Fighting other people

A street fight is not lethal. You put people in hospital, take some of what they were carrying, and they are back on their feet on a timer — within a round, nobody can take what you built by beating you up.

Killing is different, and it is real. Once you are past the protection window, someone can end your character, and you can end theirs. It does not delete an account — it wipes everything you built *this round* and drops you back to the start, keeping playing at once. The window, the methods, and exactly what a death costs are all below.

The four stats

Strength, defense, speed, and dexterity, all trained at the gym, none of them capped. Attacking leans on strength and speed; defending leans on defense and dexterity.

Your odds come from your rating against theirs. Equal fighters meet near even; a fourfold advantage wins most of the time but not all of it. Nothing is guaranteed, in either direction.

The risk

If you lose, you are the one who goes to hospital. Attacking is not free money, and picking a fight you have not scouted is how you lose an evening.

You cannot see another player's battle stats. Rank and name, and that is all.

Mugging

Winning lets you take cash the other player was carrying. A given target only pays out once in a while, no matter how often you hit them — one person cannot be turned into an income stream.

Money you are carrying is at risk. Money in a house is partly shielded. This is the game telling you to stop walking around with everything you own.

The newcomer shield

Below a certain amount of crime experience you can neither attack nor be attacked. Veterans cannot farm brand-new players, and brand-new players cannot pick fights they have no chance of winning.

Killing

Past 2,000 crime experience — three to five days of real play — the protection window lifts, in both directions. Under it, you cannot kill and cannot be killed; over it, both are on the table. A killed player restarts at zero and is protected again, so nobody can be farmed: killing the same person twice means waiting for them to climb all the way back first.

There are four ways to do it. A gun eats ammunition every time you pull it, win or lose, and leaves the most heat. Up close — a blade or knuckles — is quiet and cheap, with worse odds and the longest stay in a cell if it fails. Poison names nobody, ever: it works over hours, and the target can buy an antidote from the Armory if they notice in time. The finish is for someone already in a hospital bed — near-certain, and the most brazen thing you can do.

Killing draws heat. Heat makes your next attempt harder and your next stint in jail longer, and it fades slowly on its own — so a killing spree costs the person on it, which is the point. Money never buys its way past this: better ammunition nudges the odds a little, but there is no way to shorten the wait or guarantee a kill.

Ammunition comes from one counter in the city — the bullet factory, on the Armory page. Any player can own it: pick it up while it's unclaimed and you set the markup on every round sold in town and keep the difference (the base cost still burns; only the markup is yours), for a daily upkeep. There's a ceiling on that markup, so an owner can price ammo up but never price killing out of reach — and while nobody owns it, ammo sells at plain cost. The poison kit and the antidote are sold straight, by nobody, so no owner can decide whether a poisoned player gets to live.

What a death costs you: everything you built this round — your cash, crime experience, rank, stats, gear, house, job, corners, and your place in a family. What it does not touch: your name, your Points and anything you paid for, your prestige, your friends and watchlist, your letters, and everything another person wrote. You keep playing the moment you have read what happened.

Bounties, dead or alive

Anyone can put money on anyone's head, and the cash leaves the poster the moment they place it — every bounty on the board is real, and the poster is never named. A beat-down bounty pays whoever puts the target in hospital. A blood bounty pays only for a kill, and starts higher. The two sit side by side on the Hitlist, which is also where you find who is already laid up and who did not make it out of the week.

Finding out what happened

You do not have to catch an attack as it happens. What You Missed — the bell in the header — lists everything that happened *to* you: who hit you, what they took, prices put on your head, corners contested, letters waiting. The bell carries a number only when there is something new.

It shows what happened to you, never what you did. Anyone can see who has been hitting you; nobody can see your feed but you.