Make Animals Threatening [Basic]

[AlexanderHowl]

Well, a skull possesses a default DR 2. Add another DR 2 from the structure required to support the horns (costing 3 CP) and another DR 2 from their hide (costing 6 CP), and you end up with DR 6. Add ST 25, HT 12, Fit, High Pain Threshold, and Berserk (6-). A 6d piercing attack to the brain would deal an average of 60 damage after DR, reducing the HP to -35, but the creature would avoid death and unconsciousness on a roll of 17-, and then they would proceed to murder everyone in view.

[(E)]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Well, a skull possesses a default DR 2. Add another DR 2 from the structure required to support the horns (costing 3 CP) and another DR 2 from their hide (costing 6 CP), and you end up with DR 6. Add ST 25, HT 12, Fit, High Pain Threshold, and Berserk (6-). A 6d piercing attack to the brain would deal an average of 60 damage after DR, reducing the HP to -35, but the creature would avoid death and unconsciousness on a roll of 17-, and then they would proceed to murder everyone in view.

The brain is also smaller (and harder to hit) than most people expect. Domestic cattle can reliably be brought down by .22LR or .22Win mag.
I have seen a 4-5 month old swamp buffalo calf keep 6 people clinging to the rails of the cattle yards before.

[martinl]

It might just be easiest to give them metal heads.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by (E)

The brain is also smaller (and harder to hit) than most people expect.

There should probably be a modifier to skull attacks for animals, they have smaller brains relative to their overall size than humans (say, -1 for IQ 7-, with an additional -1 per point below 5, so -10 for skull attacks on IQ 3 cattle).

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Anders

One of the best speeches in movie history.



Jaws is a great example of an "animal monster" movie. And I doubt any of the three main characters is more than 75 points - maybe Hooper because he's apparently wealthy but that's not very relevant to the movie.

Yep, I agree and even then one of the big reasons why jaws is a great monster movie and has effective jump scares and the shark is a threat despite being a fish that can't leave the water. Is because the humans all through the film literally leave their element (the land) and enter the shark's. The sea hides the beast, it allows it to prowl and go undetected, it confuses and negates the humans many advantages and often acts as another difficulty to over come.

The moment the film switches* from great hunt adventure story to an "uh-oh we're in big trouble" story is not even when they get on the boat. It's when the bit of their native element the humans take with them (the boat) is shown to not be as safe as they thought as the shark which they had underestimated demonstrates the boat is not able to protect them.

(and even then it takes Quint's misjudgement brought on by backstory, and a monster shark able to wreak a 42ft lobster boat).



*it's an odd film in some ways it start's as an aquatic slasher flick, goes to boys own character driven adventure, back to to bloody finale. (one of those films I'll watch over and over again and not get tired of)

[Tinman]

One of the most dangerous animals in the world is the Hippopotamus.
Hippos kill more people a year than lions, crocodiles and water buffalo combined.
They are very territorial and are known to chase trespassers for a mile.
If they catch you (& they are fast) they will gore you with their lower teeth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippop...acks_on_humans
According to wikipedia:
The hippo is considered to be extremely aggressive and has frequently been reported charging and attacking boats. Small boats can easily be capsized by hippos and passengers can be injured or killed by the animals or drown. In one 2014 case in Niger, a boat was capsized by a hippo and 13 people were killed.

As hippos will often engage in raiding nearby crops if the opportunity arises, humans may also come in conflict with them on these occasions, with potential for fatalities on both sides.

[Anders]

A hippopotamus would have ST 29 and fangs doing impaling damage. That's 3d impaling, which is pretty terrifying.

[Phil Masters]

Yeah, I've been told before that hippos were seriously dangerous. Just seeing one yawning in a zoo... would make me unwilling to test the point.

The "players spooked by bad experience with animals in other games" thing may have a justification of sorts. There's an account from 1997 of a Siberian tiger which turned man-eater after it was wounded by a poacher. (And it appears to have deliberately stalked and killed the guy who wounded it.) The guy who had to take a team after it normally worked to stop poaching. In the version of the story I read, he was tracking it with his colleagues and moving a few yards ahead of the others when the dogs went quiet. The next thing he remembered was waking up under a dead tiger with multiple bullets from his colleagues in it.

He was physically okay, but he gave that job up, and from the story I read, very seriously permanently spooked by it. Failed Fright Check at large penalties leading to ... tigriphobia, I guess?

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Yeah, I've been told before that hippos were seriously dangerous. Just seeing one yawning in a zoo... would make me unwilling to test the point.

There's a video on YouTube of one that charges a pickup truck, and winning. They also supposedly eat meat, which they cannot really digest, apparently just out of spite of whatever they happened to have killed.

[Anders]

A lot of animals we thought were strict herbivores go into the meat section from time to time.