If you surprise a bear in the woods, does it ever recover from being stunned?

[pawsplay]

So, a lot of animals don't have Combat Reflexes, including bears and wolves. With an IQ of 2 or 3, if you achieve complete surprise, will they ever recover from being mentally stunned? I've always been skeptical of those "fight a bear" discussions like on X, but if it just say there for forty or sixty seconds while you punched it, maybe you would have a chance...

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by pawsplay

So, a lot of animals don't have Combat Reflexes, including bears and wolves. With an IQ of 2 or 3, if you achieve complete surprise, will they ever recover from being mentally stunned?

This is clearly a mistake.

For animals and similar creatures recovery from Surprise and mental Stun should be based on HT, Per or Will as a Feature of any given Animal template.

Alternately, it's a mistake to not give predatory animals Combat Reflexes. Bears, Wolves, etc. should have that trait.

As a final option, the Surprise rules are crocked. Anything that's mentally Stunned should still be able to use the All Out Defense, All Out Attack or Move maneuvers in tactical combat. That allows for instinctive "fight, flight or fawn" reactions as well as the default "freeze" option.

Another feature might be "Surprise results in X pre-programmed response other than mental Stun (freezing)."

[Anthony]

I would generally say that surprise situations should be a perception recovery, rather than an IQ recovery. There are situations where an IQ roll to recover is appropriate, but they're related to confusion (there are plenty of things an animal will never figure out) and usually result in ineffectual or inappropriate behavior, rather than simply taking no action (this is actually generally appropriate for stun).

[malloyd]

There are people who claim that's an intended feature (including the implication of the text under Total Surprise), but we've always used Will rather than IQ for recovering from mental surprise, and figured animals had similar ones to humans (the ones in the 4e Basic Set are perhaps even a little higher, most of them have Will 10-12).

I actually think that makes more sense for humans too. Being [smart] doesn't seem to contribute to making fast decisions with poor information. Indeed being smart might even weigh against being decisive in many cases.

[mlangsdorf]

I've often thought that recovering from surprise should be a Fear roll. Brave people recover from surprise faster than cowards. Surprise being solely based on IQ is probably a legacy from Man to Man, which needed things for IQ to do in order for it to be worthwhile to buy over more ST or DX. Heck, Fear didn't exist until the release of GURPS Horror, which wasn't nearly the first genre book put out for 2nd edition.

Regardless of the history, Perception, Will, or Fear are probably better choices than IQ.

[Donny Brook]

I give +1 per turn after turns equal to margin of failure.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

Regardless of the history, Perception, Will, or Fear are probably better choices than IQ.

I suspect that some of that text may be a survival from older editions, in which there was no such stat as Per, and you rolled IQ to see if you perceived something. That sort of thing turns up, for example, in GURPS Magic from time to time.

[Stormcrow]

I would propose an alternative: non-sapient animals don't experience surprise in the way the game rules depict. They automatically flee when surprised.

Sapient beings freeze in surprise because their brains are trying to figure out what's going on and what to do at the same time. Animals acting on instinct alone don't generally have this problem.

There are undoubtedly exceptions (deer in headlights), but in general you don't see surprised animals standing around dithering about what to do.

[Stormcrow]

I don't see why Perception would be rolled. Recovering from surprise isn't a matter of perceiving something. You're already perceiving it; that's why you're surprised. IQ works because you're trying to sort out what to do. Will makes a certain amount of sense because part of it is "your ability to withstand psychological stress," though I think of that more as the ability not to break down, not the ability to work something out. IQ really does make the most sense in this application, for sapient beings.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

I don't see why Perception would be rolled.

Mostly because it produces coherent results. Realistically low intelligence creatures may have less processing power, but they also have much simpler decision trees, so it makes as much sense to have IQ be a penalty to recovery rolls as to have it be a bonus (however, once a creature recovers, the quality of its response will depend on its intelligence or relevant skills).