Melee Combat

One-pager. Melee is nothing new — it's opposed resolution applied to hitting someone at arm's length: your attack against their defence, QRs compared, exactly like stealth-vs-search or a tennis point. It just asks four questions in order, and hands the last one to Damage.

The four questions

1. Did it land? — your weapon skill against their parry or dodge; compare QRs.
2. Was it wholly or partially mitigated? — the blocking table below turns the two QRs into the attack's effective QR.
3. Where did it strike? — hit location — unless it was an aimed strike, in which case this came first (you called the target and paid for it up front).
4. How hard? — the effective QR and the weapon's DC, through armor → Damage. Armor and damage are that page's business, not this one's.

Attack vs defence — compare QRs

Both sides roll their own task and the better QR prevails — the general opposed-resolution move. The attacker rolls their melee skill; the defender parries or dodges, each a reaction (so it stacks the cumulative −2 of Intense Action — the parry you saw coming is cheaper than the one you didn't). Equal QRs cancel: the blow just turned aside, the tension holds, you both go again — which is what makes a melee a taut back-and-forth rather than one roll.

Attack and defence are two intents

"Kill him with this sword" is a statement of intent, not one action — it plays out as discrete beats: a lunge to close, a wind-up for an especially heavy blow, the blow itself. "Don't get hit" is a second intent, and a fighter is almost always pursuing both at once — pressing the attack while keeping a guard up — one primary, one secondary; or (the berserker, the duellist waiting for the opening) all-in on just one. That is exactly the Intense Action split: your focus is sharp and everything else is worse. So the all-out attacker hits harder and guards poorly, while the careful fighter trades a step off the attack (−1) to keep a real defence (−2) — and melee's ebb and flow is that choice, remade each exchange.

Partial blocking — how much got through

A defence doesn't just win or lose; it can eat part of a blow. A defence equal to or better than the attack negates it; otherwise the attack's QR drops (5 − the defending QR) notches down the 1-2-3-4 scale. The failure end isn't arithmetic: a QR7 defence is no defence (the attack lands at its full rolled QR), and a QR10 defence makes it worse by a notch (you fumbled into it). Read off the attack's effective QR — what actually reaches the target:

(The better the defence, the more of the attack it eats; an equal defence blocks it clean — the just-barely parry. A botched defence leaves you worse off than no defence at all.)

Parry, and the counter

A parry meets steel with steel (or shield, or forearm). A critical parry (a QR well over the attack's) lets you counter on the same beat; an overwhelming one leaves the attacker off-balance — a chance to disarm or trade places. A parry can also shade the hit rather than stop it: a strong-but-not-clean one may shift the location roll a step or shave a point of DC instead of eating a whole QR.

Dodge — movie reality, or actual reality

A dodge gives ground to deny the opening — and this is where forty years show. When these rules were first written, the reconstruction of historical Western martial arts was in its infancy (the SCA and its kin); it's a far more serious discipline now, and one thing it has taught us plainly is that dodging a blow is a losing strategy — you do not lean out of the way of a sword.

So decide which reality your table is playing in, and read dodge accordingly:

• Movie reality — it's the hero's preternatural reflexes, the world in slow motion, the matrix-lean. Dodge freely; it's a genre convention and a perfectly good one.
• Actual reality — a "dodge" is really pre-emptive movement: you anticipate the attack and shift before it commits, so it can't land well — denying the opportunity, not out-reacting the blade. That makes it a matter of positioning and timing (a held/pre-empting action — see Initiative), not a reflex save after the fact. Under this reading, favour the parry, treat a dodge as something set up early, and penalize the desperate leap-aside for what it is.

Either is legitimate — ForeSight colours no setting. Just tell the table which one, and modify the dodge to match.

Grappling, pinning, and fighting dirty

When a fight collapses into a clinch it stops being about landing blows and becomes about control — of the other person's limbs, of a weapon, of position. Seizing, pinning, twisting, gouging, choking.

There's a light spine if you want one: track control as a few steps — partially restrained → restrained → completely restrained — and when the struggle is over an object (a knife, a gun, a fountain pen), simply who holds it. Each contested moment is an opposed roll — Strength, or whatever skill fits — and the winner shifts control a step; someone completely restrained is at the other's mercy: choked out, disarmed, pinned, or worse.

But mostly: don't reach for a rule. Grappling is the purest case of ForeSight's founding bet — that the people at the table understand this particular tangle far better than any designer ever could. Run it on Initiative (who acts, who's waiting for an opening) and opposed resolution (each contested thing), and improvise the rest.

The gedanken cases: the brawl atop the tank in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade — arms tangled, a fountain pen squirting ink into someone's eyes, everyone scrabbling for a grip on everything at once. Or Gersen and the Hetman at the close of Vance's The Killing Machine — his hands crippled, Gersen traps the Hetman's arms with his legs and head-butts the broken nose to drown him in his own blood. No table produces those moments; "roll Initiative, then make the opposed roll that fits" does.

Designer's Note: melee earns a page not because it needs new rules — it doesn't, it's the One Rule's opposed move plus the reaction economy — but because the questions have an order (land, mitigate, locate, wound) and because the dodge and the clinch each deserve an honest footnote. The blocking table is the only genuinely new thing here, and it's just "(5 − QR)" made into a lookup so you don't do arithmetic mid-swing.