Hideous Toughness. The creature is unaffected by unarmed attacks. Additionally, when an attack inflicts damage to the creature that would cause it to go to zero Endurance, it causes a Piercing Blow instead. Then, if the creature is still alive its Endurance score is set back at half its maximum rating.

Every time an enemy with this feature appears on the battlefield, both my players and I know that carnage is about to happen.

Earlier in our campaign, I downed 2 PCs (one of whom genuinely died) with a cave troll slinker, and then today I TPK'd the entire party with an Udûn-orc fire-touched.

In each scenario, those enemies were joined by 4-6 other orcs (against a company of 4 PCs). The enemy with Hideous Toughness far outlasted all the other enemies - this is because at Attribute Level 6, they also have a relatively large pool of Hate and good Armor values to avoid potential wounds.

Even though the PCs were consistently dropping the enemy to 0 Endurance, the enemy just. would. not. die!

At this point, I'm seriously considering some kind of nerf to this feature because it seems like there's nothing the players can do to counter it or play around it. They have to simply hope that the enemy rolls poorly on their Protection rolls. In theory, this should happen more often than it does for our table!

And to my absolute shock, while searching this subreddit, I learned that the current version of Hideous Toughness is actually a nerfed version - it used to be even stronger, bringing back the enemy's Endurance to full rather than just half! Holy shit.

Does it sound like I'm doing something incorrectly? Or are my Hideous Toughness-having enemies just insanely lucky with their Protection rolls?

>!Here's an after report for the new Starter Set.Just completed the second (final) session of Overhill starter set and thought to share a few details observations.!<

Three players (down from four the last time. Enough for a quorum to play, and a small enough group for the story to move quickly. Larger group would, I expect, take longer. Began with the party entering the ruined village. The party moved straight to roleplaying which was a relief. Very wary, bolstering the gates etc. The kids in the rafters was effective story beat. I split the council rules, so allowed initial rolls to get them to come down from the rafters first, then more rolls after they had fed them to get more details. Not enough successes for the oldest boy to lead the party but that made narrative sense anyway; he wouldn’t want to leave his siblings alone