The Dresden Files > DFRPG

Evocation questions

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Deadmanwalking:
The other elements have less tangible advantages than Veils:

Air: Judging by Hyperawareness, you actually can use Air to get initiative.
Earth: It's casually easy to make people defend against your attacks with their Might. That's both hilarious and vicious.
Fire: Fire maneuvers are alot easier to justify making ongoing (as are all fire effects, actually). Also there's the ability to do elemental inversions and get ice, no small thing, that.
Water: This one I have a bit of trouble with, honestly.

neko128:
Water counter-spell?  A "water veil" or "water shield" to counter a fire spell is the first thing that comes to mind.  How about a more subtle, internal effect to counter a poison or similar attack spell?  Water spells could be used to separate and manipulate existing liquids (blood, gases even)...

crusher_bob:
I'd prefer that there be some minor advantage to each of the elements, so that you occasionally have a reason to do one over the other.

How's this:

Air
You can explicitly listen in on peoples conversations with air, that you can't really do with the other elements.  Plus probably some other detection related stuff.
Advantage: detection
You can use an air based detection spell to substitute for an investigation roll

Fire
Why is the fireball throwing wizard such a standard trope? If you want everything over there blown up, fire is your go to element.
Fire's gets the AOE advantage since it naturally spreads so easily.
Advantage: area
When changing out power for area of effect, you only have to pay 1 power for the first area instead of 2

Earth:
Harry always talks about how 'once you actually get the earth moving, it tends to stay moving'.  So earth effects last longer.
Advantage: duration
When you are spending shifts to increase duration, or are using another magical action to extend duration, earth spells get one additional free shift in duration.

Water:
Running water tends to ground out magic, if you want to counterspell something, you are doing the same thing.
Advantage: magic destruction
This is the element that counterspells are based on

Spirit:
Spirit handles light, os it gets illusions, of which veils become part.
Advantage: illusion
You can veil things as well as create illusions of things that aren't there at all.

So now, your choice of which 3 evocation elements to know how to do has some effect over what sort of stuff you want do.  There's a (marginal_ reason to want to put points into something other than you main element, and even wizards who are hyper specialized in one element feel slightly different from another wizard who is specialized in another element.

Falar:
So how would you express all that in raw mechanics?

crusher_bob:
Something like this:

Air explicitly gets the ability to do the following:
Eavesdropping (investigation sub-ability)
Examination (investigation related ability), for example, you could walk into the bookstore and use an air effect to speed up your finding of Die Lied der Erlking.

The other elements can do detections to find their own element, for example, you could use earth to find the weapon points in a steel bridge, or something.  But air based detection lets you find almost anything.

Fire:
bonus area:
So if we have a power 5 spell that we want to effect a whole are, we'd normally pay 2 power for that, meaning that if would be power 3, area 1.
If it were a fire spell, we only have to pay 1 power for the first area (but 2 for all the following areas) so it would be power 4, area 1.

Earth:
same trick for duration.  If I want to make, say, an earthquake spell: I start with 8 power, I want it to effect 2 areas, and last for 1 extra exchange.  So that would normally be power 3, area 2, duration 1 spell.  But with the duration bonus for earth, it would be power 3, area 2, duration 2. 
In addition, when you make the roll to extend an earth magic spell, you get 1 free shift to duration if you succeed.  Example, I call up my basic earth shield, power 4.  But the next round, I want to to stick around, so i spend an action on increasing its duration.  I get four shifts for duration, so normally, my spell would stick around for another 4 exchanges.  But since it's an earth spell, it will stick around for additional 5 exchanges instead.

Water:
The counterspell ability is now based on your skill and power with water magic.  So any foci, specializations, etc that apply to water also apply to your counterspell ability.

Spirit:
veils, (which generally act as a stealth roll) and illusion maneuvers go here.

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