Part 2: A Dungeon with no Dragons

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Dren and Frip have heard of a haunted mansion, with a nobleman's daughter trapped inside due to some business with a witch. The plan is simple: get in, rescue the lady, collect a nice reward. In case that doesn't work out, the backup plan is simplier: get in, take the nice stuff in the house, don't come back to town.

The pair traverses a few rooms without incident, and come upon a closet. Reasoning that this would be a good place to hide a hostage, Frip opens the door. Unbeknownst to him, this is the weapons closet, and the weapons inside have been cursed to fly out at whomever opens the door.

The blades lash Frip's face and arms, which the GM decides to represent with two ad-hoc rolls against his HAC, with no modifiers.

Frip is now bleeding once per "round", but as the weapons crash to the floor lifeless after jumping out, there's no need for initiative right now. The GM informs both players that they each get a turn to try and stop Frip's bleeding, if they so choose. Frip suggests using his healing light prayer, but Dren doesn't want to risk him failing a test of faith for such a minor wound. Instead, Dren steps forward to administer first aid.

First Aid allows the wounded to add the healer's dex, int, and wis to the toughness check to stablize, and immediately starts the process of resolving wounds. Normally the first step to resolving wounds is transferring the current wounds into ability damage, but since these two managed to treat the wound before any actual damage was dealt, that can be skipped.

With their immediate concerns resolved, the pair search the weapons on the floor, and the closet itself, for goodies. Meanwhile, the skeleton guardians in the hallway have heard the disturbance, and sneak their way over to the interlopers. Neither of the two skeletons considers the other a leader (neither has a loyalty score, being undead), so they must roll independently

Having approached to striking range, the skelton's attack. Because the two have no leader, one of the two must be the first to take action and start the combat as initiator (henceforth "skeleton 1"). Skeleton 1 now starts the combat at init 10. (int and wis bonuses would apply here if these weren't undead.) The other skeleton (henceforth "Steve"), being aware of the situation, starts at init 5. Frip and Dren, meanwhile, start at ten less than their max initiatives. Frip has 12 max init (he gains +2 from high intelligence and ignores his low wisdom in this case), as does Dren (who gains +2 from high wisdom, and noting from intelligence), so the two start at 2 init.

Skeleton 1 has the highest init, so gets the first turn. With 10 speed, this monster has 10 action points to spend. It starts by spending four of them to move towards Dren. It then spends 4 more to attack with its shortsword. Dren happened to have been inspecting a battle axe at the time, which he nows grows much more familar with as his only barrier between himself and the pointy end of the undead's blade.

Skeleton 1 now has only 2 action points left, but it is allowed to dip into its initiative once per turn to get more. Skeleton 1 does so, lowering its init to 8 in order to make another attack with the shortsword.

Skeleton 1's turn is now over. With 5 init, Steve goes next. Steve moves towards Frip instead, and attacks him with a longsword, using up exactly 10 out of 10 action points. Frip, sadly, had his head inside the closet at the time, with neither of his weapons drawn. Because he doesn't have a shield equipped, nor any weapon with the "defends" special rule, Steve gets two rolls to hit for each attack action, for a total for 4 attacks!

Even with exactly zero action points remaining, Steve is allowed to take another action drawn purely from initiative, but the longsword takes 6 init to use, while Steve only has 5. With Steve's (amazingly unlucky) turn complete, both Frip and Dren are tied at 2 init. The two roll opposed speed checks to determine who goes first, and Frip wins.

Frip has 12 action points from his 12 speed, and no weapon in his hands. For his first action, he draws his dagger for 2 action points. His second action is to move to where Dren is, positioned so he can attack skeleton 1. This does provoke an attack of opportunity from Steve next to him (he went from right next to Steve to further away, so he moved at least 5 feet in range of him), but with only 3 init left (Steve started with 5, and converted 2 into action points in order to afford another attack), Steve doesn't have the opportunity to strike again after charging so recklessly.

Frip is now next to Skeleton 1, with 6 action points left. He three to attack once.

Frip has three action points remaining, but chooses not to use them. Dren still needs to get distance from his attacker, and Frip still wants to have the init left to punish either skeleton next turn if they try to chase him. (It's pretty debatable if this is a good strategy compared to just trying to kill this one now, or a naive friendly gesture) Frip's remaining 3 points go into his initiative, so he ends his turn at init 5.

Dren goes next. He has 11 action points to spend. The last thing Dren wants to do is use a weapon he isn't even proficent with in a fight, but compared to trying to run away from two skeletons with only one friend to cover him (Skeleton 1 DOES have init to make attacks of opportunity right now), he decides it's the safer bet.

With nobody to threaten him, Dren now drops the battleaxe (costing no points), and draws his crossbow (costing 4). His crossbow was already loaded (he knew he was going into a dungeon after all), so there's no need to pay 8 points for that, but it's still 4 more to actually fire the weapon. With 1 action point, and only 2 init, Dren can't manage anything else useful right now, so he ends his turn to start with 3 init next round.

It's now the end of the round, and Dren is bleeding. Dren has not taken any action to resolve his wounds, so there are no dice rolls here. Dren simply adds one immediate wound, bringing him up to 4. Dren's staying power is 6 (5 + 2 for passion bonus - 1 discipline bonus), so nothing special happens until he has at least 7 total wounds, at which point he risks incapacitation.

At the start of round 2, Steve and Frip are tied at 5 init. Steve wins the opposed speed roll and goes first. Its first action is to move into contact with Frip, where it unsuprisingly attacks with its shortsword. Frip's dagger is NOT a defending weapon, so Steve still gets two attacks for the price of one.

Because Frip dodged, Steve does not get his extra attack; those bonus attacks are sequential, not simultaneous. With no target in range, Steve decides to use up one init and the remainig two action points to take the sidestep action, moving next to dren at a slightly lower init cost.

Also because of Frip's dodge, Frip now is at init 2, lower than Dren at init 3, so Dren goes next. Dren has 11 action points, a loaded crossbow, and no excuse not to fire. The crossbow is not a "defends" weapon, but on Dren's turn that confers no pentalty for using it in melee. At the cost of 4 init, he attacks.

Dren is now at 5 immediate wonuds, and the situation is only going to get worse the longer he ignores it. He decides to try and resolve his wounds immediately for four action points (and provoking an attack from Steve, who can't do anything). He first rolls 1d4 to pick a physical attribute at random to be most effected. He rolls a 2 for speed. Half the wounds, rounded up, go into speed. In this case that's 3 speed damage, reducing Dren to 8 speed. Of the remainig two damage, 1 goes into toughness damage. The other two physical abilities each take half the remaining damage, rounded down, which in this case is zero. The remainder of one goes back into toughness, for a total of 3 speed and 2 toughness damage. This speed damage does NOT change his action points for this turn, so he's still got 3 action points left. Dren's 5 immediate wounds now get reduced to 0 immediate wounds. He's still wounded, and he will still bleed at the end of the round, but now he's a lot less likely to hurt himself doing this, and a lot more likely to stablize.

Dren's player decides it's best to save his last three action points. With both his HAC and WAC lower now, he needs init for dodging, and 6 init is enough for one really good dodge. Dren looks up from his wounds and focuses all his attention on the skeleton in front of him, readying himself to be right where the sword isn't. (Intrestingly, Dren is currently on track to start his turn ahead of Steve anyway. If Dren wanted he could keep saving up init until he was capable of such large dodges that he couldn't possibly be hit in one attack. This can be a useful strategy in the short term, but it's an inefficent was to use your init, and functionally isn't very different from just running away.)

At init 2, Frip finishes up the round. Frip draws his heavy pick to have something to block attacks with, and uses a sidestep action come back into range with Steve. He has seven points left, and uses his last two init to get three thrusts of his dagger. We will skip these rolls as they are many and nothing new is happening here. Suffice it to say that Steve has spooked his last spook, and combat ends here.

Dren takes another wound from bleeding, but is still one below what would start requiring him to roll for incapacitation. Luckily none of the ability damage he took lowered his incredible +7 to first aid, and even with his now terrible toughness Dren is able to stablize himself. Frip now prays to the gods for his friend to get better.

Frip lays his hands upon Dren, healing a total amount of physical damage equal to double his own empathy bonus, plus Dren's empathy bonus. Sadly, Dren's bitter soul (-1) slightly inhibits Frip's abilities (2 times +2), so Dren is only healed 3 of the damage. Frip may choose what is healed, and decides to clear all of Dren's toughness damage, along with one of the speed damage. This also allows Dren to roll to resolve his 0 hourly wounds, adding Frip's empathy bonus.

Frip offers to attempt the prayer again, but Dren declines. Daily wounds aren't much of a concern for characters who aren't stranded, and Frip shouldn't risk losing faith right now. They're still in this mansion, and they've got a job to do.