When can you invoke an aspect twice for free on the same roll?

Question

Pages 14-15 of the Fate Accelerated PDF says this about the Create an Advantage action:

If you're creating a new aspect or discovering an existing one:
...
* If you succeed with style: You create or discover the aspect, and you or an ally may invoke it twice for free. Usually you can't invoke the same aspect twice on the same roll, but this is an exception; success with style gives you a BIG advantage!

If you're trying to take advantage of an aspect you already know about:
...
* If you succeed with style: You get two free invocations on the aspect, which you can let an ally use, if you wish.

Emphasis mine. So all versions of Create an Advantage give you two free invokes when you succeed with style, but only the create/discover rules emphasize that you can use both of those on a single roll. It also establishes the general rule that you can't invoke the same aspect more than once per roll.

The rest of page 15 is a summary of the basic actions:

Create an Advantage when creating or discovering aspects:
...
* Succeed with Style: Create or discover the aspect, get two free invocations on it.

Create an Advantage on an aspect you already know about:
...
* Succeed with Style: Generate two free invocations on the aspect.

Here, there's no mention about whether you can use those two free invokes on one roll. The Quick Reference on page 44 has the exact same text except for adding page numbers.

Finally, there's the "Invoking Aspects" section on page 28:

Important: You can only invoke any aspect once on a given dice roll; you can’t spend a stack of fate points on one aspect and get a huge bonus from it. However, you can invoke several different aspects on the same roll. If you’re invoking an aspect to add a bonus or reroll your dice, wait until after you’ve rolled to do it. No sense spending a fate point if you don’t need to!

Free invocations: Sometimes you can invoke an aspect for free, without paying a fate point. If you create or discover an aspect through the create an advantage action, the first invocation on it (by you or an ally) is free (if you succeeded with style, you get two freebies).

Here it reiterates the general rule of one invoke per aspect per roll, followed immediately after with reiterating rules for free invokes. But it only mentions create/discover. Also, it's unclear to me whether the last parenthetical remark refers to earning two free invokes with one action (in which case it should refer to Create an Advantage in general) or being able to spend them both on one roll (which is an exception to the general rule written just before, so it should have been written more clearly).

Going by the rules as written, I see only one place in the entire book that allows invoking the same aspect more than once on a roll, even though the case where it should come up is mentioned multiple times. That's why I have to ask for clarification, "When can you invoke an aspect twice for free on the same roll?"

Answer 1

You're gonna have to go to the Fate Core book for the full explanation. Although they don't mention it for this particular case, FAE makes a habit of expecting players to refer to Core for more details on a host of subjects. This is because Fate Accelerated, in order to stay svelte, doesn't talk much about corner cases. Since multiple free invokes on one aspect usually come from "with style" outcomes on Create Advantage, that's where they put this detail. They may feel it's implied on page 28, but it could definitely use more explication.

So for more comprehensive coverage we look at page 70 of the Fate Core book, Free Invocations:

Free invocations work like normal ones except in two ways: no fate points are exchanged, and you can stack them with a normal invocation for a better bonus. [...] You can also stack multiple free invocations together.

It's a shame they left these lines out of Fate Accelerated, but comparing the two books' phrasing we can easily infer that they had this rule in mind. They just pared it down a little too aggressively.

So the answer is: Free invokes, as part of their inherent "freebie" nature, ignore the "one invoke per aspect per roll" rule, stacking with each other and with normal invokes. Put another way, you can invoke an aspect as many times as you like for the same roll provided a maximum of one of those invokes is made using an actual factual Fate point.

This means you can stack one normal invoke (powered by a Fate point) with as many free invokes as you have available on the same aspect and get the full effect of all of them.

Answer 2

I think the confusion arises from the fact that Fate Accelerated Edition is so condensed that sometimes explanations are glossed over.

Fate Accelerated's rules (not clear enough)

If we only have Fate Accelerated rules to go on, it seems you only get to stack your two free invokes on a Create an Advantage action when you succeed with style on creating or discovering an aspect.

Usually you can't invoke the same aspect twice on the same roll, but this is an exception; success with style gives you a BIG advantage.

However, as you have shown, when the rules are condensed there appears to be no difference between succeeding with style on Creating an Advantage, whether you are creating or discovering, or taking advantage of an aspect you already know about. The prose rules you have quoted do not explain this properly.

Fate Core's explanation

In Fate Core things are expressed much more clearly. Note that throughout FAE, the reader is referred to Fate Core for more detailed explanation, and although this is not the case here, I think this is a valid move to understand an unclear FAE rule in general.

Free invocations work like normal ones except in two ways: no fate points are exchanged, and you can stack them with a normal invocation for a better bonus. (...) You can also stack multiple free invocations together. (Fate Core 70)

So reading this back into the FAE rules, wherever you get two free invokes on the same aspect, you can apply them to a single roll. The FAE rules are unclear mainly because of their brevity and omission of the above clear statement from Fate Core.

Note that both the FAE and Fate Core rules prohibit spending multiple Fate points on one roll to invoke the same aspect, and free invocations are treated differently. But only in Fate Core is the idea that free invocations can always be stacked expressed clearly.