MONDAY MAY 31 Let's Fight! – It's Fight Week here at worldofdarkness.com as we take a look at how combat works in the new Storytelling System. Of course, combat should always be a last resort and the story comes first and… okay, let's fight! Rolling with (and for) the Punches – When a character attacks an opponent, he does so with a bare fist or a high-powered rifle, you resolve the action with a single die roll. As with almost all other rolls in the game, this dice pool is the sum of an Attribute and a Skill. For throwing a punch, the dice pool is Strength (Attribute) + Brawl (Skill). At its most bare-bones, an attack is resolved by just rolling that dice pool. Every success (a die that comes up 8 or more) inflicts a wound on the opponent. No one is rolling other dice to defend or to “soak” damage or for any other reason. One attack means one roll of the dice. Where the variation comes in is in modifiers to that dice pool. We mentioned last week how favorable and negative conditions can add or subtract dice, and nowhere is that truer than in combat. You add dice to your pool for anything you have that makes your attack more effective (like a special move or the damage rating of your weapon). You lose dice for anything the opponent does to avoid getting hurt. Most importantly, every character has a Defense trait, which represents his ability to bob and weave or otherwise make himself harder to hit, and this serves as a penalty on any close-combat attack. Armor and defensive actions can also penalize attacks. Therefore, maximizing bonuses to your attacks and penalties to your opponents' attacks is the key to winning a fight. An Example (with an illustration by Durwin Talon): Sandy never should have opened that box her great aunt sent to her. Now something is loose, something with long claws and sharp teeth, something that's chased her into her own kitchen. Sandy grabs a butcher's knife off the counter and turns around to strike back. Sandy's 2 Strength and 1 Weaponry grant her player three dice. Her knife, with a damage of 1, adds one bonus die to that pool. The creature has a Defense total of 2 but no armor. That means two dice are removed from Sandy's player's pool. She is left with two dice, and her roll yields a 6 and a 9. That's one success, so the creature takes one wound. |
