Cinco: Group Combat

While inactive but lurking, I saw someone on a Discord have a question about handling groups of figures with two-sided melee rolls (where partial success may mean both hitting and getting hit). There's some answers on the Dungeon World side of things, but I wanted to think about what a dynamic ruling would look like were I in the driver's seat.

When multiple players target the same monster: Everyone rolls. Successful hits accumulate, but only the character with the lowest roll takes damage if they would otherwise.

Everyone gangs up on a living scarecrow. Alice rolls 16, Bob rolls 3, and Claire rolls 8. Only Alice rolls enough to land 1 hit, and would usually take 1 hit in return, but only Bob takes 1 hit from the scarecrow for rolling the lowest.

When a monster would deal multiple hearts of damage: They may deal 1 heart of damage up to that many characters. Hearts of damage in excess of characters cycle through again.

Alice and Bob attack a dragon, rolling 15 and 17. Both land 1 hit each, but so does the dragon who lands 3 hits total: 2 hits against Alice, and 1 hit against Bob.

When one character is attacked by multiple monsters: They can only attempt to (counter-)attack one monster, as their melee roll, but in doing so they cannot prevent the other monsters from freely attacking them.

Alice is affronted by 3 goblins, who could each land ½ a hit. She rolls 18 and chooses to protect herself against 1 goblin, but the other 2 goblins freely land ½ plus ½ hits against her (total of 1). She could have taken 1 ½ hits if she opted to land 1 hit herself, or she could have avoided the situation by attempting to flee instead.

Hope this makes sense without being overly rigid or formal! I didn't want to linger on combat, but it was an interesting question that made me think.

P.S. Updated FMC Basic to reconfigure rules for experience calculation and dungeon stocking.