My question is this: When you are in combat and you are up against a creature (or whatever) that has 0 for damage for any of the phases (melee, ranged, or magic) do you just skip that step (meaning you don't decide to attack or defend). And what happens when you have an ally(s)? If some of the creatures have 0 damage for 2 of the phases and you have a one of two allies as well...how could you lose?

Is this just the reality of the situation or am I missing something?

You can attack a creature with 0 damage, but there is no reason to defend against it...

radioboyeric said:

When a Challenge has 0 damage in some combat Phase there's no reason to roll the die if your Hero defends, of course if you attack and fail the roll you don't have bad consequences (damage). Such Phases are best exploited with Allies (cheap attacks).

If a Challenge does damage in only one Phase and you have one or two Allies, your chances to succeed become high. But this is just how Runebound works: depending on your Hero status (Experience counters, Items, Allies), some Challenges become auto-wins and there's no reason to attempt them anymore. If you feel you can't lose, try something more challenging!

But beware, because in Runebound a sudden row of negative rolls can knock-out a Hero even if he's almost sure of winning! It happened me several times. The only way to avoid luck issues is to slow down the game (do many Green-Yellow Challenges, waiting to take the higher risks of the Blue-Red ones) until you auto-win the strongest Challenge in the deck. It's your time.

radioboyeric said:

You are correct. If a challenge only does damage in 1 phase of the three, you can simply choose to attack in the phase where it can hurt you. Defending in a phase where the challenge does 0 damage means there are no consequences regardless of success or failure on the roll, so just skip it. Remember that if you attack and fail, you take damage from the challenge as appropriate. So there is still a chance of failure if you get really bad rolls, but in a situation such as the one we describe, the odds are definitely in your favour. =)

Having allies will of course make things even easier, but it does take time to put together the money to hire allies (usually) so by the time you get even one ally, you will usually be ready to take on yellow challenges. Sticking to green longer than you need to only holds you back in the game, though you certainly can if you want to.

Also note that only green challenges consistently have 0 damage in two phases. Yellows will usually have 0 in one phase and non-0 in two, blue and red will generally deal damage in all 3. So this little "trick" will only apply to the challenges that are supposed to be easy in the first place; the fact that you can beat them almost all the time is not really game breaking.

A house rule I use is that you fight all three phases of combat, even if the opponent does zero damage in a particular phase. Then if you fail a roll in such a phase, you take an exhaust. This forces you to fight all three phases of combat each round and toughens the game up a smidge...

Thank you all for clearing that one up for me...

Understanding that the more harder the challenges the more chance that 0 damage is less to exist on challenges.

I like the house rule Torbul!

Cheers!

Torbal said:

That is an interesting house rule. I may suggest it to our group someday. I worry that it might make green challenges too hard, though. After all, heroes don't have that much fatigue (4 is considered a lot in my experience) and after all the fatigue is gone you start taking wounds, unless you overrule that base mechanic as part of this house rule.