Combat

In combat, things get hurt.

Standard Combat
In combat, the beings with the highest stealth plus initiative move first. Each character may take one standard action, one move action, and one free action. The move action is moving one zone. The free action can be just about anything simple enough not to need to roll for effect, like speaking a short phrase or switching weapons. The standard action is anything complicated enough to require a roll, like making an attack, casting a spell, using a social skill, do a support or interference action, or do anything else similar.

Melee
To attack with melee, roll melee against the target's defense. If you roll higher, you inflict a point of damage to the enemy. If you succeed by 4, you inflict 2 points of damage. You inflict an additional point of damage for each additional 3 points you beat the opponent's defense by.

Most enemies as well as your own followers start at healthy and are injured if they take a point of damage. An injured being is at -2 to all rolls. If an injured being takes further damage, it dies. Champions use up health before they get injured, shrugging off wounds or expending vast amounts of stamina to avoid them in the first place. Certain monsters and other beings have extra health as well.

Ranged
A ranged attack works the same as a melee attack, except your character must roll equal to or greater than the number of zones away your target is as well as beating the defensive roll. Magical attacks work the same as ranged ones, for the most part. They all have their ideosyncrasies.

Defense
Roll this to defend against melee or ranged. This represents dodging, blocking, armor, personal toughness, and so on. A successful defense roll could mean you ignore the attack completely, or that it injures you but not enough to have an effect. "It's just a flesh wound."

Move
Move is your ability to jump or fly or swim or sprint. When used as a standard action, you move a number of extra zones equal to successes rolled.

Medicine
Medicine may be used to restore one point of health, make an injured person healthy, or restore a dying person to injured. It takes one success to heal you the first time, two the second, three the third, and so on until you accumulate so many injuries you cannot be healed. This resets each year. Magical healing has a separate counter for healing. Medicine may be used for other things than healing wounds, which does not increase the number of times you have received healing this year. This might include healing poison, curing disease, applying stimulants, and so on. Medicine uses herbs and concoctions with supernatural healing effects, as well as wisdom and science.

Destroy
Destroy is commonly used for smashing inanimate objects, dealing much more damage to sturdy things that cannot resist well.

To damage a structure, you need to roll more successes than its rating. This reduces its rating by 1. Reducing its rating to 0 completely demolishes it. Repairing the structure requires rolling successes on a build structure roll equal to the building's original rating.

Toughness
Toughness is a measure of size, strength, fortitude, and health. It covers anything from resisting poison and alcohol, how much you can lift, how much you can eat, how big your belches are, and more. Use it for acts of manliness.

A note on how siege works:

Siege
Your town's fortifications are a number of zones equal to the town's military development rating. As your city expands this represents and increasing size of the defensive border and is a bit of a liability. However, better defenses give a number of benefits.

Treat fortifications as a structure with a rating equal to the military development, that increases as that development increases. It gets the following amenities by default, as well as any you add.
 * Mounted Weapons: Bonus to attack.
 * Protective Walls: Bonus to defend.
 * Torches and Clearings: Bonus to spot intruders.
 * Barriers: Penalty for enemies to move into the zone.