So, I’ve said this before as a bit, but monster hunting wouldn’t really be about combat most of the time. There’s probably some edge cases, like vampires, where you’re fundamentally looking at a human with superpowers, but against the vast majority of critters, monster hunting would be more like, well, hunting, or pest control.

If the monster is exceedingly lethal, you don’t want to be getting into fights with it. That means taking a more methodical approach to identify and exploit weaknesses, and then eliminating it like any other pest.

Ironically, while the book is a bit crude at times, one of the first examples that comes to mind is Vampire$ by John Steakley, (and the film adaptation by John Carpenter.) The priority there is to identify vampire nests during the day, then use specialized stake guns attached to winches to drag the vampires out into the sun, before collapsing the building entirely.

This means, you’re probably better off looking at people with backgrounds in animal control, exterminators, park rangers, game wardens, and similar backgrounds, rather than military or law enforcement backgrounds. (Though, technically, rangers may fall under the header of LEOs.)

Effectively dealing with any animal (and most cryptids tend to fall into this category) involves learning about its behavior. Now, obviously, if you’re dealing with some incredibly reclusive creature that’s evaded detection by the modern world, it does strain credibility a bit when someone wanders in with a complete understanding of their behavior. (See: Every bigfoot expert ever.) But, the basic premise is foundational if your characters are going to go out hunting those creatures.

When you’re dealing with more overtly supernatural foes, then the focus on information they’d need would change somewhat. But, in a lot of ways, the same template holds. It’s critical for your hunters to understand the limits and favored behaviors of those creatures.

Now, obviously, you can have very different approaches. I was recently reminded of the old World of Darkness Demon Hunter X splat, where one of the groups detailed (in a modern urban fantasy setting) were using extensive cybernetic augmentations to directly fight monsters (with a very anime inspired aesthetic.) If you have the setup for it, you can go in really wild directions with your urban fantasy monster hunters, and the advice of a relatively low-power group that treat cryptids the same way you’d treat a rat infestation might not be applicable. Similarly, hunting vampires and werewolves may involved more conventional, military tactics, if that’s what you’re looking for.

It does depend on what your story calls for, and I’ll readily admit, my main observation here has more to do with how modern horror writing tends to present these creatures, and then looking for a practical solution to the problem they pose. (Also the juxtaposition is funny. You start out expecting Blade, and instead get some random guys in jumpsuits with animal control poles, who are going to grab the horrific deathbeasts, stick them in crates, and ship them off to a preserve in Montana.

-Starke

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CQC and CQB are blanket terms. These are abbreviations for Close Quarters Combat, and Close Quarters Battle. Describing either as a combat style is an awkward application of the term. You’ll sometimes see either term used to categorize the intended use case for a weapon. Especially more compact weapons.

For example: Clearing a house, or dealing with tight alleyways, are likely to result in CQC if combat does occur.

Also, the terms evaluate the distance between enemy combatants, so technically CQC can occur in open spaces, it’s just more unlikely.

You might encounter someone using CQC as a shorthand for any melee combat. That’s technically not quite right, but it’s not wrong.

CAR is a handgun stance. Short for Center-Axis Relock, CAR was developed by the late Paul Castle. It is designed for using handguns in CQC. The stance is built around keeping the handgun very close to the body. This has two direct features. First, it’s very hard to disarm someone using CAR in hand-to-hand. Simply put, there’s not a lot of good access to the pistol. Second, and a related feature, you can use the handgun in far tighter spaces than you could in a more conventional stance like Weaver. Again, this is because the pistol is close to the body. The trade-off is that it’s less stable and accurate than Weaver. Ideally, you don’t need to worry about those, because of the ranges you should be using CAR at, but, you may find people who try to use CAR longer distances.

John Wick is probably where CAR got the most attention, though it’s not the originator of the stance, and the films include a lot of material that’s completely unrelated to CAR. Even in the film, Keanu regularly switches between CAR and Weaver stances (though, he’s not always switching to Weaver when it would make sense to do so.)

I think it would be fairly obvious, but in case it’s not, if you don’t have a handgun, there’s no way to practice CAR. It’s not some martial art where you can use a handgun, it’s literally just, “here are a few ways to hold a gun so you can use it effectively in tight spaces.”

CQC is just, “a fight is happening and everyone’s really packed in there.” It could be guns, could be knives, could be fists, could be tire irons, but there’s not a lot of room between the fighters.

-Starke

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So, there’s two approaches to this. Like you, I’m not coming into this with a lot of prior knowledge, so this is from some very cursory research.

The first one is, simply put, they’re not suitable. Rhinos tend to be a bit too aggressive to take a rider. This isn’t 100% true, and there are rare examples of rhinos that were willing to take riders (though the only examples I’ve found have been singular parings of a rider and animal, not rhinos that would take whomever.) The aggression might sound like a good feature, until you realize the animal will also be aggressive towards its potential rider.

Also, interestingly, rhinos appear to have limited eyesight. The estimates I’m seeing suggest it drops off sharply at ~25ft. That would make them less than ideal for use as shock cavalry. They’d be fine once they were in contact, but getting them out and maneuvering them around would be a pain. (I’m going to point out, this “fact” isn’t particularly well studied. So, it might be somewhat incorrect, but reportedly does appear to reflect how the animals react towards humans approaching them.)

Put those together, and you’ve got a recipe for an animal that will identify its rider as the problem, and then go after them, without any awareness of the enemy army.

The other option is to simply go for it. It’s not something you could do in the real world, but if you’re accepting that as break from reality, you could simply roll with rhino cavalry as part of your world. Granted, this works better if you have an overtly fantasy setting, rather than one trying to maintain a veneer of realism.

If you’re wanting to go this route, then you’ve already answered your question. Using the rhino riders as heavy shock cav, and probably relying (at least partially) on the rhinos themselves to participate in the carnage. At that point, the real world considerations of the animal don’t really apply, because your rhino riders are riding something other than the real world animal.

So, you’ve got options.

-Starke

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So, I’m probably missing something here, but “keeping” the knives backwards?

There are a couple ways to read that which make perfect sense. One is the reverse grip. There are reasons to carry a knife in a reverse grip (meaning, the blade protrudes past the pinky finger, rather than the ring finger.) The first thing that comes to mind is the karambit. This a curved knife which is intended to be used from a reverse grip (though, it can be used in a forward grip as well.)

Another thought is that in a reverse grip you can conceal the blade along your forearm before striking. Because the blade doesn’t (noticeably alter) the wielder’s silhouette it has a significant impact on limiting their victim’s ability to see the blade. An experienced knife wielder can quickly and easily switch their grip, so they’re not limited to reverse grip strikes from this starting position.

From a throwing perspective, an experienced knife user (with a lot of guts) can simply drop their knife and catch the blade before throwing. There are multiple ways to throw, and the one I’m most familiar with is a spinning throw while holding the blade. Actually doing that is not a great idea; it’s unnecessarily risky, but it is the kind of thing you’ll see in fiction from time to time. (It’s probably easier to simply to reverse it into a forward grip and launch the knife into a flat throw. But, that’s the one I’m less familiar with.)

If the intent was that the character was wearing their knives with reverse sheathes (meaning the knife is carried blade up on the body), that’s a personal preference, and has more to do with how they reach for their weapon. For example, a vertical sheathe on the chest (whether blade is up or down) can be very easy for a practiced fighter to reach and draw. (If the blade is up, it will easily draw into a forward grip; if the blade is down, it will draw into a reverse grip.)

Incidentally, if you’re wondering how you keep a sheathed knife in a blade up position, you’ve got options. There are pressure sheathes which will hold the knife in position until pulled. There are strap options that are a bit more secure. It depends, but it can be securely held until needed.

Now, it’s just a joke that the character is throwing their knife behind them, when they get ready to launch it, that’s not really going to happen. It’s the kind of mistake someone might make once or twice when they first pick up a knife, but learning how to hold and throw a blade isn’t that difficult, and the motion bringing the knife to ready for a throw isn’t (or, shouldn’t be) forceful enough to have that result. Your arm is not a catapult or bow, the energy going into readying the knife doesn’t need to be equivalent to the force of release. You’ve got the electrically excited meat to generate that force, and you don’t need a lot of energy to get that knife moving.

For a character without a lot of combat training, knives are one of the worst weapons you can hand them, and throwing it makes things even worse. This is one of those blindingly obvious statements, but, if you have a knife, and you throw it, you no longer have a knife. You have just surrendered your weapon, and are now unarmed. (Obviously, if your knife was a backup, you might not be unarmed, but you’re still giving up a functional weapon, until you can retrieve it.)

Even without considering throwing, knives are exceptionally lethal in the hands of an experienced wielder. An inexperienced fighter armed with a knife, is not going to stand a reasonable chance of surviving contact with the enemy. So, someone equipping an inexperienced fighter with a knife has already made a horrible mistake. It’s a deceptively high-skill weapon, being put in the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to use it.

Beyond that, if someone is training for a full year, and not seeing any progress, that’s a personal choice. They’re either disengaged entirely, or their teachers are completely incompetent (which, might track with the part where they decided to start her off with a knife.)

With most weapons, you should see practical competence within a few weeks of regular training. When you see longer time frames like this, it can either reflect a weapon that is exceptionally difficult to use (such as the urami, I’m not sure how long it takes to train on one of those), that the writer has severely dropped the ball, or that they’re letting their biases show.

In this case, it’s probably the latter. That’s not the kind of mistake someone’s going to reasonably make more than once.

So, in answer to your original question: Yeah. It kinda is. It’s a little harder to say who that reflects on, but it isn’t a reasonable mistake to make.

-Starke

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Inelegantly and briefly. The golf club isn’t particularly well suited for use as a weapon. Most attacks have large, telegraphed swings, that are easy for a trained foe to counter or evade.

Ironically, one of the more “realistic” depictions I’ve seen was from the film Suicide Kings (1997) where it’s used to ambush someone seated at a booth. Because the victim is pinned, his options to defend himself are extremely limited, the attacker can just flail away on him. The attacker also breaks his club during the attack. (And, it wouldn’t surprise me if Dennis Leary broke the actual prop shooting the scene.)

Which is a bit of a theme, given the use in Bioshock also results in a destroyed club. Fragility is a problem with a lot of improvised weapons, and the golf club is no exception. Just because it’s designed to hit a 1.6oz (46g) ball, that doesn’t mean it’s well designed to kill another human being. That thin shaft is not meant to sustain combat damage, nor is the head designed to remain attached when you start slamming the club into large sack of watery meat with the distressing habit of leaking and screaming.

So, what you’re left with is a disposable, improvised weapon that a character can probably use briefly, but in the process it will be ruined and discarded. That cuts hard against it being used as a serious weapon.

Ironically, the use in Bioshock does nicely illustrate one potential application. Because the club will start to fail quickly, it makes the ensuing murder feel much more brutal, than if Jack used the wrench.

Dogma (1999) is another. In that case, the absurdity of killing a literal demon with a golf club is more used for comedic effect (because it’s a ridiculous weapon), with the punchline, “[he’s] the kind of asshole who’d bless his own clubs.”

It’s also, probably, pretty telling that both of the film examples that come to mind (at least for me) are comedies.

I can’t think of anyone trying to do this seriously beyond a couple swings. I can think of a few cases where someone gets their hands on one and uses it in a single scene before discarding it, but in spite of the name, it’s really not a weapon, and can’t be converted into a weapon the way a baseball bat can.

They do pop up in video games a little more often. Though, those tend to be games that bend a little more towards the absurd (Dead Rising, Fallout: New Vegas, and I’m pretty sure they’ve showed up as options in the Hitman games and Dead Island.)

Ultimately, the golf club really isn’t well suited for life as a serious weapon.

-Starke

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So, something that stuck out to me originally, when reading this is, most snipers are going to have a close range PDW. Whether that’s just their sidearm or something more substantial, they’d need to be proficient with something in close quarters if it comes to that.

Now, the hard part about answering this question in the abstract is that, almost everything associated with firearms is extremely date sensitive.

For example, if your CQB/CQC character was originally trained sometime in the late 90s to late 2000s (in a Western country), they’d have likely encountered Center Axis Re-lock. Outside of those 20 years, then that style hadn’t seen widespread adoption, or had fallen out of favor.

For some specific film examples, Vincent (Tom Cruise) from Collateral (2004) would have been working as an assassin for at least a decade by the time we see him in the film. We can make this assessment based on the way he handles the USP, and then compare to CQC training. His one-handed disarm and execute he uses in the alley puts his training sometime in the 80s to 90s at the earliest, while his lack of CAR in close quarters tells you he didn’t have Western military or law enforcement training after the mid-90s.

Another film example that might surprise you is John Wick (Keanu Reeves). In those films he exhibits CQC training that suggests he still in the military less than 15 years before the events of the first film. Except his CAR stances are actually a little sloppy (which is unusual for Reeves), which suggests that Wick may have observed others using the stance, and then improvised a version of it for his own use. Meaning you can’t really estimate when his combat training occurred. (This might also might explain why he’s a bit sloppy about when he switches between Weaver and CAR.) By the way, it is quite difficult to pick this out. It took a few experts dinging on the first Wick film before I really started picking up on the issues with Reeves’ technique. And I haven’t seen anyone else draw the conclusion that Wick is probably self-taught in CAR. (This was corrected for the later films, as Reeves did get proper training in CAR in preparation for the second film.)

In particular, this is a singular example, but there are a lot of things someone can do that will inform you about their background and training. This starts with weapon selection. Things like their preferred sidearm and primary can be very insightful. People tend to go in one of two directions with firearms. Either, they’re very willing to adapt and experiment, or they’ll find something they’re comfortable with and hone in with that specific firearm.

For example, is your sniper carrying around a Remington 700, or something like an MSR or AWM? Both are legitimate answers, but they say very different things about how your character approaches their area of expertise. Similarly, are they carrying a 1911 pattern pistol, or something more modern, like an HK USP or FN P45?

If your sniper is carrying around an AMT Hardballer, and your CQC specialist is carrying around a P45t, your CQC specialist has twice the magazine capacity. They can afford to dump rounds into someone until they stop twitching. Where as a Hardballer is “just” an extremely well made 1911. Their kills are going to look different, but it’s a function of the weapon they chose.

Without knowing what they’re carrying, it’s very hard to answer definitively how their kills will look.

If it was me, kitting out for CQC in a situation where I’d need to hide the weapon under a jacket, I’d seriously consider an AAC Honey Badger hidden under a sport coat. (I know, I trash talked the Honey Badger a few years ago, before getting a good look at one and seeing just how tiny they are. Mea Culpa. I should know better than to shit on a gun I’m unfamiliar with by now. That’s a toxic element of gun culture I’ve been trying to get away from. It still clings a bit sometimes.) Similarly, the Mk18 and Colt 733 are also pretty good options. That’s a little bit of an M4a1 bias, but it’s a decent platform. There are other valid options, those are just the first that come to mind for me.

If your character was kitting for CQC, and wanted Warsaw pact weapons, the Groza is a bit exotic, but that’s what it was designed for. The SR-3M Vikhr is an update of the Val, and a pretty legitimate choice. They’re both 9x39mm rifles, so long range accuracy isn’t happening, but in close quarters they still hit stupidly hard. Granted, any Krinkov would work in that role. (So, mostly AKS-74Us.) (I think there were some 7.62x39mm Krinkovs, but I can’t remember the name.)

So, ultimately, identifying the differences between the weapons, starts with knowing what the weapons are. Having a basic idea of how they handle (even if that’s not first hand), and then being able to see how they differ from one another. This is made even harder in the sense that modern firearms have become extremely modular. Given the option to fully kit out the same gun for you CQC specialist, it’s a pretty good bet you and I would walk away with distinctly different end results. Even if the base model was the same. (For the record, I’m not saying my configuration would be better. I have biases and preferences that aren’t necessarily the best option available.)

The best place to start, is looking at the kinds of weapons your character would use. Your sniper’s going to want a long range precision rifle and a sidearm. She might also go for a small machine pistol/SMG. Your CQC specialist would probably prioritize an actual primary. That might be an SMG, a carbine, or even a shotgun (because nothing says hello quite like three or four 12 gauge shells pumped out of a fully automatic Saiga. (And before someone corrects me, yes, I know, there are no production full-auto Saigas, however they can be illegally modified for full-auto.)

Once you know how different the weapons are, you can start digging into how the characters themselves approach combat, and how their respective styles differ.

-Starke

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So here’s a fun thought to play with. A leather jacket is made from treated animal hide. In most cases, they’re actually softened a bit to be more comfortable.

Shotguns are frequently used to hunt large game. Large game where their primary form of armor is their skin. Their skin which does almost nothing to stop a shotgun blast.

So, unless it’s loaded with something like rocksalt, a leather jacket is not stopping a shotgun.

In answer to your original question, “what kind of wounds?” Catastrophic ones. It would be really messy.

Also, remember shotguns are still usable up to ~100 meters, at which they’ll have a roughly 2m spray pattern. Getting hit by a shotgun, even at 50 meters, is going to be really bad. It’s a bit like hitting someone simultaneously with a hail of small caliber rounds. Individually one piece of shot isn’t likely to be lethal, but get hit with five or six of them, and that’s a real problem. It’s going to create a bunch of wound channels, and each wound has a chance to hit something vital, or ricochet and try again. And even at best, you’re going to be losing blood from each of them simultaneously.

As for actual armor, most Level III or higher armor should stop a shotgun blast. However, shotguns are pretty good at damaging body armor. So someone wearing a ballistic vest who takes a shotgun hit, probably isn’t going to be safe from the next pistol round that hits their vest anywhere near where the shot landed.

Similarly, with plate carriers, it should be fine, but there’s a real risk that some of the shot chipped the plate. That’s not going to cause the next shotgun blast to punch through, but it does mean that carrier now can’t be trusted to stop rifle rounds.

Now, none of that are things you usually obsess over. For the most part, ballistic armor is single use anyway. If you’re wearing a Kevlar vest and get shot, it’s time to replace that vest. So, having your vest soak a shotgun hit isn’t some kind of special tactic on your enemy’s part, and is really just your vest doing its job.

Against unarmored targets, shotguns can be downright horrific.

So, using a winter parka to stop a shotgun blast is probably the result of someone who heard the, “shotguns are horrible at armor penetration,” line and took it a little bit too seriously.

There are some AP shells out there. Including slugs that market themselves as armor penetrating. I’ve never looked too deeply in to these. I know of their existence, but not how effective they actually are.

There’s also probably some close quarters scenarios where a slug might punch right through body armor, even though, generally speaking, slugs lose energy extremely quickly, and at mid to long range, they’re not going to penetrate. Ultimately, it is an 18mm bullet without a lot of powder behind it, so the drop off makes sense, but it’s still a lot of mass to deal with when it’s leaving the barrel. Even if your armor holds up, taking that hit is probably not going to be fun.

-Starke

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But also on the other hand, Pokemon don’t always obey their their trainers (usually a trust issue) but perhaps this actually could be a good thing and help turn that disadvantage around since if they trust each other enough for the Pokemon to respond appropriately by themselves if they feel the trainer is making a bad call or not quick enough to respond to an attack called out by the opposing trainer. What do you think? Any other ideas?

Something to remember: Pokemon is a game. I don’t mean in the meta-sense that the anime and ancillary materials are based off of the video game and card game, the way you could, for example, describe the Fallout TV series as based on a game. I mean, literally, that the structure of Pokemon itself is a competitive game.

When you start stripping it apart, and really dig into the structure, combat in pokemon is a game where the trainers are the players, and their pokemon are the pieces they’re using on the board. This is an important concept to grasp when you’re dissecting the material, because it informs why it functions.

There is a concept in games called an action stack. When you’re playing a strategically intensive game, you’ll often come across some version of this concept. Basically, you announce your action to your opponent, they then get an opportunity to take a legal response (if one exists), and then the action resolves. In situations like this, calling out your actions is a necessary step in keeping your opponent apprised of changes in the game state. It’s also (often) necessary as a step to give them the opportunity to respond (whether that’s part of the same action stack, or as a following action.)

Now, much like in Pokemon, in casual games, these kinds of declarations, and even the structure of the action stack itself, can become very ad hoc. You wouldn’t do this in a tournament environment, but in casual circumstances you’ll see players doing things like say, “I’m playing this,” or just drop the card on the table as part of their appropriate action window. (Though, again, this behavior is extremely rude in a tournament environment.)

As you mentioned, the instructions given by the trainer is, technically, for the Pokemon’s benefit, rather than the opponent. Also, pieces on the board not following the player’s commands is a concept that does exist in some tabletop games. For example: if you botch a Leadership test in Warhammer, you’re not going to get the results you were hoping for.

So in this specific case, being privy to your opponent’s actions ahead of time is really more an example of intelligence gathering (even though it’s at a very limited level.) And, this is, absolutely, a consideration in competitive games. If you can accurately predict your opponent’s next action it can let you take preemptive steps to mitigate their move, or even outright prevent them from doing what they want.

Not being able to collect intelligence conventionally is a little bit of a problem, but it’s not necessarily a deal breaker. A lot of the time, intelligence gathering in games (for an experienced player) is testing limited information against extensive system knowledge to make educated guesses about what your opponent will do. If you have awareness of the board, you don’t always need to actually have specific knowledge about what your opponent is planning. Meaning, if they’re extremely knowledgeable about what’s out there, they might not need to hear their opponents’ every command. With enough familiarity, each pokemon is recognizable on sight, and they have limited move options determined by their appearance (with the occasional outlier or exception.)

Also, lipreading is a thing. It’s a lot harder when you’re just sampling general use of the language, but when you’re looking at a limited number of individual words (and you know which words could be issued because of the aforementioned system knowledge) it can become quite possible for someone to pick out what a trainer is telling their pokemon, even if they wouldn’t be able to hear the words normally (or lipread a stray conversation between strangers.)

Incidentally, if you’re thinking that it’s unreasonable for someone to have the stat sheets for over 1k pokemon committed to memory, that’s in line with what you need to have committed to memory for a number of competitive games, if you’re operating at a high level. Chances are, if you’re a highly ranked M:TG player, you’ll probably have at least 2-3k cards committed to memory even if you can’t use them in Modern anymore.

-Starke