The Dresden Files > DFRPG

Refinement, Advancement and Focused Practitioners

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paul_Harkonen:
Focused Practitioners seem to be in a difficult position when it comes to refinement, both at character generation as they advance.  To compare, wizards may take refinement to add two specialization points to their Thaumaturgy or Evocation, provided they follow the pyramid structure, or add focus item slots.

Focused Practitioners on the other hand, can only add focus item slots, and never have the ability to refine and improve their spellcasting on it's own merits.  This means that a Focused Practitioner, for example a pyromancer, who wishes to use spells as his or her primary attack method either, must take a few incredibly potent focus items, and is in deep trouble if they are ever without them, or will rapidly fall behind the power curve as other characters slowly tap into ever increasing wells of power.

In theory they could advance to sorcerers and buy Evocation instead of Channeling as they advance, but this requires a fundamental change on the character, one that the player may not want.  They could also start buying mortal stunts, or other powers, but again, this has a lasting impact and change on the character.

My concern here is that all of the information and commentary on Focused Practitioners is that they can be incredibly powerful, in very specific areas (see Dresden's Note in Your Story) which doesn't seem to be born out given the difficulties of purchasing refinement for these characters.  All of the notes say they are specialists, not simply flat out weaker.  I don't know what the solution is necessarily, but I felt pointing it out and asking for thoughts might spur my thoughts and help figure out what to do to deal with this.

Moriden:
I've found a lot of problems are solved by simply ignoring the templates entirely as anything other then vague guidelines.

Hoar Grimnir:
This was discussed quite a bit in this thread:

http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,16839.0.html

Hopefully it'll give you some ideas on how to house rule it.

paul_Harkonen:
Thanks for that link, although I don't think it answered the question particularly well.  It seemed to devolve into a discussion solely about different enchanted items, whereas I'm somewhat more curious about the potential for increasing casting ability.  This may just be one I have to deal with a house rule, or lots of focus items.

Llayne:
I'd do a limited form of refinement for channeling. Each point in refinement would only give you one specialization instead of two. that means you could only take it 3 times, to get control (for example) up to +2, and power to plus 1.

Far more limited than refinements to evocation, but then again channeling is the limited form of evocation anyway.

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