A fight is fought in rounds. In each one you decide what all five of your people are doing, and then the whole round plays out at once — yours and theirs together, in whatever order the moment decides.
When something finds you, the game shows you what you are facing before it asks anything of you — not a headcount, but the shape of it: what is there, how many, and how far away each part of it stands. That layout is the whole basis of the decision you are about to make, which is why you get to see it first.
Then the party chooses, as a party: Fight, Advance, or Run.
Choose to fight and you give each living character an order — attack, defend, cast, use or equip something, catch your breath, or move — along with how hard they are pushing, which the stamina page covers. You are ordering the whole party before any of it resolves, so you are committing without knowing how the round will go.
When you confirm, the round plays out. Everyone on the field — your people and theirs alike — acts in order of initiative, which is rolled fresh for every combatant at the top of every round. Nobody has a fixed place in the running order. Someone who acted first last round may well act last this one.
That is the tension the system is built on. You commit to an order for a character who may act before the enemy that was about to kill them, or after — and you will not know which when you decide. An attack aimed at something that dies before your turn comes around is an attack spent on a corpse.
Everyone in a fight stands in a rank — a line abreast, everyone in it the same distance from the enemy. Your party has two: a front rank, which does the fighting and takes the blows, and a back rank, which is out of easy reach of anything swinging a blade. Where each character stands is your formation, set before you ever go down.
The enemy has its own ranks running away from you, and the game addresses them by distance — ten feet, twenty, thirty, forty. Rank and distance are the same thing seen two ways: the rank is where something is standing, and the distance is how the game names it.
What you can touch is decided by reach, and reach is simply how many ranks a weapon can span. Most melee weapons reach exactly one, so the front ranks maul each other and nobody else is involved. A long weapon reaches two, which lets its wielder strike over the top of the fight — or strike your front rank from behind their own. A bow reaches across most of the field.
Reach is not mutual. A thing with a spear can hit you from a distance you cannot answer at with a knife, and the answer to that is not to swing harder — it is to close, or to shoot, or to accept that this is a fight your back rank is going to have to win.
You do not pick out one particular creature. You pick a group — the creatures of one kind standing in one rank, "three goblin archers at twenty feet" — and the fight works out which of them your blow actually lands on.
But it remembers. Once one of your characters has engaged a specific enemy inside that group, they keep going after that same one round after round until it goes down or they deliberately turn on something else. Your people finish what they start rather than spreading damage evenly across a crowd and killing nothing.
The enemy is under no such convention. It picks its own targets by its own reasoning every round, and it will not politely keep fighting whoever it fought last.
Something has to cross the gap, and there are two ways to do it.
The party can Advance together, which costs you the entire round: nobody acts, and everyone moves a rank closer. It is only offered when there is a real gap to cross — you can never advance past something already engaged with your front rank, any more than it could walk through you to get at your casters. And it is a genuine trade, not a free step, because the other side still takes its turn against a party that spent the round walking.
Or a single character can move on their own as their order for the round, forward or back, going further the harder they push. Pushing all the way forward is a charge to the far end of the field — past everything in between, every one of which gets to notice you going by. Falling back to your own rear is the same idea in reverse, and is how a character who should never have been in front gets out of it.
The enemy closes the same way, one at a time, by choosing to. A rank of theirs dying does not drag the rank behind it forward — nothing on that side moves without spending its own turn to do it. Which is what makes watching the distances worth doing.
Running is a decision the whole party makes, and it is a gamble rather than an exit. The party's best pathfinder — whoever has the sharpest eye for ground, one roll for everybody — tries to find the way out.
Succeed and the fight is simply over; you are gone. Fail and it costs you the round entirely: nobody acted, nobody defended properly, and everything on the field takes its turn against a party that had its back to them. Running late in a losing fight is how a bad fight becomes a disaster.
Note also what you leave behind. Anything the fight was going to yield stays where it is — fleeing is not a way to take the spoils and skip the risk.
Fights end three ways. You kill everything, and then you divide what is left on the ground between you. You get out, with nothing. Or everybody falls, and the run is over — there is no fighting on from there and no second attempt at that fight.
What there is not, ever, is a reload. The fight you just had is the fight that happened, and the party you have afterwards is the party you take forward. That is the same rule the whole game runs on, and combat is where you feel it.
One thing worth knowing about the other side: nothing down here runs away. Whatever finds you fights until it or you are finished. There is no morale to break and no point at which a losing enemy decides it has had enough — so a fight you have chosen to start is a fight you are going to finish, one way or the other.