Real Lich Hours 13: Owlbears and Spiders
Added 2024-03-10 17:00:07 +0000 UTCEnough already about the Owlbear! We get it!
Comments
Hey! Owls are a special interest of mine so I thought I would respond to the anti-owl slander of this podcast episode. Mainly about owl cannibalism being stupid. Apologies for my humourless autism. Some owl nestlings will kill and eat their siblings and some parents will kill and eat their nestlings so the game definitely does get this right. However, it would be wrong to say that owls do this because they are stupid. Recorded instances of cannibalism among owls from nest box cameras show that owls consume their own family members under conditions of intense starvation. For example, in one case studied by Dr. Aaron Anderson from 2015, out of a brood of 5 Alaskan Boreal Owls, the three youngest owls were cannibalized by their siblings for food in order from youngest up, with only the eldest sibling surviving and the second eldest dying of starvation without being cannibalized. This shows that owl cannibalism happens in situations of real food stress, and that it is not indiscriminate, because Boreal Owl eggs hatch asynchronously, with the youngest being the weakest and unambiguously most likely to die. The owls will quite rationally consume their siblings with the least chance of survival and will work their way up to those with the best chance of survival. If there is a fight with one of the eldest trying to kill the youngest and it is not clear that the youngest is too weak to live, the brood will go back to huddling together for warmth, thereby saving energy. In a species that: 1) Does not hunt socially (like Corvids, or even a handful of other owl species), so there is little to no benefit to cooperation in numbers and 2) In which nestlings cannot forage for themselves because they are carnivores and need to actually have some skill at hunting and can't just eat plants that don't fight back or run This is a better survival strategy than the entire brood getting "party wiped" by starvation. The key point here is that owl cannibalism is very deliberate, and not a case of them being so stupid that they eat their own family. As with a lot of these things, people mistake owls being specialists for owls being stupid. As anyone who has just earned a degree that has been made unmarketable by AI will know, specialization makes you vulnerable in some ways, but people specialize because there is also a prospective payoff they're willing to gamble on. Owls are not all close genetic relatives descended from one ur-owl species. Recent genetic research has shown that they're actually a convergent evolutionary niche descended from various bird species in various separate places, and for the most part they have been surviving for centuries across very wide geographical areas. They are not like the Dodo, which could only survive in a highly isolated and noncompetitive island environment, and whose entire evolutionary family is now extinct. Calling owls stupid seems to me to be a mistake of failing to imagine what smart looks like when you are a being like an owl and not a being like a human.
Kyle Thompson
2024-04-08 22:44:40 +0000 UTCI have a weird order of doing things. 1) Runes 2) grove -all the chores in there 3) owlbear- Karlach 4) the blighted village (just the normal. Find infernal iron. Book and that dagger. The ogres. 5) sell stuff- a lot of time selling stuff (heck yeah i’m picking up that rotten carrot ) 6) buy stuff (mainly searching for hand crossbows) 7) Karlachs quest 8) hag 9) knolls in the cave and that stupid chest. 9) give chest back because they give you an awesome crossbow I’ve carried to the end 10) spiders (because them m-fers) 11) goblins I used to go from back to front (and secretly taking out the drums) but now I use that entrance in the front of the temple that you have to take out or break down the wall. I think that was the best suggestion you guys gave. Because I use that now all the time I mean I haven’t done that many play throughs I’m just saying. 🤣🤣😑🤫
Orins meat puppet
2024-03-14 16:25:27 +0000 UTCSo I found out that if you take to long in the owlbear fight the cub will attack. So I normally just cast hold on cub.
Orins meat puppet
2024-03-14 16:14:42 +0000 UTCOn my playthrough I'm playing as a druid, so I didn't kill the owlbear mom. When I eventually got to the goblin camp later they were actually terrorizing a chicken instead of the owlbear cub. I later went back to the cave and saw that the mom owlbear had died, and then I went back to the goblin camp and the goblins had changed the chicken out for the owlbear cub. It's so cool how much this game considers a player's actions on the world and accounts for various scenarios.
Patrick Swearingen
2024-03-13 04:23:38 +0000 UTCMy Durge and I will sleep peacefully at night, knowing mama owlbear was probably an asshole. Thanks!
Spencer Johnson
2024-03-12 02:12:29 +0000 UTCOwlbears are sort of real assholes in DnD. But yeah, he can join in, depending on where you take the fight. I stand corrected! I usually lure the mom to me, and leave the cub out of it. -GB
Duckfeed.tv
2024-03-12 01:59:13 +0000 UTCLove the show! It boosts my enjoyment of the game. I’m doing two simultaneous playthroughs to experience areas in different ways before hearing about them on the show. Here’s a correction and question. You said the owlbear cub doesn’t join the fight. For my 2nd character the cub attacked me with the mom. I wanted the cub, so I had to knock it out carefully non-lethally and then dispatch mom. Some players say they don’t want to hurt innocent animals, so they don’t hurt the cub. Yet they—and you guys—seem pretty accepting of killing mom. On my first encounter I backed away because I didn’t want to murder its mom—and right in front of it to boot. For my 2nd character—my Duergar who partially resists the dark urge—I decided I’d give in to killing mom and try to keep the cub. BG3 is my first D&D experience. Does something in D&D lore limit sympathy for owlbears? Or do people just really want that cub?
Spencer Johnson
2024-03-12 01:53:56 +0000 UTCLittle bit of feedback, I feel like the Sage Advice segments tend to drag. I would extend out the lets play and lore bits but that could be a personal taste thing.
Corbin
2024-03-11 15:51:24 +0000 UTCYou don’t need to resolve the Goblins to get Owlbear to follow your scent. after Volo gets off the stage I did an animal handling check on the owlbear and asked it to follow me to camp, but it responds that I need to save it from the goblins. Then you do the race for money and after intimidating the goblin for my winnings I can say, « btw I’m taking that owlbear too »
Jonah Guibbert
2024-03-11 08:35:39 +0000 UTCI’ll always befriend Scratch and the owlbear cub. And I started to use Scratch as an adventuring companion with goods results. But I quickly stopped using him due to a couple of things: First, he started to sniff a crate on the risen road and run into the gnolls, agroing them when I wasn’t prepared. The second was when I reached Grimforge and was ready to free Nere. I thrown a smokebomb and, every time that I thrown it, Scratch picked it up and gave it back to me… he was sure that a dinamite grade bomb is a good catch toy! From now on, he sits in camp babysitting the owlbear cub.
Rodolfo Katz
2024-03-11 07:34:18 +0000 UTCFalling down via cutscene and hitting the ground and dying was how I learned about the Underdark ahaha
Mateus Silva
2024-03-11 01:39:54 +0000 UTCYou can convince shadowheart to think of it as looting Selune for resources n she’s down for that. And in there is an idol of selune which my first dude who was romancing her gifted her n she carried it around the whole game. Lmao
Mateus Silva
2024-03-11 01:09:16 +0000 UTCBringing Beavis and Butthead in here really helps with the honor mode fight but the caveat is the balding bastard will go after the cub?? It’s so rude. I ended up having to surround the cub and take attacks from it while fighting the mom n pop and then I sent them to the camp and killed them along with the goblins.
Mateus Silva
2024-03-11 01:02:09 +0000 UTCIf you sneak around to take out of all of the egg clutches prior to combat with the Matriarch, it actually completely obviates the Honor mode legendary action. The gossamer tomb will only proc if you attack the spiderlings while in combat mode.
Ryan Bennett
2024-03-10 20:11:16 +0000 UTC“Why do I always give in to Owlbear? It’s his skull, it’s hypnotic!”
Ethan Vaughn
2024-03-10 17:41:27 +0000 UTCYou sound very delicious. But I will not eat you. Baby owlbear promise
Matthew Sumption
2024-03-10 17:12:15 +0000 UTCI'm sorry fellas...I just need more that gosh darn Owlbear!
Joe Binson
2024-03-10 17:05:00 +0000 UTC
