Combat encounters are broken down into rounds, and during each round, each character takes a single turn.

Initiative

When combat begins, the player who initiated the combat takes a turn immediately. Once this is done, the first round begins and the character with the highest initiative goes first, and then each character takes a turn in order of highest to lowest. If there is a tie, the GM decides which character or creature goes first. Once the last character has completed their turn, the round ends, and the character with the highest initiative takes the first turn of the next round. Repeat this sequence until the conflict ends.

Sequence of Play

1. Initiate Combat: The character who initiated the combat takes a single turn before the first round.
2. Initiative: List all characters in order of their Initiative statistic, from highest to lowest.
3. Take Turns: Each character, in order from highest initiative to lowest, takes a turn.
4. Begin New Round: Once every character has taken a turn, the round is over; begin a new round, repeating step 3 and step 4 as many times as needed to resolve the conflict.

Spending Luck to Act Faster

You can also spend Luck points (see Luck) to take your turn earlier in the round. You must do this at the end of another character’s turn but before your turn. Once you have taken your turn, you do not take another until the next round.

Actions

You can attempt one minor action on your turn in combat. You can take one additional minor action by spending 1 Action Point, and you can take one additional major action by spending 2 Action Points, but the difficulty of any test attempted on that second major action is increased by 1. You may take your actions in any order you wish during your turn.

You cannot take more than two minor actions and two major actions on your turn by any means. You cannot take more than one movement action per turn.

Minor Actions

• Aim: Re-roll 1d20 on the first attack roll you make this turn.
• Draw Item: Draw one item carried on your person or pick up an object or item within your reach. You may put an item away as part of this action.
• Interact: Interact with your equipment or environment in a simple way, like opening a door, or pushing a button.
• Move: Movement action. Move up to one zone, to any position within Medium range. Alternatively, stand up from a prone position.
• Take Chem: Administer a dose of a chem that you are holding, targeting yourself or a willing character within your reach. If you’re not holding the chem, then you need to draw it first.

Prone

You may be knocked prone by attacks, hazards, or complications. You may also drop prone willingly, at the end of any movement action you perform. Being prone has the following effects:

• When you’re prone, you crawl. The Move action becomes a major action, rather than a minor action, and you cannot take the Sprint action.
• While you’re prone, enemies at Medium range or further add +1 to the difficulty of any attacks against you.
• While you’re prone, enemies at Close range reduce the difficulty of attacks (including melee attacks) by 1, to a minimum of 0.
• While you’re prone, you can re-roll any cover DC you have.

Major Actions

• Assist: You assist another character with their next test. When the character you are assisting takes their turn and attempts their task, you provide assistance (see Skill Tests). If you have not yet acted this round, you may give up your turn later in the round to assist an ally when they attempt a skill test.
• Attack: Make a melee or ranged attack, as described in Making an Attack.
• Command an NPC: If you have an allied NPC under your command, choose a single major action for them to take. If the action requires a test, then you automatically assist using your CHA + Speech (if the NPC is a person), CHA + Survival (if the NPC is an animal), or INT + Science (if the NPC is a robot).
• Defend: You focus on protecting yourself. Make an AGI + Athletics test with a difficulty equal to your current Defense. If you succeed, add +1 to your Defense. For 2 AP, add an extra +1 to your Defense.
• First Aid: You try to quickly patch the wounds of yourself or an ally. Make an INT + Medicine test, with a difficulty equal to the number of injuries the patient has, and increase the difficulty by 1 if you are trying to perform first aid on yourself. If you succeed, you can either:
  • Heal HP equal to your Medicine rating,
  • Treat one injury the patient is suffering from, or
  • Stabilize a dying patient
• Pass: You choose not to do anything.
• Rally: You grit your teeth, catch your breath, and prepare yourself. Make an END + Survival test with a difficulty of 0, and save any Action Points you generate. The GM may allow you to use a different ATT + skill for this action depending on how you describe it, such as CHA + Speech to inspire your allies.
• Ready: Describe a situation you expect to occur, and choose a major action you will perform when it does. If that action occurs before the start of your next turn, you may perform that major action immediately, interrupting other characters’ actions as necessary. If more than one character has readied an action for the same situation, their readied actions occur in initiative order.
• Sprint: Movement action. You move up to two zones, to anywhere within Long range.
• Test: Perform a skill test for an action not covered by the other actions, with the gamemaster’s permission.

Making an Attack

1. Choose Weapon and Target: Select one weapon you are currently wielding. Then, select a single character, creature, or object as the target. If you’re using a melee weapon, the target must be visible to you and within your reach. If you’re using a ranged weapon, the target must be visible to you.
   • Choose Hit Location: You may choose to target a specific part of a target creature or character. This increases the difficulty of the attack by 1.
2. Attempt a Test: The test is determined by the type of weapon used.
   • Melee Weapon: Roll a STR + Melee Weapons test, with a difficulty equal to your target’s Defense.
   • Ranged Weapon: Roll an AGI + Small Guns, END + Big Guns, or PER + Energy Weapons test (based on the ranged weapon you’re using), with a difficulty equal to your target’s Defense. This is modified by the range to the target (see Range)
   • Thrown Weapon: Roll a PER + Explosives or AGI + Throwing test, with a difficulty equal to the target’s Defense, modified by range.
   • Unarmed: Roll a STR + Unarmed test, with a difficulty equal to your target’s Defense.
3. Determine Hit Location: If you passed your test, roll 1d20 or a hit location die to determine the part of the target you hit. If you choose a specific hit location already, you hit the chosen location instead.
4. Inflict Damage: Roll a number of Combat Dice ( DC ) listed by the weapon’s damage rating, plus any bonuses from derived statistics, or from AP or ammo spent. Reduce the target’s health points by the total rolled.
   • Resistances: The target reduces the total damage inflicted by their Damage Resistance against the attack’s damage type, on the location hit. Characters and creatures have different DRs for different types of damage: physical, energy, radiation, and poison.
5. Reduce Ammunition: If you made a ranged attack, remove one shot of ammunition, plus any additional shots of ammunition spent on the attack. If you made a thrown weapon attack, remove the thrown weapon from your inventory.

Hit Locations

There are 6 body parts that you can target as hit locations: head, torso, left arm, right arm, left leg, and right leg. When you successfully hit an opponent with an attack, you either randomly determine which body part you hit, or hit the body part you chose before you made the test. Use the Hit Locations table for reference.

Creatures with Other Hit Locations

Some creatures in the wasteland may have other body parts—wings, claws, and tails—that do not appear on the hit location table. These locations will be listed in the creature’s statistics, replacing the Hit Locations table with its own.

Hit Locations

Range

Ranged weapons can be used to attack any target you can see, but they vary in effectiveness depending on how far away the target is from you. Ranged weapons have an ideal range noted in their profile (just listed as Range), which is based on the relative distance between the attacker and the target, using the zones of the combat environment. A weapon’s ideal range will be one of the following:

• Close (C): The weapon is most effective against targets within the same zone.
• Medium (M): The weapon is most effective against targets in an adjacent zone.
• Long (L): The weapon is most effective against targets 2 zones away.
• Extreme (X): The weapon is most effective against targets 3 or more zones away.

The difficulty of a ranged attack increases by one for each range band outside of the weapon’s ideal range, whether closer or further away; a long sniper’s rifle is deadly at long ranges, but awkward and unwieldy in close quarters, while a pistol is great at close range but less useful at longer distances.

Weapon Range Difficulty

Ranged Attacks Within Reach

Being in reach of an enemy is disruptive to ranged attacks and tests, adding +2 to the difficulty of any test that isn’t a melee attack.

Combat Dice

When your attack hits its target, you inflict damage based on the weapon’s damage rating. This damage rating is described as Combat Dice, abbreviated by the DC  symbol.

Combat Dice are specially designed six-sided dice, with four different results as shown on the Combat Dice Results table.

Combat Dice Results

When you hit, roll all the DC  for the attack together as a single dice pool, and total up the result. This total is the amount of damage you inflict on your target. In addition, any effect symbols (the face showing the DC symbol) activates special abilities—called damage effects—listed for the weapon.

Sneak Attacks

If the enemy is unaware of you before you attack, the difficulty to attack them is reduced by 1 (to a minimum of 0), and your attack gains the Vicious damage effect if it did not have it already, or the damage is increased by +2 DC  if it already has the Vicious damage effect.

If the difficulty to hit your opponent is 0, you do not need to roll to hit them, but you may still decide to do so, generating Action Points and complications as normal.

Increasing Damage

You can increase the number of Combat Dice you roll to inflict damage with an attack by spending Action Points or ammunition, depending on the type of weapon you are using. 

For melee weapons (including unarmed attacks) and thrown weapons, each Action Point (AP) you spend adds +1 DC  to roll in your damage dice pool. You can spend up to 3 AP to increase your dice pool by up to +3 DC . You can only spend AP you have saved in the group pool or generated with your attack. You cannot generate AP for the gamemaster to use this AP option.

For ranged weapons, each unit of ammunition you spend adds +1 DC  to roll in your damage dice pool. You can spend ammunition up to the gun’s fire rate.

Damage Types

There are four damage types in Fallout: Physical, Energy, Radiation, and Poison damage.

Each weapon lists the type of damage it inflicts:

• Physical: Unarmed attacks, blunt force, slashing and stabbing, ballistics.
• Energy: Laser, plasma, and flame weapons.
• Radiation: Exposure to RADs, or nuclear weaponry.
• Poison: Toxins, chemicals, and creatures’ stings and barbs.

Each target has a Damage Resistance (DR) for each of these types, based on their clothing, armor, or naturally tough hides and chitin. While most forms of protection provide Physical DR, Energy DR is rarer, while Radiation or Poison protection are particularly rare.

Damage Effects

Damage effects augment how the damage you inflict to a target is applied. When you roll one or more DC  symbols in your Combat Dice pool, all your weapon’s damage effects are triggered. Some damage effects are also based on the number of DC  symbols appearing in your result, as described in each entry.

Each weapon lists its damage effects immediately after its damage rating.

• Burst: The attack hits one additional target within Close range of the primary target for each Effect rolled. Each additional target spends 1 additional unit of ammunition from the weapon.
• Breaking: For each Effect rolled, reduce the number of DC  a target’s cover provides by 1, permanently. If the target is not in cover, instead reduce the DR of the location struck by 1, according to the damage type of the weapon—Physical damage only reduces Physical DR, for example.
• Persistent: If one or more effects are rolled, the target suffers the weapon’s damage again at the end of their next and subsequent turns, for a number of rounds equal to the number of Effects rolled. The target can spend a major action to make a test to stop persistent damage early, with the difficulty equal to the number of Effects rolled, and the attribute + skill chosen by the GM. Some Persistent weapons may inflict a different type of damage to the weapon, and where this is the case, it will be noted in brackets, for example: Persistent (Poison).
• Piercing X: Ignore X points of the target’s DR for each Effect rolled, where X is the rating of this damage effect.
• Radioactive: For every Effect rolled, the target also suffers 1 point of Radiation damage. This Radiation damage is totaled and applied separately, after a character has suffered the normal damage from the attack.
• Spread: For each Effect rolled, your attack inflicts one additional hit on the target. Each additional hit inflicts half the rolled damage (rounded down) and hits a random location even if a specific location was targeted for the initial attack.
• Stun: If one or more effects are rolled, the target cannot take their normal actions on their next turn. A stunned character or creature can still spend AP to take additional actions as normal.
• Vicious: The attack inflicts +1 damage for each Effect rolled.

Radiation Damage

Radiation damage is applied differently than other damage types. Each point of Radiation damage reduces a character’s maximum health points, rather than their current health points. If a character’s health point maximum is reduced below their current health point total, then their current HP is reduced as well.

Radiation damage is only reduced by a target’s Radiation Damage Resistance, according to the location hit. If the radiation would affect the whole body, like an environmental effect, then use the character or creature’s lowest locational radiation DR.

In all cases, where a character would suffer Radiation damage and another type of damage at the same time, resolve the Radiation damage after any other types of damage.

Breaking Things

Inanimate objects can be damaged just like characters and creatures. Damaging an object works just the same as damaging a character: roll to hit, roll the weapon’s  DC  damage rating, subtract the object’s damage resistance, and reduce its health.

The GM provides damage resistance and health for the object you’re trying to break. If you inflict a critical hit on an object—by inflicting 5 or more damage at once—you’ve broken it. Especially large objects, like vehicles, may have multiple locations which can be hit and broken, and they will be destroyed when all their locations are broken.