This post is purely to help understand how combat works, for the newly initiated of the Wild Talents game.
Scenario 1: Brick vs Flex
Brick has a Brawling pool of 7d, a Block pool of 5d, and has the Duration Heavy Armor Wild Talent at 2HD.
Flex has a Brawling pool of 10d, a Dodge pool of 8d, and has the Duration Light Armor Wild Talent at 8d.
Round 1: Brick decides to go all-in, charging into Flex with a Brawling pool of 7d. Flex decides to split his pool, dodging and if possible, hitting back.
Brick: 7d results in: 10, 8, 7, 6, 6, 5, 3. Result: 2×6
Flex: 7d (-1 for multiple actions, take the lowest pool): 8, 7, 7, 4, 4, 2, 2. Result: 2×7, 2×2.
Round 1 results in Flex going first (2×7 beats 2×6), so he uses that to Dodge out of Brick’s way. 7 beat’s 6, so he “gobbles” 2 of the 6’s, meaning Brick has no sets. If Brick had 3×6, it would have done before Flex dodged, and so would have hit Flex. Flex then hits Brick (who has no defensive actions) with 2×2. Height of 2 means it’s a hit to the left leg. But Brick has 2HD in Heavy Armor. 2HD means that he has 2×10 defense, which takes away 2 dice from Flex’s set. No damage. If Flex had rolled 3×2, it would have taken away 2 dice, meaning that even that would not have hit (no set). Flex needs to roll at LEAST a set of 4 to do a single point of damage… this isn’t going to happen often enough to ever take out Brick.
As you can already see, Brick will win this fight. Brick just needs to get a set on a round that Flex doesn’t, and he will hit Flex. Flex has Light Armor though, so he will only ever take shocking damage (most likely), since even if Brick is doing Killing damage, the first 2 points of killing damage are converted to Shock damage. He -might- get a set of 3, but that’s still going to only be 2 shocking, 1 killing. As such, almost guaranteed to knock Flex out, not kill him outright.
Scenario 2: God vs Warden.
Now let’s take a look at a bit more complicated. In my previous Blogs, I posted Seraphim and Night Warden. Let’s compare these 2 in a battle.
What we know. Seraphim has an 8HD Interference Defense, so he subtracts 8 dice (8×10) from any/all attacks against him, if they are physical in nature. Meanwhile, he fires a 7d, 3wd blast as well.
Night Warden has +5wd on pretty near any action, even if using multiple actions. He can attempt to attack and dodge every turn, simply by splitting his dice how he wants. But he’s all ‘skills’, so has no real offense, definitely nothing that would let him beat 10HD. As a matter of fact, the only way he could do even a single point of damage to Seraphim is if he rolled a set of 5 on his 5 dice. And chance are, he will always dodge the Blast of Seraphim, as Seraphim gets, on average, sets of 5, sometimes 6, and Night Warden gets 6 by default, minimum.
It’s a stand-off.
However… we have flexible hard dice. Our GM has decided that the height of a Hard Dice isn’t 10, but rather, always equal to the width (or lower if you like). This changes things drastically.
Now Seraphim has 8×8 instead of 8×10 as his defense. This means that now, Night Warden can take him out in a single round. Night Warden can set all his WD’s to 10 (or 9, if he rolls 9’s), and roll his remaining 5 dice. Even if he doesn’t roll a 10 or 9, he will do 5 damage to Seraphim’s head. Doesn’t matter that Seraphim’s width is wider (he may go first, but he can only gobble dice that are equal to or lower in height).
In our game, Seraphim found himself spending his first 2 willpower (he started with 8) and 1 Base Will on getting +1HD to his Golden Skin, and shortly afterwards, he did take it up to 10HD, at which point, he was almost unbeatable in physical combat. Eventually he gained a few more WDs on his Hellblast, and was able to destroy pretty much anything he wanted, and Night Warden was never a problem again.