You don’t have hit points. You have breath, armor, and a body — and the dungeon takes them in that order.
Attributes
Each novice has four attributes, rated 0–3 at creation (gear and traits can push a rating to 4 or 5). A rating is the flat bonus you add to a d20 roll. The creation array is [3, 2, 1, 1] — assigned by your archetype; swap any two.
| Attribute | Governs | Derives |
|---|---|---|
| Might | Muscle and leverage | Melee and Breaker attacks; forcing doors |
| Wits | Aim, cunning, quick hands | Ranged and Piercing attacks; locks, traps, searching |
| Grace | Agility, poise, reflex | Sets Wind (2 + Grace) and Defense (8 + Grace) |
| Resolve | Will, nerve, vigor | Sets Vitals (2 + Resolve); resists Shaken, Stun, Poison |
The Three Defense Layers
Incoming harm burns through three layers, top to bottom. Together, your current Wind + Guard is your Fortitude — the shield everyone sees over your head on the tabletop.
| Layer | What it is | Size | Recovery |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wind | Breath, stamina, the near-miss | 2 + Grace | Refills fully at the start of your activation — unless denied by [[04 Conditions |
| Guard | Structural armor | Worn armor + shield | Erodes; never self-repairs. In combat, only Patch and Second Wind restore it. Repairs out of combat cost time; a proper rest restores it fully |
| Vitals | Scarce wound slots — the body itself | 2 + Resolve | Never regenerates. Only rare consumables (a healing poultice) buy one back mid-run |
The three don’t stack from the same source — they trade: armor sizes Guard, Grace sets Wind, Resolve sets Vitals. The anvil (big Guard, slow) and the wasp (big Wind, snappy) are both durable, differently.
No Rounds — One Clock
Combat has no rounds. It runs on the same clock as the crawl: every action costs moments, and after acting you recover for a beat before you can act again. Enemies strike on their own visible tempo markers — you can always see who moves next, and the clock politely waits while anyone on your side is still deciding. “Refreshes each round” is therefore really “refreshes each time your turn comes back around” — at the start of your activation.
The Stat-Block Corollary (learned the hard way, 2026-07-24)
The same three layers size monsters, and there the refill has teeth pointing the other way. Because Wind comes back in full and Guard never does, a swing only banks progress when its Break outlasts the target’s Wind. At or below it, the Break lands in Wind and the next activation hands it straight back.
So a monster carrying its whole Fortitude as Wind is not merely tough against a light weapon — it is immune to it. A rapier could never kill a rattlethrong. A crossbow could never kill a warp-touched inmate. A falchion could never kill a warden-construct. The Footpad took forty actions to grind one down, ninety-one percent of them changing nothing at all, and won only by rolling a Breakthrough crit. That is what a three-player table described as “fights against rats drag on.”
Two rules now hold the deck honest, and a test fails if either breaks:
- No monster’s Wind reaches the arsenal’s lowest Break. Every stat block keeps its Fortitude; the excess simply lives in Guard instead, where chipping it sticks.
- No weapon sits below Break 2. The piercing line pays for its low Break with Wound 2 and the Pierce spend — it does not pay by being inert.
Run dotnet run --project dotnet/TPK.Tools -- balance for the current table.
Why This Shape
- Wind refilling every activation makes chip damage meaningless — until something denies the refill, at which point attrition becomes terrifying. That’s the Poison/Fatigue economy. The corollary above is the same rule read from the monster’s side: keep Wind small, put the mass in Guard, and every hit means something.
- Guard eroding without self-repair makes every fight leave a mark on the run, not just the moment.
- Vitals being scarce and nearly unrecoverable is where permadeath stakes actually live. The wound that kills you comes back as a scar on whoever survives you.