Magic Realm: Day 4

At the end of day 3, the Black Knight beats a hasty retreat from the Guardhouse, as both the Guard and the Patrol challenge him.  As a result, the Black Knight incurs a single point of fatigue.

On day 4, the Black Knight records one action to move back to the Guardhouse (where the Guards and Patrol are waiting), records two hide actions, and for his last action, records a rest, in order to recover from the fatigue of running away yesterday.

We have recorded two hide actions because there's a chance that a hide attempt will be unsuccessful.  When attempting a hide action (and many other actions) you roll two dice, taking the higher of the two rolls, and consulting the related table to determine the result.  If, for example, a hide roll reveals a 6, your hide action is unsuccessful.  Therefore, we have recorded two hide actions, to improve our chances of hiding.

The monster roll, at the start of the day, is 4: giants and trolls.  As we are staying in the valley, we don't need to worry about prowling monsters.

During the day, we move back to the Guardhouse, and roll a 1 and 3 on our first hide attempt, thus successfully hiding.  The second hide action is lost, as we must pre-record all of our actions at the start of the game day, and then follow the actions in order once our turn begins.

Since the Black Knight is hidden at the end of the day, neither the Guards nor the Patrol challenge him.  Time to take down the leader of the Guards. 

Since the Black Knight is hidden during the initial combat encounter step, he readies his medium mace by alerting it.  He uses his FIGHT M5 chit to do so, thereby temporarily removing that chit from his active action pool.

Because we are attacking while hidden, the Black Knight gets a free attack on the leader of the Guard.  Thus we don't need to play a move chit to avoid the Guard's attack during this first round of combat, only another fight chit to strike our blow (you must always play a fight chit along with whatever weapon you employ).  The Black Knight uses his FIGHT H6 chit in combination with his medium mace.  Since the mace is already alerted, it has an automatic attack speed of 3, which is faster than the attack time of 6 on his fight chit (smaller attack numbers are faster that larger numbers, and weapon speeds over-ride fight chit speeds).

We compare the Black Knight's mace speed of 3 to the Guard's move speed of 5.  Since the mace is faster than the Guard's move, we undercut the Guard, and inflict an automatic hit.  And since we played a heavy fight chit, which is a more powerful swing than the mace's normal damage, we inflict a heavy wound, one harm level higher than what the mace usually does. 

Splat!  The Guard dies, as we inflicted, as he is vulnerable to, heavy damage.  

As a result of dispatching the leader of the Guard, we gain 6 notoriety, and 4 more gold.  At this point, It's tempting to try dispatching the other two Guards, but there's a risk that one of them will get a lucky swing during the second round, killing me or destroying my armor, neither of which is palatable.  Dying on day 1 is not fatal to winning the game, but dying on day 4 might put victory out of reach.  Therefore, at the start of combat round two, we once again use the Black Knight's MOVE H4** chit to run away, suffering a single point of fatigue while fleeing down the road. 

The Black Knight can successfully flee in this circumstance because the Guard's move speed is 5, while his speed, while exhausting, is 4.