Combat
Combat plays out in the conversation turn by turn, with the Narrator describing each exchange. You state what you do, and the game resolves it and shows you the numbers behind the result.
Attacks, damage, and offensive magic resolve through their own model rather than skill checks, so you never roll a d20 to swing. Dice rolls covers the uncertain actions outside a fight.
How a strike resolves
Every hit passes through the same three stages, and the outcome card shows what each one removed. All three can apply to the same blow.
- Evasion. The defender first gets a chance to avoid the blow entirely, and a dodged strike deals no damage at all. Evasion is 5 per point of Dexterity plus whatever your gear rolls, and the attacker's accuracy cuts through part of it. Your armor's weight class limits only the evasion your Dexterity gives, so heavy armor leaves you none of it, medium holds it to 40, and light and cloth leave it alone. Evasion rolled onto your gear is added on top of that limit, as described on Armor. A defender who is stunned, dying, or badly hurt cannot dodge at all.
- Armor. Armor reduces physical damage, which covers slashing, blunt, piercing, and bleeding. Larger raw hits punch through proportionally more of it, so armor works best against a flurry of small blows and never turns a strike aside completely. Elemental damage ignores armor entirely.
- Resistance. Whatever survives armor meets the defender's resistance to that damage type, which removes a share of what is left.
A shield can block on top of all this, removing a large share of physical damage and a smaller share of elemental damage, and some fighters can parry a physical blow outright. Both appear as their own line on the outcome card, along with what armor and the level gap absorbed.
Damage types
Physical damage covers slashing, blunt, piercing, and bleeding, and it is what armor stops. Elemental damage covers fire, frost, storm, holy, dark, acid, and poison, and it bypasses armor and is reduced by resistance instead. A weapon can carry both at once, which makes an elemental rider especially valuable against a heavily armored foe. See Affixes for which damage lines roll where.
Damage over time weakens as it runs, so the first tick is the strongest and every later one lands weaker.
Conditions
Fights hand out conditions as well as damage, and the worst of them change how a round plays:
- Blinded characters strike poorly, and attacks against them land more easily.
- Chilled characters move more slowly and dodge less well.
- Stasis holds its victim in place and beyond all harm until it breaks.
- Stunned, asleep, paralyzed, petrified, frozen, grappled, restrained and stasis all prevent movement for as long as they last.
When a target is immune to a control effect, the Narrator says the attempt failed rather than passing over it. Status effects with no fixed timer show the condition that sustains them, and the rest count down. Enemies carrying magic items can trigger those items' effects in combat, the same as you.
Critical hits
A critical hit re-rolls the damage dice and adds the second roll on top of the first. Flat bonuses are not re-rolled, and affix damage dice join the crit in the same way. A critical hit always lands its full rolled damage, because the per-turn damage limit never trims it. The extra damage still passes through armor and resistance like the rest, so a crit against heavy armor is worth less than a crit against cloth. Critical chance is a stat you can raise on gear, and each weapon crits on its own chance.
Out-leveling a fight
A defender above the attacker's level shrugs off part of the damage, and tougher creatures count as further above than their level alone suggests. This works in one direction only, so nothing protects you for being higher level than your attacker, and there is no damage bonus for attacking something below your level.
In practice a fight far above your level is not merely slower but close to unwinnable, and the answer is to level up, gear up, or find another way through. Experience from a kill is never split between party members, and you earn full experience even when a party member lands the killing blow.
Reach
Every attack has a real reach, so a melee strike needs contact while a bow reaches far beyond a thrown knife. The game tracks where everyone stands, which means a distant enemy has to close the distance over turns before striking rather than crossing the whole gap at once, and you get a turn to answer the approach. You and your party can still charge to open a fight. Closing in, backing off, and holding a line all matter. Shots spend ammunition from your quiver, as described on Ammunition.
When you go down
Dropping to zero health does not kill you outright. You fall into a dying state and slip a quarter of the way toward death with each exchange, so allies have a few turns to reach you, however much story time a single message covers. The blow that put you down never carries its overkill into that window, and you always start bleeding out from the top. Sleeping through the night with a dying character untreated still ends them.
A dying character can be stabilized by their own effort or by an ally's help, and healing brings them back up. You can also give up while dying and end it on the spot at no credit cost, and the death recap and revive options then work as they do after any other death. Resting afterward is how wounds actually close, as described on Progression.