Revaluation of Attributes and Secondary Characteristics

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Why? Humans have antibiotics, sanitation, and vaccination to prevent their sickly members from dying off (and societal and technological advances that prevents those with dimished senses from being detrimental to survival). The sickly and unobservant wild animals die in the wild long before they reproduce, so hundreds of millions of years of evolution favors health and perception among wild animals.

In my games, wild animals have a minimum of HT 12 and Per 12 if they live to reach adulthood, and many of them will have higher levels than that (a wild animal adversary will be 16 in both, at a minimum, in order to provide a challenge). If I need to, I will also give them Stalker and Strangler (teeth can strangle just as well as hands). A tiger with ST 20, DX 16, IQ 6 (Per 16 and Will 16), HT 16, Combat Reflexes, Stalker 4, Strangler 4, Brawling-22, Stealth-24, Tracking-24, and Wrestling-22 is a legendary maneating nightmare.

Yeah. Evolution doesn't really work like that and neither does health. An animal in the wild is much more likely to be carrying a load of parasites than a human. The evolutionary answer to the low life expectancies of animals in the wild isn't becoming really hard to kill, super-alert and resistant to disease. It's fast sexual maturation, short pregnancies and reproduction in litters.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Why?

Humans are heavily adapted toward the things that the HT attribute covers in a way that rabbits, deer, iguanas, parakeets, etc. aren't.

We're some of the best endurance runners in the animal kingdom. We recover from injuries very well. We're exceptionally tolerant of poisons. We're exceptionally resistant to disease. Humans age fairly well.

We've specialized in this stuff. It's kind of our thing. We're the long-lived social endurance apes with the big brains.

The long-lived part means we need bodies that can heal wounds and survive for many decades. The endurance part means we can beat almost any other animal in an endurance race. The social part means we're exposed to frequent injuries inflicted by others of our kind, and it also means we're exposed to both types and frequencies of diseases that no other animal encounters. We're omnivores, so we're exposed to abnormally high levels of poisons compared to other animals.

High HT is one of the defining qualities of the human.

In my games, wild animals have a minimum of HT 12 and Per 12 if they live to reach adulthood

Then your games are modeling reality poorly. An average human, not in poor physical shape, should be able to chase down a deer, and kill it with a few weak muscle-powered attacks from a spear or bow. Those things aren't possible if the deer has a better HT than the human.

If the human and the deer both tumble down a steep mountainside, each breaking a leg as they fall, the human should survive--the deer should not.

And when the human crawls down the mountain and eats the rotting deer meat they find there, they should survive the food poisoning because they're tough.

Humans are among the hardiest of animals. Our bodies are very well adapted to endurance and survival in ways that other animals' bodies are not.

There is no aspect of what HT covers that the average wild animal should have higher than a human. All but the rare exception should have every aspect of HT considerably lower than a human's.

[AlexanderHowl]

Humans are just not that tough. Our primary advantage is in our intelligence and our social capabilities, not in our physical abilities. Yes, someone like my fiancee could run down a deer, but she has built up the required endurance through 10 hours a week of endurance running for the last 15 years, I doubt more than 1% of humans could do the same. Yes, someone like me is capable of killing a deer without any trouble, but I am massive and stronger than 99% of humans.

My fiancee could not kill a deer though, while I could not chase one, so we would individually starve. We could survive, however, if she chased a deer towards an ambush where I waited with a spear (which is generally how humans hunted deer for hundreds of thousands of years). Individually, we would fail. Together, we would succeed. Humans who worked in groups survived while humans without groups starved, which is one of the evolutionary reasons why we evolved into social creatures.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Humans are just not that tough.

Humans have relatively low strength and Hit Points for our weight, as we're not terribly robust animals. We are also thin-skinned, and have unusually vulnerable brains (due to their relative size). However, we have good HT - we are quite resistant to shock, poisons, diseases, and infection, we heal fast, and have high endurance. Thus we are fairly easy to injure, but we have a better chance of recovering from injuries that don't kill us outright than most animals.

You don't work draft animals that are sick unless you're okay with them dying, because they likely will and they won't work well either (some, like donkeys, will probably refuse to work at all). Humans, on the other hand, are often expected to work while ill, and manage to do so, with the usual result 'merely' being that they take longer to recover and their output lowers in rate and/or quality to some extent. You just can't do that to most animals - they'll die.

[dataweaver]

The Prometheus/Epimetheus myth where the animals got all of the good stuff in terms of physical gifts while humans had to rely solely on intelligence and technology is just that: a myth. As Rupert points out, humans have remarkable stamina and longevity compared to most animals.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

IMHO, even here the HP should be based on ST. It wouldn't be a linear relationship; but the number of HP that you get for free should still be calculated from ST in a way that causes them to fall somewhere within the the valid range that ST defines, and then can be bought up or down from there.

The reason I'm not doing that is that I'm looking at using Conditional Injury in complete replacement of conventional damage and HP, and getting an increase to either requires more than one point of ST. In fact, +3 ST is +1 to damage and resistance. But it seems wrong to charge points for a value that still rounds down to zero.

[dataweaver]

Actually, Conditional Injury works ideally in keeping HP (well, Robustness)=(Know Your Own)ST; all you need is a replacement for the damage roll.