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Battle! The clash of swords and spears upon shields! The whistle of arrows and sling bullets! The exultations of mighty warriors as they jump into the fray—and fall into the dust.
Combat is a big part of WSSWNN—and, of course, attacks are a big part of combat! This section details the basic attack actions, explains how damage works, and covers special options for attacking.
Attack Actions
Attack Actions
An opposed attack roll is a ✦ Success if it beats the foe’s Guard. It’s a ⬖ Struggle if it only beats the foe’s Agility. An attack is a ⓧ Failure if it doesn’t beat either the foe’s Guard or Agility.
The game rules use three other terms for attack outcomes: a hit is a successful attack, a block is a struggle, and a miss is a failure. These terms are only used for attack actions.
Melee Attack
Roll Attack to strike a foe in your span with a melee weapon or fist.✦ Success: Hit! Inflict lethal and guard damage based on your weapon and success margin.⬖ Struggle: Block: inflict only guard damage based on your weapon. ⓧ Fail: Miss! The foe dodges.Melee Attack
Ranged Attack
Roll Attack to launch or throw a projectile at a foe. All ranged attacks have a -2 penalty. This penalty increases to -3 if you’re three spans away, -4 if you’re four spans away, and so on. ✦ Success: Hit! Inflict lethal and guard damage based on your weapon and success margin.⬖ Struggle: Block: inflict only guard damage based on your weapon. Ranged attacks can only be blocked by a shield or certain magical effects.ⓧ Fail: Miss! The foe dodges—or, if the range penalty reduces your roll to zero or below, you just plain miss.Ranged Attack
Take Hold
Requires one free hand. Roll Attack to close distance and grab a foe within your span. ✦ Success: Make a free Grapple or Shove brace.⬖ Struggle: Make a free Grapple or Shove brace with a -2 penalty. ⓧ Fail: Miss! The foe dodges. This attack establishes temporary physical contact; if you don’t successfully Grapple the character afterward, you no longer hold them. Take Hold
Damage
Damage
Most attacks inflict two kinds of damage: lethal damage and guard damage. The amount of each type of damage depends on the roll, the foe’s Guard and armor, and the armament used to attack.
Lethal Damage
Lethal Damage
Lethal damage reduces life. Standard lethal damage equals the success margin of the attack roll—that is, how much the attack results beats the foe’s guard. The foe’s armor further reduces lethal damage equal to the armor’s value. To calculate lethal damage from a hit:
Lethal Damage = Attack roll – Guard – Armor
Blunted weapons and unarmed strikes cap their lethal damage at your Strength + 1. For example, if your Strength is 2, you can never inflict more than 3 lethal damage with a staff or your bare hands.
Weapons that don’t have the blunted property can potentially inflict lethal damage up to the number of sides on the attack die, if the foe has no armor or guard left.
Guard Damage
Guard Damage
Most attacks inflict -1 guard on a hit or block, reflecting how the attack’s force staggers the foe. Some attacks with heavier weapons can inflict -2 guard or even more.
On a hit, guard damage occurs after lethal damage, not before. For example, if you roll 7 to attack an unarmored foe with 4 guard, your attack inflicts -3 life (7 – 4), then inflicts -1 guard, reducing it to 3.
Awareness Damage
Awareness Damage
Certain attacks inflict -1 awareness on a hit, rather than (or in addition to) lethal damage. This damage ignores armor, but doesn’t vary based on your success margin.
Damage Reduction
Damage Reduction
Some items and abilities reduce incoming damage. Armor, for example, reduces incoming lethal damage (unless the attack says otherwise).
The ✪ Unflinching ability, available from The Stone lore, reduces incoming guard damage in many circumstances. Many large monsters have a similar ability—it’s difficult to knock a massive creature off its guard.
Keep your guard up, hero!In the heat of battle, Guard is the most important defense for survival. The lower your guard, the more likely foes are to hit you—and the more damage you take from hits! The Stand Fast brace action is the main way to quickly recover guard.
Jump-Attacks
Jump-Attacks
Being on high comes with the risk of falling, but also offers a thrilling way to greatly increase a melee attack’s damage—the jump-attack.
When you jump-attack a foe from on high,make a melee attack with maneuver advantage against a foe below you. However, take a -1 penalty for each height you leap from.
On a block or hit, add +3 per height—plus your Strength—to your attack result. The attack also inflicts additional guard damage equal to the number of heights.
On a miss, plop. You take falling damage, as described in Movement.
If you jump-attack with a blunted weapon, the attack's total lethal damage still can't exceed the weapon's damage cap.
A Tale of Two Jump AttacksFrom the balloon’s gondola, Wandu the Wanderer sees her chance to strike the giant kulu brute monster lurking in the forest directly below her! She draws her dagger and jumps over the railing.The balloon is two heights above the monster. Wandu rolls Attack and only gets a 2, but rolls Maneuver (advantage) and gets a 7. She subtracts 2 (for the two heights) for a result of 5. The monster has Agility 0, Guard 6. Ordinarily, the monster would block. But since Wandu’s jump attack doesn’t miss, she adds 6 to her attack result (+3 per height), yielding an 11! (If she had more than zero Strength, she’d increase the result even further.) The attack inflicts -5 life and -3 guard—the monster staggers from the blow!
...Now Chom the Champion, emboldened by Wandu’s successful jump-attack, also leaps from the balloon, spear in hand. He, too, rolls only a 2 on his Attack. Unlike agile Wandu, Chom’s maneuver advantage can’t help much—he has a d4 Maneuver die with a -2 penalty from his shield and armor. He rolls and gets a -1. Chom keeps the 2 from his Attack die, then subtracts 2 from the height, resulting in a 0. A zero fails to beat the monster’s 0 Agility. Chom misses and lands in the (luckily soft) forest canopy. Chom makes a free Maneuver roll to land gracefully and reduce the falling damage. He gets a 4, but with his -2 penalty, this only reduces the fall's lethal damage by 2. He takes -2 life and -2 guard.
Other Attack Rules
Other Attack Rules
Breaking and Disarming Arms
Breaking and Disarming Arms
Some attacks trigger a free brace roll to determine if the defending armament is disarmed, or breaks. See the following section, “Braces,” for how these actions work.
Targeting Arms Directly
Targeting Arms Directly
If you’d like to aim a melee attack at a foe’s defending armament, declare this intent before you roll. If the attack is a hit, treat it as a block instead.
Throwing Weapons and Objects
Throwing Weapons and Objects
If a weapon has the throw trait, you can throw it as a normal ranged attack. But in a pinch, you can also throw other weapons, or even rocks on the ground.
Throwing something not designed as a thrown weapon has the following limitations:
The ranged penalty increases to -3.
You can only throw it at a foe in your span.
Its lethal damage is blunted, capped at your Strength +1.
Attacking Objects
Attacking Objects
An object is by definition inert, so it has no guard or other defenses. Instead, objects have two statistics: Toughness and Structure.
Toughness works like Armor: it reduces the damage from an attack. Structure roughly corresponds to the object’s mass and works like Life: when an object’s Structure is reduced to zero, it crumbles, shatters, or is otherwise rendered unusable. Attacks with the blunted property are not limited in how much structural damage they can inflict.
If an object is made of multiple materials, use the average Toughness. For example, a balloon, made of a cloth envelope and a wicker gondola, has a Toughness of 1 and a Structure of 16.
Object Toughness and Structure
Damage multiplier. Heavy weapons and other attacks that inflict more guard damage are also better at destroying objects. When attacking an object, your attack’s guard damage works as a multiplier.
If an attack inflicts -2 guard damage on a hit, multiply the attack result by 2 before subtracting the object’s Toughness. If an attack inflicts -3 Guard damage, multiply the result by 3 before subtracting the object’s Toughness.
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