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NorseQuest (A Norse Xianxia)

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Alright, so, tentative plan:

[X] Plan This Is Our Kenning, How Do You Like It?
-[X] Unassign Firebomb Strike and assign Sailwind before the fight. Also reassign Chuck from our Fylgja.
-[X] Invest 2 Orthstirr in Hugr, 1 in Composure, 4 in Tactics, 3 in Scouting (-11 Orthstirr)
-[X] 79d6 Attack (79d6 tricks)
-[X] 25d6 Defense (25d6 tricks)
-[X] 0d6 Intercept
-[X] Put 4 Orthstirr into 8 layers of Reinforce Shield before the combat begins (-4 Orthstirr) and add Explosive-Reactive Armor (-9 Orthstirr) to it
-[X] Activate Slipstream (-8 Orthstirr), and Ember-Wing Cloak (-6 Orthstirr) as combat begins and take to the air and stay there (all attacks and defenses below include +1d6 from Skyfire).
-[X] Put up a 170d6+9 (w/Hugareida) Sword Guard defenses (-174 Orthstirr), a 2d6+9 (w/Hugareida) Sword Guard (-6 Orthstirr), and a 2d6+9 (w/Hugareida) Atgeir Guard (-15 Orthstirr). The latter two will not defend against anything the first one does.
-[X] Open up with a 100d6+5 (w/Hugareida) Orthstirr-Enhancedx61 use of our 3Fold Kindle Spinner from our Fast w/Puncture (-70 Orthstirr) followed by a 100d6+5 (w/Hugareida) Orthstirr-Enhancedx66 3Fold Inetia-Arresting Throw from our Fast w/Puncture (-75 Orthstirr), if he gets caught by that, use the opportunity for a 7d6+5 (w/Hugarieda) Sharpenedx2 Lightning-Enhanced Flashfire Cleave w/Puncture (-18 Orthstirr) and a 6d6+5 (w/Hugareida) Orthstirr-Enhancedx3 Sparkbomb w/Puncture (-27 Orthstirr) while he's trapped and if he's still up after that retreat back to the sky with EWC (-6 Orthstirr if needed). At that point, whether he was trapped or not, if he doesn't have a Guard type ongoing defense and the first Kindle Spinners weren't completely useless after hitting him, hit him again with another eight 6d6+5 (w/Hugareida) Orthstirr-Enhancedx3 Kindle Spinners (-5 Orthstirr each), adding Puncture to the first one (-9 Orthstirr each) if he actually got caught by the IAT so they are sure to hit.
-[X] Against the first melee attack using Puncture we use a Contested Movement adding all our Stoker State dice and one use of Fight of Our Life (-3 Orthstirr, 30d6+5) and counterattack with a Sparkbomb w/Puncture (-24 Orthstirr)
-[X] By default use Halting Vortex (-4 Orthstirr) or another perfect defense as appropriate against anything without Puncture (or something else that makes them unusable) targeting either us or or primary Sword Guard. Against attacks with Puncture or other methods of avoiding our Perfects (other than the one melee one mentioned above), use our largest Sword Guard to defend against everything. In response to anything with Puncture (or other ways of getting past perfects) that gets through the first Sword Guard and is still coming rely on our Reinforce Shield to take the blow. If the big Sword Guard goes down and more attacks are incoming thereafter, first use the other Sword Guard and the Atgeir Guard as ablative defenses if possible and then use up to five 75d6+9 Reinforced x69 Hefty-Halter-Chop defenses (-72 Orthstirr each)
-[X] If our Orthstirr drops below 100 or so, stoke an Aspect, do this again as needed if it happens again, though we will not use Calm Charges on this.
-[X] Tactics – Fly out of his reach and try and nova him down with fire attacks immediately is the basic plan here. If he weathers those and there's no round break, we try and whittle down his defenses a little with relatively cheap attacks.

[X] Abjorn

This is basically an alpha-strike plan. Will it work? No idea, but it should be flashy and cool and make him spend resources stopping it, I think. Also, it's emblematic of the way Halla fights without giving away too many secrets (it reveals our ability to store Tricks in Fasts, but people already know that's a thing in general, even if not specifically about us), I don't think. We'll get trickier next turn once we see more of his kit...unless this works, of course, in which case we won't need to.

EDIT: Added a Flashfire Cleave and a Sparkbomb if he gets caught in the IAT.
EDIT2: Added emergency Contested Movement and ablative Guard effects.
 
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What IAT? All I see is two sets of 3fold Kindle Spinners there.

I do suggest if one of the IATs connect though, that we hit him with a Flashfire Cleave and then jump back away with another EWC trigger.
 
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Alectai said:
What IAT? All I see is two sets of 3fold Kindle Spinners there.
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Crap. Perils of copy/paste. The second one is supposed to be IAT...we only have one 3Fold Kindle Spinner in a Fast, so the second has to be something else. Fixed now.

Alectai said:
I do suggest if one of the IATs connect though, that we hit him with a Flashfire Cleave and then jump back away with another EWC trigger.
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Odds are real good that his armor will be wrecked by then anyway, but sure, I'll add one in.
 
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Imperial Fister said:
Yeah, I have no idea how other quests handle combat if they don't do daily or multi-daily updates. How do they keep the pacing feeling good?
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Mostly just have the voters uninvolved in specific combat decisions and put the whole combat in one update. Like, maybe a high level tactical plan at the beginning but not round by round breakdown. The version you do gives a lot more opportunities for us the Questers to be tactically clever.
 
will a trick be possible to let us use weapon attacks at range? in those cases that we wanna stay flying but also attack with weapons?
I wonder if we can make runes to allow us to throw our Atgeir and have it return to us?(kinda like Marvel's Thor Mjollnir or d&d returning weapons). will let us more easily combine our artillery style and stoker state by doing basic attacks from the sky

do we intend to get EWC to perfected in the foreseeable future? will be massive honestly
 
Turning this into a ranged contest is also something he's planning on and apparently believes he can win:
Imperial Fister said:
If he can't get you in melee, he'll resort to a variety of ranged attacks both precise and area. He may also throw rocks.
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The wording of this seems to imply he may have more ranged attacks he feels comfortable using against us than we have to use against him. I mean, we've got Kindle-Spinner, Gale Spear, Spark-Bomb, Fireside Barrage and a couple Stoker State ones whose names I forget and we can't really use at the moment... but of those, I think the only ones we could effectively use in this fight are KS or GS.

I think that trying to spend the first round at range seeing if Kindle-Spinners work is something we can try, but may find us in an uneven contest, or possibly getting hit in the face with a boulder.
 
Blademaster said:
will a trick be possible to let us use weapon attacks at range? in those cases that we wanna stay flying but also attack with weapons?
I wonder if we can make runes to allow us to throw our Atgeir and have it return to us?(kinda like Marvel's Thor Mjollnir or d&d returning weapons).
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We can combine Sword Strike with other Tricks...we probably want an Atgeir Strike for the same reason. It's a bit lower damage than our real attacks, though, without either our shapeshifts or Elemental effects from our weapon.

Blademaster said:
will let us more easily combine our artillery style and stoker state by doing basic attacks from the sky
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We can actually do basic attacks with our bolt thrower already, I just thought the damage itself was better this round. I could be talked around to making some of the later KS's into basic attacks, potentially.

Skippy said:
Turning this into a ranged contest is also something he's planning on and apparently believes he can win:
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He has a contingency for it, but he very explicitly vastly prefers melee.

Skippy said:
The wording of this seems to imply he may have more ranged attacks he feels comfortable using against us than we have to use against him. I mean, we've got Kindle-Spinner, Gale Spear, Spark-Bomb, Fireside Barrage and a couple Stoker State ones whose names I forget and we can't really use at the moment... but of those, I think the only ones we could effectively use in this fight are KS or GS.
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We have at least two ways to make Sparkbomb work at range as well. And he may think he has more ranged options than he does...he may not be aware we have Fire Resistance and even if he is, he may not be aware we have it at level 4.

Skippy said:
I think that trying to spend the first round at range seeing if Kindle-Spinners work is something we can try, but may find us in an uneven contest, or possibly getting hit in the face with a boulder.
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If he's better at ranged we've got a problem, because he's definitely better in melee than he is at range.

Orbmorb said:
I would rather stay in the air and throw a spark bomb if he gets caught in the IAT
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Sparkbomb is pretty defensible, yeah. Hmmm. Maybe combine the two? That should work...
 
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DeadmanwalkingXI said:
We can actually do basic attacks with our bolt thrower already, I just thought the damage itself was better this round. I could be talked around to making some of the later KS's into basic attacks, potentially.
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bolt thrower doesn't seem ideal though. it needs reloading, and isn't our best weapon generally. it just seems like a pretty good thing to have if we double down on flying
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
We can combine Sword Strike with other Tricks...we probably want an Atgeir Strike for the same reason. It's a bit lower damage than our real attacks, though, without either our shapeshifts or Elemental effects from our weapon.
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hmm. can we create a trick that lets us send the Atgeir/weapon elsewhere, basically allowing us to attack from two places at once? its pretty useful for battle control
 
Blademaster said:
bolt thrower doesn't seem ideal though. it needs reloading, and isn't our best weapon generally. it just seems like a pretty good thing to have if we double down on flying
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I mean, it's more a matter of tailoring our responses to our opponents than wanting to double down. This guy prefers melee, so we're going ranged.

Blademaster said:
hmm. can we create a trick that lets us send the Atgeir/weapon elsewhere, basically allowing us to attack from two places at once? its pretty useful for battle control
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When Sagaseeker uses Atgeir Tricks he basically hovers so he could go attack things on his own if we grabbed an Atgeir Strike Trick, so we could let him do that and attack with ranged stuff or other weapons then. He can't do basic attacks like that, I don't think.
 
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DeadmanwalkingXI said:
He has a contingency for it, but he very explicitly vastly prefers melee.

We have at least two ways to make Sparkbomb work at range as well. And he may think he has more ranged options than he does...he may not be aware we have Fire Resistance and even if he is, he may not be aware we have it at level 4.

If he's better at ranged we've got a problem, because he's definitely better in melee.
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I interpreted the bit about "arms length" as saying that we did not want to get into a grapple, not that we did not want to fight up close at all. I think that we're probably disadvantaged by fighting at range more than he is, and might be better off meeting his challenge.

I think that the ideas for making Sparkbomb work as a ranged attack kind of ignore the trade-off inherent in it and are unlikely to work, by the way. (IF spoke about how this tradeoff for big moves back when we were doing the research which led to FTB - which was about Finales but I would assume applies to Finishers as well.) Sparkbomb's whole deal is that it's a big powerfu lattack where you need to immobilise the enemy or get hit them by surprise at close range, and trying to work against that fundamental nature is probably going to fail against stronger opponents.

That being said, I drafted that post before reading the plan (which is why it was deleted), and I do like how you've got the first Kindle-Spinner in there as exploratory and the follow-ups only triggering if the first seems effective.

[X] Plan This Is Our Kenning, How Do You Like It?
 
Skippy said:
I interpreted the bit about "arms length" as saying that we did not want to get into a grapple, not that we did not want to fight up close at all. I think that we're probably disadvantaged by fighting at range more than he is, and might be better off meeting his challenge.
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Well, the issue there is, as we've seen, there are wrestling Tricks that replace your defense with an opposed wrestling contest, which he'll beat us at and pull us into a grapple if he's got them. Per IF, Abjorn has several Tricks that do that, so they can't be super rare and I think we have to plan on this guy having them.

Skippy said:
I think that the ideas for making Sparkbomb work as a ranged attack kind of ignore the trade-off inherent in it and are unlikely to work, by the way. (IF spoke about how this tradeoff for big moves back when we were doing the research which led to FTB - which was about Finales but I would assume applies to Finishers as well.) Sparkbomb's whole deal is that it's a big powerfu lattack where you need to immobilise the enemy or get hit them by surprise at close range, and trying to work against that fundamental nature is probably going to fail against stronger opponents.
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I mean, we specifically asked IF is the Sailwind idea would work and were told it would (it's actually the main reason we got the Trick). So...I think it will? It's probably still not the fastest combo ever, and quite expensive since you have to add them together, but it works and they need to beat its roll to dodge it. And the Gale Spear + Sparkbomb idea works for sure...we used it in the Abjorn spar and it worked (he sacrificed his shield to cancel it, but he had to do that, and that cancels any one Trick).

Generally speaking, using an entirely separate second Trick to compensate for the weaknesses of a Trick has been fair play historically (most notably EWC to compensate for Leaping Cleave's down side)...we're using two Tricks' worth of training and a lot of Orthstirr for the purpose, so the down side is replaced by 'very expensive, took a lot of training to get working'.

Skippy said:
That being said, I drafted that post before reading the plan (which is why it was deleted), and I do like how you've got the first Kindle-Spinner in there as exploratory and the follow-ups only triggering if the first seems effective.
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Yeah, I didn't want to waste them if it didn't work. I mean, it'll work on his armor pretty close to for sure, but it may not work otherwise.
 
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DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Well, the issue there is, as we've seen, there are wrestling Tricks that replace your defense with an opposed wrestling contest, which he'll beat us at and pull us into a grapple if he's got them. Per IF, Abjorn has several Tricks that do that, so they can't be super rare and I think we have to plan on this guy having them.
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That's probably true, but this is just a gut feeling - I think there have to be some kind of limitations to these or wrestling would predominate more in the "meta" of Norse combat than it seems to.

DeadmanwalkingXI said:
I mean, we specifically asked IF is the Sailwind idea would work and were told it would (it's actually the main reason we got the Trick). So...I think it will? It's probably still not the fastest combo ever, and quite expensive since you have to add them together, but it works and they need to beat its roll to dodge it. And the Gale Spear + Sparkbomb idea works for sure...we used it in the Abjorn spar and it worked (he sacrificed his shield to cancel it, but he had to do that, and that cancels any one Trick).

Generally speaking, using an entirely separate second Trick to compensate for the weaknesses of a Trick has been fair play historically (most notably EWC to compensate for Leaping Cleave's down side)...we're using two Tricks' worth of training and a lot of Orthstirr for the purpose, so the down side is replaced by 'very expensive, took a lot of training to get working'.
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Don't get me wrong: I think we might get something roughly as fast as a regular Kindle-Spinner out of the combo. But a strong opponent who sees what is obviously a very powerful attack coming their way probably has several ways to dodge or intercept something as fast as a regular Kindle-Spinner. That's why I think that trapping an enemy in IAT or using it as part of a Contested Movement is probably needed against stronger enemies.

Against multiple weaker foes, like the wolves, this is probably still really useful though!
 
Skippy said:
That's probably true, but this is just a gut feeling - I think there have to be some kind of limitations to these or wrestling would predominate more in the "meta" of Norse combat than it seems to.



Don't get me wrong: I think we might get something roughly as fast as a regular Kindle-Spinner out of the combo. But a strong opponent who sees what is obviously a very powerful attack coming their way probably has several ways to dodge or intercept something as fast as a regular Kindle-Spinner. That's why I think that trapping an enemy in IAT or using it as part of a Contested Movement is probably needed against stronger enemies.

Against multiple weaker foes, like the wolves, this is probably still really useful though!
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I mean, Wrestling's good in 1v1.

But when you're in a scrum, being locked down with another dude is a great way to get fucking stabbed by his buddies. Which is why Fang is all about becoming resistant to those buddies and is required to make Wrestling viable in a real fight.

Resistant, but I guess not actually immune.
 
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