Skill: Animal Handling

[logan9a]

SKILL: Animal Handling (specify animal)


WHAT THIS SKILL DOES

Allows you to saddle, hook up to different things meant for the animal (plow, wagon, etc) and to calm it down when it is irritated or freaked out. Riding does not calm the animal. Once a snake goes for it your riding roll will probably be just to stay on the beast while it does something like run into a fire.

Also, this skill allows you to care for the animal. Unlike vehicles that we are able to get into today, turn the key and blithely go where we want and the only thing we have to remember to do is hopefully lock it and take it in for service occasionally, beasts are a huge daily pain in the ass.

If you don’t know how to take care of them (often twice per day) they will go lame, start missing patches of hair from the saddle rubbing because you don’t know how to adjust the flank cinch and so on. And the animal will come to hate you over time.

Also caring for the animal in adverse conditions.

Cars are easier.



HOW TO GET AROUND HAVING TO WORRY ABOUT THIS SKILL

In many medieval places, they often had inns/taverns every day of the normal journey length.

This is a great way (if you stay on the road) to just be able to toss the reins and some money to the stable person and say ‘take care of the horse!’ and go in to drink. Sure, they may screw up their roll but at least you didn’t have to roll it.

Or run everywhere like they did in the first Conan movie. See skill “Long Distance Running”.

[thad]

Do you need this for animals like dogs and cats?

And can it be for non-standard handled animals like leopards?

[logan9a]

Dogs if you want to train them.

Cats - I don't think they typically give a fuck. Training them would be at a negative. Finding videos of trained dogs is common; trained cats is much more rare.

Non-standard animals - it's possible but the PC's rarely have the time/inclination to bother with animals, unless they're sitting atop them. They've even made it a joke in many of the comics (like the Dan Harmon D&D one) where the animal disappears whenever it is actively not being used - simply because having to worry about something else, possibly while you're in combat, is a hassle. In addition, wild animals are always wild at heart. If the PC's wanted to train several say combat leopards, as soon as the smells and sights of combat started going all of them might end up going quickly berserk attacking anything near. Or running off. Attack dogs are much better though again you get in to the 'look at what a huge pain in the ass twenty dogs are'.