Krakoa would rather you talk than fight. When that fails, this is what a fight looks like.

Fights are played in the Danger Room, on a hex map, by everyone at the table at once. Every fighter is built from their character sheet: their five attributes, their Physiology and their moves. The examples on this page use real fighters: X-23 (Brawn 17, Agility 20, Endurance 15, Perception 14), Hellfire (Agility 14, Endurance 14, Intellect 18, Perception 14) and a Hand Operative, a henchman with 10 in everything.

Every roll is a pool of ten-sided dice. Each die showing 6 or more is a success; the rest, 1s included, count for nothing. Only a Fumbling fighter has to worry about 1s: each one cancels a success, and more 1s than successes is a botch.

A card prints its own Base: its Speed and its Damage. Anything rolled without a card (a saving throw, a contest) uses Base 3, so it rolls 3 + the Attribute bonus dice, never fewer than 1. X-23's Agility 20 gives her 8 dice for a Reflex save; the Hand Operative's Agility 10 gives him 3.

A fight is played in Turns. Every Turn goes the same way:

1. Pick a card in secret. Every fighter chooses one card for the Turn: a strike, a power, Block… Nobody sees anyone else's choice.
2. Speeds are revealed. Your Speed for the Turn is your card's Speed plus your Agility bonus. Powers (Focus cards) use your Perception bonus instead.
3. Fastest goes first. On your turn you reveal your card, move, and act: attack, aim an area, use a power. Then the next fastest fighter goes, down to the slowest.
4. Movement. Every card says how far it lets you move before you act: 3 steps (poor), 4 (standard) or 5 (good). It is the card's own number; your Attributes don't change it.
5. Wait. When your turn comes, before you move or act, you may Wait: you drop to the end of the order and act after everyone else. You can Wait once per Turn.

Being fast gives you a choice: hit before anyone else moves, or Wait and see what everyone does first. A light, quick card acts early; a heavy blow comes late, and its target may already have moved.

Every fight is set to a mode before the first blow, and you will always know which one you are in.

There is no roll to hit. If your target is within your card's Reach when you attack, the attack lands, and the roll that matters is the damage roll. What a card can reach is printed on it: Adjacent, a number of hexes, a Line, a Cone, a Burst and so on.

An attack that lands can still do nothing. It misses when:

A Dazzled attacker misses half the time, and a Confused one may hit an ally instead.

Some powers allow a save. The target rolls their save pool against the attacker's pool; the target needs at least as many successes to save (a tie is a save). A save halves the damage, rounding down, and stops a power that only hinders.

Every body perceives the world through a Sensorial Class, set by its Physiology. Ordinary human senses are Terrestrial. A class has two ratings, each Basic, Superior or Absolute.

Fog, smoke, rain and darkness make a place harder to see in. Every location has a Visibility, and the worse it is, the bigger the penalty on your attack rolls and Perception checks — Investigation included — unless your senses cut through it. How well they do is your class's Acuity.

Blind Fighting ignores Visibility entirely. Some mutants are born with it; a power dampener takes theirs away along with the rest of their gifts.

Every attack has a Speed. If it is faster than your senses can follow, it is Unreactable: you lose your Agility bonus to Defense, and only an Emergency Active Defence can catch it.

Some characters can do more than be hard to hit. Instead of attacking, you can spend your turn arming an Active Defence — phasing intangible, throwing up a barrier, blurring out of focus. It catches the first attack to reach you that it is built to stop. Each has limited uses per fight, and most have gaps: a guard good against fists and gunfire may do nothing against a psychic assault.

Some also heal you or empower you when they block, and a few — Shields — can be raised over a teammate instead of yourself. Most need you to see the attack coming; only an Emergency defence works against an Unreactable one.

The attacker rolls the damage pool. Every success is 1 Health off the target.

Every card that deals damage prints its own Base Attribute: the attribute whose bonus it adds. X-23's strikes use Brawn, Hellfire's Amaranth uses Intellect, Mach Two's Scrap Storm uses Endurance and Archangel's Metal Pinions use Agility. Nothing is assumed from the kind of card.

1. Build the pool. Card Damage plus the Base Attribute's bonus, minus Soak. A damage type the target is Vulnerable to adds 2 dice, one they Resist takes 2 away, and one they are Immune to does nothing at all.
2. Roll. Count the 6s and up. BOOST (1 Stamina) adds one automatic success. Lucky adds a success, Jinxed takes one away.
3. Save: if the target saved, halve the successes, rounding down.
4. Toughness removes that many successes from every hit. Lacerating attacks ignore it.
5. Shield soaks up what is left before Health does.
6. Dizzy: if one hit takes more Health than the target's Endurance pool (3 + their Endurance bonus), they are Dizzied and lose their next action: this turn's if they haven't acted yet, otherwise next turn's.

Grabs ignore Block. A multi-hit card rolls each hit separately, against the same Soak.

A player character's Health is their Generation multiplier × (their Phenotype's hit die at its maximum + their Endurance bonus).

Enemies use their threat tier instead: Introduced ×2, Established ×4, Invasive ×7, Dominant ×12 and Transformative ×25, times their size's hit die + Endurance bonus.

Weapons are real objects you carry. Wield one and its techniques become available to you — a katana adds its cuts, a pistol its shots — using the weapon's own skill and damage. You have two hands; a two-handed weapon takes both. A firearm empties and must be reloaded, which costs a turn. Thrown weapons are gone once thrown, and come back to you only when the fight is over.

A character is either on the ground or in the air. A grounded fighter can't reach a flyer with an ordinary melee strike: they need a ranged attack, a leaping strike built to reach that high, or to take to the air themselves. Taking off or landing costs a turn.

Crossing 0 Health triggers one roll: d20 + Endurance bonus + size Bulk against 10, plus 1 for every 5 damage past 0. Pass and you fight on fumes until the next blow lands; fail and you are down. Damage past 0 equal to your full Health obliterates you outright. Introduced enemies simply drop at 0.

When the fight ends, the Storyteller gets an aftermath report — everyone's end state, anything left on the ground, and who is bound for the Resurrection queue — and XP for the defeated enemies is split among everyone who fought.

Wounds recover overnight as the days pass, or at once after a Training bout. And this is Krakoa: for most citizens, losing a fight is a hard setback, not the end of the story.