Heroic Lands

Melee Attacks

Melee Attacks

A melee attack is one delivered at arm’s length or a weapon’s length — close enough that both combatants can reach each other, and close enough that the answer comes back in the same instant. It resolves by the ordinary attack sequence; what follows is what is particular to fighting at contact.

Every melee attack is made with a melee strike mode and tested against the Melee skill, whatever the weapon. A fighter’s training does not fragment along weapon lines: the same Mastery Level serves a sword, an axe, a staff or a bare fist, and what changes between them is the strike mode — its reach, its impact, its aspect, its precision, and what it can do in defence.

Reach and Engagement

Reach is how far a melee strike mode extends. It is the weapon’s own length added to the bodily reach of whoever is wielding it — so the same spear is longer in a troll’s hands than in a child’s, and a creature with no weapon at all still has some reach of its own.

A combatant’s reach is the longest reach among the melee strike modes they can currently use. Everything within that distance is inside their engagement zone: they can strike it without moving, and it can be struck by them. A combatant with an enemy inside their engagement zone is engaged, and one with several is engaged by all of them at once.

Reach is not symmetrical, and that is the whole tactical content of it. A spearman engages a knife-fighter well before the knife-fighter engages the spearman, and the knife-fighter’s problem is the ground between. Closing that ground is the point of a charge; keeping it is the point of a polearm.

A prone combatant does not hold an engagement zone at all — a moving opponent simply steps past it.

Making a Melee Attack

The attacker names a target within reach and a strike mode to use on it, aims if they wish, and tests Melee as described under The Attack Test.

Two conditions of the attacker’s body bear on whether the attack can be made at all:

The weapon must be held, in enough parts. Every melee strike mode names the number of body parts it takes to wield — a hand for a knife, two for a greatsword’s proper swing. Those parts must all be holding that weapon. A hand that is maimed, bound, or full of something else is not available, and a strike mode short of the parts it needs simply cannot be used. This is checked against those specific limbs, not against the fighter in general: a ruined off-hand does not spoil a one-handed cut with the good hand.

The off hand strikes weaker. A weapon wielded only in the non-favoured hand loses a point of impact, on top of whatever the fighter’s clumsiness with it costs the attack roll. See Dominance.

Defending in Melee

All four defences are available in melee to a combatant who can act:

Block — meeting the blow with a weapon, a shield, or a limb. It is tested against Melee using the blocking strike mode’s block capability, so what you block with matters as much as how well you block: a shield blocks better than a dagger, and some strike modes cannot block at all. A block wards the blow on a tie as well as on a win, but a tied block means the weapon or shield took the blow squarely and must check for breakage.

Counterstrike — answering an attack with an attack. It is a melee attack in every respect, made with one of the defender’s own strike modes and tested against Melee, and it is resolved as part of the same exchange. Because neither combatant is warding, both blows can land. A counterstrike is the defence of someone who intends to end the fight rather than survive it.

Dodge — evading entirely, tested against Dodge. It leaves the defender untouched when it works and nothing at all when it does not: a dodger must out-level the attack, and a tie goes to the tiebreak. Its virtue is that it costs no weapon, risks no breakage, and works against attacks that a block would be foolish against.

Ignore — taking the blow. A combatant who is stunned, restrained, or otherwise unable to respond has no other option, and an attack against them is resolved unopposed.

A defender with nothing in hand may still block with an arm or a leg — see Limb Block — but an unarmed block against an armed opponent is a wager on where the blade goes rather than on whether it arrives.

Strength Behind the Blow

Melee is the skill of placing a blow, not of driving it. How hard it lands is the attacker’s Strength, folded into every melee strike mode’s impact as the Strength Impact Modifier: roughly a point of impact for every two points of Strength above or below the human middle, without limit in either direction, and falling away much faster at the bottom of the scale than it climbs at the top.

This is why a strong fighter with a poor weapon is dangerous and a weak one with a fine weapon often is not, and why the same technique means something quite different when a bear performs it.

Manoeuvres

Not every melee attack is meant to wound. A strike mode may instead press an opponent back, trip them, hold a limb fast, or take what that limb is holding. Such manoeuvres are attacks like any other — they are declared, rolled and resolved through the same exchange — but winning the exchange only earns the attempt. What settles the attempt is a Strength Trial between the two combatants, and only the combatant who initiated it and won the Melee test may inflict its effect.

They are described with the unarmed techniques, in Unarmed Combat, because that is where most of them are found — but nothing confines them to bare hands, and a strike mode on a weapon may carry any of them.

Posture and Condition

Melee is where a fighter’s physical state tells hardest, because the roll happens at contact and there is no distance to hide in:

  • A prone combatant takes −20 to every melee attack and every melee defence, is easier for enemies to aim at, and must spend a quarter of their Move getting up.
  • Impairment of a limb the strike mode needs applies its penalty, and an unusable limb the mode requires fails the attack outright.
  • Fatigue applies to the attack and the defence alike.
  • A combatant in any shock state is compromised: an incapacitated one can only Ignore melee attacks, and an unconscious one is Helpless — a melee attacker against them simply scores a Critical Success.

See also