Determining Speed

The flow of battle is pretty simple and straightforward, with the characters acting from greatest to least Agility rating. If a character has more than twice the Agility of the next in the order, they may also act twice instead of once! Combat order can be altered by changing Agility with magic, or by special situations like surprise attacks.

Actions

When it's your turn in battle, you can perform a variety of heroic manuevers along with changing your battle stance. These range from attacking, using an item, using a Charge Skill, casting magic, guarding yourself, defending another character, and obviously running away. You can always elect to delay your action, or do something not listed here... feel free to be creative! The following is the low down on each of main ones:

Combat Stances & Range

Since simulating the chaos of a free movement battle system on IRC is hard, but standard rows seem too cramped, I have invented a fun and easy solution. A stance basically is a general description of your "Location" in regards to the enemies. You can either be Offensive or Defensive. Offensive stance puts you in the enemies's face with a +25% chance to overcome the enemies' Parry Rate, but you expose yourself more to attacks. Defensive is quite the opposite, allowing you to keep your distance for a +25% to your Parry Rate, but in doing so your hitting ability is hampered. Keep in mind, enemies have stances just as you do!

If you wish to change your stance, it does not count as an action in itself.. but you MUST declare the stance change BEFORE you take your action. Also, occasionally something can change it at the start of combat, like the environment forcing you into an undesireable position.

As a final note, the range of a character's weapon has an effect when attacking enemies in certain stances. Characters with Long range weapons have the advantage over Short in the fact they can attack from Defensive stance without the usual penalties.

Attacks and Building the Charge Gauge

Yes, the fighters bread and butter. If you elect to attack an enemy, their Parry Rate is checked and Range/Stance modifiers applied to the final roll to determine a dodge. Upon landing the hit, the target defends with their Vitality + Armor rating and damage is applied; if you missed, well, there's always next turn. ;) Also, with a successful Luck check, a Critical Hit (or a WHACK as we love to call it here) can occur, and your effective damage is doubled. If your attack is charged with an element type, it can affect the amount of damage you deal to certain enemies, too, enhancing it greatly or even causing it to be absorbed completely! See the element tables farther down for a list of all the relationships. Attacks will always do at least 1 damage, regardless of the target's defenses.

However, scoring a successful blow does more than just smash someone's face in real good. For every hit you land, your charge guage goes up by one bar. That leads to our next section...

Weapon Charge Attacks

No these aren't limit breaks, but you're close. :) As you attack enemies, you build up a charge meter, and when this reaches a certain level, you can perform your character's special deadly attacks! There are three levels of charge in total, corresponding to the three attacks available to a character as they advance and class change. The units for each are 2, 4, 6 respectively. So for example, after two hits on a Rabite, your charge guage would be at level 1, and your first charge move enabled. Remember later on, using a certain level charge attack depletes the corresponding amount. So if you had your guage at 6 hits (level 3), using a level 2 attack would consume 4, leaving you at level 1 (2 of 6 hits) afterwards. :)

Charge attacks are also useful because they ignore the Armor rating of the target, forcing them to defend with only their base Vitality.

Casting Magic

For all those guys in bathrobes that carry big sticks, this is for you. Casting a spell is treated the same way as an attack in most cases. For straight damage dealing, the Mind of the caster takes the place of Strength (plus spell level modifiers) and target's Spirit of Vitality, (plus Magic Resist of the armor worn) and damage is applied. Obviously elements come into play here too. In the case of causing an effect, it's Mind vs Spirit in a similar manner as hitting a target. Healing and supportive magics are not resisted in this way, so the effect nearly always succeeds. For reference, most stat increasing spells generally raise the appropriate stat by Mind/2 for the duration of combat or until the character falls, whichever comes first, and protective spells like Wall or Lucid Barrier fall after a certain number of that character's turns have elapsed.

One thing to keep in mind, is that casting a spell on multiple targets rather than a single foe reduces the overall effectiveness by 50% before any other modifiers are applied. Also, not every magical skill relies on just Mind, but sometimes other stats such as Agility, Luck, Strength, etc. Finally, SoM has the rare occurance of every 2 points of Mind being a 1% chance to "Critical Cast" a spell, doubling it's total effect for free!

Using Items

Items have a variety of uses like in any other game, and can be lifesavers. They use a turn up like any other action. One thing to consider in SoM is that all party members SHARE an item list, so if you are in doubt about what the group has in it's bag of goodies, ask me. And make sure not to be selfish kids. ;) The item list can be found in the Stats section of this site.

Guarding and Defending

Two actions that are certainly not the least are defending and guarding. They are fundamentally different in two ways. Defending is similar to a Cover type action, where you become the effective target of all physical attacks directed at the person you choose to defend for that turn. Guarding is performed only on yourself, where you reduce your damage that turn and gain a free unit of charge. Of course, you don't deal any damage this way either.

Running Away

That's right coward. If you wanna desert you comrades and go hide in a closet, go right ahead! If you elect to run away, your Agility and Luck are pitted against the highest of the enemies, and if you succeed, you leave the battle area. Understand if you do run, you can't rejoin that battle until it is concluded or everyone runs... and beware going to far or you just may get into even more trouble than before. ;)

Status Effect Summary

A very important thing to know is status effects, as they can make or break you in a fight. SoM has a virtual grab bag of conditions, ranging from the comedic to the serious, but all are quite deadly! Remember, having a high Vitality rating is a good way to shrug off these conditions faster.