Quote:
Originally Posted by thrash
To answer my own question, even if it has been a while:
There was an article, "Swords on Deck: Exotic Weapons and Animal Attacks," by Paul Montgomery Crabaugh in Different Worlds #18 (p. 7).
His approach was to add the animal weapon types to the AHL melee weapons table, and then add a DM for Penetration scaled linearly based on the creature's Book 3 hit points. The number of Serious wounds required to kill the creature is also scaled by its Book 3 hit points. |
I converted my Traveller campaign to use STRIKER values soon after it came out and used it relatively raw for NPCs and animals (though with PCs I had a conversion system so that SW/Death wasn't so arbitrary). Ignoring house rules, STRIKER (unlike the earlier AHL from Crabaugh's article) actually DID cover the animal weapons and give Pen values for claws, teeth, fists, thrashers, stingers, etc. on the same table that covered blades and so on, so I just used those.
Allowing big creatures to get extra SWs is perhaps problematic for STRIKER rules as written, as STRIKER does not differentiate between, say, a 500 kg motorcycle, a 10 ton truck, and a 250 ton grav tank in terms of ability to sustain damage: if you give them the same armor value, they're all as tough. Mind you, the design rules make it much easier to armor up something big.... To stay compatible with the system, I'd generally just make it so that big things should be built with a higher minimum armor. With that in mind, I'd just give big animals intrinsic armor values, or extra bonuses to their existing armor value, based on their mass, and do the same with penetration. Rather than using the existing wounds and damage numbers for weapons, I'd go back to the table and just look up the mass value, and then use that to generate a uniform armor and penetration modifier that is added to the basic modifiers for their generated armor and weapon type.
The Book 3 animal progression of HPs is clearly semi-logarithmic, much like Striker and AHL, so Paul Crabaugh's use of it was quite reasonable. Looking at the Book 3 Animal Sizes and Weaponry Table I'd actually be inclined to examine the Weight of the animal in the second column, and take the corresponding *first* die number from the hits column, and subtract 4, and use that that as a modifier to penetration and armor value. This gives a zero value for things in the 50 kg range. (I considered adding the both the first and second columns together, but giving the scaling in Striker that is clearly excessive; it would make horse-sized animals as resistant to damage as a man in modern body armor. But if you want tougher animals with more differentiation consider adding both hit dies to gether and subtracting 6 instead of using one die and subtracting 4).
Thus, a 50 kg animal has 4D for hits, so I would assume such a thing has 4 - 4 = +0 to penetration and +0 to armor. On the other hand, a 3 kg animal with hits 1D would get 1-4 = -3, and thus -3 armor and -3 to penetration (cumulative with its attack's penetration). I would treat negative armor values I would use the absolute value of this as a bonus to penetration rolls, e.g., when a 3 kg animal is hit, I'd add +3 to the 2d6 penetration roll.
Using this system, it means a horse at 800 kg is 5D, so it is +1 to armor value (innate toughness) and +1 penetration with hooves, but a 40,000 kg monster like a good-sized dinosaur is 16D for hits and so +12 to penetration and Armor Value 12, and can take down someone in TL13 battledress or stomp the heck out of a lightly-protected vehicle.