Bim and Cerol travel southwest from the freak mate of twilight's lair to a region of snowy forest. The Sculpture of Lace, located next to a glacier, is home to Ala Championlisted the Large Taker the ettin:
They sneak inside, Bim ready for melee and Cerol hopefully ready to fire. Sneaking is a second nature afterthought here. I think it's only really useful versus vision cones rather than any creature with [MULTIPART_FULL_VISION] which is 360 degrees. Bim gets as close as possible before setting one row of campfires. Switching back to longbow, they both fire a volley, causing the ettin to move into the nook at the top, preventing a good shot. Because of this Bim switches back to melee, vaults over the firewall to bring the ettin back into range.
The initial feel is this is a medium grade ettin, so Bim will use positional, single-action, stand and trade tick combat. He'd like to pin the ettin between himself and the firewall if possible, but Cerol's reload time will make that unlikely.
Now here's where there was an error in setting up the firewall. Bim only set one row. A campfire barricade/firewall really needs to be two rows deep. Once the ettin moved adjacent to the firewall, one of Cerol's shots or one of Bim's sword stabs caused it to jump onto a campfire. With this, Bim jumps back to stand between Cerol and the ettin:
Bim also switches his dodge preference to Stand Ground and works in the all important leg/foot shot (to drop speed and remove charge attack):
On the wrong side of the firewall, the ettin, now with a target, has no reason to immediately flee when shots are fired. This, in an odd way, is a happy accident as now there's a deviation from normal stat growth. It's not uncommon to take a peasant from novice combat skills to proficient weapon user and still only have either shield or dodge grown to adequate, with possibly the other still at novice. This is presuming every fight is solo and you're trying to finish each fight as quickly as possible.
Beginning stats prior to ettin are generally consistent with this idea (with the exception of wrestler which spiked in the first fight once it was clear that ettin was weak enough to work in some grappling):
Stats after this ettin:
There's really no way dodge and shield would have both moved to adequate under more normal circumstances. Sword may have been the same or higher.
Overall this ettin fight was a great success in that Cerol evolved from a recruit to a bowelf and also improved from dabbling to novice observer:
Sadly though Cerol didn't get the kill:
But it all ends well:
Before heading back to the elven town of Twinklelather for a round of drinks, Bim and Cerol may head out to try their luck with Iquila, the baying troll.
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Topic: What's going on in your adventure? (Read 2102474 times)