EFFORTPOST Darklands LP VIII: Raubritter confrontation & learning how combat works

We just got paid those 4 florins so I go out to spend it. I pick up some slightly better leg armor for Redactor and throwing weapons for Redactor and Yuna. One reason why I want most of the party using throwing weapons right now is that later on we'll be using alchemy, tossing potions in combat. I think (I'm not 100% sure on this) that Thrown Weapon is checked to see how fast and accurately you can do that.

Now I want to find somebody who will give us a raubritter quest, the best quest in any RPG ever. So we'll ask the usual suspects: The Fuggers, the Medicis, and the Hanseatic League.

This guy wants us to go to another city and break in and steal something. I don't do these because they're really dangerous, don't pay well, and they're not really something Christian heroes do.

This guy wants us to go on another fetch quest. It's to Magdeburg. That's way out in the east of the country. Way too far to be worth the effort. (I recently was listening to a podcast where they were interviewing a Cold War fighter pilot. His job if the balloon went up was to nuke the airbase at Magdeburg. It was assumed he would have nowhere to go back to after that because his own base would have gotten got. Some parts of history aren't romantic.)

This guy doesn't even offer us a job. Trying to get a quest depends on a lot of factors including fame, local reputation, and the speaking skills of your leader. And often they just don't have a job for you.

Let's try the mayor. It's risky trying to ask him for a job because he might just laugh at you and call you names and damage your reputation, but I'll risk it for you guys. Wow. We actually got in, but he offered us another fetch quest that would take us into East Germany.

I have a specific quest I want to go on for this episode for dramatic purposes so I'm gonna just play the game for a while until I run into it.

This is what I was looking for. A challenge to fight a raubritter. Germany was fragmented into so many little territories at this time that you could have one butthole who owns a castle and is the dictator of his little territory, robbing and raping with impunity. Actually it's not that different today. Look at Ferguson, Missouri where the cops were just randomly pulling over black guys and giving them tickets and threatening to frame them for a crime if they didn't pay it. This guy has a castle east of Paderborn.

Okay there's his castle. There's many ways to approach this. First let's trying just asking to come inside and ask to spend the night. What a nice guy.

We've gotten into the castle, which gives us the opportunity to try to burn it down. If we're very lucky then it's game over for him. We'll still have to fight him as he and his troops run to escape the castle, but they won't fight nearly as well.

Well so much for that. Obviously we can't ask him to let us in again. We could try to scale the walls and sneak in and try setting a fire again, but I don't like our odds. If our guys fall then they'll get hurt. Instead I think we'll go for a long campaign of attrition. I'll start out by ambushing his squads of troops roaming around the forest shaking people down.

They saw us first so we don't get the element of surprise. Oh well. We can take these guys I'm sure.

We're outnumbered 5-4 but all of these guys are the same level of trash as those street thugs we fought in the beginning. Their leader has roughly the same kind of equipment as us but it's of lower quality and I'm sure he's weaker and less skilled than our guys. I start out by having everyone use their missile weapons against one of the trash enemies. Hopefully we can cut him down and take away their numerical advantage before they even reach us.

It works. After that it's just a free-for-all. I maneuver my guys around a little to try to double team one enemy at a time, but it's not a tough fight. Take a look at the bar on the left side of the screen. The blue, green, and yellow columns show how much endurance, strength, and divine favor you have. The thin little column next to it is the same thing but for your current target. You can see here that Sasha and Yuna have taken minimal damage.

At this point I'm going to grind for a little bit, ambushing one or two more patrols. Every time we wipe one out, we reduce the raubritter's army a little bit. If my guys get hurt, I'll camp out and heal. You can't just camp forever, but I don't expect to get hurt very much.

All right, enough playing around. It's time to lay siege to his castle. Again, every time I beat one of these resupply parties it weakens his army. That means fewer enemies with less equipment.

Whoa! This is it. This is gonna be a tough fight as the raubritter is equipped with plate and chainmail armor, much better than ours. He's carrying a two-handed sword that will chop through us like butter. And we can expect him to be much more skilled than his minions. Fortunately since we've killed so many of his men already he only has three to accompany him. They are pretty well equipped though, comparable to us. This is going to be far tougher than any fight we've been in yet. I don't know if we can pull it off. My strategy will be to kill off his thugs as fast as possible so we can all gang up on the raubritter. Even with plate armor we should be able to take him down then.

I got one just with missiles. Good start.

I got two! That's Nathan with the bow who landed the 13-point hit.

I think we're alone now, there doesn't seem to be anyone around.

Now it's time to finally explain how combat works. It's complex but it's also pretty intuitive so you don't have to worry too much about the math if you don't want to. The most important mechanic is armor penetration. Armor comes in 5 levels of thickness. Each weapon has a rating for how good it as at penetrating armor. If the weapon's penetration rating is the same as the armor's thickness, damage is cut to 1/3. If it's lower it's cut to 1/8, which often means no damage at all. So as you can it's extremely difficult to take down a well-armored opponent.

The raubritter is wearing plate (5) and chainmail (4) on his limbs. (You hit the limbs 50% of the time.) Unfortunately I didn't remember to reequip Nathan with a better weapon and his long spear only has a penetration of 2. Sasha's longsword has 3. Yuna and I have maces with 4. (One of the reasons why we want a mix of weapons in the party is some of can specialize in penetrating thick armor while others specialize in dealing out maximum damage to less armored opponents.) At least our people will get a few bonus damage points for being very strong, but clearly we'll need to use some new tactics to beat him even 4 on 1.

First though, Yuna has taken a heck of a beating so let me see if I've got any saints who can heal her. St. Anthony hears Redactor's plea and actually heals her quite a bit. Now it's time to gang up on him.

Throughout the game up until now we've just been using the standard attack mode. But to take down the raubritter we're going to have to switch modes.

• Standard - The most appropriate in most situations, but not this one.

• Vulnerable - Try to hit the enemy in a vulnerable spot. This adds 1-4 penetration when you hit, but you also attack much more slowly. We put Sasha and Nathan in this because otherwise they'll never penetrate and only do a couple points of damage if they're lucky.

• Berserk - Just go all out on the attack like you're on PCP. We put Redactor in this mode. You're much easier to hit, but since we're just hitting him from behind that doesn't matter. Each attack is slightly less likely to hit but you attack much faster. Hopefully with that rain of blows we'll frequently hit his limb armor and do moderate damage.

• Parry - Concentrate on defending yourself. You're much less likely to be hit, especially if you have high weapon skill, but your attacks are slower. We put Yuna in this mode as she's holding off the raubritter while the rest of us attack him from behind.

It actually goes much easier than I expected and we take him down quickly. I think what was happening was that with all four of us on him at once, we were hitting on every attack. Sasha and Nathan couldn't make a lot of attacks as they were in vulnerable mode, but if every one hits that's good enough.

Now off to collect our reward. The 8 florins are nice. With that I can afford to buy at least one of my people a high-end weapon. Next time we run into a heavily armored opponent I want at least one guy to be able to penetrate easily. Pretty soon I might even be able to afford to dabble in alchemy. We get less tangible rewards as well: 40 reputation in Paderborn and +20 fame. (I think we got +3 for that satanic village.) Local reputation helps in a number of ways: better prices, better chances of being offered a quest, and people are just more likely to cooperate with you.

But maybe the biggest reward is the haul of loot we got from all those thugs we butchered. Look at all this stuff Sasha is carrying. Since they like us here in Paderborn it's a good place to sell it all. That brings in another 8 florins. The raubritter had below-average plate and chainmail. Nathan might be just barely strong enough to fight effectively in this, depending on what weapon we get him. There's also a two-handed sword. This has 4 penetration, so I'll keep it for Sasha to use against heavily armored opponents. The longsword is probably better for everyday use as it's much faster and lets us use a shield in the other hand.

Next episode: Let's spend some of this money!