Other Conflict Things

### **Sprint**

You perform a sprintaction in order to change from zone to zone within a conflict. Normally, movement is pretty self-explanatory—there’s a door to go through or simply open ground, and it’s pretty easy to justify moving from one area to another. As a result, most movement rolls are pretty easy, having an effective difficulty of Mediocre (+0)—in other words, unless you roll a negative result, you can always move one zone and every shift beyond that lets you move an additional zone.

Sometimes, however, it’s complicated to move directly from one zone to another. For instance, something like a fence, wall, or other difficult terrain might obstruct your path, or you might need to move up or down quickly (like getting to the roof of a locked building from the street, or vice versa). This complication is called a border, and the GM gives it a difficulty rating (page 310). Rough terrain is usually an Average (+1) border; fences and other such barriers are usually considered Fair (+2) borders. Extremely high walls, barbed wire, and other fortifications might be Good (+3) borders or above.

If there is a border, you must roll against the border difficulty to accomplish movement. As with a normal sprint roll, meeting the difficulty allows you to move one zone, and any shifts let you move an additional zone per shift.

In situations where there’s no border to worry about, you can also just move one zone as a supplemental action (see below) at a –1 penalty to your main action for the exchange. Within the same zone, movement isn’t considered an issue—you can always go wherever you need to within the same zone in order to perform an action.

### **Free and Supplemental Actions**

You may be able to take a minor action in addition to your main action during a turn. Often it will be assumed that you succeed in taking the action, but some free or supplemental actions might involve a skill roll of their own, made before or after the main action, as is appropriate. Defending always requires rolling the dice. You might want your character to do something very simple during an exchange. Some kinds of actions are free actions—they don’t count as your character’s action during an exchange, whether or not a roll of the dice is involved. Rolling for defense against an attack is a free action. So are minor actions like casting a quick glance at a doorway, flipping a switch right next to your character, starting a car, listening for voices, or shouting a short warning. It’s up to the GM to approve a minor action as free. If it isn’t free, it’s a supplemental action.

There is no limit on the number of free actions your character may take during an exchange; the group simply has to agree that each action is free and should only impose limits if it seems like someone is taking undue advantage of this rule.

Sometimes, your character needs to do something more complicated than a single, basic action allows. Moving one zone in addition to another action is the most common example. Several others are possible, such as drawing a gun before shooting it, opening a door and then intimidating the occupants of the room beyond, using a cell phone while shooting a gun, or snatching up a nearby vase to smash over the head of a burglar. These actions are called supplemental actions, and they impose a –1 penalty on the roll for the main action. When you’re not sure which is the primary action and which is the supplemental one, remember that the supplemental action is the one that normally requires no die roll.

### **Combining Skills**

Sometimes your character will need to perform a task that really requires using two or more skills at once. You never know when your character is going to need to throw a knife (Weapons) while balancing on a spinning log (Athletics), when he’s going to need to explain germ theory (Scholarship) to a dragon (Discipline), or when he’s going to need to hold up a falling gate (Might) just long enough for his friends to escape (Endurance).

In situations like these, you roll based on the main skill your character is using (the primary thrust of the action), but the roll is *modified* by a second skill. If the second skill rating is of greater value than the first, it grants a +1 bonus to the roll; if the second skill rating is of a lesser value, it applies a –1 penalty to the roll. Sometimes, it’ll only make sense for a skill to help or hinder another skill, but not both; in that case, ignore the value that makes no sense. In other words, the GM might decide that, while having a low Athletics could hinder a character in the Weapons/Athletics example above, having a high Athletics won’t necessarily make it any easier. In that case, she just won’t grant the bonus if the character’s Athletics skill is higher.

Keep in mind that this should not be used to allow a character to complete two full actions in one turn; that should require two exchanges. When skills are used in combination, one skill is almost always going to serve a passive role, as the thing the character needs to be able to do so that he can perform the other skill. If a character is trying to throw a knife while balancing on a spinning log, Weapons is the main skill rolled, but Athletics restricts the skill, because without it the character falls off the log and his throw is moot. Similarly, if the character is too busy gibbering before an ancient horror, his knowledge simply is not going to help him.

Sometimes it can be difficult to determine when something is a supplemental action and when something calls for combined skills. The best rule of thumb is to ask whether or not a roll would be required for each “part” of a complicated action if the parts were separated. Would the character have to roll Athletics to balance on the log if he weren’t also throwing the knife? If so, then combine skills. If not, then treat it like a supplemental action.

In practice, this rule mainly allows the GM to condense rolls in complicated situations in order to keep play moving at a brisk pace. It’s possible to handle these situations by requiring one roll for each “part.” The GM could say, “Yeah, roll your Athletics to see if you fall off the log, and then roll Weapons to see if you can hit the target.” But in a complicated conflict scene, those rolls can add up and really bog down play. Sometimes it’s just simpler and faster to combine skills and take care of it all in one roll.

### **Keep It Simple, Silly**

It’s pretty easy to get carried away with supplemental actions and combining skills, so you end up with a situation where a character needs to climb a wall (Athletics as primary), but is tired (Endurance hinders), but the wall’s part of a building the character has been studying in order to burglarize (Burglary helps). In general, try to avoid this kind of minutia, because it can turn into a zero-sum game pretty fast, where there really isn’t any significant benefit once you bring in all the attendant factors. Still, if you’re fond of that kind of complexity, the system does technically allow for some of that.

### **Overflow (What to do with a surplus)**

Sometimes you will get lucky and end up with spare shifts that don’t get spent on anything during an exchange—you succeed far more than anticipated and simply don’t need those extra shifts to complete the action you declared. When that happens, the extra shifts are called overflow, and you are allowed to spend them to take an additional, after-the-roll action if you so choose. The action is resolved at the value of the overflow, so two shifts of overflow might be taken as a Fair (+2) action.

The main restriction is that this action cannot be an offensive action and must be consistent with the sort of activity that generated the overflow; movement is fine, and so is any other action that the GM allows as supplemental.

Specifically, this is a good way to fit non-conflict actions into the middle of a conflict scene. Overflow can only legitimately happen by chance—most often by a really good roll of the dice. So if you know you need 2 shifts to accomplish something, invoking additional aspects to get 6 shifts so you can have overflow doesn’t cut it. Also, no matter how many shifts you have of overflow, you can only take one additional action, and you have to commit all your shifts to that action.