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Combat

Discworld Concept Help

Combat

Name

Combat - Settling arguments the hard way.

Description

During your travels on Discworld, you will sometimes need to defend yourself, or even choose to attack someone (or something). You may be up against evil rats lusting after your blood, or a mugger who just tried to rob you; you may end up fighting a duel with knives or taking part in a bar brawl. Apart from necessity, brutally murdering the locals on your path is a useful tactic to gain some experience for your advancement in the mud.

Combat

Combat is mostly automatic - you don't have to type commands to attack or defend yourself, your character will do the standard actions on its own. There are some special commands you can learn, but you don't have to worry about that immediately.

While in combat, every few seconds your character has the opportunity to attack (as do all the other combatants). Whether a combatant takes that opportunity or not depends on how many other actions they have done recently and their combat tactics (also related to the tactics skill & see also the tactics command).

The attacks available depend on the weapons the attacker is wielding, and the successful use of each attack depends on the attacker's bonus in the relevant skill for that weapon, the defender's skill, the weapon itself and some other factors.

If the target is hit, some of the damage may be absorbed by the target's armour and the rest of it will damage the opponent (his hitpoints go down). Once your hitpoints reach 0, you die.

Skills

Your ability to fight is determined by a set of skills and the way in which you fight is determined by your tactics. You can see your skills with "skills fighting".

fighting
| melee - your skill in a fight with:
| | dagger - daggers
| | sword - swords
| | heavy-sword - two-handed swords (except very light two-handers)
| | axe - axes
| | mace - maces (including hammers)
| | flail - flails, chain weapons
| | polearm - polearms, spears, staves, halberds etc.
| | misc - miscellaneous and improvised weapons
| range - your skill at:
| | thrown - throwing weapons
| | bow - using bows
| | fired - using crossbows, blowpipes, etc.
| unarmed - your skill at:
| | striking - unarmed fighting
| | grappling - "wrestling" (used in some special attacks)
| defence - your skill at:
| | dodging - dodging attacks
| | parrying - parrying attacks with a weapon
| | blocking - blocking attacks with a shield
| special - your skill at special manoeuvres involving:
| | weapons - weapons
| | unarmed - unarmed combat
| | tactics - fighting tactics (affects how often you can attack)
| | mounted - mounted combat
| points - how much energy (guildpoints) you can spend on fighting

Stopping combat

You will continue to fight against all of your attackers even if you leave the room and come back. Both combatants must use the "stop" command to end hostilities.

Useful commands

There are a lot of tactics you can use in combat, and commands that can help you. Most of this you will have to learn for yourself, by experimenting. Nevertheless, here are some commands that you might find useful. Each of these has its own helpfile - for example "help wimpy".

consider - shows how good your target is; always use before attacking!
wimpy - allows you to run away when badly damaged
monitor - shows brief score updates during combat
tactics - changes your character's fighting methods/attitude

See Also

consider, tactics, protect, unprotect, concentrate, monitor, wimpy, kill, stop