Section 03
Encounters
What a fight costs before anybody rolls. Every entry is a mechanism examined on its own, with the arithmetic shown and the table consequence stated. No system is treated as canonical.
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014
What a fight costs
Encounter budgets price a fight before anybody rolls. What the formulas are counting, and the two variables they almost always ignore.
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015
Action economy
Four against one is not four times harder; it is a different problem. Why numbers beat statistics at almost every table.
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016
The first round decides it
In most systems the side that acts first with focus wins. What initiative is really distributing.
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017
Attrition versus spike
A long grind and a sudden burst produce the same average damage and completely different sessions.
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018
Morale
The rule that ends fights early. Almost every old system had one; most modern ones dropped it and lengthened every combat as a result.
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019
The encounter that is not a fight
Budgets assume violence. What happens to the arithmetic when the obstacle is a locked bureaucracy or a river.