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Old 11-20-2015, 08:09 AM   #21
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Default Re: [Basic] Why do Slams hurt so much?

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Rousseau was right: agriculture and cities make us soft.
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”
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Old 11-20-2015, 08:46 AM   #22
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Default Re: [Basic] Why do Slams hurt so much?

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Quite. Slams are strikes, like punches or kicks, in GURPS. Pounce to grapple or pounce to takedown should probably invoke grappling rules. All-Out Attack (Double) for Grapple and Takedown, or Move (jump) and Attack are both appropriate here, I'd say.
That rather devalues the contribution of the momentum of a ballistic cat to the process.

It's both a grapple and a takedown, but it's not really a takedown done by way of grappling, is it?
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Old 11-20-2015, 08:48 AM   #23
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Default Re: [Basic] Why do Slams hurt so much?

I suppose the initial impact is meant not to damage but to unbalance and topple the prey. Perhaps in GURPS terms this is push and not slam?
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Old 11-20-2015, 09:03 AM   #24
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Default Re: [Basic] Why do Slams hurt so much?

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Know what's weird? They've found some human skulls in French mass tombs that are thick enough to classify as diseased by today's standards, but are common enough perhaps to have been normal even a thousand years ago. It's not inconceivable that casual braining of passers-by might have put selective pressure on our species from the time of the ice age to the Middle Ages. Rousseau was right: agriculture and cities make us soft.
This is a well known phenomenon. One of the ways we determine if a collection of animal bones are from a wild or domesticated population is by looking at changes like this. Human skeletal anatomy goes through much the same sorts of changes we see in domestication sometime after the Neolithic revolution.
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Old 11-20-2015, 11:16 AM   #25
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Default Re: [Basic] Why do Slams hurt so much?

Thanks for all the replies, everyone! It sounds like the general consensus here is that the Pounce mechanic described on B372 is not particularly workable and I need to either
a) create a house-rule for pounces or
b) have the cats do something other than pounce.

I generally dislike using house-rules that I haven't already told my group about, because I like game mechanics to be predictable (unlike story elements!). Which leaves me with option b). It sounds like an All-Out (Double) is appropriate, hopefully as a surprise attack, with a Bite followed by a Takedown. Does that sound reasonable?
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Old 11-20-2015, 11:49 AM   #26
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Default Re: [Basic] Why do Slams hurt so much?

Not having any experience with being pounced upon by anything larger than overconfident housecats, take this with a grain of salt, but I think that most pouncing cats aren't biting first.

I think a cat that pounces is trying to use its weight (and firm, clawed grip) to bring down the prey IN ORDER to be able to bite it more effectively.

Now, there are cats which might go with a bite to the throat and hold on, but I don't think those cats are tree-dropping predators. More like lions, I think (and even then, I think they might grapple with their front paw(s) for some assistance on the bite.

I would assume that most tree-dropping (or leaping) predatory cats would grab with their claws (sometimes all four sets) to 'bring down' a prey item, then use the fact that it was on the ground (or heck, just very hindered from encumbrance due to carrying around a hungry cat), to help them score a targeted attack on their preferred area (neck, skull, whatever).

I'm not confident in what precise attack to model that in GURPS, but I think, in most cases, the 'grabbing' part should precede the biting bit.



(In Technical Grappling, the claws and the bite could all be part of one attack to gain more Control Points, but I would see that more as lions 'dogpile' on an elephant or water buffalo to bring it down than as a killing attack in itself.)
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Old 11-20-2015, 11:58 AM   #27
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Default Re: [Basic] Why do Slams hurt so much?

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Originally Posted by Gnome View Post
I generally dislike using house-rules that I haven't already told my group about, because I like game mechanics to be predictable (unlike story elements!). Which leaves me with option b). It sounds like an All-Out (Double) is appropriate, hopefully as a surprise attack, with a Bite followed by a Takedown. Does that sound reasonable?
A cat first grapples with its paws and claws, and uses those to position the prey for a targeted bite (usually to the neck as part of a strangle, although Jaguars typically attack the back of the skull, driving their fangs through the brain stem). Lions and other large cats usually do not execute a takedown with their pounce against larger prey - you often see video clips of them clinging to the sides of zebra or wildebeest (or even hippos and elephants!). They will try and drag their victim to the ground once they have hold, however.

The closest GURPS analogue would seem to be an All Out Attack, since this lets you move forward up to half your Move (reflecting a cat pouncing from ambush). This would be an attack with the claws to grapple (and incidentally cause damage, but that is secondary - the main goal is to use the claws like meat-hooks to hold, restrain, and position the victim) - either AOA (Strong) or AOA (determined), depending on the circumstances. Then once the prey is grappled, either go for a takedown or attempt to further restrain the prey before administering a strangle with a bite (which incidentally also causes bite damage) - or, for jaguars, biting to grapple at the skull hit location.

Cheetahs are different. They will first attempt a trip (a takedown in GURPS), and then will bite to grapple the neck and begin a strangle.

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Old 11-20-2015, 12:06 PM   #28
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Default Re: [Basic] Why do Slams hurt so much?

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Know what's weird? They've found some human skulls in French mass tombs that are thick enough to classify as diseased by today's standards, but are common enough perhaps to have been normal even a thousand years ago.
Citation? I'd be interested in reading that. But be careful for someone extrapolating that the two data points they have define some sort of curve.

There's a mass grave from England from (iirc) the 100 years war; nearly a hundred soldiers. The suspicion is that they died from dysentery. That's not unusual. What's unusual is that the group have not one, but two people in it with the same staggeringly rare bone disorder, which causes fusion in the joints of the limbs. That doesn't indicate that this disorder was carried by 1/50 at the time, however. The two are related, and having relatives go to war together was very common at the time.

In many cases with genetic disorders, if you find one case, you'll quickly find a cluster nearby because they'll (of course) be common in the one family. Sometimes an entire village is close-bred enough to count as one family, too. But if it's a rare disorder, you may never find it anywhere else in the same generation, even if you have 30 cases all at once in the one family.

Plague graves can get particularly weird for statistical information about a population - they're not a sample of the general population. They're exclusively a sample of the subset of the population that caught the plague, and only represent the sub-subset that were weak enough to die from it in the region within corpse-carrying distance around that particular grave. The profile of the average person to die of the Spanish Flu was pretty different from the average person dying of Bubonic Plague.
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Old 11-20-2015, 12:40 PM   #29
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Default Re: [Basic] Why do Slams hurt so much?

First, I'm no expert on animal biomechanics, nor on animal hunting practices, but AFAIK, cats and other pouncing predators "slam" with their limbs, not with their torso or joints. They use their limbs' flexing to absorb part of the impact. The idea isn't to hurt, but to topple, and to land on top of the target. As such, I see two options:
  • Treat the damage from the slam on the feline as a fall, and let acrobatics and specially catfall reduce the damage.
  • Create a new technique, "Pushing Slam", that does not do damage on the pouncer or the pounced, but the damage calculation is only used to see if the target falls down.
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Old 11-20-2015, 01:24 PM   #30
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Default Re: [Basic] Why do Slams hurt so much?

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Create a new technique, "Pushing Slam", that does not do damage on the pouncer or the pounced, but the damage calculation is only used to see if the target falls down.
Could be as simple as allowing the substituting-slam-for-thrust bit Martial Arts allows for general charging attacks to be used with the regular pushing technique...
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