Contests
As with most role-playing games, Striker is full of conflict. The very life of an adventurer is on the edges of society, between law and lawlessness, between the known and the unknown, between what is deemed acceptable and what is not.
In the Strikermechanica, combat is termed a physical contest. A contest is a timed adversarial framework where we perform checks on a subset of skills and determine their consequences. There are two other notable contests: technical contests and social contests.
It is a timed adversarial framework, because in acute situations many parties to the contest all want to get their thing done.
Common Concepts
Regardless of the type of contest being carried out, whether the encounter is:
- a fist fight between two soldiers in a bar;
- a shoot out between the crew of a striker behind a bulkhead and some boarders;
- a shoot out between two strikers surrounded by chunks of ice in a Kuiper belt;
- a striker's engineering officer, tracking down an enemy hacker's attempts to bring down the shields;
- a taunt and reposte between two striker captains;
- a negotiation between delegates at a diplomatic dinner; or
- a combination of two or three of these at once.
there is a common organisation of contests, in cycles, around the round and the turn.
Turns
During the round, each creature participating in a contest takes a turn.
Encounter
An encounter is a meeting between adversaries. Examples of encounters was provided above.
Surprise
Surprise occurs when one or more of the participants in a contest is significantly aware before others, of the upcoming contest. That is, they know their adversaries are present and its going to be a contest, and also, they know enough time in advance that they can do something. That something is some kind of action, and that action must be able to be performed with a round.
It is up to the GM to determine whether conditions of surprise exist and for whom. However there are a number of Skills that can help here. Principal amongst them is Stealth.