|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
08-16-2022, 08:18 AM | #11 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: One Mile Up
|
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...
|
08-16-2022, 08:53 AM | #12 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
|
Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?
Quote:
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. |
|
08-16-2022, 08:56 AM | #13 |
Join Date: Apr 2005
|
Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?
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. |
08-16-2022, 09:09 AM | #14 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
|
Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?
Quote:
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. |
|
08-16-2022, 09:24 AM | #15 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
|
Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?
Quote:
__________________
GURPS Overhaul |
|
08-16-2022, 09:24 AM | #16 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
|
Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?
Quote:
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. |
|
08-16-2022, 09:53 AM | #17 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
|
Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?
Quote:
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.
__________________
"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
|
08-16-2022, 07:38 PM | #18 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
|
Re: What's the skill to kill birds with a stone and catch fish with your hands?
Quote:
|
|
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|