It's powerful, but I'm playing in a game where the wizard has power 7 rotes. I'll be taking over the dming soon, so I want good opposition. We're a 10 refresh group and he has +5 conviction along with foci.
That's why I used power 8, but the number was intented to be a bit arbitrary.
Understood.
Tag to effect...I've seen it in one of the example spells...the "grasping branches" spell YS,pg294.
I suggest checking out these forums and looking for the discussion threads where Fred gives the official answer on stuff like this. Basically, tagging for effect means that instead of using a fate point to invoke for effect, the PC is using their free tag from a maneuver... for effect.
To get this straight, your guidlines are that if you succeed by 2 shifts you can tag to effect? Officially, are there any guidlines for this? When you say "invoke for effect", are you giving the perp a fate point?
If the PC were invoking an aspect for effect, the perp would get a fate point. If the pc is tagging for effect, no fate point is spent so no fate point is received.
The 2 shift thing is just an example. Tags and invokes for effect, just like spell fallout, are in the hands of the GM. My own personal rule is that the thematic effect of a tag for effect is going to scale appropriately depending on how many shifts the maneuver succeeded by.
If a fate point is used to invoke for effect, I am generous - especially since the perp gets a fate point out of it.
Also, how can you kill something with a maneuver? I thought the purpose of a maneuver was to set-up killing blows and fancy moves.
If I did a maneuver to knock someone out, what's the difference if it's 8 shifts of power vs 4? If the the perp fails, he faces the concequenses.
It also seems a bit powerful to be a maneuver. Wouldn't you have to just do piles of damage until they conceeded and said "they're knocked out"?
Maneuvers kill when appropriate. Look at the books. Harry does not get into huge firefights with RCVs. One shot and they're dead. Why? Because he's making evocations like, "Fire to the gut" then invoking for effect. This does not happen with named enemies, just mooks.
As for the 8 shifts vs 4, 8 shifts is a battle tank's cannon vs 4 shifts of a .50 bmg.
As an astral bolt to knock someone out, these are two vastly different power levels.
The way I would model it is that tagging "knocked out" for effect would knock a perp out for one round, but each round after they they would roll endurance to be conscious again.
If they become conscious again, it would count as a supplemental action and they'd be able to act that round.
I'd give them +2 to their endurance roll for every time they took damage while unconscious.
So you can see, trying to beat an 8 shift spell would be a lot harder than a 4 shift spell.
To beat an 8 shift spell, they'd probably have to stack aspects while unconscious, taking at least several rounds to come to. (or use fate points).
To beat a 4 shift spell, they'd only have to roll endurance once.