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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shadow" data-source="post: 8959324" data-attributes="member: 16760">[USER=6684958]@bloodtide[/USER]Let's start over, okay? I've been trying to think of a combat example from my games to share with you, but it's difficult, as my group generally likes to avoid combat through sneakiness and trickery. But here's one that may possibly help.In a fantasy version of Renaissance Italy, my character Ludovico is a spy having tea with his rival spy and femme fatale Chloe. As they banter, Ludovico's friend Marco is sneaking in the back to poison one of their dishes (a sedative to which Ludovico has previously taken the antidote).Marco flubs his Stealth roll, and decides to "succeed at a cost". He adds the poison to the dish, but gets caught coming out the back by Chloe's boy-toy, a guard captain who's a notorious duelist and a deadly swordsman.Marco's agenda here is to get away clean, and more broadly to help head off a war that would trash our home city, which Chloe is trying to incite.Rather than get hauled off to jail on trumped-up charges, Marco thinks quickly and challenges the guy to a duel! A daring move, as Marco, while a great shot, hardly knows which end of a sword to hold.The guard captain, as the challenged, gets to choose the weapon. (Technically he could have refused the duel, as he was performing his official duty, but Marco knew he wouldn't.) Naturally, he chooses swords.Marco's player knows he has essentially no chance of winning this duel, barring truly extraordinary luck. So he concentrates his efforts on trying to minimize the amount of harm he takes before he can yield without dishonor.Baked into the rules of Fate is that player characters cannot die without their player's consent. (With one exception we don't need to go into here.)  No possible result on any string of die rolls can force Marco's death.That doesn't mean characters can't get really severely abused, though! At stake here is, well, any number of things depending on how things go:  Marco could be so severely wounded that he'd be drastically reduced in effectiveness for an entire story arc (quite a number of sessions), and/or end up in jail until he escaped or, more likely, his friends busted him out.The fight goes about how you'd expect:  The guard captain utterly dominates Marco. Wounds him, disarms him, humiliates him. Then Marco's player makes another daring move:  He yields - then, on his knees, deliberately says something to enrage the guy.Marco's player rolls Provoke and succeeds beautifully! The guard captain, enraged beyond all reason, stabs Marco brutally! Then his own men tackle and arrest him for the dishonor of attacking a defeated and unarmed opponent. Marco, IIRC, spends a Fate point to help get out of Dodge before anyone notices him again. If he'd failed there, he might yet have been arrested.Marco's wounds, if left untreated, would have hindered him for a very long time. Thankfully his bodyguard Jurgen is pretty good at patching people up, and the three characters together can cast a minor healing ritual... Even so, Marco had a couple sessions of not being anything like his best.You see, the point of the fight wasn't so much, "Who wins?" and certainly not "Do I live?" It was about, "Do I stay out of jail?" and, more remotely, "Do we stop the war?" It was also a bit about, "How badly am I going to get hurt?" but really even that mattered mainly for, "Do we stop the war?"In this kind of play, a Fight roll, a Provoke roll, a Stealth roll, or what have you, are at the service of the central questions of play. Survival, on this view, isn't that interesting. What's interesting is, "Do you achieve your goals?" and "What are you willing to do to achieve them?" Marco proved he was willing to take a sword through his guts!Even the goal of "Do we stop the war?" is at the service of even larger goals. Things like, "Who's going to make the best ruler of our city, and what are we willing to do to make that happen?" Along with more personal goals of the characters.</blockquote>

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