Combat, Goblins, and Power
After months of looking for time, I have finally found it. I talked to both my players to run a simple and quick combat test, unfortunately one of my players couldn't attend but I did get one to join in. I was thinking the combat may be a bit too one-sided with the goblins having more numbers compared to the player, but oh boy was I w r o n g. So this combat encounter is a simple escort mission. Escort the cow to the end of the road and defend it from goblins.
First I'd like to talk about the combat, each character has 6 actions on their turn 2 interrupt actions. Actions are used to do things within your turn, like swinging your sword, using items etc. While interrupt actions are used during a turn that isn't yours, this is mostly used to defend yourself against attacks with actions such as dodge and block. The combat felt interesting, although quite scuffed as I didn't know what I was doing, I had forgotten how the initiative order works so I instead preset it where it goes, player first, then goblins, then cow. But for the actual fighting, it is quite different from DND, there is no such thing as the potential to miss as everything would hit, and the only way to defend against them is interrupt actions and armor, I've already discussed interrupt actions earlier, but for armor, armor essentially reduces the damage of the attack by its armor value. For example, my friend had plate armor which gives him 15 physical defense AND his natural defense which gives him 17 from what I remember, so an attack that deals 25 would instead do 8 damage.
Now I'd like to talk about the encounter, like I said earlier I would've thought the goblins would hold a great amount of advantage as they had the numbers but oh I was so wrong... Before the encounter, when he was making his character I allowed him to make an extraordinary weapon, essentially an uncommon weapon in RPG games, and there is on attribute in that weapon that seems quite...strong. That attribute is called poisonous which bypasses a character's SHP. Now there are two health points for characters, one is called SHP the other is DHP, SHP is surface health, this usually is the first one to go down as you are getting damaged, and you can heal this back up with remedies and healing items. DHP on the other hand is deep health points, essentially your organs, innards and soul health. You can't heal this with simple remedies and sleeping, so only actual treatment can heal you from this. Now back to the combat, with his SHP ignoring weapon he fought against goblins with, 8 DHP for the small savage goblins, and 10 for the bigger hobgoblins. AND the small savage goblins had clubs that only dealt 1d12(12 sided dice) damage, and since the player had 17 armor, even if the goblins rolled a 12, they'd only deal 1 damage because you can't outright negate damage. Suffice to say, the player slaughtered all the goblins up until he got overwhelmed by 5 savage goblins and 2 hobgoblins where he got held down, and the hobgoblins with their axes managed to go through his armor and kill him.
I've learned quite a bit in this combat encounter and I'm wondering how I can counter the player's SHP ignoring weapon, and balance out my encounters more. Hopefully in the future I'd be able to get the session 1 started and manage my very first dming session with the least amount of scuff possible.
