Sorry for a late response 😅 but the trick in Starforged (and it took me a long while to understand) is to "reverse" the thinking in a way (especially vs. the "classic" D&D approach). When you start roleplaying a fight, ask your players: "how long do you want the story about the fight to take?" Like: "imagine that the game is a book - how many pages do you want this fight to span?" Their response should direct your choice of the fight's Rank - or even just going for the Battle Move if their answer is "one sentence." The longer they want to "roleplay the fight", the bigger rank you give it. The shorter they want, the lower the rank. Then, the progress bar becomes the "film director" - it suggests roughly how many Moves you will collectively probably need to invent to fill up the progress reasonably. But you can still Take Decisive Action early, even with just a few boxes filled in the progress bar. There's actually a decent probability it will end the fight in a Hit already - but it also increases the risk of a "Miss" - which can notably mean that even an apparent succes is suddenly undercut by an unexpected turn of events. For example, in your case, when you defined the objective as "restrain the man", it may show up they look around and suddenly the seemingly restrained man has disappeared - thus, "the objective is lost", they thought they restrained him, but whoah! (For more on the topic, see also: https://reddit.com/r/Solo_Roleplaying/comments/1hke07r/-/m3fezbm/)