| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
There isn't much that is core. You could use something like the Earn Income table with a task level of the creature and have what you gather be used towards the material cost of crafting appropriate things (or sold for a reduced value). If you're using this, I would scale it based on how long it takes to do the task. ie: if they can completely harvest a creature in an hour, you'll want to scale the earned value of the materials appropriately so they can't do it 8 times in a day and gain massive amounts of income.
Then if you've harvested from animals, you could use those materials at full value towards making things like food/leather armor/etc.
I'd consider Survival and Hunting Lore especially appropriate for this, but could be persuaded to allow other skills based on the type of creature (Religion to harvest magic dust from an undead corpse, for example).
If you're interested in third party content, the Battlezoo line has a "Monster parts" system that talks about this. I don't have it so I can't speak to the quality of it, but it exists.
Community & Social Media Specialist
|
In my experience, I've had GMs typical associate a task like this with an amount of time! Since we don't have any official material to draw from, a good place to start would be to add and subtract time based on how large or small an animal is, or based on how many limbs an animal has, or difficulty of fur vs feathers?
As far as written rules systems, it's pretty sparse/vague.
Survival would likely be used to harvest animal bits. And if you take the Monster Crafting feat, it would allow you to make things from them using survival.
However, it doesn't give details about what animals/monster can be used to make what, nor any guidance on what the value is.
Honestly, I'd probably just have the player make a survival check to Earn an Income, but the level of Earn an Income task would kind of be dependent on the "average" level of creatures in the area, which you would just have to choose.
There isn't much that is core. You could use something like the Earn Income table with a task level of the creature and have what you gather be used towards the material cost of crafting appropriate things (or sold for a reduced value).
That is what I would recommend as well. It gives real tangible benefits but without breaking the wealth and income balance of the game.
If you're using this, I would scale it based on how long it takes to do the task. ie: if they can completely harvest a creature in an hour, you'll want to scale the earned value of the materials appropriately so they can't do it 8 times in a day and gain massive amounts of income.
I also like this idea. It lets the scavenging be done as an hour long exploration activity instead of the normal day long downtime activity. Meaning that it can be done during a day of adventuring.
I agree that Earn Income is the best way to translate this into the game.
Tanning a hide takes between a few days and a few weeks. It takes an extensive list of tools and materials to accomplish. Simply skinning an animal and carrying its hide around is like carrying raw meat around; it will rot over time.
Check out something like 'My Side of the Mountain' or this wildabundance.net blog post for a simple rundown of the steps.
Now, specific animal parts, such as a venom glands or a torch bug's abdomen are harder to adjudicate. I'd suggest:
1-require an artisan's toolkit
2-take at least 10 minutes
3-use the level of the creature to set the a survival check DC to harvest a part and/or a crafting check to preserve it correctly
4-increase level if the creature is uncommon or rare
5-allow the part to be sold for the Earn Income amount of that same level
I agree that Earn Income is the best way to translate this into the game.
Tanning a hide takes between a few days and a few weeks. It takes an extensive list of tools and materials to accomplish. Simply skinning an animal and carrying its hide around is like carrying raw meat around; it will rot over time.
Check out something like 'My Side of the Mountain' or this wildabundance.net blog post for a simple rundown of the steps.Now, specific animal parts, such as a venom glands or a torch bug's abdomen are harder to adjudicate. I'd suggest:
1-require an artisan's toolkit
2-take at least 10 minutes
3-use the level of the creature to set the a survival check DC to harvest a part and/or a crafting check to preserve it correctly
4-increase level if the creature is uncommon or rare
5-allow the part to be sold for the Earn Income amount of that same level
Alternatively, you make it abstract such that the character is doing stuff to process/preserve the bits of the animal (presumably as they adventure). The hard bit is just figuring out what level to set those tasks at to provide the right amount of income.
Comparing to crafting, which can be done in downtime while adventuring at an on level task (because you can theoretically be crafting an on level magic item) would kind of set the "baseline" for how much income could be made.
Maybe some of these will help.
** Perhaps the character incorporates parts of their kills into themselvesto emulatetheir abilities.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
All of the Animal is in contention for the worst feat that Paizo has ever written and should be totally and utterly ignored.
With this feat you can take the carcasse of a moose and, since you're using ALL of the animal you can get enough meat to feed TWO entire people. Without this feat you'd be limited to only getting 950 lbs of meat instead. WHAT a bargain this feat is.
All of the Animal is in contention for the worst feat that Paizo has ever written and should be totally and utterly ignored.
With this feat you can take the carcasse of a moose and, since you're using ALL of the animal you can get enough meat to feed TWO entire people. Without this feat you'd be limited to only getting 950 lbs of meat instead. WHAT a bargain this feat is.
Technically without the feat you can only subsist, and not utilize the corpse of a particular creature...
Of course any GM who would run it that way would be kind of jerk and a moron. When a multi-hundred pound creature dies, it should provide a lot of usable animal products. Although, there is the potential need for checks to know if any of the parts of the animal are harmful to ingest. A great example being polar bear liver, which contains levels of vitamin A that is lethal to humans. Honestly though, consuming any carnivore is very risky without some magical ability to purify food and drink.And honestly, getting some kind of magic to feed yourself is usually one of those things characters end up with.
|
|
Technically without the feat you can only subsist, and not utilize the corpse of a particular creature...All of the Animal is in contention for the worst feat that Paizo has ever written and should be totally and utterly ignored.
With this feat you can take the carcasse of a moose and, since you're using ALL of the animal you can get enough meat to feed TWO entire people. Without this feat you'd be limited to only getting 950 lbs of meat instead. WHAT a bargain this feat is.
But the ONLY thing the feat does (despite the name) is to give you food. Ie, let you subsist. By using up the meat in the carcasse.
So, Technically, it lets you convert 900 lbs of food together with the hide, bones, etc into enough meat for 2 people for an indeterminate length of time.
I would look into the Battlezoo Bestiary’s monster parts system as mentioned with the link above in Tridus’ post. I got that book for the creatures, but this post inspired me to finally read the section on monster part gathering and now I wish that I had a player who wants to harvest monster parts. The system is balanced against the regular treasure that you normally give the players, but the harvester can also create special magical items after refining the parts - or you can just use the gold piece value for sale on the market. Better yet, you can hunt down certain monsters to get parts for upgrading and imbuing your current item with additional properties. All the rules are there and they seem to be well-balanced. You can dig as deep or as little into the system as you want.
Technically without the feat you can only subsist, and not utilize the corpse of a particular creature...All of the Animal is in contention for the worst feat that Paizo has ever written and should be totally and utterly ignored.
With this feat you can take the carcasse of a moose and, since you're using ALL of the animal you can get enough meat to feed TWO entire people. Without this feat you'd be limited to only getting 950 lbs of meat instead. WHAT a bargain this feat is.
But the ONLY thing the feat does (despite the name) is to give you food. Ie, let you subsist. By using up the meat in the carcasse.
So, Technically, it lets you convert 900 lbs of food together with the hide, bones, etc into enough meat for 2 people for an indeterminate length of time.
Oh yeah, no argument from me, it's a bad feat. It's worse than just using survival to subsist in 99% of cases. It's just that normal subsistence doesn't require a specific animal carcass to use. And absent some specific feats, there's not a mechanic specific to harvesting meat from animal/creature you've killed.
I guess my point is more, the rules around getting food are very generic and don't really take into account "hey you just killed a bear and want to eat it". And while a sensible GM will let this happen, All of the Animal does provide mechanics to do it, they just happen to be bad.
To your point, the average moose weighs ~800 lbs. Let's say, you're avoiding bones, antlers, organs, anything else that is inedible or maybe not safe to eat and you end up with 400 lbs of meat. 400lbs of meat should be able to feed lots of people for multiple meals. A human could probably eat up to 2lbs of meat in a meal (that's a lot of meat, but let's pretend it's the only thing you're eating). That's still 200 meals. For a party of 4, that's 50 meals.
All of the Animal let's you get enough food for 2 people for 1 meal, by using a large animal. If the feat instead used a tiny animal, I'm thinking like a rabbit, then maybe it's okay. But really, if probably should have just done something like "if you've recently killed an edible creature you provide enough food as though you achieved a critical success to subsist. At the GM's discretion depending on the animal, additional food can be provided based on the animals size." With some additional guidance on how much food based on animal size is available.
How are you preserving 400 lb of meat for more than 48 hours, much less transporting it around on an adventure?
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
How are you preserving 400 lb of meat for more than 48 hours, much less transporting it around on an adventure?
In this particular adventure path you're part of a nomadic group of 60 odd people who are basically hunter/Gatherers who have spent centuries living off the land.
So a group of hunters kill a moose. They'd dress it at the site and transport the food back to the following (or move the following to the moose, whatever).
And have a huge feast that night. And then make Pemmican or Moose Jerky or something similar the next day.
None of that is covered by the rules (nor should it be, its not what adventures are made of even in this AP). But any remotely competent GM is going to allow something like that to just automatically happen. Kill moose, lots of meat for the tribe for awhile.
I have several issues with All of the Animal
1) It doesn't do what it says it does (using All Of The Animal entails using a heck of a lot more than just the meat of a slain animal)
2) It is a skill feat that is in every way far, far worse than the forager skill feat
3) It is totally and completely unrealistic. To the extent that Claxton is suggesting changing it to requiring a Tiny animal instead of a Large one.
4) Arguably worst of all, if the GM is of a bent to follow rules very, very closely you now have a feat that says how much meat you can get from an animal. So. that means that without this feat you can clearly get no food at all. And you can get 2 meals from a moose.
As an aside, my 900 lbs figure for the meat from a moose came from
here
First non AI generated result from my search "How much meat is there on a moose". When I do research I try to spend nanoseconds if at all possible :-)
How are you preserving 400 lb of meat for more than 48 hours, much less transporting it around on an adventure?
Bag of holding and a preserving rune.
There are probably some other options out there.
And to someone else's point. When you get that kind of meat, you stop adventuring for a day and make pemmican to preserve it. If survival is really an issue.
The bigger issue is that feat saying you only have enough food to feed 2 people once.
How are you preserving 400 lb of meat for more than 48 hours, much less transporting it around on an adventure?Bag of holding and a preserving rune.
There are probably some other options out there.
And to someone else's point. When you get that kind of meat, you stop adventuring for a day and make pemmican to preserve it. If survival is really an issue.
The bigger issue is that feat saying you only have enough food to feed 2 people once.
May make more sense if you tie the 2 people to the size level. So if you take a medium sized prey you get enough for 2 if you take a large enough for 4 huge 6.
Also one thing to note is sure amount of meat is useful but not all meat is the same. Take moose for example if all you do is eat moose meat you will eventually starve because it has basically 0 fat. There are parts of the moose that are fatty but it is significantly less. You can use moose meat to bulk up other things but if all you have is moose meat you are going to be very full eating moose steak/jerky/soup all day every day for a while and slowly withering away while doing it.
Well Kaid, think about it like this. A medium creature is an adult human.
You're talking something that weighs at least 100 lbs. Even if we estimate only 50% of that weight is edible for any random creature, that still means like 50 lbs of meat.
Saying you can only feed 2 people with a medium creature is pretty crazy.
And we're also talking about subsistence and survival situations, not long term only living on the meat of 1 creature.
I just went and check on archives again all of the animal while not stellar for a feat is a solid upgrade over basic survival for subsisting. A normal role to subsist you have to get a crit success to feed two people.
All of the animal basically makes it so there is no roll if you have a large animal you will get enough food for two people.
The biggest issue with it is the forager feat is just all around better. it does effectively the same thing just better and eliminates some of the negative options on the survival roll as the worst you can do is success.
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I just went and check on archives again all of the animal while not stellar for a feat is a solid upgrade over basic survival for subsisting. A normal role to subsist you have to get a crit success to feed two people.
GM: Well, you killed a moose, now what?
Players: We dress the moose and take the several hundred pounds of meat back to the Following and have a feast!GM: Sorry, the ONLY way to get food is to make a subsistence check. You can't actually use the several hundred pounds of meat
Players: Are you actually serious? That is your ruling
GM: That is what the rules say so yes, I'm serious
Players : Ok, we all quit. Its no use playing with a GM as insanely stupid and rulesbound as you are.
We're about to go to level 4, so I've reminded him of the natural medicine skill feat and the herbalist dedication. Am I right in thinking that you can take both of those together at level 4?
Yes.