Defend

Use the defend action to avoid an attack or prevent someone from creating an advantage against you. Whenever someone attacks you in a conflict or tries to create an advantage on you, you always get a chance to defend. As with attacks, this isn’t always about avoiding physical sources of danger—some of the skills allow you to defend against attempts to harm your mind or damage your resolve.
Because you roll to defend as a reaction, your opposition is almost always active. If you’re rolling a defend action against passive opposition, it’s because the environment is hostile to you somehow (like a blazing fire), or the attacking NPC isn’t important enough for the GM to bother with dice .

• When you fail at a defense, you suffer the consequences of what ever you were trying to prevent. You might take a hit or have an advantage created on you.
• When you tie a defense, you grant your opponent a boost.
• When you succeed at a defense, you successfully avoid the attack or the attempt to gain an advantage on you.
• When you succeed with style at a defense, it works like a normal success, but you also gain a boost as you turn the tables momentarily.
No Stacked Effects! 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 at tacker gets two boosts—it’s the same result, just from two different points of view. We just wrote it that way so that the results were consistent when you looked up the rule, regardless of what action you took.

Zird the Arcane is arguing a magical thesis before the council of the Collegia Arcana. But one of the adjutants on the council, an old rival named Vokus Skortch, has it in for Zird. He wants not only to see Zird fail, but to damage Zird’s self-confidence by forcing him to misstep and doubt himself. The group agrees that they know each other well enough that Skortch could affect him this way, so the conflict is on. As Zird finishes his opening argument, Amanda describes how Skortch uses Provoke as an attack, poking holes in Zird’s theories and forcing him to reevaluate. Skortch has a Provoke of Good (+3). Zird defends with Will, which he has at Fair (+2). Amanda rolls for Skortch and gets a +1, for a total of Great (+4). Ryan rolls or Zird and gets a +2, tying at Great (+4). Zird doesn’t have to deal with taking a hit, but he does grant Skortch a boost, which Amanda decides to call Momentarily Tripped Up.