Archived from groups: rec.games.frp.gurps (
More info?)
In article <creioc$3us$1@news.service.uci.edu>,
LukeCampbell <lwcampbe@uci.thetrash.edu> wrote:
>
>
>Gregory L. Hansen wrote:
>
>>
>>Ground speed 12? I think you're under-estimating them. They've been
>>reported going as fast as 45 mph by a naturalist who matched speeds in his
>>car with one running alongside the road.
>>
>Measurements of the speeds of wild animals is tricky and full of
>errors. Chasing with a vehicle, for example, tends to overestimate the
>speed, especially if the animal curves while running (the vehicle will
>usually follow a wider curve, thus treaversing more distance in the same
>amount of time). All sorts of wild speeds have been measured for
>animals that were later shown to be either full of errors or at least
>atypical. This is not to say that my stats for speed are not way too
>low, they very well might be. Just to be careful when interpreting
>measurements of wild animal speeds.
They're at the high end of dog speeds, anyway. If you've seen a fox
run, it's amazingly different from the way a fox-sized dog runs. Light on
the feet, almost floating.
>
>I choose my speeds from a book by Dr. R. MacNeil Alexander about
>biomechanics. He notes that most wild cursorial specialists have speeds
>between 12 and 14 m/s (27 to 32 mph). Without specific data on animal
>speeds, I tend to assign a ground move of 12 by default. Note that the
>fastest domestic dogs, bred only to run and with extreme cursorial
>adaptations that would kill any wild animal, have well measured speeds
>on a racetrack of 16.7 yd/s (whippet) and 18.3 yd/s (greyhound) (at
>least as of 1950, a more recent record is 18.7 m/s for the greyhound).
>That's 34 and 37 mph, respectively (or 42 mph for the more recent
>greyhound record). Also note that exeptional foxes will have greater
>speeds than those for the average fox.
>
>>
>>I'd lose the Gluttony. Compared with a wolf, they can't eat a lot in
>>proportion to their body weight. A wolf lives by feast or famine. A fox
>>gets small meals, like one mouse at a time. Half the food they find or
>>catch they'll bury for later. They continually dig up old food and bury
>>new food, and will have prepared a number of burrows throughout their
>>territory. Finance and investing should come easily to a werefox-- it's
>>just a human twist to an instinctive behavior.
>>
>I am not sure gluttony is about how much you can eat, rather with how
>motivated you are for food when you are not hungry. In any event,
>mental traits like this are always arguable. Gluttony seemed to
>describe most members of the dog family, so I put it on the template
>(just like my cats are all callous and careful, my mustellids are all
>overconfident and impulsive and curious, and my reptiles all have low
>empathy). Feel free to drop it from the fox template in particular, or
>the dog template in general, if you don't think it fits. Maybe add
>Miserly instead.
Miserly might be appropriate.
It might be difficult to interpret how interested a wild animal is in
food when they're not hungry, because you don't know how hungry they are.
But dogs descend from wolves, which tend to catch something big, gorge,
and then perhaps not eat again for a long time. Foxes have a different
way of life than that. In many ways they're more like a cat than a dog.
With their slit-pupils, long whiskers, and other traits, they've caused
some controversy among 19th century taxonomists over how to classify
them.
It's tempting to call them solitary, but that's something they learn.
Mice and other fox food can quickly run into a hole, up a tree, or fly
away, so foxes depend on stealth, pouncing, and sprinting. A partner
just makes the job harder. But when food is easy to get (e.g. provided
by humans), they remain quite sociable.
As long as we're giving them traits, based on my own experience it's hard
not to assign them Paranoid. If they catch me sitting quietly a hundred
yards away they'll turn tail and run when other animals would ignore me
and deer would stare and snort at me. In my experience, they learn about
me and learn how to avoid me, even when they know I have food for them and
they want it.
>>I don't know if it will fit into a racial template anywhere, but unlike
>>wolves, foxes are comfortable living very close to people. They'll
>>come into people's yards, use the sidewalks at night, live in the little
>>strips of terrain that separate clusters of houses, and the neighbors
>>might never know. I don't think I saw anything like a gift for
>>stealth in the template, but it would be appropriate.
>>
>Good idea, or at least racially learned Stealth skill. I think I'll add
>this to my fox template.
>
>There should also be some GURPS advantage for being able to precisely
>locate things by sound alone, good enough to make an attack against it.
>Many dogs and cats, not to mention owls, have this ability.
From what I've read, they can locate a sound source (e.g. mouse) to about
an inch from ten feet away.
Might give them direction sense. They have an excellent memory for
locations. They cache food all over the place, and when they recover it
they rely mainly on memory.
--
"In any case, don't stress too much--cortisol inhibits muscular
hypertrophy. " -- Eric Dodd
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