Scribbles and Horrors

The Realm of Yolmi has 8 combat matrices: Land Combat, Hand-to-Hand Combat, Underwater Combat, Ship vs. Ship Combat, Air Combat, Spaceship vs. Spaceship, Spaceship vs. Creature, Spaceship vs. Planet. Besides this, weapons of a sufficiently high tech level skip combat to-hits altogether, automatically hitting unless a saving throw is made.

So the answer to the question “well, do I hit it? What do I roll?” could be on one of 9 tables, depending on what weapons are being used and in what circumstance.

This is typical Realm of Yolmi excess—the breadth of possibility is impressive and awe-inspiring.

Usually, of course, Land Combat is what adventurers will be using. The rest are special cases clearly understandable—naval combat is between ships, phasers are phasers, etc. But Land Combat and Hand-to-Hand combat seem to be weirdly intermingled, and I’m having trouble figuring them out.

Land Combat is a straightforward percentile to-hit vs Armor Type, with modification by weapon, strength, and tactical positioning.

Unless surprised, initiative is rolled individually on d8s with bonuses, and damage is dealt on a hit. Standard stuff.

Firearms are extremely powerful in Land Combat. They automatically jump to the top of the initiative against other opponents and have a 15% chance to kill outright any creature hit. Additionally, a successful hit allows the shooter to “empty the clip”, dealing as successive rounds-worth of damage. Firearms are mitigated by being expensive and rare, and requiring scientists to reload them.

My basic understanding of the combat sequence is this:

1. Determine surprise
2. Determine initiative order
3. Within each combatants turn:
a. Move
b. Resolve to-hits
c. Resolve damage
d. Reload firearms, other actions, etc.

So far so good. But then there’s this whole other section…

The Hand-to-Hand system is described right after Land Combat, and has a similar initiative process, except that non-firearm weapon-wielding characters get +3 initiative. The attacker rolls 1d20 and subtracts 1d8 rolled by the defender, trying to meet a target based on armor type.

It is said elsewhere that Scientists do damage “openhanded”, as do several creatures. The damage calculation in the H-2-H section is appropriately weak (level x STR). Presumably “doing damage openhanded” has something to do with the Hand-to-Hand combat system, right?

But when is this system supposed to be used? It is not simply a hit resolution mechanic which could be swapped into the initiative order, because H-2-H adds +3 to initiative where Land Combat does not. Could it be that initiative is supposed to be rolled each and every combat round? That seems quite cumbersome.

An appendix (containing errata and additions) says that close range (½”) is required for hand-to-hand. Perhaps the initiative order is set at the beginning of combat, but when Hand-to-Hand begins (forced by closing ranks) it triggers a re-assessment of the initiative situation.

A thorough statistical analysis might reveal whether there are advantages to one matrix vs another—I can imagine it being tactically useful to move into hand-to-hand as a way of making it harder to be hit—but I leave that to better calculators than me.

For the most part Yolmi is more coherent and complete than, say, OD&D. But this is one area where things don’t quite seem to fit together. Unfortunately I have not yet made contact with anyone who played Yolmi back in the day, who could answer this question.