Animal HT scores

[Anders]

I looked over the animals in Campaigns and most of them have much higher HT scores than humans, in the 12-13 range. Isn't this backwards? Fit humans can outrun just about anything except wolves in an endurance competition and are very good at surviving trauma. What we lack is sheer speed - Basic Move, and I would argue that other animals who sprint have bought up their Basic Move and maybe taken Unfit to compensate.

What do you think?

[JulianLW]

Humans in theory can outrun most animals, but in fact, most folks get tired of running before their dogs do. The humans who can outrun animals have high Running skill - which virtually all early humans probably had but relatively few humans do today.

What humans cannot do that animals can is drink from puddles without dying of diarrhea or other very common illnesses.

As for trauma - humans tend to have higher HP than most animals because we're larger. And we have more evidence of humans surviving trauma because we live in more traumatic environments AND have an infrastructure that aids recovery. I wonder how many deer would survive being hit by cars if they had access to crutches and grocery stores?

The high HT of animals represents their natural resistance to environmental conditions, which humans lack.

Also, the fatigue rules for endurance running are pretty good for a game, but not great as a representation of reality, which is an argument you can find on the forums in a few places.

[tbone]

Originally Posted by JulianLW

What humans cannot do that animals can is drink from puddles without dying of diarrhea or other very common illnesses. . . The high HT of animals represents their natural resistance to environmental conditions, which humans lack.

Yeah, that's always how I've largely seen it: animals' high-ish HT scores represent the ability to live outdoors without medicines, agriculture, tool use, hands, high intellect, etc., yet still (sometimes) manage to live long enough to leave behind a generation or few.

To the OP: It's true that the "humans are better long-distance runners" aspect isn't well represented in the rules. I'm sure it's possible to imagine and add in the "missing bits" that would make it so. A simple idea: Maybe the Enhanced Move that's common in animals should often have a limitation that burns extra fatigue. (Cheetahs certainly come to mind.)

Or maybe, rather than crunchy rules stuff, the intellect factor is at play: Humans (or the smart ones anyway, like skilled traditional hunters) know when to plan for a long run, and adopt a very measured pace. Animals, meanwhile, might instinctively react with all-out sprints to immediately get as far as possible from a threat - at the cost of quick burn-out.

Maybe, anyway. Sounds plausible to me, but I welcome people taking a hammer to the idea.

[Extrarius]

Many animals seem to be healthier than humans in several ways, such as being more resistant to disease and infection. Most animals are also more active than modern humans, in that they have to exercise to catch food (or avoid being food).

Humans do have greater endurance, so maybe we need a new trait kind of like Unfit, but the penalty instead goes to skills that increase endurance (along with the double FP expenditure)

[Shuckster]

Just as ST can be broken down into Lifting ST and Striking ST, DX can be broken up into High Manual Dexterity and advantages like Perfect Balance, Per can be broken up into each individual Acute Sense etc. You can break down HT into different Resistant/Immunity advantages, as well as stuff like Reduced consumption (Cast Iron Stomach), Fit or Very Fit, hard to kill and hard to subdue. Fit would be the domain of long distance running as you recover FP faster and lose less of it.

If you really wanted to, you could reflect stone age humans' hunting method of being slower than prey but being able to run much, much longer than them by just slapping fit on every cave-person, since most humans in that era were much more physically fit than many humans in modern times

[Tymathee]

I think that a lot of the stat blocks have straight up better HT while not having Fit, Resistant, etc. is for the sake of abstraction. I know a lot of GURPS forumites will want to have as much realism in their own stat blocks as possible, but that's testing GM sanity to track every minute detail about them... the many traits of the PCs are often difficult enough to keep track of, so why not zoom out the scope of granularity of the stats blocks of NPCs? You just need the important stuff and what might be considered "signature traits" as suggested in GURPS Furries. So this abstraction might be part of why we see higher HT scores for animals in Basic's Campaigns... the same could be said of other aspects of their stat blocks too.

[Not]

Reintroduce predators to pick off the weak and you'll see average HT creep up.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Anders

I looked over the animals in Campaigns and most of them have much higher HT scores than humans, in the 12-13 range. Isn't this backwards? Fit humans can outrun just about anything except wolves in an endurance competition and are very good at surviving trauma. What we lack is sheer speed - Basic Move, and I would argue that other animals who sprint have bought up their Basic Move and maybe taken Unfit to compensate.

What do you think?

Give humans a monopoly on Fit and running skill, and we can run other animals into the ground. A typically fit human with no running skill isn't going to be outrunning any horse. But on the other hand, animals aren't really that hard to kill.

[Flyndaran]

Fit has to do with a mere +1 bonus and double recovery from fatigue.
Perhaps humans and a few species should be the only ones allowed to gain Very Fit.
Also, I always doubt those claims of what humanity as a species can do when everyone seems to reference highly trained, young adult athletes with excellent present and childhood nutrition, running shoes, no chronic injuries or poorly healed past ones, and under near optimal conditions where they don't have to worry about predators, etc.
Our species seems to have the potential to be really good in slow continued exertion, sure, but I dislike the claims that we're literally the best.
Edit: one more thing is our long life spans. A human could train for many years without reaching old age the way other animals would.

As to non-humans, it could easily just be that those with low-ish Ht scores rarely make it to adulthood skewing the present average to above 10. Under safer conditions, they may quickly drop in average health.