Hello! We’re new at this game, and I have a quick question that hopefully isn’t too obvious.
So, my character is armed with a plain sword. She hits an enemy and rolls 5 damage dice (4 from the sword, +1 from Brawn). She rolls 5, 5, 5, 6, and 6. Since there are no effects listed on the sword (except for Parry), this adds up to only 5 damage.
The enemy then rolls 3 dice for Soak, getting 1, 2, and 5. This negates 4 of the 5 damage, receiving only 1 point of damage to their vigor.
Is this correct? Thanks!
How do you get this odd number of Cover Soak?
Armor works this way:
The Armour Soak is a FIXED value, not variable, no rolling of dice involved, which is subtracted from the damage a character receives by a hit.
The Cover Soak is a VARIABLE value, you roll your Cover Dice which are the same as the Conan Combat Dice (CD - the ones with the Phoenix symbol). Light Cover is 2CD, Heavy Cover is 4CD. Most Shields give 2CD Cover Soak. Hiding behind a fortified castle arrow slit could give 4CD cover soak.
On the hit above, if the target had Armour 3, that would reduce the 5 points of damage to 2 points.
You described rolling variable Cover Soak dice, so your target had not worn any Armour, but was hiding behind some Cover that is between Light Cover (2CD) and Heavy Cover (4CD), so you rolled 3CD for 4 points of Cover Soak result. That would reduce the 5 damage received to only 1 point.
Aha! No, I chose 3 for Soak at random, just as an example. But this is very helpful, thanks!
The main thing was to confirm that 5s and 6s don’t provide any effects for the sword.
There are some weapon Qualities that are “always on”, like the Parrying quality.
Others are triggered by the number of Effects rolled on the damage dice.
And a few others are triggered by other conditions, like Intense for example, which is triggered by the attack causing at least one Harm, then Intense will add another.