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.

Fate and the Elusive Mental Conflict

This post assumes familiarity with the Fate role-playing game. The rules are available to read online for free if you'd like to learn more about it.

One part of Fate that has never sat well with me is mental conflicts. I love that the game supports a combat mechanic besides the typical brawl, but I've never been able to figure out where it would actually fit in to a game. Even when watching examples of mental conflicts in actual play videos, they felt off in a way I couldn't put my finger on, until recently. I think the key to all this is that we're applying the wrong mechanic. Instead of using conflicts, we should be using contests.

Let's look at a concrete example. Reddit user ParamedicAntic posted a thread with an example of a mental conflict between Spider-Man and Aunt May. The background is, Peter agreed to volunteer at the soup kitchen with Aunt May, then forgot and promised Mary Jane that he would spend time with her. Aunt May calls Peter to ask where he is, and the conflict ensues as Peter tries to get out of his obligation at the soup kitchen.

Right away, something feels wrong. As this phone conversation drags on, Spider-Man is going to be filling up his stress and consequence boxes as Aunt May guilts him into coming to the soup kitchen. Those consequences are the same consequences that would get filled if Spider-Man were in a fist fight with the Sandman or Doc Ock. This seems entirely incongruous. How could a phone conversation with Aunt May be as damaging or debilitating as getting body slammed by a super villain?

The short answer is, it wouldn't be, and we can turn to the rules to see why. Here's how the Fate Core rule book describes a conflict.

In a conflict, characters are actively trying to harm one another. It could be a fist fight, a shootout, or a sword duel. It could also be a tough interrogation, a psychic assault, or a shouting match with a loved one. As long as the characters involved have both the intent and the ability to harm one another, then you’re in a conflict scene.

That last sentence is the key. The characters involved need to have "both the intent and ability to harm one another" for this to be a conflict. I don't think Aunt May wants to hurt Peter. She just wants him to come help her at the soup kitchen. Peter doesn't want to hurt Aunt May, either. He just wants to go spend time with Mary Jane. No intent to harm means it's not a conflict.

So, let's look at contests instead.

Whenever two or more characters have mutually exclusive goals, but they aren’t trying to harm each other directly, they’re in a contest. Arm wrestling matches, races or other sports competitions, and public debates are all good examples of contests.

This really describes the situation perfectly. Aunt May and Peter have mutually exclusive goals (where Peter will spend the day), and they aren't trying to hurt each other.

If that's the case, then what is a mental conflict? The key ingredient is intent to harm. This could take a lot of different forms. The most obvious would be a direct insult ("You're ugly"). Maybe it's a lie ("I never loved you"). Maybe it's the truth ("I am your father"). Maybe it's poking an old wound ("It's your fault your partner died"). It could be destroying a beloved object ("No, not my collector's edition Fallout bobble head!").

I think the neat thing about this is that it also removes the need to strictly divide mental and physical conflicts. In the middle of a fist fight, you could decide to smash the bobble head instead of going for another punch. You could also have a conflict between something like a barbarian and a politician where one side is physical and the other side is mental. The barbarian is trying to smash his opponent's face, but the politician attacks by saying things like, "Your friends are already dead and it's your fault."

I think the culprit here is the use of the word "conflict." In colloquial terms, Aunt May and Spider-Man are absolutely in conflict with each other. But they're not in a Fate conflict, because they lack the intent to harm one another. I think by carefully inspecting the characters' motivations, it will allow us to better utilize the contest mechanic, and have richer conflicts by including mental or psychological attacks into what might otherwise be entirely physical brawl.