Hi all, please forgive the newbishness of my questions. I'm trying to figure out the combat rules, and not succeeding too well so far.

Consider this scenario: Our brave player character, Bronzebeard the Ironfaced, is engaged with 3 evil cultists. Bronzebeard is a Dwarf with 4 Toughness; he's wearing a Brigandine and wielding a shield, for a total of 2 Soak and 2 Defence. The cultists are Cult Followers, as per Tome of Adventure p. 55, with St / To / Ag at 3(3) / 3(1) / 3(0) . They are armed with assorted hand weapons, as well as their fanatical devotion to Tzeentch. It is currently their turn, and they're going to Slay the Unbeliever -- specifically, Bronzebeard.

1). Do the Cult Followers automatically count as Henchmen, or do they count as individual NPCs, or is this up to the GM ?

2). If the Cult Followers are Henchmen, they all act at once. What is the dice pool for their roll to hit the player ?

3). On the other hand, if the Cult Followers count as individual enemies, they would act 3 times (once for each cultist). What would they roll to hit the player in this case ?

Let's assume that the cultists somehow rolled a regular hit on Bronzebeard (Tzeentch be praised). How much damage do they do ?

4). Do the cultists just do their base damage (3), or so they add the damage from the weapons they're wielding (5 for a hand weapon), for a total of 8 damage ?

5). If the Cult Followers count as Henchmen, do they deal one hit worth 3 damage (or perhaps 8 damage, see above), three hits worth 3 (or 8) damage each, or one single hit worth 3 * 3 = 9 (or 3 * 8 = 24) damage ?

6). How much damage does Bronzebeard soak ? Does he soak only 2 damage (due to the soak value of his equipment), or 2 + 4 = 6 damage (adding in his Toughness) ?

Thanks for your help.

Bugmaster said:

right then...

1) up to GM. Use henchmen or individual NPCs (or nemesis NPCs) as you set fit. Bear in mind some NPCs group make better henchmen than others from a thematic sense. I.e. snotling henchmen make sense, Wargor henchmen, less so....

2) So if the cult followers are henchmen, their dice pool is based on their characteristic (ST for a melee attack), which are blue. you replace the blue with red or green, dependent on their stance, so thats 2 blue and 1 green (based on ToA p55 stance = C1). Each additional henchmen over the first adds a fortune die to that roll, so thats 2 fortune dice, a melee attack has a default challenge of 1 purple, and slay the unbeliever is default 1 misfortune (black dice on the action entry). BB's defence adds a further 2 black, plus he may add more dice due to reactive defences he may use (parry/dodge). GM may add more dice for cultists from A/C/E budget, plus any environmental factors. Assuming they don't do any of that though, as a bare minimum the dice pool would be 2 blue, 1 green, 1 purple, 2 whites, 3 blacks

3) if the cultists were three individual NPCs, then the default pool is more or less the same except there is no henchmen bonus for white dice. So its 2 blue, 1 green, 1 purple, 3 blacks. This is rolled 3 times though rather than once.

4) Assuming the cultists get minimum success result from slay the unbeliever, their damage total would be ST+base damage, which appears after strength (or agility for ranged attacks) in brackets in the NPC stat line, so for cultitsts that's another 3, for a total damage of 6. Note, if you specifically decided the culttists were armed with specific weapons, so you decided they were all armed with swords/axes with base weapon damage 5,rather than the default 3, then their overall damage will be ST+weapon, which is 3+5, so 8.

5) Henchmen only do a single hit, so their default damage is still only 6 (or 8) depending on how they are armed. Realise though, that as henchmen groups are rolling additional fortune dice, they may well get better than the base success line, and therefore in theory are more likely to get addtional damage by getting the 3 hammer success line on slay the unbeliever, for instance.

6) Soak is normally armour plus toughness, so default for BB is 6. Note though that some attacks ignore soak from armour (or toughness) or both. some also do "wounds" directly, which also ignore all soak and are taken directly as wounds (as the name implies!). for NPCs soak is normally toughness+default soak (which is listed in brackets after toughness, so total soak for cultitst is 4. In the same way that you can change weapons though, you can also change cultists default equipment so if you decided these cultists also had Brigandine and wielding a shield, their soak would be toughness+equipment for a total of 5.

hope that all helps

anymore questions, just ask, the board are normally pretty good at answering them....

Thanks pumkin, that was very informative. I did not realize that the value in parentheses after the Strength rating on the NPC chart is the damage the NPC does in addition to his Strength the book didn't make it quite clear.

This raises a question about game balance, though. A regular, unaugmented, run-of-the-mill Cult Follower does 3 + 3 = 6 damage. Bronzebeard has 6 soak, which is not unreasonable, IMO all he did was beef up one of his stats by one point, then bought the recommended equipment for his Career. So... does this mean that our Dwarf is now completely immune to all of the cultists' attacks ? Can he wade through a sea of cultist minions, swigging ale and singing traditional Dwarven mining songs, as their feeble blows bounce off of him ? Or am I missing something ?

successful hit makes at least 1 wound. no matter if the soak value is greater.

Pumpkin was correct. I will clarify #6 though. Damage reduction is Soak + To. Soak comes from armor soak + other sources of soak (such as talents or spells/blessings). Toughness is NOT soak, so abilities that ignore Soak (not just armor soak) do not ignore toughness unless they say they ignore Toughness. People often use the term "Soak" for all damage reduction, and it usually doesn't matter, but there are some cases where it will so keep that in mind.

Also to clarify, the number in parenthesis after Strength is basically a "default" weapon damage. Which, as pumpkin explained, gets replaced if you designate a specific weapon that the NPC is wielding.

Similarly, the numbers in parenthesis after To and Ag represent "default" armor Soak and Defense values. If you equip the NPCs with a specific armor, you would replace these values with that of the armor.

Lastly, as skolo said, a successful hit will always do 1 wound, regardless of damage reduction. In addition, critical hits convert to Wounds (if the normal damage is reduced to 0). So, if BB only takes 6 damage (thus reduced to 0 by his damage reduction) but the hit inflicted 2 criticals ... BB would take 2 wounds from the hit (1 for each critical).

dvang said:

Here's a good example of me forgetting what is a house rule and what is an official rule. We play where critical wounds can never be soaked, so a hit in which a character with DR 6 is hit for 3 + 2 Criticals will receive 0 wounds, but 2 Criticals. The same character hit for 5 Wounds will take 1 Wound persuant to the "1 Wound Minimum" rule.

I nearly posted that this was the official rule, so you saved me from doing so. Cheers!

The core box rules are very unclear on the whole soak, toughness and damage reduction values - having several examples and explanations that directly contradicts each other.

That said I think it's safe to just go with the explanation dvang posted as people report that the PG is more precise in explaining it like that (haven't got it myself yet, but dvang and the others have a history of having a good insight into the rules in my opinion ).

Thanks dvang and everyone else, this was very helpful. Sadly, it means that my players would've survived their latest encounter, instead of getting chopped up by cultists...

Do you think I should invest in the Player's Guide ? I'm a little upset about Gallows's last comment, because it feels wrong to spend money on buying more books that merely patch other books which we already bought :-(

I love the PG, but only because I like the hardcover copy.

It's not necessary to purchase it; download the FAQ and ask any questions you need to on the boards.

As far as your group, have you already moved onwards? If not, you can always have them come-to, saved by allies, as captives, or simply left for dead!

Bugmaster said:

From what I have heard the PG isn't just that. It contains full lists and explanations of action cards, which is VERY handy for me as a GM when making NPCs. It may be a players guide, but when creating your NPCs (or converting from 1st/2nd edition) a list like that would be brilliant. When looking at the number of pages in the PG there must be quite a lot of extra stuff. I also like hard cover and having it all in one book

But I wouldn't say you NEED to buy it. There are a few grey areas in the rules. Recovering from permanent insanities for instance... weak explanation. Healing is a quite badly written. But as a whole, I wouldn't say you need it as I guess everything will eventually make it's way into the FAQ, that you can download for free.

But I have just ordered all the new books today as I like to have it all in two books (except perhaps some of the stuff from signs of faith and winds of magic).

Darrett said:

I have actually done all of the above (we were playing the introductory adventure in the Grunewald Lodge, and I had already modded Sister Sonja to be a bit more useful). But they still said they'd rather reroll...

Bugmaster said:

Ah. Well, always best to let them do what they'd like.

I was a player for that Cultist fight. Though we're entirely off-topic now, I had a lot of fun with it. We ended up blocking the other exits from the basement, stealing (and burning) the book, and mowed them down like cattle. The very first wound on the cult leader (Can't recall his name now) was a critical, dislocated shoulder which gave him -2 damage. Pretty memorable.

Bugmaster said:

As others have said I wouldn't reccomend buying the PG just to get expanded explanatons of rules; the FAQ is pretty good already and anything else can almost certainly be clarified by a quick post on the board. Check out the Fan made cribs sheets - univeralhead's is very good - they have a lot of the rules neatly summarised.

However, if you do want a book with reference for all the cards in one place, then the PG is good for that and you would get better examples and clearer rules (but not really new ones) as a bonus (not for healing though, which is still slightly contradictory.. )

The PG is also useful in case a career/talent/action card goes AWOL (or eaten by a cat, etc), as you'll have the information handy to create a replacement.

pumpkin said:

Wait a sec... The DEFENSE is added as black die? ooo I´m doing it wrong for ages?

In Attacks vs Defense , I make a simple test (0d) PLUS Defense purple dice (in this case 2purple) PLUS black dice for dodge/parry/etc, and stuff. Ima doing it wrong?

With a simple attack vs defense action the difficulty dice would be one purple (due to this being the default for an attack) and and X number of black dice where the X is the targets defense. It's written on p.58 of the core rulebook.

Unless I'm doing it wrong too!

Yeah Rumux, but in the FAQ page 2 example, the image Shows something that confused me....So I thought that was 1 purple for each 1 of defense...

You are right

The default for melee and ranged attack actions (vs Defense) is 1d. To this is added any modifiers from the action card, the defender's Defense value in misfortune dice , and then any additional negative modifiers the GM wants to impose as more (darkness, mud, rain, etc).