Hey, welcome back. Quick reminder for anyone new: Porchirren: Crucible of Cards is a tactical, solo-first, card-driven tabletop RPG, no dice, no Game Master, resolved entirely with a standard pack of playing cards.
Last issue was about who takes the hit in a fight: colour decides, every single time. This issue is about something Infiltration never had to deal with, and that's where everyone is actually standing.
Here's the thing. A locked door doesn't move. A foe does. So a fight needs a real "where", and the Violence Ashcan gives it three simple steps called Zones. Engaged means close enough to touch. Nearby means close enough to reach in a moment. Far means real distance between you.
Every scene in this Ashcan opens by drawing cards until a Heart comes up, and Hearts are red. That fixes where everyone starts. One foe begins Engaged, right in front of you. The other begins Nearby. Both are facing you.
Then they move. Every foe has a Tactic, drawn at the start of the scene, that decides how it behaves. After every Action Check you resolve, each foe still standing moves once, reading the colour of the card you just drew through its own Tactic, and that includes the foe you didn't go after. I'll cover Tactics properly in a later issue. For now, all you need to know is that the foes respond to your cards, check after check.
That matters because each Action Check starts with you declaring one of your six Skills, and some Skills only work at certain ranges. Grapple only works Engaged, for example. If a foe steps back, that choice can disappear. You're never actually stuck, though, because Skills without that limit work at any distance.
Reach is a positional bonus that helps with exactly this. It treats a target as one Zone closer, for a single Action Check. It doesn't move you, and once the check resolves you're exactly where you started. It closes one Zone only, so a foe who's Far is still out of reach of a Skill that needs Engaged.
Then there's Facing, which is the way everyone is oriented. Stand at someone's opposite facing and you've got behind them, which earns you Advantage on a check against them: draw a second card and keep the higher one. In this Ashcan you don't choose your own Facing. Foes start out facing you, and a foe's Tactic is the only thing that can change it. I'll come back to Facing in a later issue.
Here's what that actually looks like. You open the scene on the 8 of Hearts. One foe starts Engaged and the other starts Nearby, and each can take 9 trauma. The Nearby foe's Tactic is Disruption, which backs away whenever you draw black. You declare Grapple (9) against the Engaged foe and draw the 5 of Spades. It's black, so the trauma lands on your foe. 9 plus 5 is 14, more than 9, and that foe is down. The other foe reads the same black card and retreats from Nearby to Far. Now Grapple is off the table against them, and Reach wouldn't fix it, because it only brings a Far foe to Nearby. So you pick a Skill that works at any distance and carry on.
Here's the real reasoning. Infiltration is a static problem: the obstacle just sits there, so one question covers it, did you get past it. A fight isn't like that. Both sides are responding, so where everyone stands keeps changing, and what you're allowed to do changes with it. Distance isn't decoration in this Ashcan. It decides which of your Skills you can use, check by check, and the foes are the ones moving it.
Next issue: how you move a foe. Criticals, Push and Pull, and what happens when there's nowhere left to send someone.
If the cards you're dealt aren't kind, don't flip the table, have fun anyway.
See you next Monday.