Combat
When the talking stops, the dice don’t change — combat is the same opposed roll you already know, just put on a six-second clock. What changes is the cost. In Chrome & Covenant, every firefight is a choice with weight.
Most of the game runs in narrative time, where the GM compresses or expands the clock to fit the story. Tense, coordinated scenes shift to structured time — turns and Action Points, but no immediate threat. When violence erupts, you drop into combat time: strict, round-by-round, every second accounted for.
Initiative
When combat starts, everyone rolls 1d10 + Agility + Perception. Highest acts first, down the line; ties break to higher Agility. Catch someone off guard and you add 2; get ambushed and you subtract 2. There’s no waiting — when your turn comes, you act or you forfeit it.
Action Points
Each turn you get 3 Action Points. Spend them in order, resolve as you go, and lose whatever you don’t use — AP never banks to the next round. Most turns are a 2-AP main action plus a 1-AP move or setup.
An attack is an opposed roll — you against your target. Both of you roll; higher total wins, and ties go to the defender.
On a hit, work out damage: roll your weapon’s dice, subtract the target’s armor, and apply the rest to Hit Points — minimum 1 damage, because no armor is perfect. Beat the defender’s total by 5 or more and it’s a Critical Hit: roll one extra damage die.
Critical Effects
Roll doubles on your 2d10 — attacker or defender, hit or miss — and a Combat Critical Effect fires. Roll 1d10:
Some attacks skip the body entirely. Neural and Mesh attacks strike the mind through your own cyberware — they bypass armor completely, and a heavily chromed operative is the most exposed of all.
Weapons roll dice by class — light arms on d6s, heavy hardware on d12s, explosives in fistfuls. Armor is flat Damage Reduction (DR): subtract it from each hit before it touches your Hit Points.
Armor wears down — it loses 2 DR on a Critical Hit or a Shattered Defense result, and once it hits 0 it stops protecting until you repair it with Crafting. Stacking armor doesn’t help (use the highest single value), though energy shields layer on top because they work on a different principle. And remember: mental and Mesh damage ignore armor entirely.
Damage isn’t the only way a fight turns. Conditions stack on top of Hit Point loss — some clear on their own, others demand intervention.
Hit 0 Hit Points and you’re Downed — still conscious, but you can’t act. You don’t die there. Death waits until your HP falls to negative your maximum, which buys your crew a precious window.
Anyone can stabilize a Downed ally with a Medicine check (TN 14), stopping the clock and bringing them back to 1 HP. Better still: in Chrome & Covenant, healing and stabilizing never provoke opportunity attacks. Pulling someone out of the fire is sacred work, and the rules treat it that way.
Recovery is an act of rebellion. In a world built to consume people, choosing to drag a friend back from the edge — to heal instead of harvest — is the most defiant thing an operative can do. Scars become strength. The crew that survives together is the crew that stays human.
Heavy chrome carries its own combat risk: push Humanity too low and cyberpsychosis sets in, fraying your hold on the people around you. That’s the long war every augmented operative fights — covered on Cyberware & Humanity.
This is everything you need to run a firefight tonight — initiative, actions, damage, armor, conditions, and going down. The Core Rulebook goes further: the full tactical-options toolkit (suppression, grappling, burst fire, dual-wielding), neural and AR combat in depth, the complete condition and critical tables, and long-term consequences that turn a bad night into a defining one.
You can run a fight now. Here’s what feeds into it — and what it costs.
How the Dice Work Skills Cyberware & Humanity Character Creation