Creating an Advantage on existing aspects: differences between FAE and Fate Core?

Question

I was comparing Actions & Outcome from Fate Core and FAE to see if there were any significant differences I should know about and I'm wondering if I found one on Create an Advantage.

Fate Accelerated

FAE mentions three possibles variants:

1. Creating a new aspect
2. Discovering an existing aspect
3. Taking advantage of an existing aspect

It then explains the consequences of each roll result in two groups:

• "If you're creating a new aspect or discovering an existing one" (grouping variant 1 and 2)
• "If you're trying to take advantage of an aspect you already know about" (variant 3)

Yet, creating new and discovering are distinguished from reusing a known aspect on failures:

Create/Discover:

Don't create or discover,or you do but your opponent gets a free invocation

Reuse:

No additional benefit

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Fate Core

Fate Core mentions the same three variants initially:

• "doing something to actively change your circumstances" (creating a new aspect)
• "discovering new information that helps you" (discovering an existing aspect)
• "taking advantage of something you've previously observed" (taking advantage of an existing aspect)

... but then only mentions two as it explains what happens when you fail, tie or succeed:

• "If you're using create an advantage to make a new aspect..."
• "If you're using create an advantage on an existing aspect..."

"Existing aspect"... Is that to mean aspects you're trying to discover or aspects you already know... or both? First confusing bit to me.

It looks different from FAE when you look at the fail results:

• Failure when making a new aspect: "you either don't create the aspect, or you create it but someone else gets the free invoke".
• Failure when using an existing aspect: "you give a free invoke on that aspect to someone else instead".

Fate Core seems to have done away with the "nothing happens" result.

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So...

• Do results on "existing aspects" in Fate Core apply both to discovering and reusing or not?
• Is the "no consequences" failure of FAE nowhere to be found in Fate Core?

I assume this might be a key difference of FAE, possibly to make reusing aspects easier... and absent of Fate Core as "no change" is usually a bad thing to keep stories moving.

Answer 1

I think you nailed it yourself. "nothing happens" is boring. But maybe for FAE it simplifies decisions just a little bit.

I think playing either way is fine.

Or its entirely possible that FAE is just based on an earlier draft of Core and could stand to be updated to remove "nothing happens".