Pacifist resolution ends an encounter without emptying boss health. Restraint, survival, dialogue, or another non-attack condition makes a clearly signaled spare action eligible; choosing it resolves combat through its own authority, so merely waiting, dealing nonlethal damage, and actually ending the fight remain distinct states.
Tavi sheathes the sword at 0.42 s and the restraint clock starts at 0.55 s. Kern sends three fixed rune lanes at 0.96, 1.72, and 2.25 s; Tavi clears each with ordinary movement. No offensive event is recorded, Kern remains at full health, and the clock reaches its 2.05-second requirement at 2.60 s.
Autoplay is disabled by reduced motion. Scrub across 0.42, 0.55, 0.96, 1.22, 1.72, 1.98, 2.25, 2.60, 2.82, 3.46, 3.88, and 5.20 seconds to inspect sheathing, restraint, each lane, qualification, choice, spare, close, and reset.
Define the nonviolent condition, qualifying and disqualifying actions, timer or state progress, whether damage resets or permanently closes the route, boss attacks during restraint, eligibility signal, choice deadline, spare interaction, multiplayer agreement, reward and narrative outcome, persistence, retry rules, accessibility cues, and telemetry that prevents both defeat and spare from resolving the same encounter.
Choose an observable condition: refrain from attacks for a duration, select a sequence of dialogue actions, protect another actor, return a weapon, lower hostility, or reject a finisher. List every qualifying and disqualifying event. If an accidental damage tick resets progress, show that immediately; if prior violence permanently closes the route, communicate the lock before the player invests more time.
Keep readable danger, movement, resource pressure, or interaction decisions active during the condition. The player needs reachable defensive responses that do not secretly count as attacks. Tune duration against the boss pattern so waiting is a designed challenge, not an idle pause, and decide whether defensive counters, summons, companions, hazards, and reflected damage preserve eligibility.
Eligibility should expose a separate action, not silently end the fight. On commit, reserve one resolution id, stop new attacks, settle projectiles, record spared rather than defeated, select the correct rewards and narrative flags, and open the exit. Reject simultaneous lethal damage, repeated inputs, and competing players after the result is reserved.
Invisible restraint turns discovery into guessing. Show when the condition begins, what maintains it, how far it has advanced, and which event broke it. A diegetic behavior can carry the same information as a meter, but the state still needs an accessible equivalent.
If a damage callback empties health while the spare input also succeeds, rewards, cinematics, and persistence can diverge. Reserve one encounter result before presentation, cancel incompatible callbacks, and test every ordering around the eligibility deadline and lethal threshold.
Useful states are unavailable, tracking, reset, condition-complete, choice-offered, choice-committed, resolving, spared, failed, and encounter-reset. Store condition version, qualifying start, progress, disqualifier, eligible actor, deadline, claimant, resolution id, health snapshot, result type, rewards, and persistence write.
Audit dodges, blocks, parries, movement skills, companions, damage auras, thorns, and automatic attacks. A route based on restraint should not be invalidated by an upgrade the player cannot disable. Either classify unavoidable effects as neutral, provide a temporary replacement, or explain the restriction before entry.
A spare route can change dialogue, rewards, later encounters, relationships, or ending state, but it should not falsely claim moral superiority as a universal rule. Explain the local consequence and preserve the player's informed choice. If rewards differ, reveal enough structure to avoid a hidden permanent penalty.
Simulate lethal damage and spare in the same frame, delayed projectiles, damage-over-time, two players choosing different results, boss interruption, disconnect, rollback, retry after failure, checkpoint reload, and repeated interaction. Exactly one terminal result and one persistence record may survive.
Tavi lowers the blade while Kern's warning runes still cut the floor. Each lane is crossed without an answering strike, and the elemental's inscription slowly changes from challenge to question. When the final mark quiets, Tavi touches the open rune instead of the core. Kern steps aside, leaving the passage intact.
Offer adjustable condition duration, generous choice time, input buffering, a persistent eligibility marker, strong reset audio, captions for tracking, broken, eligible, and spared states, and a non-color progress shape. Classify passive damage and companion actions explicitly; in co-op, show whose action can commit the shared result and how disagreement is resolved.
Objective-linked invulnerability eventually restores ordinary damage. A survival phase ends after elapsed time but may still lead to a normal attack window. A stagger or surrender prompt can be temporary without ending the encounter. Pacifist resolution instead commits a terminal spared outcome without requiring boss health to reach zero.
Baby Plum leaves after taking no damage for thirty seconds; damage resets rather than permanently removes that timer. The boss remains active during restraint, then visibly waves and exits, and the encounter awards Plum Flute instead of resolving through an empty health bar.
Toriel's encounter asks the player to keep selecting Spare while surviving turns rather than finding a conventional damaging finish. Her attack behavior and dialogue change across the sequence before the final mercy action ends the battle, so repeated intent and terminal resolution remain separate.
On the unlocked spare route, Fajar's second phase requires the player to reject an available takedown, let Structure recover, and break it again without emptying health. A separate spare prompt then replaces the habitual lethal resolution, turning demonstrated mastery and restraint into the terminal result.
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