Negatory Knightery

Manuscript found buried in a pile of letters from the 6th century, something about an old Pendragon campaign.

Action and Intent

Whenever serious, weighty, delicious Conflict is present, the active part will decide what is their Intent and the passive part will respond with either a compromise or trying to avoid it entirely.

If they compromise, they describe how they’re mitigating the effect of the active party. This usually involves sacrificing something of similar or greater value, such as fictional positioning, equipment, honour, your horse, etc.

If they try to avoid it entirely, they describe how, choose between Heads or Tails and the GM flips a coin for it. If the coin doesn’t go their way, the active party fulfills their intent completely.

Alternatively, we can roll a 2-in-6 chance, or a 1-in-4, or just try to get the same face in two coins tossed one after the other.

Passions

Sometimes you want to do something truly superhuman, such as breaking your sword with such force upon someone that, if it connects, it will kill them. Your character has Passions. For each Passion that applies in a scene, you may raise your effective Scale by 1 for its duration. Whenever you do it, however, you must sacrifice something yourself - usually knights break their weapons in angry smites.

You may also “bank” these sacrifices beforehand to “cash them in later”. So you can be dismounted earlier as an additional, unnecessary compromise, so that in your next round you can call in your Passion without having to sacrifice anything that round.

Scale

There are 4 scales a character can belong to, starting at 0.

0 - Man - The Normal Human tier, where most people belong. In D&D, this would be levels 0 to 3.

1 - Hero - The tier of those humans who can’t be described as normal anymore, and the things which are considered glorious when they defeat (such as bears and ogres). In D&D, levels 4 to 6.

2 - Monster - The tier of those humans who can’t be described as “humans” anymore, and the things which they must kill or be killed by (such as giants and hydras). In D&D, 7 to 9.

3 - Myth - The tier of those things which shouldn’t exist, yet do. In D&D, 10 to 12 and beyond.

Whenever there is a disparity of scale, the difference is applied in compromises. So a Hero demands 1 extra compromise from a normal human, if they’re resisting. Likewise, a Hero’s compromise counts for 2 against a normal human.

In a fight, creatures may attempt 1 extra Intent per Scale above 0. So a Man may try 1 Intent at a time, a Myth against a Man may try 4; a Myth against a Monster may try 2, while the Monster will be able to only try 1.

Objects may also be of a higher scale, such as a Mythic Sword (+3 in D&D terms) or a Heroic Armour (+1). These either demand more compromises or allow for more compromises, much like a character’s scale, but this isn’t innate and the object may be lost.

Avoiding Danger

If danger threatens your character, the GM will tell you, and inform you of what its effects will be, exactly as above. If this is during another action of yours, you may choose to suffer the full damage but fulfill your intent too.

Combat

Initiative is handled through common sense and whoever attacks first.

In a fight, intents are discrete actions: “tackle someone and stab them in the eye” is two Intents: “tackle someone” and “stab them in the eye." Intents should also be specific: "I swing at him" is not a sufficient Intent, but "I swing at his nose" is.

If your Intent is to attack another character, you declare what you intend to do to the defender. This is limited by the fictional positioning of the you and defender - weapon lengths still apply, them being:

• Touch (human reach in fight)
• Short (knives and short swords)
• Medium (one handed swinging weapons)
• Long (one handed thrusting weapons or two handed swinging weapons
• and Very Long (two handed thrusting weapons).

The attacker must always be specific in the effect that the wound they perform might have, such as:

• I will disarm him
• I will chop off his hand so that he can’t ever hold a sword anymore
• I will drive my knife through the chink of his helmet and bleed him dry like a pig for the slaughter
• I will break his fucking leg, yeah the left one

When determining a wound, we can also refer to these guidelines if needed:

• Killing wounds, which can only be delivered to the head, neck, torso, and hip or thighs. They’re deep punctures, compound fractures, or long cuts. It only rarely can be delivered on top of armour.
• Incapacitating wounds, which are grave enough to break or chop off a limb, or to generally put someone out of commission unless they have something serious to fight for. Likewise, it’s rare to get one of these over armour.
• Hindering wounds, which are things like simple fractures and things that require time to heal, but aren’t necessarily something that will stop someone immediately. You’re wounded but still standing.
• Glancing wounds, the most common kind. This is when something results in just welts, swelling, small cuts and punctures, blisters, that kind of thing.
• And Disadvantages, which don’t necessarily wound the enemy but might make it possible to deliver a graver wound in the follow-up. You can also understand this as Stunning wounds, where you just leave someone dazzled or dizzy.

If the attacker did not specifically aim to cut off a limb and the defender did not offer up a limb in response, yet the attacker still lands a Grievous wound in one of the defender’s limbs, roll 5d6. If it surpasses both the defender’s Strength and Constitution, the limb has been chopped off anyway. Otherwise it’s just broken.

The defender then offers up something they can possibly do or sacrifice to prevent injury - or several things, if fighting against something of a bigger scale. In a pinch, you can break your armour to avoid damage most of the time. They can also offer up their entire limb, if needed.

The defender may also opt for the coin toss instead, describing how they try to avoid the hit.

Range: When doing ranged attacks, at medium range the enemy is considered its own scale. At short range, the enemy is considered to be of 1 scale inferior, and at long range the enemy is considered to be 1 scale greater.

Wounds and Healing

A character dies when they’re killed, and heals when they’re not hurting anymore.