A contest is when two or more sides are in direct opposition but there isn’t a conflict. This doesn’t mean one side doesn’t want to hurt the other. Contests may involve the group trying to escape a threat before it cuts off any chance of victory.

At the start of a contest, everyone involved declares their intent, what they hope to get out of it. If there are multiple PCs involved, they can be on the same or different sides, depending on their goals—e.g., in a foot race, each character might be on their own side. In a contest, the PCs can’t or aren’t trying to harm the enemy. External threats (e.g., erupting volcano, angry god) may attack any or all sides; those threats might also be a participant in the contest.

Contests take place over a series of exchanges. Each side takes one overcome action to do something to achieve their goals during each exchange. Only one character on each side takes the overcome action in each exchange, but their allies can provide teamwork and try to create advantages to assist (which comes with some risk—see below). The overcome actions can be against passive difficulties—if the contestants are facing separate environmental challenges—or compared against one another when they’re in direct competition.

At the end of each exchange, compare the efforts of each side’s action. The side with the highest effort marks a victory. If the victor succeeds with style—and no one else did—then they mark two victories. The first one to three victories wins the contest. (You can always decide instead to run an extended contest requiring more victories, though we recommend no more than five.)

When there’s a tie for the highest effort, no one marks a victory, and an unexpected twist happens. The GM will introduce a new situation aspect to reflect how the scene, terrain, or situation has changed.

In contests where a threate is trying to harm any of the contestants, everyone on a side takes a hit when their contest roll is lower than the threat's attack roll or static difficulty rating. They take shifts equal to the shifts of failure. Just like in a conflict, if a character can’t absorb all the shifts of a hit, they are taken out.