I ran across Goblinville the other day. It’s a fascinating amalgam of indie rpg game ideas. The designers took many great ideas and melded them into a coherent whole.
One design stance of the game is to remove all stats, replacing them with moves, tags, and conditions. There are given evocative names, and it’s really up to the GM and players to bring these names to life in the fiction.
In GV2: Monsters and Mazes, there is an essay by one of the designers on this topic, using an encounter with a dwarf lord as an example (page 9):
But the Danger Happens, so the dwarf lunges forward and grabs the goblin by the shoulders.
However, this “danger” does not affect the rest of the encounter. As far as I can tell, the fiction was not followed, and I’m curious as to what the design intent is.
(Background: In conflict situations, Goblinville adopts a kind of “our team vs your team” approach, reminiscent of Torchbearer though not the same. So even though one goblin has been grabbed and another is acting, I would expect the “danger” to have an impact.)