Biting

You can grapple with your bite. Make a grab with your mouth. If you hit, you cause bite damage as well as grappling your opponent. However, as with any bite, if your opponent parries and succeeds his usual weapon check after parrying an unarmed attack, he hits your head.

Every turn after you bite, you can cause extra damage by crocodile rolling, twisting, or shaking your victim like a terrier with a rat. See the Grappling and Close Combat house rules.

Your victim can break free by ripping your mouth off using the normal rules, but this causes your normal bite damage when doing so! If the victim can pry your jaws open, he can escape without taking extra damage, but this is difficult - you get a +4 on your roll to prevent his escape. Extra Jaw ST does apply here! The GM may require a Will check to rip off a bite unless the victim failed a fright check regarding the biter.

The Striker advantage can be applied to bite attacks, to reflect tooth structures that cause more damage than normal. Simply take the Cannot Parry limitation (-40%) and define it as a bite +0%.

Bites that cause crushing damage do not necessarily mean they only crush the victim! They can reflect jaws with sharp conical teeth designed for puncturing, gripping and holding rather than ripping and slashing. These teeth are common in the animal kingdom among creatures that prey on slippery wiggly food like bugs, worms, and fish, or among animals with powerful crushing jaws that would snap flimsier teeth. Crushing damage should be applied to any bite that has high penetration without causing all-that-nasty wounds, such as the bites of bone crushing scavengers, shell crushing snail or turtle eaters, and the like. While conceptually, these bites seem to be piercing (they poke holes in you), animal bites of these kinds cannot target the eyes or vitals, do cause extra damage to the throat, and cause extra blunt trauma from the sheer crushing power of the jaws, making crushing damage a better fit for the game mechanics.

Some appropriate bite types for different animals are listed below:

• Chewing bites are handled normally; they do thr - 1/die crushing damage.
• Gripping bites have short, sharp conical teeth for grabbing hold of small slippery, wriggly prey. These cause normal damage - thr -1/die - but have one or more levels of the Gripper advantage. These bites are typical of small insect eating lizards and fish eaters like dolphins. Snakes typically have gripping bites with several levels of gripper and a Weak Bite.
• Ripping bites have a upper and lower pairs of enlarged canine teeth or equivalent fangs. This is the standard killing equipment of all mammalian carnivores, as well as the weapon of choice of many primates (such as baboons and the apes). These are treated as Sharp Teeth, doing thr-1/die cutting damage. Animals with ripping teeth often have extra jaw ST: placental mammals that hunt prey as large or larger than themsleves (such as the giant cats, pack hunting dogs, and spotted hyenas) will have a total jaw ST should be about the cube root of the mass in kg × 3.5; Those that typically hunt game smaller than themselves tend to have jaws that are not quite this strong, foxes, jackals, coyotes, wildcats, and the like typically have a total Jaw ST of around their mass in kg × 3. Animals that are not typically hunters, such as bears, have the multiplier reduced to × 2.5. Marsupials have more room for powerful jaw muscles because they have smaller brains - and thus marsupial predator bites (such as those of the tazmanian devil, the spotted quoll, and the extinct thylacine and thylacoleo) are more powerful than those of placentals Give marsupial large game predators a total Jaw ST equal to the cube root of their mass in kg × 4.3. Marsupial small game predators (like the eastern quoll) can be treated like placental large game predators. Interestingly, the bite force available to the killing equipment of placental carnivores is the same for bone crushers such as hyenas as it is for wolves and lions. The powerful carnassal teeth (cheek teeth) of bone crushers can be treated as an alternate attack (crushing striker (bite, cannot parry, clumsy -3) that causes damage based on Jaw ST.
• Crushing bites are for animals with sturdy teeth and powerful jaws that have more penetrating ability than injury causing potential. This type of bite is common among crocodilians and is also found in the African monitor lizards and the theropod dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex. Crushing bites do crushing damage at -1/die, but the animal delivering the bite has plenty of extra Jaw ST. A total Jaw ST of the cube root of the mass times 5 is typical.
• Slashing bites have serrated, steak-knife teeth for causing huge gaping flesh wounds. These rip through tendons, muscle, nerves, and blood vessels to deliver massively bleeding, crippling injuries. Because the bladed teeth are more fragile than the simple round pegs that most other animals use, this type of bite is usually only seen in animals that can regrow or regularly replace their teeth (such as sharks and reptiles). Slashing bites are treated as a Striker (bite, cutting, cannot parry -40%, armor divisor 0.5 (not against skin or Tough Skin) -20%) for 3 points; they do thr damage at +1 per die, but DR is doubled against them unless that DR was taken with the Tough Skin limitation. Normal skin provides no protection, contrary to the usual rules for armor divisors less than 1. Examples of animals with slashing bites are modern monitor lizards, sharks, and most predatory theropod dinosaurs.

Animal mouths (including human mouths) have lots of bacteria. Many of these can become nasty if introduced into a wound. When any bite causes damage, roll to see if you aquire an infection. Use the base HT+3 roll for most bites. If the animal is primarily a meat eater or scavenger (and does not regularly brush its teeth), treat it as if infected matter (carnivore spit) is introduced into the wound, giving a HT+1 roll to resist. Some predatory animals may have tooth or mouth structures that cultivate truely nasty bacteria. Treat bites from these animals as if infected material (carnivore spit) has introduced a special infection into the wound, for a net HT-2 roll to avoid infection. The only animal known to use this technique in the modern world is the Komodo dragon, but some meat eating dinosaurs had the same meat-fiber trapping structures in their tooth serations and probably had the same infectious bite. Science fiction or fantasy animals (particularly the more loathsome of the dragons) may employ the same trick.

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