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Old 08-16-2022, 08:18 AM   #11
Gold & Appel Inc
 
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Default Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?

In a very silly *ahem* I mean cinematic campaign, I'd let somebody roll at -6 to kill two birds with one stone...
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Old 08-16-2022, 08:53 AM   #12
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Default Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?

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Originally Posted by SID View Post
As the title reads, what's the skill to kill birds with a stone (throwing) and catch fish with your hands?
Birds - Throwing skill to kill them, with Naturalist or Survival as a complementary skill to find them. Maybe Mimicry skill to lure them in using animal calls.

Fish - "Tickling" fish (an old poacher's trick) seems more like Survival skill to me, but is probably defined by RAW as Fishing skill, possibly with a unfamiliarity penalties or a Technique for hand-fishing. Again, Naturalist or Survival might be complementary if you're trying to find good places to fish.
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Old 08-16-2022, 08:56 AM   #13
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Default Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Catching the fish is a maybe though that might also be DX-based grappling.
Throwing or DX-based rolls are RAW for attacking individual critters. For abstracted wilderness survival where you're playing the odds and making many repeated attempts to get "something" edible, Survival is the better option. That's particularly true in areas where animals of a particular type are so abundant than a thrown weapon is likely to hit "a" creature, rather than just "the" target you were aiming at.

Last edited by Pursuivant; 08-16-2022 at 09:18 AM.
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Old 08-16-2022, 09:09 AM   #14
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Default Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
I would rule out Tracking for birds. As flying creatures, they don't leave a lot of tracks, not like rabbits or deer or tigers.
Ever lived in a place where there are pigeons or commensal Canada Geese? They're flying creatures, but they leave a LOT of evidence of their presence and nesting/roosting sites.

Tracking isn't just following tracks, it's also following "spoor" and whatever other traces a creature left behind.

As an example, if you keep cats, and if you're anything but a meticulous housekeeper, you might notice that darkish spots show up on light-colored doors and door frames right at cat shoulder level. If you run your finger up the corner of a piece of upholstered furniture, you'll get a bit of cat fur off of it. The same tricks tricks hold when trailing animals in the wild - checking vegetation along possible routes of travel for mud, blood, fur, or other stuff the animal might have left behind.

In an area where certain types of birds are abundant, they will leave lots of footprints, feathers, and poop behind. That will give even an amateur tracker a decent estimate of how many there are, what type they are, and how recently they've been there. That's good enough to set up a hunting blind or bird traps and wait. Hunters regularly use tracking to identify places where wild turkey, pheasants, or similar game birds are likely to hang out.

Naturalist skill is very much a complementary skill to tracking when following animals, since it gives you a sense of where certain animals are likely to be found and how they move through the terrain. Tracking skill might give you "rabbit tracks" or even "rabbit trails," but Naturalist will give you "look for patches of dense low-lying brush in well-drained meadow areas, look for signs that plants that rabbits like have been grazed, hence shorter than they should be compared to vegetation that rabbits don't eat."

Last edited by Pursuivant; 08-16-2022 at 09:15 AM.
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Old 08-16-2022, 09:24 AM   #15
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?

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Originally Posted by Pursuivant View Post
In an area where certain types of birds are abundant, they will leave lots of footprints, feathers, and poop behind. That will give even an amateur tracker a decent estimate of how many there are, what type they are, and how recently they've been there. That's good enough to set up a hunting blind or bird traps and wait. Hunters regularly use tracking to identify places where wild turkey, pheasants, or similar game birds are likely to hang out.
I feel the Tracking skill is about tracing a target's path (and through that, tracing them to their current location), and indeed that's the way GURPS treats it. I think the evidence birds leave behind more just gives you ideas about the areas they frequent, and that seems more in line with the Survival skill. But in real life the two skills are pretty commonly intertwined - someone who is a skilled tracker will generally have Survival or Urban Survival in addition to Tracking, and someone who is a skilled survivalist will generally have Tracking in addition to Survival and Urban Survival. Honestly, I wouldn't be opposed to having Tracking simply be an application of Survival, with the option of taking it as an Optional Specialization if you want to only be able to track. Of course, that would mean Tracking has to be specialized by terrain type, but that doesn't strike me as unrealistic (optionally, allow Tracking to be taken as the Required Specialization, such that it applies to all terrain types, like the current Tracking skill does).
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Old 08-16-2022, 09:24 AM   #16
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Default Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?

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Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc View Post
In a very silly *ahem* I mean cinematic campaign, I'd let somebody roll at -6 to kill two birds with one stone...
Or, more seriously, a CS with Survival or weapon skill when hunting in a place where game birds are extremely abundant.

Modern people forget how incredibly densely-populated and bio-diverse the pre-modern world was. Until the late 19th century, market hunting was a viable, even ecologically sustainable, profession. There were once incredibly rich fisheries, shellfish beds, and migratory bird flyways within a day's walk of any coastal city.

15th and 16th century explorers in the New World were astonished by the richness of places like the Chesapeake Bay, but just a millennia earlier the same level of natural abundance could have been found in the Thames Estuary.
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Old 08-16-2022, 09:53 AM   #17
jason taylor
 
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Default Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post

*Realistically, actually sneaking up on an animal is pretty difficult. More likely, you use Survival to figure out how close you can get without spooking it, and strike from there. Although really skilled hunters will indeed use Stealth.
True enough. There are other kinds of hunting. Pigsticking is about speed, dexterity and endurance, It's problem is not that it is difficult to close with the prey but that it bites back (which makes it one of the more sportsmanlike types of hunting). Falcons and Persian Cheetahs (they don't have many of these anymore though they are recovering and it may become popular to use them for hunting again), and hounds that are bred for the purpose also hunt with speed. When I was young I used to hunt flies gross as it sounds: I gave that up because I decided it was unethical to hunt an animal that wasn't a threat and which you were not going to exploit (I couldn't bear to eat a fly of course). For that what you need is timing as they always jump the same way.

However killing a bird with a stone does need a bit of sneaking. Of course most songbirds take humans for granted: no one eats them any more. But waterfowl, turkey, etc know that a human might think them tasty.
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Old 08-16-2022, 07:38 PM   #18
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Default Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
I feel the Tracking skill is about tracing a target's path (and through that, tracing them to their current location), and indeed that's the way GURPS treats it. I think the evidence birds leave behind more just gives you ideas about the areas they frequent, and that seems more in line with the Survival skill.
In some cases, it would make sense to allow Survival skill to be complementary to Tracking.
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