Descending into a dark mausoleum, you discover a vampire rising to feed. You quickly find yourself fighting for your life. Make a Combat (-2) check. If you pass, you defeat the vampire, gaining 1 Clue token and drawing 1 Unique Item. If you fail, roll a die and lose that much Stamina.

Need a little bit clarification here. What can influence the Combat check here? I believe to make it fair to the rules (comparing to other types of checks in encounters), you don't count weapons into this and of course either goes for spells. Am I right? Also do skills (fight and marksman) count in this check? Oh, oh, almost forgot. What about flesh ward. Can you use it here? Thanks in advance

Great question and one we've seen on multiple occasions over the years. A "Combat" check includes both "Fight" and any applicable weapons or spell bonuses, while "Fight" checks do not.

Cheers,

Joe

That's interesting. I have the italian version of the core set, and it's worded "Fight (-2)" check. Curious to see if this is something that was fixed with the translation (we saw this happening in the past; French edition of the game has both a STL and an OW encounters with a wording that completes the English one), or it was the italian translator who had a couple of extra glasses of wine.

Julia,

The English version is also a Fight (-2) check, as well.

Ciao,

Joe

Ah! Thanks, Joe. Before posting, I checked the wiki, and it's stated "combat (-2)". Possibly something went wrong with the reprint?

Ok, I get it. Fight check, no weapon bonuses. What about second part of my question: skills? And flesh ward?

As general rule of thumb, whenever you have a game effect (such as a Skill or an Ally or the effect of an Environment card in play) that reads "+ X to Fight", you consider all these effects in your skill check.

Flesh Ward allows you to ignore the Stamina loss from one source, whatever this source is, so, it's perfectly legit to cast it and ignore the Stamina loss due to this encounter.

Thanks. Also about marksman skill. I just noticed that skil description says Combat check. So you can't apply it here I guess. Right? I now remeber somewhere in the rules it is said that any kind of bonus to Fight check would apply to Combat check but not vice versa. So even if it would make some logical sense that you could reroll the Fight check from this encounter with Marksman skill it is against the rules.

That's correct.Marksman allows you to reroll a Combat check, not a Fight check. You can use Marksman to reroll the dice after failing to kill a monster, but you cannot use Marksman to reroll a Fight check done for closing a gate, and you cannot use it in the Graveyard encounter your original query was focused on.

Specifically:

- Evade checks are a subset of the Sneak checks

- Combat checks are a subset of the Fight checks

- Horror checks are a subset of the Will checks

- Spell checks are a subset of the Lore checks

all bonuses boosting the "general" category (Sneak, Fight, Will, Lore) (and all maluses too) affect all the "special" categories (Evade, Combat, Horror, Spell); all bonuses / maluses affectic the "special" categories do not apply to the "general" category.

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As for the Graveyard, you can thematically explain you cannot use Marksman in this way: the vampire assaulted you and you're in close quarters combat, so, there's no way you can use your weapons (hence, it's Fight in stead of Combat) nor to spot properly where to hit (hence, Marksman is useless)

Well for my copy of arkham it says a combat check. It actually says combat in both the app that I have and the actual physical card.

Thanks for reporting the bug. They messed up something in the reprints (facepalm)

Thanks for reporting the bug. They messed up something in the reprints (facepalm)

Who's surprised?

IIRC, in the base game (and the base game ONLY) there are three encounters that ask you to do a "Combat" check, and the Graveyard/Vampire one is the most common.

Treat it as combat against a 1-toughness monster with no horror check or option to flee. Except that it isn't an ordinary monster combat, so you don't get a trophy or any special bonuses for defeating a monster. At its base it's just a skill check being made.

You vets can probably see why this kind of check was not used in any of the expansions ever again.

LOL. True.

Also, nice to see you back, Chris