How do they survive?

[pawsplay]

Cats often consume part of their prey, but often allow their kills to "season" over the course of days as they eat them, rather than trying to gorge themselves al at once.

 

[cattoy]

Cats often consume part of their prey, but often allow their kills to "season" over the course of days as they eat them, rather than trying to gorge themselves al at once.

How does that work if they can't inflict any but nonlethal damage?

 

[Mark Chance]

Ah. Must've had levels in Spawn of Satan. Ups the damage considerably, apart from anything else.

Evil little buggers.

And let us never forget the titantic housecat of legend!

 

[Aus_Snow]

How does that work if they can't inflict any but nonlethal damage?

If a creature's nonlethal damage is equal to his total maximum hit points (not his current hit points), all further nonlethal damage is treated as lethal damage.

And let us never forget the titantic housecat of legend!

Heh. So that's what it's called. My bad.

 

[Skytheen]

Several years ago, I had a 7th grade student get hospitalized for a day after being attacked by a domestic cat. The boy looked someone stuck his head in a blender.

Icky.

Cat confirmed the crit.

 

[cattoy]

Cat confirmed the crit.

Nah, cats do less damage when they crit.

 

[Wicht]

The rules can pretty much simulate an actual cat hunting a mouse.

The mouse, we will say, is tough and has 2 hp.

The cat does a pounce attack for 1 hp. The mouse runs. The cat chases and bats the mouse again - the mouse now has 0 hp and is pretty dazed. Now the cat toys with the mouse, picking it up, carrying it around and then finally giving it a good shake and kills it.

At least that seems to be how my cats do it.

You could also run cat vs. mouse as a grapple action. The cat grapples the mouse and then carries it around and finally kills it.

Incidentally, I would house-rule that anytime there is a negative modifier to the critical, the negative is never doubled. Otherwise, yeah, a cat getting a critical would have to do less damage or at least no more than 1 non-lethal.

 

[ST]

If you are actually interested in gaming out a cat catching a mouse, might I suggest the Cat RPG (Cat RPG). I think there are others, too. A cat would be extremely offended at your attempt to model them using characteristics like Str and Dex -- cats know they can do anything, and anything they can't do they didn't want to do anyway so there.

If I may be brutally honest, there are two approaches to this kind of problem in RPGs (the problem being stuff that's totally in a different scope or scale than anything the rest of the rules deal with.)

You can
A) Abstract it away by saying "GM Adjudicates", or
B) Meticulously model it in game, find it doesn't work right, add modifiers, scale, rescale, which is really just A dressed up in mechanics.

It's kind of like, the rules never say my guy goes to the bathroom, but I drank all that ale, do I need to roll to see if he explodes? No system models everything.

 

[ST]

Nah, cats do less damage when they crit.

Laugh point. My cat attacks me for subdual damage any time she's bored, I only start bleeding if she rolls a miss.

 

[El Mahdi]

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