Re: [HOE] Maze Dragons and other big critters [Possible Spoilers]

["Scott Pedersen" <spederse@hotmail.com>]

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> I was looking over the rules for getting swallowed by
> a big animal. And it came to me, if an animal with a
> size of 24, say a large Maze Dragon, were to swallow a
> posse member. The poor brainer would then recieve a
> lot of damage for being in it's stomach. However, it
> says that you may cut yourself out by causing over 20
> damage with any weapon. Is this info correct? That's
> no even a wound on a critter with a size above 20. It
> therefore does not make sense that a posse member
> would be able to crawl out of a hole which is not even
> big enough to be a wound. If a human being can get
> through a hole that's not a wound, how big will the
> friggin' wound be????

First off, you might want to adjust the exact damage number required
depending on the critter, and the size of the posse member that's trying to
get out.  Secondly, damage that ends up counting for nothing is a
side-effect of the wound system in HOE, it happens all the time in all kinds
of circumstances (which is why a big size is so amazingly powerful).
Finally, it does make a certain amount of sense.  Damage that is under the
size threshold is still damage, it just isn't enough to cause penalties.
Consider the extreme case, the biggest of the big, the ancient rattlers.  It
takes just as many wounds to kill an ancient rattler as it takes to kill a
chipmunk, five.  However, a human sized hole is hardly even a pin-prick to
these behemoths, and certainly wouldn't move a rattler a fifth of the way to
death.  Meanwhile, a hole that was big enough to actually cause a wound
would probably be big enough to drive a truck through, so expecting a single
human to make a hole that big to escape seems unreasonable.  The maze dragon
is the same kind of deal, just a little bit less.  A human-sized hole just
isn't enough to slow one of these big guys down.  Of course the difference
between 20 damage and 24 is fairly small, so there's a good chance that an
escapee would cause a wound anyway.

As for the size of the wound, I'd guess an escape hole would have to cover
about 2 square feet.  If two square feet equals 20 damage, then 24 damage
would be 2.4 square feet.

As with all things, this requires a certain amount of common sense on the
part of the marshal in the extreme case.  While one person-sized hole might
not cause a wound, many person-sized holes would have to eventually bring
the beast down.

-Scott Pedersen