First; I am SORRY about this wall of text, ohgod.
There certainly could be a more robust tutorial out there! Perhaps that's something I can work on.
When I was first getting into the pit, for it to start making sense, I read a
lot of old battles. It's a good way to see what stats do, what certain moves do, and how they're treated when being rolled for. I'd still recommend reading a bunch of battles! I'll do the best I can to explain some stuff though, even though I'm much more of a newcomer to the pit than other players! Forgive anything obvious I might be telling you, I just want to be thorough and dunno where you might be in terms of researching/understanding.
The Pit is mostly mod-run. Most fights happen within a tournament, in which your pet will be tied up and unable to be role-played outside of the pit until the end of the tourney. In these, mods make the threads and post the match ups for each round; obviously by the end, everybody will have fought one another at least once. Winner of the tournament is the one who won the most battles, and sometimes tie-breaking battles happen to.
(Private battles happen occasionally too, but they're less common. A player can make the thread themselves, mods still roll. Since we have yet to have any private battles since moving here, it would be good to check in with the other mods with before carrying out. These are nice if you want to practice!)
SO.
First, each party posts their 'introduction' posts with their pets' full stats, items, and stat boosters (like the gym), and a short intro RP to getting to the pit, getting settled in the arena or whatever.
A mod confirms, and the battle begins.
The pet with the highest dexterity will make the first move. If dexterity is equal, a coin is flipped each round to determine who will go first that round.
As you can imagine, depending on what tactic you're using, it can still be beneficial to be the slower pet as much as it can be the faster one, it just depends on how you play it!
(Because we're all human, people might not post in the 'right' order. There's nothing wrong with that! The higher dex pet will still have it's moves calculated first, no matter the posting order.)
I think the easiest way of understanding battles is to look a the rolls, so I'll pull some up.
Here's a nice simple damage dealing roll from
here.
So, where do all of those numbers come from?
Here's another one between my Vidarr and Ridleys' Caiman in
our battle earlier in the tournament.
Let's break down that mass of numbers, too.
Here's
another;Dexterity is a pretty neat stat, because it does a few neat things in battle. As you can see above, it's kind of an additional way to evade hits. It's even a way to 'dodge' them completely, in some cases.
Like this;
Some moves are [Nrs], which means they're
no resistance moves, and bypass resistance when dealing damage.
[Flt] moves deal a static amount of damage, without any strength added, but are still subject to being damped by resistance.
Example;
Fire Spout [Flt] [Nrs]
Releases a burst of flame at the opponent.
4 Damage
Fire - 5
Read battles for ideas on what a good 'toolkit' is for battling; what happens to pets who don't have certain abilities? You might notice
Rayak has his stats lowered because he doesn't have an ability to counteract Intimidation. Another interesting part about that battle is the use of Run and Charge, which is fun to see because it's unusual, and clearly has some real potential! When sarane battles were heavily underway, we were reminded harshly why
Danger Sense is a vital move, even if it's only against an unbroken brown. It was nearly unheard of for a trained sarane to get hit by an unbroken, let alone knocked down! Darky showed us just how effective
dashing away can be, in an interesting example of how being the slower pet can be made to work to your advantage. We've even seen an equillion win over
not only one, but
two thundergug with the plethora of tricks he had hidden up his sleeve!
Uh. I feel like that was a ton of text to say a lot of nothing at all. xD Does this help anything? These are basically just the small steps I took personally to understand the battle system.
This is why I say read lots of battles - lots of learning about the pit isn't as much about the stats as it is the RPG-fighting aspect. We have a surprisingly robust battle system that allows for some pretty neat things to be played and experimented with.