Attack Draw
The goal of making an attack draw is to determine whether the attack landed and how well it succeeded if it did land. To make the attack draw, draw a number of cards from the Probability Deck equal to the rating your Protagonist has in the assigned ability. The highest card out of the draw is the result. If the value of this card meets or exceeds the target difficulty, then the attack was 100% successful. Depending on the attack or weapon used, missing the target difficult by 1 or 2 may still register as a hit, reducing the results of the attack to 50% or 25% of the target’s total Vim.
Rounding Down
Always round down to the nearest whole number when calculating trauma. The trauma is rounded down after each phase of the round. You could potentially round down three times: Base Damage, Modified Damage, and Resisted damage.
Critical Hits
Any time you draw a natural 10 (and the action doesn’t require training of which you lack), the attack is considered a critical hit. A critical hit will modify the difficulty of any subsequent Resistance draws for this attack by +1.
Determine Base Trauma
Combative actions, including strikes and offensive spells, deal trauma to targets when successful. Weapons and spells list out the most common types of attack methods. Each method lists out the trauma by percentage for the target difficulty. This percentage is based on the target’s Maximum Vim (rounding down, if needed). If the result is 100%, then that means the attack does as much trauma as the target’s maximum Vim. A result of 50% does trauma equal to half of the target’s maximum Vim, and so on.
In addition to listing the trauma for the target difficulty, each weapon and spell lists trauma for partial successes. For example, if there are 3 numbers listed, the left number represents the trauma if the target difficulty is met or exceeded. The middle number represents the trauma if the draw missed the target difficulty by 1 and the number on the right represents the trauma if the draw missed the target difficulty by 2.
For example: Qulia is striking an opponent with the weapon, Sword 100% | 50% | 25% | 10%. The target difficulty has been determined to be 9. If the highest card Qulia draws is a 9 or 10, the attack does 100% trauma on the target (potentially killing the target). If the highest card Qulia draws is a 6, the action is still partially successful – doing 10% damage to the target (9 = 100%; 8 = 50%; 7 = 25%; 6 = 10%). If instead, the highest card Quilia were to draw is 5, then the strike misses altogether.
Superficial Trauma
While most trauma is considered “mortal” (requiring vim for Clot), some trauma either intentionally or indirectly results as “superficial”. Superficial trauma does not require vim for Clot but it does modify the target difficulty for future resistance draws by +1. Superficial damage can stack, therefore each resistance draw you make has a modified target difficulty of +1 for each level of superficial trauma.