Traveling near the coast, after fleeing a black bear and a pack of wolves the previous day (unless your charatcer's food/stat hungry or a murderous sort, why kill the forest critters?), Imush begins the morning with over-hydration.
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Vomiting, he drops one of this books. Ah, clumsy spam fingers. Imush backtracks and somehow remembers the tree he slept in, looking for white scroll against green twigs in the z-level viewer.
When Imush reaches the lair of cyclops Onget Zephyrgranite the Brown Justice, he finds her a few tiles from the entrance, 1 z-level down, facing away. Why most vision cone semimegabeasts and megas enjoy staring away from oncoming pathing/entryway, immersed in their own interior life, is gameplay weird. But then who stares at the front door to their home?
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Imush opens with arrows from the surface. It's a fairly safe choice as Imush is standing on undergrowth, orthagonal to a tree, which sets his visual stealth at
good. Optimally as a shooter he could have waited for nightfall for to reach
great-to-
fantastic visual stealth. A cyclops only has 2-4 tile vision inside its lair and even if facing Imush, would need better visual rolls against level 6 ambusher.
Imush hopes to ground Onget so he can have 3 actions for every action she receives (Imush's 1.000 walking speed versus something more towards Onget 's 0.323 ground speed) and double momentum off standing attacks versus a grounded target. All ranged attacks miss because Onget is not quite in the line of sight for any of that and Imush has low skill levels for bow and throwing.
When it comes to novice skill characters running first fight vanilla DF melee combat against the no-skill semimegabeast of cyclops/ettin/giant variety, there's the plucky civ-peasant with novice shield who can manage consistently successful roll-to-block and run
recovery combat, or the outsider peasant who will only have novice fighter/observer/dodger and probably shouldn't.
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As an outsider peasant, with his rolls buffed from
Focused!, Imush pulls Onget out of her lair with the multi-attack combination of quick-attack + (manual/directional) dodge away. On the surface he's free to outfight off the backfoot to safely get that needed grounding hit to her leg or foot.
The landed leg/foot shots are weak. With above average strength, Imush should have used the large copper dagger with its 5 contact area stab, instead of the roleplay-ish iron (short) sword with its 50 contact area stab. Still, Beowulf might be proud. Probably not as Beowulf would have started at High Strength with the other physical attributes at above average (esp. endurance) *and* used the copper dagger. There are enough misses to advance swordsdwarf from dabbling to almost novice before he gets his grounding shot due to OP force transfer.
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Once Onget is grounded and no longer charge-to-
stun dangerous, Imush takes any good stab, but really wants lower body shots. If he can cause nausea's 50% debuff, he can somewhat safely use dabbling shield user and slap on a few grabs prevent to her from rolling away.
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All the roadwork which brought his endurance to
high/superior pays off as Imush out-cardios Onget, leading to a throat slash and a chokehold.
Hype aside, the basic level one novice skill bandit has a better roll-to-hit chance against your character in a very first fight scenario than the cyclops/ettin/giant, as that's novice NPC vs novice PC as opposed to big dabbling NPC lummox vs novice PC.
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Topic: What's going on in your adventure? (Read 2138431 times)