When it’s your turn to declare what you’d like your character to do, you have a lot of choices.

A very interesting part of the Fate system is how the system actively encourages players to affect their environments.

When it’s your turn to declare what you’d like for your character, your choices often fall into one of these basic categories:

• Attempt a task
• Overcome an obstacle
• Create an Advantage
  Use the Create an Advantage action to make a situation aspect that gives you a benefit, or to claim a benefit from any aspect you have access to.
  Depending on how you roll, you could give your character a temporary boost, or create an Aspect on the situation or on a character.  
  You can also change / reinforce / magnify / reduce / negate an existing aspect
• Attack an opponent
• Assist someone else’s action (sometimes can be declared as an interrupt on someone else’s turn)
  You can use your action to assist another character in their action.  They get +1 to their roll for each ally that helps in this way.  The GM decides how many people can help at once, and it’s usually limited to only one or two before they start getting in each other’s way. If you would like to assist someone else’s action and still have an action of your own, the GM may impose a disadvantage of some sort.

Conflict Actions

When a scene drops down to turn-by-turn exchanges, where every moment counts and actions are considered in discrete blocks of time, we can also consider these basic categories:

Attack:  Roll against one or more opponents to try to inflict stress or consequences on them directly.

Maneuver:  Roll against an opponent or against a fixed difficulty to try to create, modify, and/or place an Aspect on the opponent or the scene.

Block:  Roll to set up a preemptive defense against a specified future action; anyone committing that named action will have to roll against the block to succeed.

Full Defense:  You can always choose to do nothing active in the exchange at all; your character is assumed to be concentrating entirely on defense. As such, any opposing defense rolls you make to avoid attacks or maneuvers against you are done at +2.

Sprint:  If in a Scene with multiple Zones, and you want to be in a different one, you can roll to change zones, with a higher roll allowing a greater degree of movement.

Each character gets one basic action per discrete turn, but under certain circumstances your character can multi-task, take a supplemental action and/or a free action in addition to that main action. This often applies a disadvantage to each action being simultaneously attempted.

Conflict

So, the basic flowchart would look something like this:

1. Set up the Conflict
   • Determine the Sides of the conflict, and set up skills and aspects and stress tracks for each Side, if not already in place. (A group of mooks or even a whole army can be described as a “Side” with a single set of Skills, Aspects, and stress track.)
   • Describe the scene, setting up situational Aspects for all to use
   • Decide if there’s more than one Zone in the location of the conflict, and delineate them, if necessary.
2. Decide who’s turn it is, by some manner.
   • Initiative is generally given to those who “take” the initiative. If more than one Side wants the initiative, then do a quick Contest to determine it. In many cases, Popcorn Initiative can be applied.
3. The side whose turn it is gets to declare what they want to do. This can be a normal Conflict Action, but this should be narrative, rather than simply “I attack”
4. Determine what Skills and Aspects will affect the outcome, remembering that some Aspects will require the expenditure of fate points to activate.
5. Determine if this action could be affected by any Compels, remembering that any that are declared voluntarily by Players can earn fate points for the affected Character, while those that are declared by the GM will not.
6. Decide on a target level of difficulty for the action. If the action is contested, this will include the Skills and Aspects of the opposition, as well as an opposing dice roll.
7. The side whose turn it is may roll 4dF to add to (or subtract from) the value of their Skills and activated Aspects
8. Compare the sum result of step 7 against the target level of difficulty determined in step 6.
9. Remembering the dice results do not absolutely determine success or failure, the side whose turn it is then determines what happens, with GM as final arbiter.
10. Play the scene out, then return to step 2 to determine who goes next (from among those who haven’t yet had a turn this round) and continue the cycle until everyone has had a turn.