How Dangerous Are Ploppers?

Question

After realizing I made it way too easy for people to become lethal monster slayers, I felt the need to create the Plopper.

So, what is a Plopper? Ploppers are essentially Chompers, but with a few key differences (due to fusion with a Plop, which has an in-story explanation. Comment if interested.) One, the shell. Their shell is about as hard as tooth enamel, but with the same tensile strength and flexibility as vulcanized rubber, and covered in slime like a snail's: sticky but lubricative.

Two, the limbs. Unlike Chompers, Ploppers have "arms"-four stalks, two on each side of its body, each tipped with a red egg-shaped orb. Their feet are still suction cups, but resting beneath and inside of these rigid suction cups is a slime-coated orb. This allows Ploppers to skate at speeds of up to 30 mph, and since these orbs are coated in what is essentially snail slime, they can skate up walls and even on ceilings.

Three, offense. Regular Chompers are about as strong as a 1 to 2-year-old, Ploppers are about as strong as a capuchin monkey. They aren't at the same power level as a wolf or a bear, but they can most definitely mess you up. As if that wasn't enough, they can vomit a Plop's powerful acid distances of up to six yards when they feel like that one guy with the glowy hammer might just be a legitimate threat.

Add in intelligence twice that of a regular raven, and you can see this is a problem.

Clarification (What Ploppers can Withstand):

1. Enamel is already very fire-resistant, and vulcanized rubber is more resistant to heat. With their slime, Ploppers can go through a flame and be perfectly fine. However, if trapped in sustained temperatures, their slime will eventually evaporate and they may die of suffocation or dehydration (or even disintegrate, if it's a hot fire) before that. Boiling water can kill them, by cooking their insides, but only if they're trapped for at least six hours in it, (Unless, of course, you're utilizing a geyser to do this.)

2. Cold and hot temperatures can crack and weaken enamel, so while they are about as weather-resistant as vulcanized rubber, they're still vulnerable to extreme temperatures in general.

3. Like Plops, Ploppers can survive just fine underwater (unlike slugs, FYI, which can drown) but they don't take cold water too well. It slows them down, can even freeze them. They can survive being frozen, but it makes them vulnerable to shattering and damage in general (since their shell can't bend in freezing temperatures).

4. Ploppers are (in my estimation) tough enough to take being thrown against a brick wall, being dropped from 1-2 stories up, and being jumped on by a heavyweight Italian (so no pulling a Mario here!). If one drops a large rock on a Plopper, chances are it will survive. If a boulder falls on one, no dice; it's definitely dead. A boulder rolling over a Plopper won't kill it, though it certainly won't be in its best shape afterward!

Ploppers also have a decentralized nervous system, like jellyfish, and their organs are packed in shock-absorbing gel, gelatinous and flexible as well, and simple to boot. In other words, they don't take damage from getting slammed or thrown around so well.

Specifications For Best Answer:

1. The best answer will analyze a Plopper's lethality (its ability to harm or kill medieval Europeans) and its CRD (Capacity to Resist Dying) to determine how dangerous it is. CRD is based off a monster's durability, and how hard it would be for medieval Europeans with medieval weaponry to kill or harm that monster.

2. The best answer will also take the Rarity of Plops and Chompers into account, which have populations akin to rats in the wild. Chompers often eat Plop, just because they are there, and that is how Ploppers are born; there is a 9 in 10 chance of a Chomper eating a Plop and becoming a Plopper, the tenth becomes a Spikagi or Whackigi, which is outside the scope of this question.

Answer 1

Defense First

Ploppers are very hard to kill without a weapon. Their hard, yet flexible shell makes a punch or kick virtually meaningless.

They are, however, small enough for a person to throw around with a single arm. A person who gets a good grip on one of its arms can whip it around and slam it repeatedly on the ground. Its only chance of survival is to use its other arms to scratch its attacker and make it let go. That would be very hard to do while getting rag-dolled around and suffering repeated concussive brain damage.

Give a human a weapon of any kind, and the Plopper dies in one hit. It's body is too small for its hardened/rubberized shell to stand up to the leverage of a typical melee weapon.

Offensive Capabilities

Their physical offense is petty. A capuchin monkey poses almost no threat to a human except in swarms. You even mention that they are less threatening physically than a wolf, and there are stories of people killing wolves with their bare hands, not to mention plenty of stories about people surviving attacks from wolves (although less from packs of wolves).

They do, however, have an acid spitting ability. Used from a distance while strafing their target at full speed, they could very likely incapacitate most targets relatively safely.

Combined with their high intelligence, I would expect them to hunt in packs like wolves with a very similar strategy.

Overall Threat Level = Wolves or Baboons

Ploppers are no more threatening than wolves to humans on open terrain. Their top speeds are similar. I would rate their offensive capabilities slightly higher than wolves because their high intelligence allows them to use their acid attack for offensive hunting instead of simply as an escape mechanism. Their defensive capabilities are probably a hair lower, however, as I'd expect them to suffer internal injuries much easier and faster than wolves.

They are also easy to hunt. A pack of humans larger than the pack of Ploppers will win a protracted conflict with no fancy strategy and using little more than clubs.

However, humans tend to bring the right weapons for the job, and in this case that's a glaive. Much like hunting a boar requires a specialty pike to ensure that it doesn't kill you after you impale it, hunting a Plop requires a 6 ft reach with a bladed weapon.

Ploppers are smart, so they know that they best way to hunt a target on open ground is by strafing them with their acid breath. This strategy, however, is fatal against a human whose reach with a single step extends more than 6 ft.

In a forest, however, Ploppers are smart enough to know that they should climb trees and drop acid from high above. This might not be enough to stop humans, however, as a solid hit from a thrown weapon or an arrow would knock it from the tree, daze it, and open it up to attacks.

My money says that Ploppers are smart enough to flee from the apex predator that is humanity and would content themselves with hunting easier prey the same way as most wolves will leave humans alone unless they're very hungry.

Answer 2

Savanna, Steppe, plain hill, a place with lot of sand/dust at disposal. they can slide so far until those slime-coated orb gathered all the sand you thrown at them (either in sack, modified sand bomb , wood dust, coal powder should worked too)

now they slowed, rolled down a log at them, this is not meant to kill but to stall the time from having them in firing distance. keep at it, eventually they will run out of gel/acid, covered in dust which will be much more easy to deal with.(you know the rest, drag to throw them off the hill, throw in cooking pot etc etc)

Answer 3

Alright then, we got an upgraded version of chompers to deal with, so following the advice of Sun Tzu, let's first know our little enemies before worrying about any battles and see exactly what they do:

1-intelligence: this is by far the most important thing to check, because how intelligent an animal is directly impacts how capable they are of problem solving and escaping traps and enclosures. Your ploppers are twice as smart as ravens, but how smart is that? Well it's actually pretty smart. Ravens can organize themselves in groups, hold grudges, plan ahead and have demonstrated to be on par with adult primates regarding performance in certain intelligence tests. Then what does it mean to be twice as smart as a raven? I'd say it wouldn't be that absurd to assume your ploppers are as intelligent as some early hominids, possibly as smart as a young Neanderthal or even a young human. What does this mean if it's an accurate assumption? It means that if you want to involve tactics like traps you'll need to understand you're not really dealing witha group of weird animals, you're dealing with an organized group of fast critters with potentially near-human levels of intelligence that can climb walls and spit an acid that reacts violently with organic tissue. That comes to show how much of a threat they can be, especially if they don't see humans as a threat they can't overcome. THAT WOULD BE if their nervous system wasn't decentralized, because that means it technically shouldn't be all that smart since there isn't really a cluster of nervous tissue to really specialize into a more capable brain, but because it's a magical monster I'll just mostly shrug it off and still assume it's a little dumber than your average human.

2-durability: this part was elaborated well. They can handle some fairly heavy blows, stand on a fire for short periods, are immune to any attempts to drown them.

3-mobility: these are some speedy boys, since they can out-sprint Usain Bolt as well as most humans in a normal sprinting chase. The fact that they can also sprint on the ceiling and on walls due to the snail slime means that they're probably hard to catch, especially within an enclosed space where they can just go to the ceiling (and vomit acid on you from there). This speed and climbing ability also means that, if they produced it at a fast enough rate or were able to control the output, which I assume they can to a degree, they could easily, due to their intelligence, just go to a higher ground and projectile-spit acid at exposed parts of humans targeting it, simply skating away to to safety if someone came too close (monkeys know how to throw rocks and understand sometimes they can reach places others can't, so this is far from an exaggeration). However, I don't think the egg-shaped thing with 4 little legs can jump well, so I'm fairly certain that if they want to go somewhere higher, climbing is their only real way.

4-offensive capabilities: like I already spoke a bit about, their acid attack is probably one of their best weapons, since their ability to climb surfaces and intelligence allow them to better exploit its potential. Other than that thigh, the only other attack options I see include variations of charging at a human's lower leg or biting them with their chomper mouth, both of which require getting very close. Sure they could potentially climb a person and give it an acid bath, but it would probably require it to use a lot, if not all of its acid reserves and thus would leave them stuck with their significantly less dangerous attack options until they produced more (yes they have a large mouth but it won't do much when you're the size of an elephant bird egg that can easily be grabbed by a person when you get too close, and before you think the slime would make it Hard to hold onto, they have 4 arms that end in egg-shaped orbs, so not as hard to hold as you'd initially think). These orbs could also hurt a bit if they were to use them to hit an enemy, but this is by far their least effective offensive maneuver, and most likely not something you'd normally see them using unless they've completely ran out of other options.

5-numbers: you said that 90% of all chompers that eat plops become ploppers and that both chompers and plops have populations comparable to rats in the wild. Now the problem in this is that 1-I couldn't find any exact numbers for what exactly that means and 2-in some wild places rats are an invasive species which multiplied absurdly and caused many problems to the ecosystem. Based on this it's hard to estimate, but I'd say there's a fair number of ploppers roaming around, which is a big problem due to their intelligence and potential to work in groups.

Summing up what we got from this analysis, if say that your poppers are a less capable, slightly less dangerous, less abundant and MUCH more family friendly version of the goblins from the show Goblin slayer. They're present in large enough numbers to be a threat but lack the necessary structures to become a more meaningful threat, like grasping appendages for tool use, being stuck with whatever they can manage with their natural abilities.

Threat level from S+ to F-: B-. The only traps they can really make involve luring you to a place where many others are waiting to gang up on you and give you an unpleasant acid bath. They can't use tools and can't jump out of the way, but their intelligence still makes them hard to trick and able to both plan ahead to a degree as well as hold grudges if you let one escape. Their main attack is clearly their acid attack, still don't think they're totally harmless. Not only they can still pack a mean bite if they manage to align their bodies properly, they can easily skate out of the way and away to a more strategic location. Their fairly large numbers also make them troublesome due to the fact that they can and likely will form, travel in and hunt in organized groups like you see in chimpanzees.

Now that we have analyzed the enemy, how do we prepare against it? Well if my comment has given any hints, I'd say the best strategy to fight these things include making not some omelets but some boiled eggs. If there were enough resources my strategy would be pretty simple:

Step 1- make a fairly large (preferably 7 to 8 feet) and decently deep moat around the entire village and preferably line its interior ground and walls with uneven rocks, including drawbridges for people to enter and leave. This combined with high enough walls makes it so ploppers attempting to attack the village must either enter the moat or use the drawbridges since they can't jump over it. Problem is that if a plop falls inside the moat, chances are they can't really get out, since their slime doesn't really work as well underwater and the uneven walls of the moat inhibit the use of their suction cups. This alone should already help you deal with invading ploppers, since their lack of tool using ability only gives them the option to dive in or to leave.

2-if you find a plopper stuck in the moat, get a group of metal boxes, use 8 feet long rods with a basket at the end and use it to remove the ploppers form the water, throw it in the metal box and close the lid. Poppers are smart, but without contact with the ground they're not very mobile and they have little to do to prevent this from happening. Carefully lock the boxes and use ropes to drag it to the proper place.

Step 3- light a big fire, toss the metal boxes in it. The ploppers will boil and cook within the box soon enough. After that, wait for the boxes to cool, open them up, take the dead plopper and hang it near the places with the most plopper activity or near where it was found. They may be smart and able to hold grudges, but they're also smart enough not to target the village that regularly exposes the corpses of those who get too close.

Like SirTainsaid, they might be very troublesome foes and even be an actual danger to someone unprepared, but they live in a world where humans exist, which means that the magic that spawns the 2 creatures that create them is the only thing truly keeping them from crossing with humans in a hostile manner without ending like the wholly mammoths. If they're really as smart as an hominid, they'll learn in no time that the hairless monkeys they attacked a couple times also hold deep grudges, and that avoiding them is always the smartest thing to do.