Ud Beanstalk doesn't come across any wolves, just endless snow. He witnesses a second bloody insurrection, and later makes his way to a cave occupied by a fat cyclops and yet another cave with a slim ettin.
Since Ud's not a civ-peasant, he couldn't be rolled with novice shield user. As an outsider who can't rely on a dabbling shield roll-to-block, he runs the quick attack + dodge away game, first to ground and then to induce the 50% debuff nausea penalty, before being willing to add in some wrestling grabs (for both XP and to pin to tile to remove opponent dodge), and work in shield blocking.
Finishing fights as quickly as possible is heavily governed by RNG at the beginning, so there isn't great way to estimate fight duration. While your character can play the endurance game and outlast a creature who doesn't have the NO_EXERT tag in their raws, you don't know what their endurance is compared to your character, and I don't remember if anyone ever spaded out the endurance cost of each action a PC/NPC takes.
Amount of blood loss is based on damage suffered, but how much blood a creature has might be size dependent, and there isn't a reliable way to estimate size via live creature description. I'd guess the test for all that might be to roll a character who could score a major artery rupture immediately, and begin tick counting until NPC death, then look at corpse size. And then do that again and again and again…
While you can engineer suffocation, this too is still influenced by RNG at the beginning. When you can reliably war hammer the neck, you're already a high level, and similarly could just spam a headshot.
Since the fat clops is in a cave, the RNG plopped out some giant cave spider webs. To speed up the clock, Ud dodges his way into the network of GCS webs, hoping the cyclops will path into one of them.
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Getting an NPC into path-webbing itself opens up an undefended throat attack = major artery rupture. But he doesn't do this before leveling dabbling skills like wrestler/spear to novice.
Sadly, there are no GCS webs with the ettin, but there was an RNG throat attack. Just so random.
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As with the clops, caves yield no weapons or armor. And since this (44.12) is a post-tavern arc release, the random pools of booze don't hold any sparkle.
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Maybe Ud should have scavenged metal armor off those dead insurrection dwarves. Those were some nice steel mail shirts.
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Topic: What's going on in your adventure? (Read 2138298 times)