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[jimy]

It was my first time playing adventure mode again since the new release.
I was a peasant who managed to grab some armor, a spear and a shield and a member of the glorious Group of Cheese. Apparently we are nomadic and the hamlet I was born in is destroyed.

Our group consists of two dwarfs in the mead hall and me, a human. We have no leader and no one knows what we're even doing here.
Since the only trouble we had was an abduction 50 years ago I decided to ask if the dwarves wanted to come with me to the next town in search for wealth and glory.
They all declined... whatever, I didn't like them anyway.

So when I arrived in the human town the first thing I saw were elven merchants talking to some goblin merchants about dragons, titans and such. I knew that I was only a lowly peasant so for now I decided to ignore them and headed to the first house I saw.

Inside was a human thief who has been "rescuing" children for the last three years. After some small talk about the freezing weather he told me about a vampire consort living in a lair just a short walk south of here. I took a liking to him and asked if he wanted to be my companion.

Unfortunately that feeling wasn't mutual and I set out alone on my first quest to slay that night creature.

I sneaked inside the lair. There it was. A skinless humanoid... thing... with wings. I braced my spear bravely and pressed "." to let the beast approach me.
Suddenly I'm on the ground. We were at least 3-4 tiles away from each other and my speed was at 1.000.

What followed was a quick and brutal battle where that thing broke most of my bones and punched through my skull without me being able to do anything.

Why is everyone so fast now? And how can I avoid situations like that?

[Bumber]

That's no vampire. It was a night troll. A new adventurer shouldn't be fighting either.

Start with bandits, untransformed werebeasts, and animals.

[10terrapin01]

As Bumber says, you were way out of your league.  Even as a peasant make sure your Agility is as high as you can get.  Mechanically, '.' waits ten steps and ',' waits just one, so you can try that as well.

[Tawa]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Jokes aside, you should also sprint whenever you're in fights. Also make sure you crank your Shield, Armor, and Dodge skills up pretty high during character creation. And only ask "[weapon]dwarves/men" to be your companions; nobody else will agree.

[Broseph Stalin]

1.0 is your walking speed. For example if you decided to get sandwich from the corner deli this is the speed you would be going. You saw a monster your immediate response was to treat it with the urgency of a sandwich while you stood there doing nothing.

When you see an enemy begin sprinting and never press "." press "," it waits 1/10th the time of . and is 10x less likely to get you killed.

[peasant cretin]

Everything you do in adventure mode is measured by units of time.

When you pressed the "." as Broseph Stalin pointed out, 10 instants (10 units of time passed). If you had pressed "," only 1 instant would have passed. Since that Night Troll (which is always very very fast) was sprinting towards you, it not only moved to the tile adjacent (next) to you in those the 10 instants, but it also had time to strike or grab you well before you got to do anything.

Keeping that in mind, I'd suggest a more specific form of Bumber's advice as a good experiment/way to learn how to fight.

Do solo fights. Fight one creature by yourself (here skip the companions/go against multiple opponents because they'll cause more randomness in the outcomes). One on one is something that you can control. When you are fighting, try to control everything that happens.

The example is you are fighting a bear:
B≈≈≈
≈≈@≈
≈≈≈≈
1-You see the green direction arrow. Where it's moving.
2-You press "," until it moves to the tile adjacent (next) to you.
3-The green arrow goes away.
4-Now you press "," again.
5-You see the red direction arrow. It's attacking.
6-Now you do something.
7, 8, 9, etc-What happens here? Why did that happen?

So everything from 2-5 you've controlled. 6 you controlled, *but* did that make 7 something you, not just wanted, but knew would happen?

If you can consistently control almost everything, and only gamble on the randomness where you know it will be, you can use a peasant to kill pretty much anything (including that night troll) on day one without powerleveling. There's times you'll die of course, but you'll know why everything happened.

[Robsoie]

If you can consistently control almost everything, and only gamble on the randomness where you know it will be, you can use a peasant to kill pretty much anything (including that night troll) on day one without powerleveling. There's times you'll die of course, but you'll know why everything happened.

To be honest, unless you're using the multi-attack-dodge exploit, having a peasant adventurer on day one fighting a night troll is not a good idea, peasant starting attributes and skills are very low at start, so hitting/dodging/whatever is often leading to a failed roll at start.

Depending on how such night troll is generated during worldgen,  of course if you're lucky the monster will not be too hard, but if you're unlucky the night troll in front of may just send the peasant body parts flying all around in a couple of rounds.
That's a huge risk for your peasant survival, better go fight enemies with less possible extreme stats/skills randomly generated enemies (bandits and bandit bosses/overlords are a joke in df2014, nothing in common with the strong warriors of 34.11) to train your skills to have more chance when you'll face the serious enemies.

And something to keep in mind is that night trolls aren't always be generated as a lonely creature, but could be a part of a family, and while having a hard time with a night troll only to see suddenly 3 or 4 other night trolls running to you is well, an experience you'll remember when you'll re-roll a new adventurer

[NJW2000]

With the punching and kicking at the end, the only good thing for "stunlock" i.e. you're incapacitated, out of the game in some way, is some good companions to save you, and take some of the blows in the first place. Try arming drunks or accosting random travellers from other civs rather than lord's men or townpeople, if you're gonna tough it out on peasant rather than locally important.

Oh, and night creatures: f*cking never. I play as a locally unimportant peasant, but had a 200 kill full iron demigod adventurer with 3 hardy companions go down to one.

tl;dr: armour, companions like drunks or travellors if not warriors, don't do night creature battles.

[vjmdhzgr]

Most of the time an enemy will take far longer than one press of . to move three tiles and punch you. Most attacks take six ticks total, three before the attack, and three after. Most enemies also take a full press of . to even move a tile, so if you're fighting a bandit don't worry that they're going to teleport across the screen and kill you with just one .. I would also recommend against sprinting in combat, as the only benefit would be faster normal movement which you don't want to use during combat anyway (dodge instead), and if you do it'll use up more energy than jogging while being just as fast unless you're running for a long distance. In which case the increased strain will very quickly tire a peasant, bringing the speed down to only slightly above jogging while still using far more energy, causing you to quickly collapse on the ground. Maybe once you have superhuman endurance, but there's still very little benefit.