Reviewing, Revising, and Finalizing Prehistoric Animals and Dinosaur Ecology

hamishspence said:

Some ceratopsians were bipedal, and looked a bit like pachycepholosaurs, their nearest relatives.

And they could get pretty small- the smallest all seem to be around 2 ft long.

Maybe there could be a "armour-headed dinosaur" group- bipedal and quadrupedal- ranging from Tiny to high-end Large for bipeds, and Small to high-end Huge for quadrupeds?

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Well as far as their 3E stats go I was thinking the bipedal Ceratopsians wouldn't be much different (if at all) from a "Generic Herbivorous Dinosaur". Maybe with a more powerful bite, but not much else.

Anyhow, I think we're better off concentrating on the quadrupedal ones to begin with. I've already got a updated Triceratops based on the SRD version which I think will serve well as the foundation of an Enormous Ceratopsian (e.g. "Huge and a Half"). Then it's just a question of scaling them down from there and picking some appropriate species.

e.g.:

Small Ceratopsian 1 HD, Str 6
Little Ceratopsian2 HD, Str 8
Medium Ceratopsian 3 HD, Str 10
Big Ceratopsian4 HD, Str 14
Large Ceratopsian6 HD, Str 18
Very Large Ceratopsian 8 HD, Str 22
Huge Ceratopsian 12 HD, Str 26
Enormous Ceratopsian 16 HD, Str 30

Hmm, those Strength seem too low for the smaller varieties. I think I'd better tweak it up by Str +2 across the board.

hamishspence said:

With modifications for horns (triple, single, or just a heavy lump rather than long horns.

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I'm not sure what difference, if any, there should be in the D&D stats of a 3-horned Ceratopsian and a 1-horned one. They will both do gore damage with their main attack. The lump-faced ones would do slam attacks instead.

That reminds me, I did wonder about giving them a Bite attack (Ceratopsians had enormous jaw muscles, sharp beaks and jaws full of shearing teeth, so their mouths were like big serrated scissors. They could probably have bitten smaller theropods to death with little difficulty.)

However, a gore attack can also cover that kind of slashing/slicing bite, is in the case of the SRD Boars, so I think gore alone will cover the jaws as well as the horns.

That raises the possibility that the lump-faced have a choice between gore and slam for their attack.

Another thing I am considering is giving the larger Hornfaces some DR/-, since they were probably pretty tough beasts.

Noticed a couple of errors in the attack modifiers of the Double-Taloned Maniraptors (they were a point or two too high).

Also noticed some formatting problems with the main Maniraptor entry.

I've corrected them.

EDIT: Also noticed that the Small Maniraptor had the wrong Dexterity in its ability line - Dex 19 when it should have Dex 17 like the Little Maniraptor (which is why all its Dex-based abilities are based on a +3 Dex modifier).

That's been corrected too.