This post has required reading: Defeat, Not Death
Among those who study kung fu, a fight is never just a fight. It always exists within a context, especially a social one. To that end, we have a unique rule for framing each battle, setting its narrative weight, the pacing of gameplay, and the amount of XP it imparts. It's called setting the stakes.
Here's the first words of the chapter on combat:
When a fight begins, each side chooses their own level of stakes. In a friendly fight, you’re defeated once you’re winded. In a serious fight, you’re defeated at 0 qi. In a deadly fight, you’re defeated when you’re dead. A side is beaten when more than half its members are defeated. All combatants are a member of a “side,” even if they’re alone.
For context, a character is "winded" once they're at (roughly) half the qi they began the fight with, while they're dead once they've taken about that same amount of additional damage beyond 0 qi.
In practice, I always start the fight by telling my players what stakes the opposing side is setting for themselves. This helps them judge the situation better, just in case they misread the NPC and expected a serious conflict rather than a more casual one. So far, I've never seen the players set different stakes from the NPC's, but they do always consider it, and I'm sure it'll happen once in a blue moon.
It's also important to stress that this doesn't determine victory, only defeat. Most of the time, those two are one and the same. But sometimes a fight has a separate goal entirely. Maybe you're competing to acquire an object, or you're trying to defend an NPC, or you just need to get from Point A to Point B. If you attain that victory condition, you need not defeat the opposing side. Likewise, if you defeat the opposing side, it could make that victory condition trivial to secure.
What's the point of this rule? Well as I explained in "Defeat, Not Death", sometimes it's nice to have a combat-centric game where killing your foe isn't the default outcome. Look, characters in wuxia fiction fight each other all the damn time. No matter what's going on, there's always an excuse to start a fight. Sometimes it's deadly and vicious, as in the genre captured by games like Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades. But a lot of the time, an opponent knows when they've been beaten and they yield accordingly. Thus, most combats, even against thugs and bandits and whatnot, are still only serious stakes. You kick their ass, they're at your mercy, you take their weapons away, and then you tell them who you are so they can share your name to the whole world. Deadly stakes are typically reserved only for the most heinous of villains, which also serves to emphasize how wicked and threatening they are.
Also as mentioned in that post, this makes player vs player combat much more appealing. Splitting the party into teams to fight each other, or even doing a free-for-all, is a fun change of pace that players usually enjoy. This also allows for casual fights against NPCs who aren't villainous, but who still want to see what you're made of. I like to populate my game with plenty of heroic NPCs who the party can only win over as an ally by having a fight with them.
And of course, this is also a tool for pacing. The more dramatic weight a fight carries, the longer it takes. A big final boss fight can be set up just like a normal fight, but merely by having deadly stakes instead of serious, it becomes a greater ordeal. Meanwhile, it's easy to squeeze in an extra friendly fight into most sessions, since they're pretty quick to resolve.
There's a little bit more mechanical detail on top, though. Continuing from the text:
If you concede a fight before being defeated, you lose face. Likewise, you may choose to change your stakes after a battle has begun, but you lose face. If the opposing side has already changed their stakes, you may then change your own side’s stakes without also losing face. If you escalate your side’s stakes from friendly to serious or from serious to deadly, then anyone on your side who’s already defeated but still conscious may rejoin the fight.
Just like any good RPG beta edition, we've got ourselves some unfinished mechanics. Expect to read more about them in the next draft. Here's what you should know now: "face" is a social mechanic, an abstraction of a character's esteem in the eyes of others (and even in their own eyes). Having high face makes people trust you more, want to help you and offer you nice things, and give you access to exclusive things.
Try to imagine this rule in action. By raising the stakes mid-fight, you're buying yourself some time, extending your life in the fight. But, y'know, you look like an asshole. If you get into a friendly fight and are then reduced to your "winded" value, you should lose. But you're allowed to escalate the situation if you can't handle failure... although now everyone knows you're a sore loser. Likewise, losing a serious fight honorably means you can walk away with your life, but choosing to escalate to a deadly fight makes you seem ruthless.
In the opposite direction, you can also imagine getting into a serious fight, realizing it's not going great, and then decided to backpedal and concede the "friendly" match. "Aw jeez, well, you got me! We were just kidding around, right? You sure are a great fighter!" You look like a coward.
And of course:
We don't give XP based on how difficult the opponent is like in most other games. Instead, the amount is based on how much is put on the line. Arguably this incentivizes you to go for deadlier stakes, but honestly I don't see it actually influencing the players' decisions that much.
I think it makes the rate of progression match the tone of the adventure a little better. If you're in a scenario with lots of friendly fights in it, that sounds like a more playful scenario, and thus takes on a more leisurely pace. But if you're in a scenario with lots of deadly fights in it, then the scenario is probably tense and even frantic, forcing you to grow up a little faster.
-Dwiz
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