General Rules
Encounter Mode
When every individual action counts, you enter the encounter mode of play. In this mode, time is divided into rounds, each of which is 6 seconds of time in the game world. Every round, each participant takes a turn in an established order. During your turn, you can use actions, and depending on the details of the encounter, you might have the opportunity to use reactions and free actions on your own turn and on others’ turns.
Basic actions represent common tasks like moving around, attacking, and helping others. As such, every creature can use basic actions except in some extreme circumstances, and many of those actions are used very frequently.
Specialty basic actions are useful under specific circumstances. Some require you to have a special movement type or class feature.
Exploration Mode
While encounters use rounds for combat, exploration is more free form. The GM determines the flow of time, as you could be traveling by horseback across craggy highlands, negotiating with merchants, or delving in a dungeon in search of danger and treasure. Exploration lacks the immediate danger of encounter mode, but it offers its own challenges.
Exploration activities are activities carried out while in exploration mode. These are most common exploration activities.
Downtime Mode
Downtime mode is played day-by-day rather than minute-by-minute or scene-by-scene. Usually this mode of play occurs when you are in the safety of a settlement, maybe recovering from your adventures or studying an artifact you found.
Skills
While your character’s ability scores represent their raw talent and potential, skills represent their training and experience at performing certain tasks. Each skill is keyed to one of your character’s ability scores and used for an array of related actions. Your character’s expertise in a skill comes from several sources, including their background and class. In this chapter, you’ll learn about skills, their scope, and the actions they can be used for.
General skill actions are skill actions that can be used with multiple different skills. When you use a general skill action, you might use your modifier from any skill that lists it as one of the skill’s actions, depending on the situation.
The following entries describe the skills in the game. The heading for each entry provides the skill’s name, with that skill’s key ability in parentheses. A brief description of the skill is followed by a list of actions you can use if you’re untrained in that skill, and then the actions you can perform if you are trained in that skill.
Conditions
While adventuring, characters (and sometimes their belongings) are affected by abilities and effects that apply conditions. For example, a spell or magic item might turn you invisible or cause you to be gripped by fear. Conditions change your state of being in some way, and they represent everything from the attitude other creatures have toward you and how they interact with you to what happens when a creature drains your blood or life essence.
Conditions  that may affect or be inflicted upon a creature are listed hereunder.
Subsystems
When your game goes into uncharted territory or you want to emphasize an element of gameplay that usually gets overlooked or condensed into a single check, you can use a subsystem. As the name implies, subsystems are extensions of the main rules system that allow you to explore a particular topic or style of play at your table.
Duels
Sometimes conflicts become personal. It’s not the entire group against a challenge, but one character struggling against the skills of a single adversary. In many societies, duels are considered a reasonable way to resolve individual differences, though others consider such practices —especially the more deadly varieties— to be a savage affront to law and order. Duels can come in several forms, and this section gives you rules to run them.
A combat duel works almost the same as a normal combat encounter, with a few exceptions. These rules require exceptional focus between two duelists and a third-party arbiter, and thus are not available in a normal combat.
Like combat duels, spellcasting duels take place in encounter mode, but their rules are not available during normal combat. They are typically more organized affairs than combat duels. Many spellcasting duels prohibit any sort of combat but spellcasting. They typically have the duelists take turns casting a turn’s worth of spells, giving their rivals a chance to counter the spells if they can.
Vehicles
Vehicles can play many roles in a game. They might simply be the means by which the party travels from one location to another, determining only the Price to be paid for passage. But a caravan wagon that gets attacked becomes part of an encounter. In a pirate campaign, the ship is both the party’s home and its primary weapon.
During encounter mode, creatures can use the piloting actions listed below to move and interact with vehicles.