The Kamikaze Blitz
An optional rule for the desperate, the dedicated, and the doomed.
We've said that opposition is a compression - a single contest standing in for what is really a separate attack and a separate defense, rolled the long way. Most of the time the compression is exactly what you want: it's fast, and it quietly assumes both fighters are trying not to die. But sometimes a character isn't. The zealot, the cornered guardian, the warrior who has chosen an honorable death - for them, the Blitz takes the system at its word and opts out of the compression.
Opting Out of Opposition
Any combatant may declare that an engagement resolves as pure attack-and-defense instead of opposition. The actor declaring it forces this for that pairing - you cannot make someone's offense protect them against your abandon. When opted out:
- Your attack dice no longer protect you. Only points you actually allocated to defense can soak a hit. In normal opposition your offense does double duty; opt out and that free protection is gone.
- Each side's attack is rolled against the other's defense, separately. Both fighters can land full effect in the same beat - the mutual kill, the ai-uchi, that ordinary opposition can never produce.
The result is more swing, more lethality, more dependence on luck. This is not a free statistical equivalent of opposition; opposition is genuinely safer, because offense pulls double duty there. Opting out trades that safety for the chance to trade blood for blood. The lethality is the point.
The Blitz
The Blitz is the all-or-nothing version: allocate zero defense and pour your entire budget into one attack. Offering no defense at all is so far outside what any sane opponent plans for that it works like a kind of ambush - nobody expects a foe to simply let themselves be killed. That shock earns you an instantly available, no-preparation free-action Boost:
Roll a Boost right now, as a free action, and add its successes as bonus dice to your EL for the attack. This genuinely raises your ceiling - an EL6 strike with a 4-success Boost is rolled, and kept, at EL10. Its value scales with your own skill, so a dangerous fighter's death-strike is genuinely dangerous, while a mook's flailing sacrifice mostly just gets him killed. (Extra Effort is a separate, stackable choice with its own overshoot risk; you may layer it on the Boost or the attack, but it is not the same thing.)
Against a foe who guards, the Blitz is largely soaked - but a pure defender deals little back, since defense dice are dice not spent attacking. Push the defense knob up and the whole engagement gets less lethal for everyone; two Blitzers, on the other hand, slaughter each other. That is the gambit's honest math: you make yourself impossible to ignore, and you accept that you will probably not survive being right.
Kazuo (Level 2 / Warrior 2 / Swords 2 → EL6), no armor, his wakizashi broken and his luck nearly spent, will not let the assassin reach his lord. Komi (Level 3 / Warrior 3 / Katana 3 → EL9) is armored and known by reputation. Kazuo is outclassed and knows it, so after two careful exchanges he chooses an honorable ai-uchi over certain defeat.
He rolls his Kamikaze Boost with 2 Extra Effort dice for a 4, adds it to his EL, and attacks at EL10 (with 4 more Extra Effort dice) for an 8. Komi, expecting a man to fight for his life rather than throw it away, has split normally: 4 attack, 5 defense. Because Kazuo opted out, it's pure attack-and-defense:
Komi's blade goes into Kazuo's shoulder - Kazuo doesn't even try to deflect it. Komi's 4 attack rolls a 2; with no defense, Kazuo takes 2 - his Down threshold is 3, so that leaves him standing, barely. Kazuo's 8 lands; Komi's 5 defense rolls only 3, leaving 5 on his one-point men-yoroi mask - 4 gets through, past his Down-3. Unless Komi spends a Luck Token for Plot Armor!, the younger samurai has a story to tell about the night he saved his daimyo.
For the GM: when a player character pulls this off against a worthy foe, think hard before spending an NPC's Luck Token to cheat the ending. The Blitz is meant to earn its win. If no one ever dares it, it isn't doing its job.