We have looked at simple task rolls, and the system there is fine for one-off rolls. But what happens when players get their characters caught up in ongoing situations, like a fight against a monster and its minions? That’s what we’ll cover here.
Clocks, and the Stakes in a Conflict
What everyone wants in a conflict can vary, and a person might easily change their goal over several turns.
Hilde decides the fight the creature she thinks of as a vampire. Then as her team maters start getting beat up, she decides to unlock a big brass door that would make a good escape route. In the meantime, she defends herself against the vampire’s minions. She gets the doors open just as an ally falls, so instead of fleeing, she rushes over to her friend and gets him out of the door. Now she closes the door, and turns back to the vampire…
There are several different goals here, and each one has a degree of difficulty. For simplicity, grant each challenge a number of Stress, and if the character gets one more Stress than that, they have achieved the goal. This makes it easy to track progress towards a goal.
The easiest task would have zero Stress, and possible tasks might have up to five Stress.
Turns
We use what has come to be known as Popcorn Initiative. The GM sorts out how many people and threats there are to act, and then somehow picks which goes first. After everyone takes an action, they choose who goes next, but cannot choose anyone who has already acted.
When everyone has taken an action, the last person to act chooses who goes first, next turn.
If no one opposes you on your turn to act, then you do what you want (there might still be a roll if it’s not easy). See Taking Action below.
On your turn, you can attack someone (if you can think of a way to attack them), or take any other reasonable action.
Being Attacked
In every conflict, you probably have some opposition. You might be physically attacked, intimidated, outsmarted, and so on. You’ll make your own defence roll against this action, and if you fail that roll, the enemy will inflict an appropriate sort of stress.
Sometimes this stress will be directly against you (marked on your character sheet) and if enough is done, you’ll take a Condition and likely be Taken Out. This is normal! The Condition you take will be appropriate to the form of “attack”.
At other times, the stress may be something which doesn’t directly harm you. This shoudn’t be common, since stress and conditions are how we measure your ability to take part in a conflict. But, for example, you and several other players might each be aboard a ship which is being attacked. How to resolve that?
The GM should (with your help!) try to personalise the conflict and make you the target of someone’s attack. You might be defending the engine on the ship, or keeping it from running aground, and whatnot.
If two players are each trying the same action, they both roll and the best result is taken. Any excess is inflicted on both of them. This is just the Helping rules.
Taking Action
In any conflict, you want to do something – disable the war machine, hurt the vampire, persuade the magistrate, and so on. The Ability needed depends on the circumstance, as does the difficulty (if there is one). You make a roll, and will accumulate stress towards this goal.
If you inflict a Condition, you achieve your goal or take out your opponent.
If you fail (the opponent does better than you), the GM describes what happens. This does not mean you got hit – that’s what Being Attacked is for. It means you didn’t achieve your goal. Something should still be narrated, even if it is just the strength of the opponent’s defence.
Conflicting and Complimentary Actions
In another system, these could be resolved as a single roll. Here, though, they are two separate rolls, and that makes it easy for the GM to assign different Abilities while being attacked to taking your own action. You might use Daring to dodge past someone, while Tinkering to try to disarm a trap (or Ferocity to hit them back).
How Many Stress?
Different targets and actions will have different Stress targets. The GM decides this based on their knowledge of the situation. But the group of players will always face a number of Threats, each of which has various Stress. A Fair Threat has 1 Stress, a Good threat 2, and so on. The GM has their own guidelines on how many of these to create (usually, at least as many as theyrae players) and what level of Threat they should be.
Fighting Monsters
Each Eldritch creature has their own Powers, aspects, and so on. The GM has guidance on how they are applied. But Eldritch creatures can also be hurt – they have Stress.
Each usually has a way to harm them, and you need to defeat this first, and inflict a Condition before you can start to harm the creature itself. So you have to get rid of their Stress twice. They aren’t easy opponents, and in some adventures, players will face multiple Monsters at the same time.
When their shield is dispensed with, Monsters may attempt to flee if they can and in the next session, may have their shield recovered. So you might need to give them a reason to stand against you. Maybe you threaten something important to them and they can’t simply run away.
There might be a limited number of times they can do this (like a limited number of Conditions).
