Very helpful! Thanks!
Self compelling was going on in the game, but the players had a hard time with this. They tried rewriting aspects, but still had a hard time with this. I do feel the aspects, while cool for flavor and story, become far too important in the mechanics. I think just giving folks a +1 or +2 here and there for modifiers will fix this dependance.
The wizard does seemed over powered, unless you get the drop on him. But few of my big bads who are non-wizards last 2 round with a wizard PC. they throw around 18 levels of stress and your player with a gun is like maybe tossing around 6? 7? Balance was an issue, but my players are good about that stuff so I never really worried about it.
I gotta say, that no one ever used maneuvers, unless they couldn't really do anything else. It really wasn't worth giving up a whole action to get a +2 or a reroll. But if the non fighting guy would do a distracting maneuver on the villain, the guy doing the actual fighting would tag it. But that didn't happen much. The maneuver is good support thing, but never used in combat by people actually doing the fighting.
I'm still fuzzy on the magic system and I've been running the game for 3 weeks. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I've been playing RPGs for almost 30 years. I read it. I think I understand it. Then when we're actually playing I have to look it up again. It's just doesn't feel as intuitive as it should.
I'll definitely give my group a link to this post!
Thanks for your help!