neatly with the fact that humans effectively have DR 0.5 for purposes of things like attacks with fractional armor divisors, and would mean that something like a titan, a humanoid giant, with 200 HP would have "natural" DR of 10. That sounds about right to me.

Then you'd multiply this by some factor based on how tough the skin naturally is. Offhand, I'd call it 1/10th HP for "leathery" or "tough hide" skin, and 1/5th for "bony" or "thick scales" skin. Most dinosaurs would probably qualify for the "leathery" category, so a 200 HP dino could have DR 20, while a dinosaur with significant bony armor, like a scaled-up Ankylosaurus, could have DR 40.

Which, I suppose, kind of contradicts my earlier point about the plausibility of that level of DR from armor based on the Spaceships series. Ah, well. I still think that it's higher than biologically plausible. But, sometimes verisimilitude should trump plausibility - I think we tend to expect big, armored creatures to be more armored than they actually would be. So, basically, to make believable dinosaurs, you probably need unrealistic dinosaurs. Human cognition, everybody! The best thing that evolution could produce. :)
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Old 12-04-2017, 10:14 AM   #28
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Default Re: Dinosaur Hunting

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Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen View Post
I think I'd recommend 1/20th instead, at least for creatures with "human-like" skin. That lines up neatly with the fact that humans effectively have DR 0.5 for purposes of things like attacks with fractional armor divisors, and would mean that something like a titan, a humanoid giant, with 200 HP would have "natural" DR of 10. That sounds about right to me.

Then you'd multiply this by some factor based on how tough the skin naturally is. Offhand, I'd call it 1/10th HP for "leathery" or "tough hide" skin, and 1/5th for "bony" or "thick scales" skin. Most dinosaurs would probably qualify for the "leathery" category, so a 200 HP dino could have DR 20, while a dinosaur with significant bony armor, like a scaled-up Ankylosaurus, could have DR 40.

Which, I suppose, kind of contradicts my earlier point about the plausibility of that level of DR from armor based on the Spaceships series. Ah, well. I still think that it's higher than biologically plausible. But, sometimes verisimilitude should trump plausibility - I think we tend to expect big, armored creatures to be more armored than they actually would be. So, basically, to make believable dinosaurs, you probably need unrealistic dinosaurs. Human cognition, everybody! The best thing that evolution could produce. :)
I think one complications is that when it comes to larger animals the DR doesn't just represent the skin (or the shell etc) by also the point that actually there's a large amount of material to get past before you actually have meaningful negative effects i.e losing HPs (or bleeding enough to risk losing HPs).

So I don't mind being generous with large animal DR, especially when you take into consideration the system's issues with the very big getting picked apart by lots of small attacks because of the way stuff scales

Last edited by Tomsdad; 12-04-2017 at 01:17 PM.
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Old 12-04-2017, 11:41 AM   #29
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Default Re: Dinosaur Hunting

Yes, I agree. If we assume that 15% of the mass of a creature is skin, then a 100 ton dinosaur would effectively have three components of organic armor. When you are talking about good enough for evolution, it is also important to remember that 100 ton dinosaurs would have experienced rather extreme selection pressures from predation by packs of five ton murder machines like Gigantosaurus. In that case, good enough means being able to survive attacks that could cut humans in half without any effort (predator evolution would have then favored armor piercing, which would have then caused the evolution of armor hardening).
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Old 12-04-2017, 12:28 PM   #30
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Default Re: Dinosaur Hunting

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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
Yes, I agree. If we assume that 15% of the mass of a creature is skin, then a 100 ton dinosaur would effectively have three components of organic armor. When you are talking about good enough for evolution, it is also important to remember that 100 ton dinosaurs would have experienced rather extreme selection pressures from predation by packs of five ton murder machines like Gigantosaurus. In that case, good enough means being able to survive attacks that could cut humans in half without any effort (predator evolution would have then favored armor piercing, which would have then caused the evolution of armor hardening).
They're 100 tons because of the extreme selection pressures.

If you can't get your jaws around it, you can't apply leverage and can't apply maximum bite forces. GURPS prevents biting to grapple if relative sizes are too extreme, I don't know that it prevents worrying too but it should, and after a certain point effective biting just isn't a thing any more.

If you're 1/20th its mass, you have the serious consideration that you may not be able to reach anything. Giraffes are "spindly", but they're also literally above most of the predators. Hippos, elephants, and whales are just simply thick, as Tomsdad points out.

I have never seen any scientific proposal that dinosaurs have super-materials for bones and skin. The agile bipeds have hollow bones, like birds, in order to reduce weight and therefore reduce stresses on their bones when they accelerate or turn rapidly.
The big thunder lizards just plain have lots of bone, even where it's cleverly designed and allocated. They also have very different kinds of bone in different parts of their body - the whip-crack tail of an apatasaurus is relatively light and needs flexibility to survive being whipped at things and thus wants more collagen and less mineralization, but its legs and spine need simply to be load-bearing and strong enough to sustain a pacing gait, which asks for more mineralization and "just enough" collagen to keep it together.

They have less bone in the neck and head (and they have that teeny tiny head) because this reduces weight on the long neck and head, which improves mobility and reduces the amount of muscles needed, which reduces caloric demand.

As for heat dissipation, whales have significantly thicker and deliberately highly insulating "skin". They're also mammalian, meaning their metabolism intentionally generates a lot of heat. It's looking like dinosaurs achieved a high body temperature the same way great white sharks and leatherback sea turtles have high and stable body temperatures - bigness. Not dissipating heat is a big advantage if you don't want to spend your calories on generating it directly. Like the great white and the leatherback sea turtle, it looks like dinosaurs enjoyed an active lifestyle simply by collecting the "waste" heat from their digestion and muscles.
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