Combat & Wounds
"A blade cuts twice. Once when it meets your guard, again when it remembers you afterward."
Combat in Wildoria isn't a single number trade. A swing passes through guards and armor on the way in; if it cuts deep, the cut keeps on cutting after the fight ends. This page walks through the layers - how a hit lands, how gear tilts the math, and how a wound finds its way out of you.
Layers of a Hit
When an enemy swings, the engine resolves the strike in steps. Most of this is invisible during a real-time fight; the simulator's replay log shows it line by line.
1. Dodge
A clean miss. Your Speed and Dexterity roll a dodge chance (diminishing, capped). On a dodge, no damage, no follow-up - the swing finds air.
2. Block
If you didn't dodge, your Defense rolls a block chance (max 25%). A block doesn't stop the hit but halves the already-mitigated damage and shows it as a separate beat in the log:
Your guard takes the brunt - 14 incoming, only 5 cuts through from the Highway Bandit.
Skills bypass blocks. They animate around your guard; a sword can come down on a parry, a bullet tracks past it. Only basic strikes are blockable.
3. Armor - flat physical mitigation
Defense shaves a flat chunk off every physical hit. The formula is simple by design - every four points of Defense absorb one damage, with a 25% floor (you always take at least a quarter of the swing). High armor turns a heavy hit into a manageable one without making the player invincible:
A Highway Bandit's blade lands for 10 (armor absorbs 3).
The "armor absorbs N" line only shows when there's something to absorb - a naked-shirted citizen reads the older, flat damage line.
4. Resistance - categorical mitigation
Magical and elemental damage routes through your resistance for that category instead of through armor. Fire damage checks fire resistance; poison checks poison resistance; and so on. Each resistance caps at 90% mitigation of its damage type. Armor doesn't help against a curse; resistance doesn't help against a knife.
| Damage type | Mitigated by |
|---|---|
| Physical (cut, blunt, ballistic) | Defense (flat + block) |
| Fire | Fire resistance (percentage) |
| Poison | Poison resistance (percentage) |
| Ice | Ice resistance (percentage) |
| Curse / Shadow | Curse resistance (percentage) |
| Holy / Light | Holy resistance (percentage) |
| Fear | Fear resistance (percentage) |
| Neutral | Neutral resistance (percentage) |
The two layers stack: a physical fire hit (a flaming blade) checks both - armor first against the cut, then fire resistance against the burn.
Gear-Aware Skill Damage
Your stat sheet says how strong you are. Your weapon says how that strength is delivered. A skill's damage is composed from three sources, weighted by the skill's design:
- Base damage - the skill's intrinsic value, the writer's number.
- Weapon roll - your equipped weapon's damage range, rolled fresh per cast. A bare-handed Whirlwind rolls a fist baseline; a Whirlwind with a sidearm equipped rolls the sidearm's damage range.
- Attack Power - derived from Strength (
STR × 2), scaled by the skill'sdamage_scaling. This is the muscle behind the swing.
Magical skills (fire, ice, curse) skip the weapon roll and run on the caster's mind alone - pure stat × scaling, the way a flame should.
A blacksmith's Whirlwind isn't a better skill than a labourer's; it's the same skill, swung with a real edge instead of a bare fist.
This is why the city's smiths and arms-dealers matter. The numbers under the hood don't lie about whose hand they're in.
Lingering Wounds
Some wounds don't close when the encounter ends.
What lingers
The catalog flags certain effects as persistent. When an enemy lands one - a wolf's bite that cuts deep, a bandit's poisoned blade, a cultist's lingering curse - the effect is recorded in your character's permanent effect list, with a duration counted in real-world time. The bleed keeps ticking after you walk back to the city. The poison keeps eating at you across days. Another encounter on top of an open wound can be lethal.
| Effect family | Lingers? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Bleed | Deep cuts that won't clot on their own | |
| Poison | Toxic exposure with a long tail | |
| Burn | Severe heat damage from incendiary skills | |
| Curse | Slow degradation, narrative-flavored | |
| Stun / Slow / Silence / Freeze | Tactical states; scoped to the encounter | |
| Buffs (attack-up, shield, hp-up) | Combat-internal; expire with the round |
The catalog's effects.is_permanent flag is what decides. Designers
pick which skills carry wounds out of the fight; everything else stays
where it was set.
Stacking
A persistent effect can stack up to its catalog max_stacks. Each new
hit while the effect is active either:
- Bumps the stack count (if stackable and below cap), or
- Refreshes the duration (if at cap, or non-stackable).
A bleed that hits five times in a single encounter ends at five stacks, ticking five times harder until each one rolls off.
The Wound Sheet
Active persistent effects live on your character's effect list - the same surface the city's healers read when they decide what to charge you. Each entry shows:
- The effect's name and category icon.
- Its current stack count.
- The remaining time, real-world.
- Where it came from - the skill that applied it, the NPC that swung.
The wound sheet is what tells you whether you can take another contract right now or whether the next encounter will finish you.
Wounds on the Road
Not every wound is dealt in a duel. Crossing dangerous ground on the world map is its own kind of fight. The creatures that hold a hex test every traveller who passes, and the further they outmatch your level, the deeper the cut. A hex ruled by something far stronger than you can take a heavy bite out of your health in a single crossing; a string of such hexes will bleed you dry.
A creature only turns on you if it has cause. Wild beasts strike anyone, while a faction's guardians ignore a traveller they have no quarrel with. So the danger of a road is never fixed - it is measured against who you are.
If your health runs out on the road you do not simply vanish. You fall, drift out of consciousness, and wake in the nearest hospital, patched back up for a fee, with a note from the nurse telling you what finally brought you down. Reading the road ahead, and turning back before it kills you, is a skill of its own.
Recovery & Dispel
If wounds linger, the city has to sell you a way to close them.
Field consumables
A bandage clears bleeds. An antidote clears poisons. A burn salve clears burns. Each one carries a list of effect codes it can clear; using the item against an active matching wound consumes the item and ends the wound on the spot.
The use flow has a courtesy guard: if there's nothing to cure, the item isn't consumed. A clean citizen who fumbles their bandage onto a healthy arm gets a polite message and keeps the bandage:
Nothing to cure right now.
You don't waste consumables on bruises that aren't there.
Field nurses
Nurse Amelia Duran handles the combat-downed lane - when a simulator run drops you to HP = 0, she finds you, bandages you, and sends a recovery letter. The letter is courtesy mail; no rewards attach, the character is back on their feet by the time you read it. Field nurses cover the fall, not the bleed - a wound stays open until something explicitly closes it.
A staffed infirmary tier - paid in coin - is the intended endpoint for citizens who prefer not to heal in the dirt. The flow is wired; the NPCs are arriving.
Cleanse skills
Some learned player skills can clear effects on cast - a self-cast "Bind Wounds", a partymate's "Mend". They run through the same dispel helper as consumables; the catalog flags the skill's effect bindings, the caster pays the mana, the bindings clear. Same plumbing, so the rules don't fork between an item and a skill.
Natural expiry
Every persistent effect carries a duration. If nothing closes it, it ends on its own when the timer runs out. The longest catalog entries are measured in tens of minutes of real time; nothing in the current catalog is open-ended.
See Also
- Stats - Strength, Defense, and the rest of the layer the combat math reads.
- Life & Vitality - HP, Energy, Mana, and the vitality underlay.
- Quest Mechanics - Combat Depth - the same surface, viewed from the simulator's side.
- Prison - what happens when a contract ends in a verdict instead of a bleed.