Many times, you will be able to resolve an action with a single roll of the dice—do you crack the safe, avoid security, or convince the reporter to give you their notes? Other times you’ll face extended engagements that take many rolls to resolve. For those cases, we offer three resolution tools: challenges, contests, and conflicts. Each does things a little differently, depending on the goal of the engagement and the opposition involved.

• A challenge is a complicated or dynamic situation. You’ll be opposed by someone or something, but there isn’t a dominant “other side.” This is how you might play out a researcher looking for clues in an ancient tome, the party negotiator distracting the librarian, and the bruiser holding back untold horrors from entering the library all at the same time.
• A contest is a situation where two or more parties are pursuing mutually exclusive goals, but not actively harming one another. Contests are perfect for chases, debates, and races of all sorts. (And just because the parties are not trying to harm each other doesn’t mean that harm can’t befall them!)
• A conflict is when characters can and want to harm one another. Wrestling in the mud with a cultist as knives stab at bellies, riddling a swarm of ghouls with bullets as their claws rake at your flesh, and an exchange of vicious barbs with your rival under the watchful eye of the queen—these are all conflicts.