the combat roll (part 1)

4/20/2025

Games We’ve Been Playing
01:18 - The Girls of the Genziana Hotel
04:30 - Running the new edition of The Between for The Bad Spot

Topic
10:20 - Combat Roll basics

Media Recommendations
53:40 - Hearts of Wulin
55:08 - R.E.P.O.

Come hang out with Alex & Jason on Discord!

1 Comment

Rafael link

4/23/2025 04:49:20 am

The idea that the more characters jump into a fight, the more dangerous it becomes for everyone is pretty easy to explain through the lens of “combat as skirmish.” This isn’t a coordinated unit - it’s a pretty ragtag bunch, often made up of a former merchant, a barber-surgeon, or a rat-catcher, going up against an eldritch abomination.

In that setup, it makes total sense that the characters have to watch out not just for the monster, but for each other - because it’s *super* easy to catch some friendly fire when everyone’s blindly swinging axes and sticks around :)

Plus, if the group *is* super coordinated in the fiction - like a trained squad or a crew that’s fought together through countless battles - you can handle that with a simple “round cap” ruling: a character can only take as much Ruin in a single round as the round number. So in round one, max 1 Ruin; in round two, max 2 Ruin; and so on.

We made a ruling like that ourselves - learning the “Command” skill during the Hearthfire phase enabled the “round cap” to kick in, but only when the character with that skill was managing the fight in fiction.

Another really interesting aspect of combat in Trophy Gold is how well it fits into “combat as puzzle” or the “one (1) HP Dragon” mindset - where the monster is treated as a *puzzle* to solve: through research, prep, skill use, exploiting the environment, equipment, or setting a trap, you wear down its Endurance until you either make a Combat Roll against a very low Endurance, or just a Risk Roll - or you’ve got the situation so well controlled that you take the monster out purely through fictional positioning.

the combat roll (part 1)

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