Bestial Disadvantage & Skills

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Makes me wonder what skill you would use to perform a Clever Hans routine. Obviously it's not Mathematics, whether the one doing it is human or not. It's sort of a neighbor to cold reading, perhaps...

Body Language?

[whswhs]

In GURPS Furries I provided a quirk-level version of Bestial, called "Opportunistic," defined as follows: You do understand legal concepts of property, but you’re casual about acting on them; if you can pick up a small item, or squat in someone’s home or workspace, you’ll do so.

This is kind of a low level of antisocial personality disorder.

[edk926]

Wrestling is appropriate. Many of the Perception skills fit like a crude version of Observation (ambush predators) and Scrounging (making nests) and definitely Tracking. For DX skills, Stealth and Climbing come to mind.

[Prince Charon]

OK, are Guns skills civilized? I mean, there's a fake video wandering around the internet of a chimpanzee 'borrowing' an AK-47 from some local African militia or similar and using it to scare the $#!+ out of them, but given that it's fake, it shouldn't count (and was only mentioned at all because someone might bring it up, not knowing that it's fake). What about Armoury (Small Arms)/TL8?

[Rupert]

No, Guns skills are not civilised. They are just applied hand-eye co-ordination when it comes to attacking someone, with maybe a bit of ballistics thrown in. Certainly no more civilised than Throwing.

More importantly, the only skills banned are those that "rely on 'civilized' notions of art or social interaction". Guns relies on neither civilised art, nor civilised social interaction, seeing as killing enemies/prey dead way pre-dates sapience, let alone civilisation.

Note it's not a ban on 'civilised skills', 'art skills', and 'social interaction skills'. It's a band on 'civilised art' and 'civilised social interaction' skills, which is a far more limited set of skills.

[Ulzgoroth]

Typical examples of Bestial are also TL 0 (or worse), but that isn't mandatory.

[Inky]

What exactly is Bestial supposed to represent, on a character with human IQ? It doesn't seem to make sense to me. Surely characters with enough intelligence to comprehend something that complex at all would quickly learn what was going on and how to deal with it, whatever they started out with.

I suppose an exception might be creatures that evolved as solitary animals, and were as intelligent as humans in most ways but didn't have as much in the way of brain structures specialised for analysing social interactions. Even there, though, in theory I'd have thought they could learn it mechanically, in the same way that a sufficiently intelligent autistic person can learn to mimic some of the social routines of neurotypical people "by numbers" even if they don't exactly understand why the people care, only that everyone's happier if you make an effort to get it right.

By the way, here's Bestial's old Disadvantage of the Week thread for quick reference. http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=153404 That thread pretty quickly came to the conclusion that Bestial won't necessarily mean the same thing for all characters - one species' ways might differ from humans in different respects from another's, leaving them with different sets of things they don't understand about humans.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Inky

What exactly is Bestial supposed to represent, on a character with human IQ? It doesn't seem to make sense to me. Surely characters with enough intelligence to comprehend something that complex at all would quickly learn what was going on and how to deal with it, whatever they started out with.

Ah but do they want to? Does a dragon want to learn Philosophy, Connoisseur, or even Diplomacy?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Inky

What exactly is Bestial supposed to represent, on a character with human IQ? It doesn't seem to make sense to me. Surely characters with enough intelligence to comprehend something that complex at all would quickly learn what was going on and how to deal with it, whatever they started out with.

It's often possible to buy off disadvantages. That doesn't invalidate them.

Bestial is definitely one where that applies: domestic animals, including tamed formerly-wild animals, don't have Bestiial per Characters p.263.

[Inky]

I was thinking that; whether it's widely (or, indeed, ever) useful long-term or not, as a temporary disadvantage it's useful - after all, many adventures play out over a few days, nothing like long enough for the horse the villain turned into a human in session 1 to have learned when to say please and thank you. :-)

That's a very good point about Bestial not being on the Domestic Animal template - I read that bit of the Disadvantage of the Week thread after I posted last time, and that clarifies things a lot. It seems to me that the things a Bestial character doesn't know aren't some mysterious abstract type of reasoning, they're more a mass of little details that you have to learn one by one and it takes time and intelligence. It's basically "Cultural Familiarity (humans)" or "Savoir-Faire (humans)". The equivalent of a spy trying to learn which forks are which to blend in at a high-society dinner party.

For that matter, would it be reasonable to use Bestial to describe a human abroad among aliens or some other very un-human civilisation, if the aliens were being used as the campaign standard? Makes me think of that Star Trek: Enterprise episode where a crew member managed to offend some alien diplomats by eating in front of them - unknown to him, on their planet that was in the same category as peeing in front of them and they wouldn't believe it wasn't a deliberate insult.

The temporary disadvantage thing probably applies to David Johnston's dragon too. The dragon perfectly well could learn those skills, but if it hasn't bothered, then it doesn't know the things - they can't be learnt on the spur of the moment if it suddenly needs them - and qualifies for the points for not knowing them. (This made me think of the dragon in Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards!. It probably did have Bestial, not as a permanent can't-learn-this trait but as a buy-off-able haven't-learnt-this-yet trait. Judging by what we saw of it in the book, it was quite intelligent enough to learn the aforementioned Savoir-Faire (Humans) if it had seen any need to, but it was a giant fire-breathing dragon with no more scruples than an avalanche and didn't need to bother.)

Of course, I've often seen it said that in GURPS you pay for what your character could do, not what they do do. A character who does have those skills but sometimes ignores them because they're powerful enough not to need to bother may have an OPH but doesn't have Bestial.
Going to quote Buffy the Vampire Slayer because I want to: "Look, a Slayer's life is really simple, B. Want. Take. Have."
Faith undoubtedly did know better than that, if she tried, but having super-strength had gone to her head!