Encounter: Hard Hat Beetle

Hey Guys!

Changing things up, I decided to tackle an enemy with a different interesting mechanic. The Hardhat Beetle from the Zelda series has the ability to repel the player a great distance with each hit. They love slamming into the player, and usually exist in rooms with large amounts of floor hazards. Let's try to stat out this guy's power first, and then we can write him up as a beast.

The Bounciness

The bounciness is simply a crushing aura with no damage. Aura means that the effects occur whenever anyone gets within melee range of the aura. We can make a really bouncy enemy with a high level crushing attack with no damage, blunt trauma, and double knock-back. So to put an example together:

Bounciness (-20%): Crushing Innate Attack 3 (Damage Limitations, No Blunt Trauma, No Wounding, -70%; Damage Modifiers, Double Knock-back, +20%; Always On, Physically Inconvenient, -20%; Melee Attack, Range C, -30%; Aura, +80%) [12]

Note, it isn't actually necessary to stat this power out when writing up monsters. I only stat this out because the idea of this as a buff or racial advantage amuses me. Though, realistically, for a regular living thing, always on would be kinda weird, but I chose that because these enemies have the same unfortunate effect on other enemies as they do on the hero.

The enemy

So, now let's stat this guy out, let's shoot for a 20 to 30 CER; He skids around kinda weird, and has to accelerate a bit. This might be represented as having very low basic move, but enhanced move to make up for it. He likes doing slam attacks, and he is very resilient. Let's put all that together to start with:

Attack Skill	4	Active Defense	0
Affliction	0	Damage Resistance	2
Damage	9	Health	0
Fatigue Points	0	Hit Points	5
Move	10	Will	0
Total Offensive Rating (OR)	23	Total Protective Rating (PR)	7

So, he barely hits the very top of our goal range after fiddling with the numbers. His slam can at best do 2d damage, with an additional +2 for a high level of brawling skill. Representing this as an encounter we get:

ST: 10	HP: 15	Speed: 4
DX: 10	Will: 10	Move: 4 (Enhanced Move Ground: 16)
IQ: 6	Per: 10
HT: 10	FP: 10	SM: +0
Dodge: 8	Parry: N/A	DR: 2

Slam (14): Run into an opponent as hard as possible. Dice of damage is calculated as (velocity*max hp)/100. Remember to apply the bounciness to the knockback in addition to any knockback generated by the slam.
Headbutt (14): Range C, 1d crushing
Bounciness (Aura): When attacking, or being attacked with a melee technique, it's opponent receives double knockback as if struck by 3d crushing.
Traits: Overconfidence, Vermiform, No Arms, Berserk
Skills: Brawling-14

Other Notes

This is meant to be an interesting encounter for gamers who prefer tactical style battling. As mentioned before, he hangs out in rooms with lots of hazards so that he can push people into them. A stronger version might have homogeneous, or enough intelligence and tactics to specifically angle on purpose to get opponents into traps; by default they charge forward without thinking.The only thing they will not do is jump off a cliff without thinking. In the Zelda games, they can often walk on spikes or caltrops without trouble, so this might be represented as high DR on the bottom of their feet only.