When you defend and maneuver, you’re protecting yourself or others, focusing on the environment and advantages you can build or disadvantages you can inflict. You change your position, maybe try to escape, maybe get to higher ground. You’re not attacking directly, but you do your best to block enemy blows. Thisapproach isn’t as aggressive as advance and attack, but it isn’t as standoffish as evade and observe. It’s a solid, resistant, tactical approach.
When you advance and attack, you move into direct battle with your foes, sticking to them aggressively, sending countless blows their way. This is a very aggressive approach, not standing back and letting your foe come to you but instead coming at them, hard. You might also expend energy attacking the environment to reshape it to your advantage in some way, but it’s still framed by aggression, advancement, forward-motion—you don’t carefully change the terrain, you break it with force!
When you evade and observe, you keep your distance, not running away from your foe but avoiding letting them get close enough to really land any major hits. You dance and dodge, avoiding more than blocking, trying to take in a better sense of your foe and your environment. Instead of intensely focusing on your enemies, you observe the situation and possibly formulate a better strategy.
Note that when you choose evade and observe as your approach, you immediately clear 1-fatigue. If you don’t have any fatigue marked, you don’t get this benefit. This represents how you fundamentally take a step back, calm yourself a bit, and refocus every time you choose this approach.
Mark 1-fatigue to ready yourself or your environment, assigning or clearing a fictionally appropriate status of nearby characters or yourself.
Steel yourself for their blows.
Each time a foe inflicts fatigue, a condition, or shifts your balance in this exchange, inflict 1-fatigue on that foe.
Move to a new location.
Engage/disengage with a foe, overcome a negative status or danger, establish an advantageous position, or escape the scene. Any foe engaged with you can mark 1-fatigue to block this technique.
Strike a foe in reach, forcing them to mark 2-fatigue, mark a condition, or shift their balance away from center, their choice.
Mark 1-fatigue to instead choose to hammer them with your blows, forcing them to mark 2-fatigue, or strike where they are weak, inflicting a condition.
Impress or intimidate a foe.
Choose an approach—your foe cannot choose to use that approach in the next exchange.
Mark 1-fatigue to destroy or destabilize something in the environment—possibly inflicting or overcoming a fictionally appropriate positive or negative status.
Mark 1-fatigue to challenge an engaged foe’s balance.
Ask what their principle is
Aid or impede a nearby character, inflicting an appropriate status.
Recenter yourself amidst the fray.
Shift your balance toward one of your principles