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Rukbat

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  • RPG Biography
    Started playing in 1989 with Basic D&D, have since played many more systems, with friends, clubs and at conventions.
  • Current games
    Running 5E and playing Earthdawn (after which I'll be either playing or running Runequest Glorantha)
  • Location
    UK
  • Blurb
    Love reading, especially (but not only) Fantasy and SF; currently owned by two cats.

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  1. Good point. And what I was originally after was not the creation of a bulk of new rules, but something more like the Saber Tooth Cat entry - a clear indication pointing to the existing rules. I'm perfectly happy to just go with my original thought and apply Slashing damage to all Bites except for the Saber Tooth - or even extending the Saber Tooth case to all other Bites, although the wording (this is a Bite capable of Impaling) feels to me more like it shouldn't. In fact, maybe Bite attacks are not capable of dealing special damage unless a footnote says so. Whichever of those, or another answer entirely, I'm just looking for a more authoritative answer because my mates and I were split in our own personal opinions.
  2. Oh thanks, but it was just a dry run 😁 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. πŸ€”
  3. This is my first post here, so I'll start by saying hello! ☺️ I am a long-time RPG GM and I'm currently learning Runequest Glorantha from scratch, with a view to run a game soon. I decided to run a simple one-on-one combat scene between Vasana (without her bison, or magic, to keep it simple) and a wolf to see the rules of combat in action, and hit a snag right at the first roll, when the wolf got a critical hit with its Bite. I could not find any mention anywhere in the boxed set of what special damage would be appropriate for the Bite. After giving it some thought, I decided I would count it as Slashing Damage. When I mentioned this to my gaming club mates, some were convinced that Impaling damage would be more appropriate given that teeth make puncture wounds; others, like me, felt that the length of the teeth was insufficient for an Impale, and that Slashing Damage would be a closer description - a gashing wound. (In the little scenario, Vasana luckily had successfully parried the blow, her shield was destroyed and her left arm made useless, but she didn't lose consciousness and then managed to roll a Special result on her counter attack, destroying the wolf's left foreleg and knocking it unconscious. Whew!) Moving from the specific case to a more general approach, I know that some natural attacks will be fairly obvious (a bull's horns would definitely Impale, a horse's hooves definitely Crush, and a cat's claws definitely Slash), but for Bites and other trickier cases, is there some table that defines the Weapon Type for beasts' natural weapons anywhere? Or if not, what are your thoughts?
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