• Spoilers
• Skills
• Barehand-combat

General Info

Having skill in Barehanded-combat (not surprisingly) allows you to fight barehanded. If you also have skill in Weaponsmastery you must toggle which melee style you want to use under the 'm' menu. Assuming you don't wear heavy armor, you will get bonuses to speed, free action, and armor class bonuses.

My opinion on Barehanded combat is that it hits very hard (high damage), but you are constantly at a relatively low plus to hit, as you have no corresponding weapons specialization skills. So you have to focus a lot on getting plus to hit from armor, spells, prayers, or item effects like potions of heroism.

Spending skill points in Barehanded-combat will also increase your Combat skill.

Code-Related Information

As I got most of this from Killerbunnies, I will use his notations. Skill in Combat is denoted as S.

1. Your speed bonus will be +S*.1. So two examples are at skill 10 you will have +1 speed. At skill 50 you will have +5.
2. You will get free action if your skill is 25 or higher.
3. Armor class bonuses are:
   1. S*1.5 if you aren't wearing body armor.
   2. (S-13)/3 if you aren't wearing a cloak and your skill is 15 or higher.
   3. (S-8)/3 if you aren't wearing a shield and your skill is 10 or higher.
   4. (S-2)/3 if you aren't wearing a helmet and your skill is 4 or higher.
   5. S/2 if you aren't wearing gloves.
   6. S/3 if you aren't wearing boots.
4. While using Barehanded combat, you receive +S/3 bonus to hit and damage and the number of attacks will depend on your skill level as per this:
   • +1 at skill level 10. +2 at skill level 20. +3 at skill level 30. +4 at skill level 35. +5 at skill level 40. +6 at skill level 45. +7 at skill level 50. So at skill level 1 you will have only 1 attack per round. At skill level 20 you would have 3. At skill level 50 you'd have a (natural) max of 8 attacks per round.
5. Spending 1 skill point on your Barehand-combat skill adds 0.5 bonus skill points to your Combat skill.

Table of bonuses to AC while not wearing specific items, while wearing only body armor, and buck naked.

As they gain levels, barehand fighters have access to different level attacks. They can deal some damage and have sides effects like stun, slow, etc. Here are the differents attacks available and their effects according to the value of the barehand combat skill. (This is directly extracted from the source code. I don't know why, ToME official documentation indicates damage values two times smaller).

At every blow, the programm selects a random attack among the available ones (depending on the BH combat skill) with the following procedure. If level in barehand combat is L, L/7 (or 1 if L<7) random selections of an attack style are done and the highest one is retained. Here are the damage table indicating the min damage (weakest attack with dice value=1), the simulated average damage and the max damage (strongest attack style with highest dice value) depending on the BH combal skill level. Of course, you must add the player to_dam bonus and multiply by the number of blows.

On your character sheet, you have indicated the minimum damage m and the maximum one M. As a rule of thumb, you can consider that your average damage is equal to 0.6 m + 0.4 M.

The "hand of Tulkas" never aids barehand fighters. I would not suggest worshipping that god if you intend to fight barehand as you won't get the interesting Tulkas damage bonus.