A conversation in the middle of a fight that costs you nothing

Turn-based combat has a rule this project will not break: the model never touches the math. Turn order, initiative, damage and death are hand-authored and rule-bound. The fiction improvises; the numbers do not.

So what happens when a companion should obviously say something — first blood, a boss changing phase — and saying it would mean spending a turn?

It costs nothing, and that has to be provable

The answer is that in-fight conversation is free. It costs no turn. It ticks no cooldown, advances no initiative, applies no status, and persists nothing. It is an overlay that opens between turns and closes, and the battle underneath is exactly the battle that was there before.

“Exactly” is doing real work in that sentence, and a comment claiming it is worth nothing. The test opens a full conversation loop — by the player’s route and by the automatic one — and asserts the battle state comes out byte-identical. Anything that would let a line of dialogue nudge a number fails the suite, not a playtest three weeks later.

Nobody quotes a number

People in a fight talk about it the way people do — someone took the worst of it, someone is barely standing. Nobody ever says a damage figure out loud.

That is not flavour. A companion who says “forty-one” when the log says thirty-eight has filed a bug report about the combat system. Keeping figures out of their mouths is what stops the fiction contradicting the maths.

Who gets to speak

A small pure module owns the round-robin, the opener, and eligibility. The dead do not speak. The automatic opener latches first blood and each boss phase and spends every trigger at most once per fight, so the drama lands where it should and never becomes chatter — and the claim happens between turns, never from inside the code that takes an action.