Not surprisingly, I have a Quest Calendar again as my day-by-day calendar for the fourth consecutive year. Because each year is published separately, the rules are continuously improving, adding new mechanics to enhance the experience… that’s a fancy way of saying it’s more fun each time. The characters this year are anthropomorphic, and the first six weeks were spent playing one character a week to get a feel for their abilities. I settled on Quill Mudsong, a porcupine Spell Keeper.
Yesterday, while protecting some travelers, Quill engaged in five rounds of combat. Each round of combat required the following rolls: Wisdom (a failed roll results in the Attack roll being rolled twice, take the lower one), Attack (a successful hit allows a Damage roll), Damage (do enough Damage and stun your opponent, allowing you to skip the Defense roll), and Defense (a successful roll reduces the amount of damage you take).
As you might surmise from the title of this post, some of my rolls did not go well. I passed all of my Wisdom checks, but only succeeded at two of my Attack rolls, and only did enough Damage to stun the beast once. I’m not concerned about the hit points I lost; those can be restored through health potions and rest.
But the travelers I’m protecting… that’s another story. This particular combat came with a special mechanic of losing one traveler for each combat round where I failed to hit. Interestingly, I don’t know how many travelers I’m protecting, or for how long… the instruction provided a couple days ago was to track how many I’ve lost. Between the day they joined me (with a mediocre rolls) and yesterday’s combat, I’ve lost six; that’s half the possible losses across three days. But today’s rolls were made with a different d20; yesterday’s sits in dice jail presumably reflecting on those poor attack rolls.