When you roll 10+ on Hack & Slash, you can choose to allow your opponent to hit you you in order to deal 1d4 extra damage. Does this option come up often in your games? It seems to me you will almost always take more damage than you deal this way. I can only think of some uncommon situations where that might helpful. Am I missing something? Or should it be an option that is almost never used?
When you roll 10+ on Hack & Slash, you can choose to allow your opponent to hit you you in order to deal 1d4 extra…
When you roll 10+ on Hack & Slash, you can choose to allow your opponent to hit you you in order to deal 1d4 extra…
Lots of armor or abundant healing are both pretty easy to arrange to make the tradeoff more appealing. Or, in the case of our fighter, copious armor AND the Druid balance ability.
Yes
I thought of the Druid, but for the fighter I don’t think it works. Tougher monsters tend to have more hp and do more damage – if you.are able to soak the counterattack, you probably wouldn’t need the extra damage in the first place. If you do need the boost, you’re probably going to get hurt.
Maybe the classes less adept at combat might use it in extreme situations (potentially ~doubling their damage), to give them a good chance at taking down an opponent?
But primarily I’d say it’s a hard choice for particular circumstances
It never worked out well for the Barbarian, but my Fighter uses it with some frequency. She has 4 Armor, though.
Also, tough monsters tend to have high armor, so you want to concentrate your damage in as few hits as possible to reduce the amount of inflicted damage that is lost to armor.
You might be a Half-Orc and deal extra damage with that option.
And sometimes other things are going on around you such that dropping this enemy now is the better option, even if you bleed for it.
Or maybe you just don’t want to risk rolling snake eyes next time. 😉
Our fighter used it all. The. Time. Even though he had Merciless and Scent of Blood. Mostly he saw it as just how his character would fight, wild & reckless. After about a half-dozen sessions he got more tactical with it, but his first instinct was always MORE DAMAGE.
And it sometimes is good tactics. The PC-to-monster HP exchange rate isn’t always (ever?) 1:1. Sometimes it’s a good gamble to maximize damage and hopefully drop the foe (taking some healable damage in the process) rather than having to make another move against it (or give it the opportunity to flee, reposition, threaten someone else, etc.).
Used by a ranger last session 🙂
Also, it’s +1d6 damage – not 1d4.
1d6 damage. However I feel my players have fear of “GM makes a move”, so they don’t use that part of H&S move often. You know, master can do really awful things with his moves, and often that has nothing to do with raw damage.
I just did this to stab a ghost extra hard with a blessed implement. Did 6 extra damage.
Side note: if the damage done is sufficient to kill the enemy, do you still make a move as GM? I do, ’cause turns are quite elastic, so the moment the character make the move isn’t the “turn” of that player…
yes I do. Could be the last thing the monster does before dying. Or you exchange a few blows before you get the killing blow in. H&S normally is not just 1 attack.
I tend to think the option is most powerful because it lets you force the GMs hand. How often do you get to tell the GM who they can target with a move? If you’re trying to draw attention, there’s not much better unless you’re a barbarian.
Never used it for my fighter.
Better save then sorry and those 1d6 probably won’t sweeten the cake enough given my fighter already had 1d10 + 1d4 + 2 damage.
Plus as the monster won’t hit the fighter back you basically are likely to get a second 1d10 + 1d4 + 2 damage.
I specially don’t use it if the monster or attacker looks anything close to messy. I can’t see how anyone would risk messy damage, even 1 dot1 for a 1d6 ^^;;;