Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl
... However, killer animals are terrifying, and they are a staple in horror stories (and horror games).
...
So, how do you make animals terrifying in your games? Do you strip your PCs of their equipement? Do you give the animals supernatural powers? Or do you do something else?
|
Ok, I'll suppose you are interested in horror or at least horror-tinged settings. In those cases, animals often are
horror-story animals; i.e., non-realistic. Then they will have exceptional characteristics and abilities like yours, but they are more special horror monsters than actual animals.
Apart from that, there is an exception I have used sometimes, if the setting is low-powered horror (wouldn't work very well in a GURPS Monster Hunters campaign, where PCs are able to tackle medium-powered vampires). That is, make perfectly ordinary animals controlled by the enemy. This circumvents the objection raised by other posters above; the animals have normal stats, but they are homicidal (and suicidal, if that's what it takes). They are living weapons, or, in a notorious case, living projectiles (imagine a big, well,
murder of crows diving down like kamikazes on non-armored humans).
With regard to the idea of stripping the PCs of equipment, in the situation above the GM easily does not need to do that. Typically, the PCs don't want to be over-encumbered, so they carry three or four additional magazines for their weapons. Throw enough normal animals at them, and they will shoot them down, yes, but they will burn through most of the ammo - leaving them in a serious worry about the soon-to-come encounter with the guy who sicced the animals against them.