Getting Hurt
There are two kinds of harm and they do very different jobs.
Conditions
A Condition is a narrative state the GM names: Rattled, Bleeding, Blinded, Pinned, Exposed. Each one is −2 dice on anything it plausibly touches — and only on those things. Blinded does nothing to a conversation you are having on a phone.
Conditions clear when the fiction says they do: a scene passes, someone spends an action, you get out of the light. They are the ordinary currency of a fight and you should expect to be carrying two or three by the end of a bad one.
Wounds
Wounds are a four-box track, and they are rarer than you think, because of one rule:
Wounds can only be inflicted across a Scale gap of 1 or less.
Something two full bands above you cannot hurt you with Wounds — it does not need to, it just wins. Something two bands below you cannot hurt you at all by direct force. Wounds happen between near-peers, which is where the whole system lives.
| Attack margin | Result |
|---|---|
| 1–2 hits over | Condition |
| 3+ hits over | Condition + Wound |
| Attacker has a Scale advantage | +1 Wound per step |
The fourth box is Down. Not dead — down. The GM chooses whether that means captured, dying, or unmasked. You narrate how it happened.
That third option is the one to watch. Getting knocked out in this game can cost you your identity instead of your life, and the campaign is usually more interesting when it does.
Healing
One Wound per downtime scene. At Scale 3 and above, all of them in a scene — by then your body is doing things a body should not, and it is not really healing so much as reasserting itself.
Armour and gear
Gear has a Scale like everything else. @Missing file is Scale 1: it turns one bullet into a cracked rib and a ruined liner, and then it is finished. That is not a weak item, it is an honest one, and it is the reference point for every other piece of hardware in the city.
A Scale 1 liner does nothing whatsoever about a Scale 3 round. Check the number before you rely on the thing.