Mustelids are up

[lwcamp]

If anyone is interested, I have put up game stats and templates for a large number of mustelids on my site
http://pizards.com/RPGs/animalia/mam.../Mustelid.html. The mustelids are a group of amazingly tough and agile little carnivores. They include among their number the weasels, badgers, otters, and the wolverine.

As usual, any feedback is appreciated.

Luke

[quarkstomper]

Ferrets! Huzzah!

I ran your description of the domestic ferret past my wife, an ardent furophile, (we own four), and she gives it two paws up.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by quarkstomper

Ferrets! Huzzah!

I ran your description of the domestic ferret past my wife, an ardent furophile, (we own four), and she gives it two paws up.

Cool!

Ferrets have long been a favorite of mine, as well. I used to own several, but my household is now sadly Mustela free.

Luke

[Ed the Coastie]

Originally Posted by lwcamp

The mustelids are a group of amazingly tough and agile little carnivores. They include among their number the weasels, badgers, otters, and the wolverine.

Hmmm...badgers and otters...

Just what I need to stat out Badger Highlander and Otterman Empire figures from Off the Wall Armies. *G*

[lunar]

Excellent! If only every writer paid as much attention to detail as you do.

[Zombiehands]

IWCAMP
Its been along time since I played GURPS, or talked to you about animal’s stats. Real good work on the animals. I think you got the advantages and disadvantages down nice. Your descriptions of the animals are very concise too.

I still can't get my head around the whole HP/ST/weight thing in GURPS, its very broken. So here is a little rant. How can animal like a gorilla or a bear be in the same range for ST as a human? I know it’s hard to compare animals with very different physical structures but come on. Gorillas have the upper body strength of 8 to 27 men. (link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas) A bear can hit for 2/3 its body weight in foot-pounds. A human boxer/martial artist is lucky to hit for 100-150ft-lbs. In GURPS a man, and not superman or spiderman, can actually be stronger then a 400lb gorilla, tiger, or bear! It’s really almost funny. Then Kromm will come out and defend it. He’ll even call it a “realistic” system. Oh well, 4th edition kill GURPS for me.

Your work is good though, and I will shameless rob your ideas for import into my own games. Although your speeds might be a bit off ;)

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Zombiehands

Its been along time since I played GURPS, or talked to you about animal’s stats. Real good work on the animals. I think you got the advantages and disadvantages down nice. Your descriptions of the animals are very concise too.

Thanks!

Originally Posted by Zombiehands

I still can't get my head around the whole HP/ST/weight thing in GURPS, its very broken. So here is a little rant. How can animal like a gorilla or a bear be in the same range for ST as a human? I know it’s hard to compare animals with very different physical structures but come on. Gorillas have the upper body strength of 8 to 27 men. (link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas) A bear can hit for 2/3 its body weight in foot-pounds. A human boxer/martial artist is lucky to hit for 100-150ft-lbs. In GURPS a man, and not superman or spiderman, can actually be stronger then a 400lb gorilla, tiger, or bear! It’s really almost funny. Then Kromm will come out and defend it. He’ll even call it a “realistic” system. Oh well, 4th edition kill GURPS for me.

I tried to model the extreme ST of bears and apes with arm ST and lifting ST rather than overall ST. My reasoning for bears is that the bears actually have fairly weak bites for their body size among the carnivores. There was a paper by Wroe et al in the Proceedings of the Royal Society not too long ago comparing bite forces for meat eating mammals. Suprizingly, all placental big game hunters had roughly equivalent bite strengths adjusted for body size - the bite force at the canines of a wolf, jaguar, or leopard was about the same as that of a spotted hyaena. The less that species of placental mammal took large game, the weaker its bite. Since bears scored pretty low on the bite force scale, I decided to give then fairly normal ST for their size, but boost their damage dealing capacity and lifting power with both lifting ST and arm ST. This way, a bear bite did not cause uber damage, but a blow from its paw would knock you into next week, and it could easily flip over a large rock or rip apart a log looking for grubs with its massive combined arm and lifting ST.

(oddly enough, marsupials have a stronger bite for a given body size than placentals. This is probably because the attachment for the jaw muscles on the skull is right around the braincase - the larger the brain, the less room for jaw closing muscles. Puny brained marsupials can thus deliver more sheer bone crunching power than the smarter placentals.

Regarding the hyaena - it can probably withstand higher forces at the carnassals than can wolves and leopards and jaguars - this is what the hyaenas use to cush bones, after all. The killing power of hyaenas is at the canines, though, so the damage should be about the same as for ther placental large game hunters).

Regarding apes, I figured they probably don't have much more load bearing capacity than men of the same size (I may be wrong on this), but they can lift far more, and really rend things if they get their hands on them. Again, this seemed to call for arm ST, plus extra lifting ST only for the arms. I didn't want to give them too much arm striking ST, because otherwise they would be better off clobbering people rather than biting them, and real apes seem to prefer to employ their canine teeth when fighting. (Using my stats, a silverback gorilla has about 6 times the lifting ST of a typical man. Maybe a bit on the low side. On the other hand, maybe they used wimpy human couch potatos for their estimates of human lifting capacity).

The wonky stats for animals in the basic set is what prompted me to start compiling my own list of animal stats, so I agree with you on the listed values in the Basic Set. My gorillas and tigers and bears are stronger than that!

(also, keep in mind that you can reproduce the effects of human olympic level weight lifters with only ST 16 plus the lifting skill and extra effort. ST 20 humans are probably unrealistic, despite what it says in Basic.)

You know, I was never very interested in sharks until I started doing research on them for my game stats. Now I find them fascinating. You know most terrestrial vertebrates have 50% of their body mass in muscle? For sharks, it goes up to over 80%. Just tubes of pure muscle! Amazing.

Originally Posted by Zombiehands

Your work is good though, and I will shameless rob your ideas for import into my own games. Although your speeds might be a bit off ;)

Probably. Speed is one of the hardest values to pin down for animals other than greyhounds and thoroughbred horses (and the later only when carrying a jockey). Methods for measuring speeds in the field are full of errors. Usually, I go with estimates by Alexander than most mid-sized cursorial wild animals sprint at 12 to 14 meters per second. If you have reliable data of speeds for wild animals, I'd be happy to hear about it! This has recently been bothering me with the sharks - mako sharks are suposed to be ultra fast, but measurements of their actual speeds vary wildly from 22 mph up to 50 mph. Other sharks are not as fast as makos, but how much slower? The lamnid sharks in general (including makos) are very fast, probably about as fast as tunas and the fastest dolphins. Still, one sailfish was measured pulling out fishing line at a speed of 60+ mph! This is while making a series of jumps, which helps reduce drag, but still, that's incredible!

Anyway, I take my best guess, and go on. What is clear is that the speeds in Basic Set are far too low in most cases.

And feel free to shamelessly steal for your games. That's what it is there for!

Cheers,

Luke

[Zombiehands]

I read Wroe too. For giggles I used his data to find a ratio of bite force to weight to 2/3 power. I did that because of the GURPS ST formula. Then I found the Standard Deviation for each animal. Only the Jaguar, Grey Wolf, and African Hunting Dog came out over one Standard deviation above the group. It’s interesting that you feel that bite strength is more important then "arm" or slamming ST, wresting ST for the base number of ST. But again I don't play much since 4th came out, so maybe that makes more sense. How is arm/body ST used in 4th edition? For example if a gorilla or wrestled with a man would he be using a 24, 20, or 15 ST? If a gorilla charged someone what would they use to knock someone over?

Also on a side note on gorillas, their bite force is very high, On a TV show Animal Face off They took film footage of gorillas biting thing and breaking in their hands and then used a mold of the gorilla’s skull to estimate the force need to bite through a coconut and 4” diameter bamboo and they about 1,300 lbs (more then twice any or the carnivores estimated by wroe). Also the thing about the gorilla ST in couch potatoes was funny, maybe the gorilla is as strong as 8 Olympic weight lifters or 27 couch potatoes? The only quantifiable measure of strength I have seen for a gorilla was in Guinness Book of world’s records. In it a 100lb Chimp lifted around 600lbs and a gorilla was estimated to be able to lift over 2,000lbs. These lifts off the ground to over their head. To me that is a basic lift of 75 and 250 respectively, or a ST of 19, and 35. If it was just off the ground they would have a 17 and 31. I don’t have the book near me.

Like I said last post I haven’t been on this page for a while so I might be going back a bit on my comments. I have to disagree with corcs DX though; a DX 12 while gorillas and bears have 10 and Chimp have 11 seems to me kind of crazy. GURPS defines DX as a combination of agility, coordination, and fine motor skills. Would you really consider a croc agile?? Crocs to me are just to short limbed to be compared favorably to bears and apes. A man with a 5’ long stick can pretty much tease (not let it bite/grab the stick) the hell out of a croc (on land) where there is no way they could do it to a chimp or bear. I know crocs are capable of extremely fast movement and I am sure, from hiding they could snag a bear or chimp near the water, but this is surprise and an all-out attack, not a high over all DX. Further crocs can only really be called agile in the water, where bear can climb, run, squeeze through very small openings, swim, open car doors, heck they can even pry open clams. Have you ever watched a chimp at the zoo, they are down right acrobatic. Could you explain the DX 12 of a croc?

I was also reading your ST rules and found them interesting, and I would love play test your HP (looks awesome) rules with my group, its just too bad I can’t get any of them to play GURPS.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Zombiehands

I read Wroe too. For giggles I used his data to find a ratio of bite force to weight to 2/3 power. I did that because of the GURPS ST formula. Then I found the Standard Deviation for each animal. Only the Jaguar, Grey Wolf, and African Hunting Dog came out over one Standard deviation above the group. It’s interesting that you feel that bite strength is more important then "arm" or slamming ST, wresting ST for the base number of ST. But again I don't play much since 4th came out, so maybe that makes more sense.

G4 doesn't have a way (that I can recall) of reducing ST for a body part, or type of action, aside from Weak Bite (apply 1/2 or 1/4ST to bite damage), so it's easiest to make the base ST the lowest ST the animal has, and build up any areas that are too low.

[Zombiehands]

So what ST do you use for wrestling, and slamming? Arm, lifting, or Base?