Combat

Combat in Runic Flux is designed to be especially unique and flexible, to make it easier to accomplish its three main purposes:

- First, to make skills of all types useful in a battle, from distracting the enemy by acting cute to setting explosives.

- Second, to make battles unpredictable and fun!

- Lastly, to make the rules simple enough to accommodate any style of attack from an anime or Japanese RPG.

Initiative

Before you worry about doing anything else in combat, the first thing to decide is who goes first and last. To decide initiative, have every player roll their character’s Perception. The character who gets the highest goes first, then down the line to the unlucky sap who rolled the lowest. Characters who roll the same initiative go at the same time.

Rolling for initiative represents how long it takes each character to realize what’s going on, before they can act on it. Because of that, the player who rolls the highest doesn’t have to go first. Players later on down the line don’t have to act at their first opportunity, either. They can hold back for as long as they want until the right opportunity arises.

For instance, Makiko is ready to act, but she waits to see what happens. The next moment she sees a bad guy proceeding to attack her bestest friend Annie Mae, so she jumps in to protect her. If something like this happens, both characters go ahead with their actions at the same time.

Now, if the round is almost over and there are still players holding back their actions, the GM is encouraged to push them to decide right away or lose their chance to do something this round. Role-playing may not be in real time, but it isn’t in freeze-frame, either!

Acting without Thinking — If you think your character is brash and would rather just rush in and do something without the bothersome task of thinking, you may roll your Agility in place of Perception for the initiative roll. However, if you do this, you have to tell the GM exactly what your character will be doing this round before you even roll initiative. The action goes through when your turn in the order of initiative comes up. If it turns out to be a bad idea, you may have a problem on your hands!

On Your Turn

Attacking doesn’t just go for swinging a sword or firing a crossbow at someone — it accounts for any aggressive movement where two forces clash. A moment ago you learned how to determine who goes first. Well, when you actually take your turn to act, you should first declare what you’re going to do. When you’re declaring, you’re free to attempt anything you can think of.

Now, just because combat in Runic Flux is done in rounds doesn’t mean that you’re limited to just one action per round. In fact, you can try to do as many things as you want during a round. The problem with this is that for every additional action you take past the first, each action gets a -3 penalty. For instance, let’s say for your action you declare that your character is firing his air gun twice. This means that both shots will have 3 points subtracted from the total after rolling your Aim skill, and it will be that much harder for either to hit.

Taking Time to Prepare

On the flip side, you can increase your success for actions by taking an extra round to do it— spending the time aiming, building up strength, etc. Your character will get an extra 1D to whatever they were preparing to do.

Attacking: The Skill Roll

Attacking usually consists of two rolls: the Skill roll and the Success roll, commonly nicknamed “To Hit” and “To Damage,” because that’s what they’re usually geared to do. The Skill roll checks to see if the action is successful in the first place (i.e. hitting a target). The Success roll is only used after the action succeeds — it checks to see how well the character did (i.e. how much damage was done).

For example, let’s say Jarya attacks by stabbing with her fencing sword at Bren. Jarya needs to make a Skill (or “To Hit”) roll. In this case, Regular Melee is the skill which is most appropriate since Jarya is using a sword. The GM rates the situation by deciding how difficult it is to hit Bren. Bren, however, gets a chance to choose a Reaction, which will allow him to react to Jarya’s attack. If he chooses to use the chance to do something defensive, such as “Block” or “Evade,” Jarya’s roll will have to beat Bren’s defensive roll to succeed, instead of facing the GM’s difficulty. Read on to find out more.

Reactions

Now, obviously, no one really plans on getting stabbed or shot when the round begins. If someone came flying at you with a knife, the decision to get the heck out of the way would be a split-second one.

That’s what Reactions are: reflexive actions. You can declare a reaction at any time during a round, but be aware that it may interfere with other things you were planning to do. Not only that, but reacting to something is more difficult when your character is trying to go through with another action. Here are some of the most common reactions:

Evade — A skill which can be raised with Character Points, this is used to dodge and avoid attacks.

Blocking — The same skills you use to hit an opponent can often be used to put something between you and their attack, as well.

Martial Arts — Martial arts skills are a combination of numerous fighting abilities. Since Martial Arts use the entire body as a whole to fight, they can be used for all sorts of reactions, including dodging and blocking.

Remember how you get a penalty for doing more than one thing in a round? Well, reactions are subject to this just like anything else, but since you don’t know you’re going to do one until you’re actually doing it, the -3 point penalty only kicks in when you declare a reaction. The trick is to count how many things you’ve done so far in the turn every time a new reaction pops up.

I think it’s time for an example. Let’s go back to Jarya and Bren.

Jayra was attacking Bren with her fencing sword. Now, you should also know that Bren cast a small ice spell earlier in the round. Bren decides to dodge using his Evade skill, but since he’s already declared an action this round, he’ll get a -3 penalty to his Evade roll. If Bren ends up reacting to something else later on in the round, he’ll get another penalty on top of that, which would bring it to -6. His ice spell, however, wasn’t effected at all since he cast it before he started declaring reactions.

Now, what if Bren hadn’t declared his main action yet? The main action would get a -3 penalty, because it’d be the second action in the round. If Bren decided instead to do multiple actions, the penalty would be cumulative. So, if Bren dodged as a reaction very early in the round, then proceeded to throw two throwing stars, each of the throwing star rolls would get a -6 penalty.

A Way of doing Reactions Without Penalties:

What happens if you want to react to something, but don’t want to deal with the penalty? Well, if you don’t want to accumulate a penalty for later actions in a round, you can avoid it by giving your character a -6 penalty on the reaction they are attempting. This represents a character’s half-hearted attempt to react to the situation without breaking their current concentration.

For an example, Radien is hard at work repairing his assault crossbow and someone with very bad throwing skills lobs a knife just close enough to hit him. Radien’s Evade skill is very high, so he can pretty much guarantee success if he tries at all, but repairing his crossbow is a difficult task that requires his full attention. So instead, he reacts by attempting to dodge with a -6 penalty, and due to his high dodging skills, he beats his opponent’s roll and the action succeeds. Radien easily ducks his head to the left without even looking up. Later in the round, when he rolls to finish repairing his assault crossbow, his roll is just barely high enough.

Damage

Everything you’ve read so far has been about determining whether you succeed. Well, once you’ve succeeded, you have to find out how well you did! This section is titled “Damage” because Success rolls are usually used to do damage. You can use this section to measure success for other skills, but hurting someone might not be the end result. Outside of weaponry, however, whether a skill succeeds and how well it succeeds are usually both done with just one roll.

Depending on the weapon or attack you use, damage will be linked with a different base stat. For instance, while a sword uses Strength to damage it’s target, a bow and arrow use Agility. This is because successful slicing with a sword depends on how hard the swordsman can swing it, while hitting with a bow and arrow depends on how quickly the archer can react to what she sees. Every weapon will tell you how it damages, but they almost always follow this pattern:

Weapon type Regular and Heavy Melee Projectile Weapons Complex Inventions and Devices Magic Spells

To Hit use: Agility Perception Technical Knowledge

To Damage use: Strength Agility Agility Vitality

Also, each weapon also has a damage level, which you can expect to be between 1 and 4. To determine damage, roll the weapon’s damage level in dice. Then, add the stat that weapon uses for damage to the roll. What you end up with is a measurement of how powerful the attack is. Next, your opponent gets a chance to defend against that, which will be covered in the next section.

“Do damage rolls get a penalty when you’re doing multiple actions?”

That depends on which stat is being used for the Damage roll. Strength, Knowledge, and Vitality get no penalties for multiple actions in a round. Agility, Perception, and Technical, on the other hand, do. (Perception and Technical are rarely used to damage) Giving penalties to damage rolls is pretty simple, though. They always get the same penalty as the skill roll you used for that action.

A note to the GM: “To Hit” and “Damage” rolls aren’t completely independent of each other. If a character hits with a Critical Success or simply beats the difficulty by a very large amount, you should consider giving a bonus to the damage roll.

Defending

To defend against damage, the recipient of the blow rolls their Armor value plus their Strength stat. Only count armor that is an effective defense against that type of attack. If the character is wearing no armor, just roll Strength.

To deal damage at all, the attacker’s roll has to beat the defender’s roll. The amount by which the attacker beats the defender determines how severe the blow is. If it’s above the defender’s roll, but hasn’t beaten it by at least 5, the defender is stunned and gets a -3 penalty to all their Skill rolls through the next turn. If it beats the defender’s roll by more than 5, for every 5 points over the defender is knocked down one damage level. That doesn’t necessarily mean he or she has been injured, though! Take a look below to see what the various damage levels are:

Damage Level	Complications
(Stunned)	Character is not hurt, but gets a -3 penalty to all Skill rolls through next turn. Penalties are cumulative, and characters can be stunned repeatedly without being knocked down a damage level.
Level 1: Lost Balance	Character has lost his or her balance and is knocked over. This may make actions difficult, so the GM may give penalties at his or her discretion. It will take a round to regain footing, but without actual injuries. However, losing another defense roll by 5 points or more later in this battle will push your damage to Level 2.
Level 2: Hurt	Character gets a -3 penalty to all Skill rolls until he/she is healed. The injury could be anything from a slice to the arm to just being pretty beaten up in general, at the GM’s discretion.
Level 3: Fallen	Character has been knocked down and injured to the point where they can’t remain standing and fighting. All Skill rolls get a -6 penalty until the character is healed.
Level 4: Fatal Wound	Character has been so badly hurt that s/he is feigning consciousness and can’t fight. Depending on who it is, this may kill the character instantly (i.e. expendable NPCs). If not, the character will die very soon if not healed!

Go ahead and take some dramatic license in how you treat the damage levels. This table is not meant to be too specific, because the type of injury varies depending on what style of anime you like to play.

Weapons and Armor

Alright, now for the fun part of combat rules — playing with weapons! There are many, many different types of weapons, but using them is rather simple. The weapon listing will tell you what type of weapon it is, and then you can look up the weapon skill to find out how to roll for it. Next, it tells you what the damage level is. Occasionally there’ll be another note beside a weapon, but for the most part that’s it. Below is a list of the standard weapons you’ll be using. The GM will probably allow you to pick any one of these for your character to start off with without any special explanation of how they obtained it.

Weapon Type	Skill	Damage	Details
Standard Sword	Regular Melee	3D
Small Axe	Regular Melee	3D
Staff/Mace:
Mace	Regular Melee	3D
Quarterstaff	Regular Melee OR Martial Arts	2D	With this it’s easier to trip opponents and block melee attacks.
Battleaxe/Long Spear:
Claymoore	Heavy Melee	4D	GM should give a penalty if the user’s Strength is under 6.
Battleaxe	Heavy Melee	4D	GM should give a penalty if the user’s Strength is under 6.
Naginata	Heavy Melee OR Martial Arts	3D	GM should give a penalty if the user’s Strength is under 4.
Guns:*
Air Rifle	Aim	2D
Handgun	Aim	4D	Only for certain eras. Often jams on botched skill rolls.
Leather Whip	Throw	1D	Good for tripping, disarming, and entangling enemies. Try using alternate methods of attacking.
Throwing Blades	Throw	1D each	Throwing stars and very small knives. They are so light that they give an extra 1D to "To Hit" rolls.
Nunchaku	Martial Arts	2D

Weapon Techs and Combos

In many anime series and even more Japanese console RPGs, you’ll see characters combining physical attacks with magical attacks, merging two different magic spells, and sometimes doing all three at once....many times involving several characters cooperating at once!

A Weapon Tech is several abilities combined into a single attack. A Combo is a Tech with multiple characters combining their powers. All of these abilities are covered by one simple system. It’s very basic, so whether it’s one character or four, you can roll it up the same way!

Setting it up: A Tech or Combo requires that several actions be done at just the right times. This means that characters who roll high on initiative may have to wait for the appropriate moment. As each character gets the chance to do their action, roll to see if their character succeeds, but don’t roll for damage yet. If only one character is involved, however, then he or she will get a multiple action penalty to their rolls since a Weapon Tech involves doing more than one action at once. Also remember that the enemy gets the chance to dodge, block, or otherwise react.

Damage: If all the actions in the Combo or Tech succeed, then the it lands and does damage. Look at each skill the was used to make the technique succeed to see what it normally uses to do its damage. Now add together the dice values from all of these (forget about base stats for the moment), and roll them all at once for your damage roll. You only get to add one base stat to the dice. This will be the base stat from the action which is most important to the technique.

Example: Alene and Jarya are going to work together to do a Combo where Alene casts a fire spell on Jarya’s sword and Jayra attacks with it.

1. Alene rolls for casting a Level 3 Fire spell. She succeeds, and Jarya’s weapon flames up.
2. Jarya tries to hit the enemy, so she rolls her Melee skill against his dodge. Jarya wins.
3. Consequently, the Combo succeeds and the two add up damage. The damage comes to 6D - 3D for Alene’s Level 3 Fire Spell, and 3D for Jayra’s sword. Since Jayra was the one who actually hit the enemy, her Strength is the most important base stat.
4. Jayra rolls a total of 6D and adds her Strength to that for damage. The victim gets to defend with his Strength, but only once, whereas he’d be defending twice if they had attacked separately, meaning this attack is much more threatening.

Failure: If part of a Tech or Combo fails, it might cause the entire attack to fail, or it might not. It depends on what the character(s) are trying to do, so decide on whatever seems to make sense in the current situation. If the characters have worked out a very specific sequence, the GM may give a bonus to damage if they hit, but decide that the whole sequence is interrupted if one part fails. In simpler Techs, such as the one above, part of it may go through — i.e. Alene fails her spell but Jayra goes ahead and attacks with her weapon anyway....but if Alene succeeded and Jayra missed, then neither would hit, since the sword itself was holding the fire spell.

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