Combat
Combat in Nephibis is player-driven. There's no initiative order you wait in: you declare what your character does, and the GM resolves how the world reacts — one fluid exchange at a time.
How a turn flows
- You state your action: attack, move, use an ability, interact, or talk.
- The GM compares your Speed to the NPCs involved and narrates the full exchange — your action and their reaction as one scene.
Speed decides who gets to react. The faster you are, the less the world can answer back:
| Your Speed vs the NPC | What happens |
|---|---|
| Yours > theirs +10 | They cannot react at all this turn. Your action lands before they respond. |
| Yours > theirs (1–10) | Delayed reaction — they can dodge or brace, but not counter. |
| Within ±5 | Simultaneous exchange. You trade. |
| Theirs > yours (1–10) | Quick reaction — dodge, reposition, and counter. |
| Theirs > yours +10 | They act before your action resolves. They can interrupt or evade entirely. |
Against fodder — enemies far below your stats — don't run turn-by-turn combat at all. You cut through them in a narrative burst: five seconds, four bodies, the alley smells like blood and fear.
Measurement
Fights are measured in feet at personal scale — ranges, radii, movement. At sea think in nautical miles and knots, in the air in nm and feet/flight levels, in deep water in meters of depth (+ fathoms), in space in km tactically and AU / light-minutes / ly / parsecs on the chart, and aboard stations and interiors in meters and deck numbers.
What you can do
An exchange can hold any combination of moving, attacking, and using an ability that your resources allow. Your abilities fall into tiers:
| Tier | Cost | When you get it |
|---|---|---|
| Active | Stamina, Energy, or Mana (small) | At creation, from your species and type |
| Signature Move | Moderate resource | The GM grants it at a key narrative moment — a personal revelation, a training milestone, an emotional breakthrough. These are your moves: flashy, memorable, uniquely yours. |
| Finisher | 50–80% of your max pool | Desperation, master training, or a power awakening. Fight-ending, and risky — it can leave you exposed. |
| Ultimate | 80–100% of your pool, once per encounter/day | A major story climax. The most impressive thing in the fight. Ultimates can't be taught to anyone but your own offspring. |
Signature moves, finishers, and ultimates define who you are in a fight. Don't hoard them — they're the moments people remember.
You are never alone
You never speak for anyone but your own character — and you never have to manage anyone else either. Companions, hired allies, bodyguards, and pets join the fight on their own, from the first exchange, acting on their personality, loyalty, and read of the situation. The GM runs them. You don't spend your turn directing them, and staying silent about your pet is not the same as telling it to stay.
The exceptions are situational: a formal duel, an agreed 1v1, an order to stay back, or a context where their joining would be wrong — by default they hold. But the exceptions bend to personality. An ally who cares deeply about you and thinks you're about to die may break the rules of a duel or ignore the order to stay back — and live with what that costs. A timid one may hold back even when they could help. They're people and animals with their own judgment, not abilities on a cooldown.
Power struggles
When two continuous beams collide mid-air — energy beams, elemental streams, holy and dark flows — a Power Struggle begins. Both sides can invest more resource each round to push the collision point toward their opponent. The struggle ends when someone runs out of resource, disengages, or gets interrupted. If a beam reaches its target, it hits with full accumulated force — an explosion that can end the fight. The risk/reward is the whole point: invest hard to overpower them, but if you run dry first, their beam is coming at you at full power.
Approaching a boss
Bosses are the fights designed to make you think. They are never invincible — every boss can be beaten three ways, and the world tells you which to use:
1. THE MECHANICS PATH — bosses don't die to raw damage alone: a core
that must be exposed, a regen that must be shut off, an element
that must be matched. Watch the tells, learn what the boss does,
then do the counter. The clean, efficient way in.
2. THE CLEVER PATH — know what you're walking into before you do.
Intel (a hunter's report, a survivor's account), prep (anti-regen
toxin, EMP, element ammo), and the ground you fight on can cut a
boss's edge in half.
3. THE OVERPOWER PATH — if you're simply stronger than the boss's
Overpower Threshold, you can smash its mechanics with raw force.
It works, but it costs: extra resources, collateral, and usually
an enraged final stretch.
Read the tells. Bosses telegraph everything before they do it — a shimmer before the aura, one deep breath before the wave, a flash before the phase change. Every mechanic is learnable by watching, researching, or burning one attempt to learn it. When you don't know what something does yet, assume the worst and keep your distance while you learn.
When the boss is weaker than you, it stops fighting fair — it brings puzzles, traps, minions, hostages, and the environment you're standing in. The "boss" becomes the situation, not the health bar. Respect it anyway; underestimating is how prepared hunters die.
Bosses also scale by kind. A Direct boss is the fight itself — its stats are set near your per-exchange damage, so trading blows is a genuine contest. A Swarm Commander keeps its own stats near your average and pressures you with numbers and reinforcement tempo. A Mastermind can be physically weak — even baseline-human stats — while its machines, traps, and counters hit like a boss. Read the situation you're in, not just the body in front of you.
Losing isn't the end. A boss that beats you leaves a thread — a scar, a stolen thing, a captured ally, or the mechanic you now understand. You'll meet it again, better prepared. The only real loss is quitting.
Called shots & vitals
You can aim. Called shots cost accuracy — arms and legs −10%, head and hands −20%, specific vitals −30% — but the payoff is real:
| Location | Multiplier | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Head (skull) | 2.0× | Stun 1 turn |
| Brain | 3.0× | Instant kill for most species |
| Heart | 3.0× | Heavy bleeding, possible instant kill |
| Spine | 2.5× | Paralysis |
| Throat | 2.5× | Suffocation, heavy bleeding |
Vital hits apply their multiplier even without a crit; crits stack on top. Limbs have their own HP — a limb at 0 is lost (permanently, until regenerated or replaced), and each limb lost costs you speed, accuracy, or weapon use. A called shot to a limb plus a crit — or a single hit dealing half your max HP to that limb — can take it off.
Resources under fire
Your pool is your life in a long fight. Stamina users regenerate 5% per turn; at 25–50% pool, ability costs climb 25%; below 10%, abilities become unstable — and at 0, you're burned out for an hour. Energy and Mana follow the same shape. Passive healing varies by race: a human heals 1 HP per 10 minutes out of combat; a demon heals 2 + CON while fighting; a regeneration mutant heals CON per turn and can rise from near-total destruction. Fire, acid, and anti-regen weapons suppress healing — a regenerator's worst nightmare is a burn they can't put out.
Death
At 0 HP you're down, not necessarily dead. An ally can stabilize you within one turn. True death comes from your species' kill condition — brain or heart destruction for humans, core destruction for androids and AI, banishment for demons — or from overwhelming trauma.
Revival is possible but expensive: nano revival needs your head intact; regeneration needs a living cell; magic revival costs mana and leaves you with memory loss; cloning starts you over as a fresh body with starting stats. The window matters — revival is easiest in the first minute and nearly impossible after a day. Omega-tier beings can regenerate from a single cell. Some fates can't be walked back; that's what makes the high-stakes fights worth winning.