Conflict Design
Physical and social conflict are the same kind of thing in this system, and this chapter explains why they're built the way they are — so you can extend them without breaking them.
No hit points, no turns
Combat has no initiative order, no action economy, no grid, and no pool of hit points. Damage is fictional — cuts, broken bones, blood loss — and it persists across scenes. This keeps combat a scene rather than a subsystem. If you feel the urge to add HP, damage dice, or a turn tracker, you're fighting the system's center of gravity. The fiction is the record; injuries live on the character sheet and follow the character forward.
The world doesn't balance fights
Encounters are not built to match the party's power. A Power 8 farmhand with Fighting 2 can lose to a Power 5 soldier with Swordsmanship 8, and three average fighters can overwhelm one skilled one. This is deliberate: it makes the player's growth meaningful (the world stands still) and makes choosing fights a real decision. Never add level-scaled enemies or encounter budgets.
Combat uses the same resolution as everything else
The GM weighs relevant stat + relevant skill + position + equipment + injury + circumstance, decides the likely outcome, and rolls only when the outcome is genuinely in doubt and failure matters. There is no separate combat math. The eight stats already cover combat — Power, Speed, Senses, and Willpower are the combat-relevant ones — and combat skills are just entries in the freeform skills array. You don't need a new field or type to run a fight.
Social = physical
Social conflict uses the same shape: the player chooses the approach, abilities determine plausibility, circumstances determine difficulty, and the GM determines the consequence. The one hard constraint is that no social skill overrides free will — NPCs keep their personality, history, and agency. When you write NPCs, give them desires, fears, loyalties, and boundaries, because those are the resistance that social skills work against. A "relationship score" is never needed and never wanted.
Adding combat content
New combat skills are just entries in the skills array — no schema change. If you add weapons or armor as equipment, give them category, value, and weight like the existing gear; the fiction (not a stat block) determines what they do in a fight. If you add a compendium type for factions or corps, remember the same rule that governs everything: the world exists independently of the player.