Combat

Combat is the main fighting mechanic in.

Combat attributes
The primary attributes that affect melee combat are agility and strength.
 * Agility affects one's accuracy, increasing the to-hit chance of striking an opponent.
 * Agility also affects one's DV, or dodge value, making it easier to avoid being hit.
 * Strength affects one's PV, or ability to penetrate the defenses of a hit opponent, causing more damage.

Hit Roll
The game begins processing an individual weapon attack by making a simple hit roll to determine if the attack hits the target:

If the attacker's hit roll is higher than the opponent's DV, the attack hits.

At this point, all on-hit effects are applied to the target. Unlike physical damage from the melee attack, on-hit effects do not need to penetrate to be applied, they simply require the Hit Roll to succeed. On-hit effects include just about anything besides direct weapon damage, such as:
 * Elemental damage from the weapon or its mods.
 * Status effects, such as bleeding or poison.
 * Physical effects, such as disarm, trip, or forced movement.
 * Special effects, such as the those caused by, , , , , and many other creatures and items.

Guaranteed Hits
Certain scenarios result in guaranteed or near-guaranteed successful hit rolls against a target:
 * If the target is Stuck or Overburdened, the target's DV is automatically reduced to, which can effectively guarantee success with all attack hit rolls against them.
 * Targets affected by the attacker's Hook and Drag are automatically hit by the attacker when the attacker moves.
 * If the attacker has latched on to the target (an effect unique to and ), the attacker is guaranteed to hit the target.

Penetration and Damage
After an attack is determined to have hit the target, penetration rolls are made to calculate the damage.

To begin, the game calculates the defender's armor value (AV) and the attacker's penetration value (PV). How PV is calculated depends on whether it is melee or ranged combat.

Penetration Rolls
The penetration rolls are now processed using the AV and PV values that were calculated in the previous two sections. Penetration rolls are the most complex and peculiar part of combat calculations. Penetration rolls determine the total amount of physical damage caused by the melee weapon.

- Roll the attacker's PV value against the defender's AV value 3 times (let's call this a triplet).
 * - Each individual roll within the triplet works as follows (let's call each roll a singlet):
 * - Roll . Each time that the maximum result of   is rolled, perform the   roll again and continue adding the results together.
 * - Add the attacker's PV value to the total roll calculated in.
 * - Note whether the total PV roll from is greater than the target's AV.
 * - If at least one singlet roll was greater than the target's AV, the attack penetrates one time (or one more time if this is a subsequent triplet). If all three singlet rolls were greater than the target's AV, reduce the PV value by 2, return to, and perform another triplet of rolls to determine if the attack penetrates an additional time. (Continue this loop, reducing PV by 2 each time, until at least one singlet fails to roll higher than the target's AV.)

In summary, the attack penetrates once for each triplet of rolls where at least one singlet was higher than the target's AV.

If all three rolls in the first triplet are equal to or lower than the target's AV, the attack fails to penetrate at all.