What do you do with animals?

[cadriel]

When I'm populating dungeons, I typically pick a few rooms that I want to have something specific in them, and then populate the rest from the charts either in Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, or (more often) from the revised charts in Greyhawk. I find that this winds up putting a lot of centipedes and spiders and the like in your games, as well as giant rats, giant toads and giant ants. But Monsters & Treasure is pretty vague about what it actually means, and I guess that was on purpose. Still, I'd like to hear how folks here tend to run these encounters -- can a 1 HP centipede still do d6 damage? Can it do any? Are they really that vicious? What about spiders? And giant toads, that's just weird. I'm looking mostly for ideas and interpretations here. (And, if you've ever been killed by a centipede, the story as well.)

[coffee]

Centipedes have poison, don't they? Well, anyway, mine do!

Spiders can be vicious. (I had an AD&D hobbit with an 18 Con (+5 on saves vs poison) die from a spider bite because I rolled a 1 on my save. It happens.)

The thing to keep in mind, I think, is that any normal animal would have gotten the heck out of the dungeon environment. So whatever's left is going to be either so deadly the rest of the dungeon denizens leave it alone or so harmless nobody bothers it.

Anyway, that's my 2 cp.

[Random]

I think every beginning adventurer should encounter at least one giant frog. That's just me, though.

In an AD&D game, we once had a fighter get his neck broken by a nice yank from a giant frog's tongue.

On a more serious note, monstrous animals are great because pretty much everyone, even the uninitiated, knows immediately exactly what they should look like.

DM: You encounter a mass of screaming kobolds!
Player: What the heck are kobolds?

or

DM: You encounter a room full of gigantic scorpions!
Player: Holy smokes, I run like hell!

[scottenkainen]

>And, if you've ever been killed by a centipede, the story as well

Not centipedes, but poisonous spiders (lumping large-giant all together) are responsible for the third-highest tally of PC deaths I've personally experienced, after trolls (1st place) and devils (2nd place).

~Scott "-enkainen" Casper

[jcstephens]

I stick with the "1 life = 1HD = 1d6 damage" formula. If it can do enough damage, without poison or other special effects, to kill an ordinary human then 1d6 damage is appropriate.

"Must be some cockroach".

"Bite your head off, man."

[blackbarn]

I believe Gary Gygax stated in one of his Q&A threads at Dragonsfoot that the first character death in D&D was due to a centipede. Or perhaps it was the first monster fought in D&D... I can't quite remember the exact question.

That doesn't help answer "what do you do with them" but I think it's neat.

[scottenkainen]

I remember reading that. Giant centipedes was the first encounter in the original Greyhawk campaign (though I retconned this in my "Castle Greyhawk" novella). There was no mention of PCs dying that first session.

~Scott "-enkainen" Casper

[blackbarn]

Thanks for the clarification, Scott. Now that you mention it, I think the question was "What was the first monster killed in D&D?"