Every blow in the game asks one question: did enough of it get through? Not whether you hit — whether what you brought was more than what they could take away. What is left over is the whole of it, and everything else follows from that number.
An attack rolls the weapon's attribute and skill, not yours in the abstract. A blade rolls Might and Melee; a bow rolls Grace and Marksmanship. This is worth saying plainly because it catches people: a character trained to the teeth in Melee picks up a bow and rolls almost nothing, because none of that training is about bows.
Onto that goes whatever extra dice you paid for by pushing hard, and off it comes whatever the character has lost to exhaustion or to whatever is currently wrong with them. What survives is the handful they throw.
Note what does not appear anywhere in that: a bonus for being strong. Might does not add damage. It adds dice — it makes you land the blow better — and what a well-landed blow is worth is the weapon's business, not the arm's.
When a character spends their turn on Defend, they are not blocking one particular attack. They have taken up a defensive posture, and it covers everything that comes at them for the rest of the round — the first attacker, the third, the one that arrives after they have already been hit twice. There is no limit, no budget, and nothing to allocate.
This matters most in exactly the round you would expect. Against one attacker, Defend costs you a turn to blunt one blow. Against four, it costs you the same turn and blunts all four.
A defense is not a choice between dodging and taking it on the shield. One declaration rolls every defense the incoming attack allows, all at once, and every one of them subtracts from the attacker.
A blade coming at you allows two: Grace and Evasion to be elsewhere, Vigor and Guard to absorb it. Both roll. Both come off. Something magical may allow Aether and Abjuration as well, and then all three roll together. Whatever extra dice you bought with effort apply to each of those rolls, not split between them.
So a defended character is meaningfully hard to hurt, and a character who has trained more than one kind of defense is harder again — not because one of them was the right pick, but because they all answer at once.
A character who spent their turn attacking, casting, or doing nothing at all still defends. They simply do it badly: they roll the bare attribute for every defense the attack allows — their Grace, their Vigor — with none of their training and none of the extra dice behind it.
Passive and active defense are the same shape. The difference is only whether your skill and your effort came along. Which is the honest way to read a hit that landed hard on your caster: not that they had no defense, but that they had a thin one, and thin defenses fail quietly.
Thin is also where luck does its most useful work. A passive roll is two or three dice, and a handful that small comes up blank often — which is precisely where a lucky character quietly gets their second look and an unlucky one does not.
One bleak detail worth knowing: a defense roll can go so badly that it comes out below nothing, and then it adds to the attacker instead of subtracting. A catastrophic flinch does not merely fail to stop the blow — it helps it along, and a swing that was going nowhere can land because of it. This is rare, a few rolls in a hundred, and it is rarest for those with the dice to spare.
Take what the attacker rolled, subtract everything every defense rolled, and what remains is the margin. Nothing left means nothing happened — the blow was turned, and no damage of any kind is dealt.
A margin that survives becomes damage in one step: the weapon's own base damage, plus an amount per point of margin that the weapon decides. That last part is why two weapons with similar base damage can behave completely differently in a skilled pair of hands — one of them turns a good roll into a great deal more hurt than the other, and that difference is a property of the steel, not the swordsman.
Damage is not finished when it leaves the weapon. It runs through what the thing you hit actually is, in a fixed order.
First its nature. Anything can be weak to a kind of harm, which multiplies the damage up, or resistant, which multiplies it down — and some things are flatly immune, where the right damage type simply does nothing at all. This is the single biggest reason to carry more than one kind of weapon: not for the numbers, but because some things cannot be hurt the way you usually hurt things.
Then armor, which is the last word: it does not subtract from a blow, it blunts it. Every piece you have on you makes what reaches you a little smaller, and each piece works on whatever the one before it left — so armor piles up without limit and never quite becomes proof against anything. A blow softened far enough may come to nothing at all; against a real threat it will not, no matter how much steel you are carrying.
Armor is strictly physical. It answers fists, blades, points and blunt force, and it does nothing — not a little, nothing — against anything else. The heaviest plate in the game is exactly as useful as bare skin against the wrong kind of attack.
And armor is everything you have on you, not the piece in the armor slot. A shield on your arm protects you the same way a breastplate does; how you bear it is not the question, whether it is between you and the blow is. It all adds up into one number.
Two races change this exchange rather than just doing it better.
A Dwarf's Ward is a backstop, and the order it happens in is the whole point. He can only cover people at his own rank or behind him — never someone standing further forward — and the ally under it defends for themselves first, normally and fully. Only a blow that has already beaten them reaches the Dwarf, who then throws his own weight in the way — and whatever is still coming, he takes, through his own armor rather than theirs. He may stop it dead. He may only shrink it. He is never the reason a blow lands, because a fumbled interception is a Dwarf who failed to get there, not a Dwarf who helped. And he does it for every blow that gets through, as many times as it takes.
An Elf's Riposte is the opposite instinct. It turns attacks aside like any defense, but the moment one is turned, the leftover margin comes back the other way as a counter-attack against whoever threw it. The commitment is real: the stance sharpens the Elf's evasion and lets everything else drop to the bare passive floor, so they are countering rather than defending broadly.
Two things decide whether a turned blow actually earns a counter, and neither is about how well the Elf defended. a bow or a sling is never answered — a shot is evaded and that is the end of it, however well it was evaded. What decides this is the weapon in the attacker's hands, not how far away they are standing: an archer at arm's length is as safe from the counter as one at forty feet, because the counter is for people who closed with you. Melee answers melee, including the long weapons that strike from a rank back. And then the Elf needs a workable way to strike that distance right now: an archer out of arrows can counter a thing standing over them, and can do nothing at all to the one twenty feet away.