Combat: What is combat like in this game? Is it real watered down like in AD&D or are there critical hits and location charts?
Is the game like Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu?
What's combat like? Faster and more dangerous than the usual d20/3.x game.
For starters, instead of a single pool of hit points, everyone has 2 pools: wounds and vitality.
Wounds are fixed based on your race and remain the same over your whole career. Wound damage reflects genuine physical assault. Ex: falling on a hard surface, drinking poison, being stabbed really nasty-like.
Vitality goes up over your career. It reflects energy, stamina, etc. When characters use magic or try a difficult physical stunt, they use up vitality.
Damage is often applied to vitality first and then wounds when vitality runs out. But characters shouldn't be complacent . A great hero can be quickly felled by a nasty fall, poison stinger, warlock's lash, or dispatcher beast's rake.
There are no location charts, but wound damage can disable a character, making it hard for him to walk, carry stuff, etc. After falling 30 ft onto a stone floor, even if someone survives, they should NOT be walking around easily, etc.without magical healing pronto.
Also, when taking wound damage for the first time (in an encounter), a creature is dazed for the rest of its turn. That includes PCs. So the tide of combat can change quickly.
Some other things: A battle mat is completely optional. There is less math. There's no "armor class". Instead, armor and armor-like protections reduce damage.
Important: The level-based system is more additive than geometric. The result: More opponents at once, and "commoners" can be useful, dangerous or both. A 10th-level character can be bested by a squad of 5 2nd-level snipers, and a 15th-level monster is a doable match for a party of 5th-level characters (whereas in 3.x game, the PCs would go down quickly).
Characters are more specialized. That is, abilities are siloed and PCs are limited to a few silos. As a result, characters can be quite good at one particular shtick if they wish, even at 3rd or 4th level. And that's expected, so they can handle the challenges.
Deities matter, in that characters have faith points they can spend -- if they are in good standing with their deity -- in really dire moments. In my experience, PCs do a lot of praying at "boss" encounters in particular.
There's a simple taint and insanity system. ;-)
Oh: There's an optional "quick and dangerous" mode that gives all monsters more damage and less vitality. You can run an encounter on Q&D mode to surprise PCs. The GM can decide at a moment's notice to use this mode, meaning creatures that have been encountered before can suddenly be more dangerous--and all just with two stats changed.
Finally, combat doesn't get longer at higher levels. I've easily run a group of a half-dozen players through a 13th level adventure, and over 4 or 5 hours we had 4 combats and 5 social encounters.
. In total that's about 8 pages, not too threatening to the trees.
