Oh thanks, but it was just a dry run π
Personally I think that this is broad enough to warrant covering by the rules, after all, there are a lot of animals that bite. And while I approve of the philosophy that most natural predators would give adventurers a wide berth and move on to easier targets, that just leaves all the animal companions and all the animals under the influence of various spirits, curses, etc.
I'm not sure how I feel about armour stripping - for one thing, this makes the special kind of useless against lightly-armoured characters, which seems counter-intuitive.
If we are house ruling it, I had this idea:
Special Biting Damage:
If the attack roll with a Bite is a special success, the attacker does normal damage, and automatically succeeds in Grappling the location hit. As per Grappling, if the defender parries, the weapon/shield arm is grappled instead, as long as the degree of success of the parry is inferior to the attack (otherwise the Grapple is negated). If the special bite is also a critical hit, the Bite does maximum damage.
The animal can mantain the hold in subsequent melee rounds, with a successful Bite attack, which also inflicts the attacker's bonus damage (normal damage + bonus damage on another special hit, max damage + bonus on a critical hit). It also then has the option to immobilise its foe, or throw them, as per the normal Grapple rules. If the location hit is the Head, however, the attacker can instead choose to inflict asphyxiation (pag. 156).
Now all of that makes me wonder how a grappled combatant can attempt to break the hold. STR vs. STR? Choice of STR vs. STR or DEX vs. DEX? STR+DEX vs. STR+DEX?
I guess it's true that we never finish learning, we only get new questions. π€