Fighting
When the machines come out, the game changes shape. Here is what it looks like from your chair.
The field is a handful of places
Every fight happens across three to five named zones — the loading floor, the upper gantries, the flooded pit, the ridge. The GM describes each one, tells you what cover it gives and which zones it connects to, and then says where everyone is standing.
You are always in exactly one zone. You will be told which, every turn.
Three distances
Every weapon you own already says which of these it reaches:
- ENGAGED — only whoever you are in contact with, in your own zone.
- NEAR — your zone and any zone next to it.
- FAR — anywhere on the field.
You will never count spaces or measure anything.
Your turn
Two quick actions, or one full action — plus your standard move, plus anything free.
With your standard move you may do one of:
- cross into an adjacent zone, or
- close to contact with somebody already in your zone, becoming ENGAGED with them, or
- DISENGAGE and step back out of contact.
BOOST is a quick action that buys a second move. So you can cross two zones, or cross one and close.
Getting hit less
Cover belongs to the zone you are standing in, and it only works against attacks from other zones. Soft cover gives attackers 1 DIFFICULTY; hard cover gives 2. Inside your own zone, cover does nothing — if they are in the room with you, the wall is not helping.
Melee and tech attacks ignore cover entirely.
Being ENGAGED
You and a hostile are ENGAGED when you are in contact inside the same zone. Ranged attacks you make while ENGAGED take 1 DIFFICULTY, so a striker who gets into your face has already done something to you.
Leaving the zone always breaks it. Staying in the zone and backing off needs DISENGAGE.
Stances instead of reactions
Reactions here are postures you declare on your own turn and hold until your next one. Each of you gets one reaction between your turns.
OVERWATCH — you hold the ground. The first time each round that a hostile enters your zone, leaves it, or breaks contact with you, you shoot them. BRACED — RESISTANCE to all damage and 1 DIFFICULTY to attacks against you, at the cost of most of your next turn. PREPARED — you name a trigger and a quick action: "when the door opens, I throw the smoke."
Area weapons
Nothing has a blast radius. Your weapons say how many things they hit:
| Pattern | Hits |
|---|---|
| single | one target |
| pair | up to two in one zone |
| zone | everything in one zone |
| engaged-burst | everyone you are ENGAGED with |
| self-zone | everyone else in your zone |
Roll an attack for each target; roll damage once. Bonus damage is halved when you hit more than one thing.
What a fight is for
Sides alternate — you, them, you, them. But the fight is almost never about killing everything. Look at the objectives: hold a position, extract someone, break through, survive a countdown, keep something intact.
@Missing file is the example fight for this system, and its objectives are almost entirely about what must not be destroyed. Read it if you want to see how one is built.
The full reference is in @Missing file.