In this chapter we'll go into some special cases which make combat more complicated. Also, we'll extend the combat system. Previously we've described all fights in terms of one-on-one physical battles, but there are many other kinds of struggle your characters might face in a game: from slinging insults to matching wits with an enemy general to a game of chess.

Unlikely Skills

Often someone will try to use a skill whose applicability to the task in hand is only tangential. In this case, they get to roll as per normal, discarding their highest die.

Do make sure as a GM, though, that you only apply this penalty when the skill is unrelated to what the player is doing, rather than just applying it when the player's solution wasn't the one you intended her to use. Generally, players should be able to come up with their own solutions to problems.

Some examples of Unlikely uses of skills:

• Using the Might skill "Swordsmanship" to pick a lock using a sword.
• Using the Magic skill "Blow Things Up With Fireballs" to threaten somebody with fiery death unless they co-operate (It's not the player's ability to blow stuff up that'll determine the success of this, it's her ability to threaten convincingly)
• Using the Mind skill "Surgery" to stab someone up with a scalpel.

Burning Focuses

At any time in a fight, a player can permanently sacrifice a focus which he hasn't yet wagered. For each point invested in the focus, he can recover three points to anybody's defence pool, or deduct one point from anybody's defence pool. This doesn't count as his action for that turn.

Limit Breaks

As the game carries on, you can spend XP to add Limit Breaks (or Limits for short) to your Focuses. Limit Breaks are special abilities which you can then use in a fight where that Focus is staked. A Limit might, for example, allow you to increase or decrease the number on one of your dice by 1, or it might enable you to reroll your dice. A Focus can have XP worth of Limit Breaks attached to it equal to its level. So a level 1 Focus can only have 1xp worth, but a level 5 Focus can hold up to 5xp worth of Limit Breaks.

Each Limit can only be used once per fight. They can only be used when you're attacking, after you've rolled your dice but before your opponent rolls theirs, and only after you've rolled enough of the same number. And yes, you can use a limit which changes your roll in order to give yourself even more of the same number and active a more powerful limit.

There are three kinds of Limits:

• Minor Limits cost 1xp each and can be used whenever you roll two of the same number;
• Significant Limits
cost 3xp each and can be used whenever you roll three of the same number;
• Major Limits
cost 5xp each and can only be used when you roll four of the same number.

To save you from doing the maths yourself, this table shows you how often you can expect to get each type of limit (that is: how many dice rolls you can expect to make between limits) depending on what your skill is.

The chapter on XP and advancement has a list of sample Limits.

Non-human combatants

So far we've assumed all combat is between people, but that doesn't have to be the case. If, for example, a party was trying to navigate the Dread Catacombs of Ooom, then this would be a combat between the party and the catacombs. The catacombs' would have skills like Full of Monsters (Might), Laden with Traps (Might), Overwhelmingly Cunning (Mind) and so on.

Non-human combatants don't necessarily have the last-ditch Your Life Focus. Instead, their Focuses will depend on what the players are trying to get out of them. If the party are trying to navigate the Dread Catacombs of Terror to get into the back way of the castle, the Catacombs will have a focus named Way Into The Castle. If the Catacombs also have a hidden gem at the bottom, that will be a higher-rank focus that the party will have to risk more to get hold of.

Swarms of Mooks

We've also assumed all combatants are individuals, but again that might not be the case. Endless swarms of mooks are a staple of this genre and can be handled in two ways:

1. Mook Swarms are represented by a single enemy. Attacks against any Mook count as an attack against the appropriate stat on the Mook Swarm. Mook Swarms have the special Might skill Wave After Wave, which can be used whenever a player's attack completely incapacitates a member of the swarm; the descriptive phrase for the defensive roll will then describe more of the Mooks turning up.
2. An enemy (whether it's a castle the PCs are trying to storm or an NPC who has a big army) has a skill named "Big Army Of Mooks" which can be used to attack the PCs. Depending on how the NPC controls his Mooks, this might be a Might, Mind or Magic-based skill: Might-based mooks are led through shows of strength (like a big Uruk-Hai bellowing his orcs into battle), Mind-based through bureaucratic organisation (an army with quartermasters and wages and supply chains and things) or Magic-based ones through, erm, magic (a big horde of skeletons).

Struggles Which Aren't Combat

The combat system can be extended to other forms of conflict. It could represent a war of words or a battle of wits (though in our experience, wars of words don't tend to stay wars of words for long...) Something to clarify is that this doesn't preclude you roleplaying out conversations. Indeed, we'd encourage you to do so, and only start staking things when the players want to push through a conversation even though an NPC is stonewalling them.