Animal Encounters - Weight/Size and Movement

[Franbo]

Hello all,

I have been perusing the marvel that is animal encounters and picking lots of interesting ideas to spring on my players, great book!

That said; there are a couple of things that are somewhat baffling me, and I suspect I am missing something obvious... so, hopefully someone can help direct me to the correct place.

Weight/Size
In the animal generation rules I can see the weight information, which lets me start guessing how big the animal might be.

However, looking at all the generated animal tables (whether encounter tables or menagerie) there seems to be no mention of the animal weight, so I am left to guesswork (ok in the menagerie where there are real world examples of the animals, but just frustrating for the encounter tables) or coming up with some reverse engineering formula based on the physical stats (which is vaguely annoying).

What am I missing?

Movement
I can see the movement types; but can't seem to find anything anywhere as to what movement speeds the actual animals should have.

So I know humans can move 6/12/18m in a combat round (depending on how many of their actions they spend on movement), but have no idea/guidance what animal actual movement rates might be.

What am I missing?


I am hoping someone can help me with these two as they seem to be fairly important bits of information to me...

Franbo

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I know humans can move 6/12/18m in a combat round (depending on how many of their actions they spend on movement), but have no idea/guidance what animal actual movement rates might be.

What am I missing?

How is human speed calculated?

 

[Franbo]

It's the same for all characters as far as I can tell, as written down on page 60 of the core rule book (in the combat section under minor actions/movement).

 

[hdan]

Hello all,

I have been perusing the marvel that is animal encounters and picking lots of interesting ideas to spring on my players, great book!

That said; there are a couple of things that are somewhat baffling me, and I suspect I am missing something obvious... so, hopefully someone can help direct me to the correct place.

Weight/Size
In the animal generation rules I can see the weight information, which lets me start guessing how big the animal might be.

However, looking at all the generated animal tables (whether encounter tables or menagerie) there seems to be no mention of the animal weight, so I am left to guesswork (ok in the menagerie where there are real world examples of the animals, but just frustrating for the encounter tables) or coming up with some reverse engineering formula based on the physical stats (which is vaguely annoying).

What am I missing?

Movement
I can see the movement types; but can't seem to find anything anywhere as to what movement speeds the actual animals should have.

So I know humans can move 6/12/18m in a combat round (depending on how many of their actions they spend on movement), but have no idea/guidance what animal actual movement rates might be.

What am I missing?


I am hoping someone can help me with these two as they seem to be fairly important bits of information to me...

Franbo

WRT Weight, you're not missing anything. This is IMHO a serious flaw in Animal Encounters (and the main rulebook) - they do NOT tell you anything about how large the creature you're encountering is.

You can infer somewhat from the stats, but along with the lack of movement rate and some other issues, I consider this supplement to be a neat article idea about more detailed creature generation and a whole lot of unusable statistics.

(It's also worth noting that though there appear to be a huge number of encounter tables, they are ALL just the same table with the 'adjustments for other UWP data' modifiers. This whole book should have been an S&P article. And even then, it would still not have the size and movement data.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

It's the same for all characters as far as I can tell, as written down on page 60 of the core rule book (in the combat section under minor actions/movement).

In that case, how about any animal higher than your boot will have a faster speed. Then it is a matter of looking at the length of the legs of an animal to determine speed. Size interferes with their DEX.

 

[nats]

See here for an old post I made about speeds in MgT, as it was all covered in Classic Traveller and missed out of the MgT Core Rule Book for some reason:

http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?f=89&t=48618&hilit=animal+speed

The whole aspect of moving during combat in MgT is not very clear actually. I rule it now that you can move your normal move rate up to three times, if not attacking (three minor actions), or you can sprint as an athletics action if using the whole round to do so. And the tables in that post show how animals move relative to humans so 2x animals movement would mean the animal can move 2 times the speed of a normal human and this would also mean it could sprint at 2 times the normal sprint distance for a human.

Cant help you with the weight, you will need to add that into the animal supplement manually based on the Core Rule book weights, and perhaps a few extra weights to make really huge animals possible like I mentioned in the above post.

Its a shame animals are treated so sloppily in MgT because creature encounters for me are one of the most interesting things in any RPG. When you look at D&D its animals are so well detailed. I would love to see a decent Mgt supplement that replaces the terrible Animals Encounters one with decent animal generation procedure and lots and lots of pregenerated animals. I would do it myself if I had the time. But I have refused to buy the present MgT animals supplement, even though they are very interesting to me in Traveller, just because I know it will annoy me a lot far more than what I get out of it! I dont buy books to have to alter them with pencil and correct sloppy mistakes.

 

[Franbo]

Thanks Nats, that's very useful indeed.

I had spotted your other post, but assumed you meant something else since the ranges seemed very low to me (and I didn't scroll down to see the full explanation). That was exactly what I needed.

I guess I might try coming up with an algorithm to propose a weight in consideration of Str/End if nothing else crops up.

I understand your point on the utility of a Bestiary-type book, I am much more used to that kind of clarity as well (from other games). I also agree that animal encounters (when provided with plenty of atmosphere) can be great fun and a flexible way to set the tone (depending on the nature of the encounter) for a planet/location.

On the other hand; I also see the need for a "generic" classification system as well as there are so many different possible ecosystems available in the game that a single bestiary that could compass them would likely be an impossibility. From that perspective I don't mind the Traveller classification approach too much.

Luckily there are a fair few animal write ups out there, although it would be nice if published adventures/campaigns could include some typical examples of fauna for flavour when new planets are introduced/covered (although this might only really be worth the effort for the writer when significant portion of the planet interaction would be wilderness based).

 

[nats]

Looks like the new Lift Off rules are continuing the trend as well - cant see any weights or speeds in the animal rules in the new documents for that box set either. Hope they get it right this time around at least. I laughed when I saw the Allosaurus example (because I have added some dinosaurs into my rules as well) but then my first question on reading through it was 'if you were running away from it how fast would the thing run'?!

Regarding weights, yeah I just extended the Core Book table to show weight and damage ratios for much larger animals to include for things like dinosaurs, megalodon, blue whales and the like (which really need to be in Traveller adventures as far as I am concerned!)

 

[GypsyComet]

I could see getting along without weight/mass, BUT all of the things that used to derive from it (wounds, as one example) would then need to be arrived at with a different method. Granted, biology is not so simple as all that, but if weight/mass is a useful shorthand, why NOT use it?

The Animal Encounter tables have changed with every edition. This is not a recent or isolated event.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

CT had rules for determining the Speed of an animal, treating human speed as 1...

Most creatures ended up with a speed of 1 with the top speed being a Speed of 3 I believe.