There are Three Actions!

In the rule books for Fate Core and Fate Accelerated, they list four actions: Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack and Defend. If you look closely, one of these things is not like the other. The first three actions are all proactive, and happen as a result of a character declaring that they do something. The Defend action is always reactive, and only happens in response to an Attack, or Create an Advantage. Defend has an additional quirk in that it cannot be used to oppose an Overcome action. The equivalent would be providing "active opposition" to an Overcome. But couldn't we colloquially call that a sort of defense?

Fate is meant to be a quick, streamlined system, and it is, but I think we can do a bit better. This blog post is not intended as a change to the rules of Fate. Rather, this should be viewed as a reorganization of the mechanics that surround rolling dice to make them a bit more straight forward. If this reorganization makes sense to you, go ahead and use it. If this makes things more confusing, then disregard it.

The Core SRD states...

You’ll notice that the defend action has outcomes that mirror some of the outcomes in attack and create an advantage. For example, it says that when you tie a defense, you grant your opponent a boost. Under attack, it says that when you tie, you receive a boost.

That doesn’t mean the attacker gets two boosts—it’s the same result, just from two different points of view. It was written that way so that the results were consistent when you looked up the rule, regardless of what action you took.

This is my main motivation in reorganizing how Defend works. I've seen this cause at least a little bit of confusion for people new to Fate. By eliminating Defend as a first class action, we can unify these two different views of the Attack action, and make it look similar to any other opposed roll.

However, there is one small wrinkle that we have to deal with first. The Attack and Defend actions each have four outcomes, but they do not match up one-to-one.

Attack Shifts	Attack Outcome	Defend Outcome
+3 or more	Success with Style	Failure
+1, +2	Success	Failure
+0	Tie	Tie
-1, -2	Failure	Success
-3 or more	Failure	Success with Style

If an Attack fails, it's possible for the Defend action to either succeed, or succeed with style. If we're going to combine these into a single table of outcomes, we're going to need one more possible outcome beyond the standard four. Just as we have success with style which is an amped up version of success, we will need an amped up version of failure. Let's call it a dramatic failure. That gives us this table.

Shifts	Attack Outcome	Mechanical Result
+3 or more	Success with Style	You have the option of reducing the result by two shifts and taking a boost.
+1, +2	Success	The target of your attack must absorb the shifts as stress or consequences or be taken out.
+0	Tie	You gain a boost.
-1, -2	Failure	The target of your attack avoids any stress or consequences.
-3 or more	Dramatic Failure	The target of your attack gains a boost.

Now, all an Attack action has is "active opposition" just like an Overcome.

We can do the same thing with Create and Advantage. A dramatic failure is what happens when the Create an Advantage fails, and the Defend succeeds with style. Failure to Create an Advantage creates the aspect, but gives your opponent a free invoke. Succeeding with style on a Defend grants the opponent a boost. To my mind, it doesn't make much sense to create a new aspect, then also create a separate boost. It's much simpler to grant an extra free invoke to the opposition. So, we end up with the following outcomes.

Shifts	CaA Outcome	Mechanical Result
+3 or more	Success with Style	Create an aspect with two free invokes.
+1, +2	Success	Create an aspect with one free invoke.
+0	Tie	You gain a boost.
-1, -2	Failure	Create the aspect with one free invoke for the opposition.
-3 or more	Dramatic Failure	Create the aspect with two free invokes for the opposition.

It's possible I'm misinterpreting things here, so if you like, you can make a dramatic failure have the same outcome as a failure. Since the goal here is to not change the rules of the game, dramatically failing on an Overcome action would have the same mechanical outcome as a normal failure. Or, you could apply the Silver Rule and grant the opposition a boost if it makes sense.

At this point, we've eliminated the Defend action entirely and replaced it with active opposition. Now, each of the three actions, Overcome, Create and Advantage and Attack, have five outcomes, and can go up against active or passive opposition.

The Core rule book doesn't cover what it might mean to have passive opposition to an Attack. What might that look like? When would it be appropriate to invoke the Silver Rule and make that happen? Perhaps someone is trapped behind an armored door, and during a conflict you're trying to break it open to free them. The obvious approach might be to make the door a scene aspect and make an Overcome roll to open it, but what if the door is really strong, and you want to heighten the drama by making it take extra effort to open. You could give the door a stress track, and a passive opposition to attacks. If it has stress boxes of 2 and 4, then a single attack dealing 5 shifts would take out the door. Or, two attacks of 3 shifts would take it out, or three attacks of 1 shift.

I hope this has been helpful, or at the very least, thought provoking.