Toothless Sharks

[Solophoenix]

I've been reviewing the rules for underwater combat (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/wilderness.htm#underwaterCombat), and I notice that pretty much every sea creature with non-tail natural weapons is supposed to take a -2 penalty to attack, and deal half damage.

Bite attacks, for instance, are Slashing, Bludgeoning and Piercing damage. As the advantage to piercing weapons is only implied by the penalties to the other types, we're forced to treat bite attacks as Slashing and Bludgeoning weapons, and penalise them.

Please tell me I'm missing something.

[Elkad]

"Land-based creatures can have considerable difficulty when fighting in water. ...... The effects are summarized in the accompanying table."

Table only applies to land-based creatures.

So a rat (which has a swim speed, but is a land creature) gets the penalty. An otter does not.

Edit: There seems to be some grey area in there. Anything listed as aquatic would be unpenalized. Stuff with a swim speed but not the [aquatic] tag might fall in the -2 category (rats, crocodiles?). Not real clear.

[Solophoenix]

Ah, thank you. I was looking in all kinds of places for something like that, should have just read the actual section more carefully.

[Solophoenix]

Edit: There seems to be some grey area in there. Anything listed as aquatic would be unpenalized. Stuff with a swim speed but not the [aquatic] tag might fall in the -2 category (rats, crocodiles?). Not real clear.

Plenty of things are water based without the aquatic subtype, as it basically just means water-breathing. Whales, porpoises, elasmosauruses etc. It starts to get a bit more debateable as you get into amphibians, because as far as I know, there's no official definition of "water based".

[Nashira]

Probably anything with an aquatic based environment (rivers, lakes, oceans, etc...) listed in its habitat section would be a creature definable as an aquatic creature.

[Solophoenix]

Probably anything with an aquatic based environment (rivers, lakes, oceans, etc...) listed in its habitat section would be a creature definable as an aquatic creature.

Well that just makes a stupid amount of good sense. Thank you very much!