Ways to achieve a 100 shift rituals

[ways and means]

In order of ease;
Kill 5 People (20 shifts a piece)
Kill 50 Animals (2 shifts a piece)
Make 30-50 decelerations and sacrifice yourself up to a severe.
Spend 99 scenes doing nothing. 

So how do you balance against this?

[Silverblaze]

Expect more from your players than to constantly abuse thaumaturgy; is my first answer.  Ask how they'd like thaumaturgy abused in games they run.
  This is because that is how we "balance" it in our game.

Thaumaturgy is hard to balance and I likely don't have good answers.  Others on here might though.

1.) That is close to or smack dab in the middle of dark magic.  Send in Wardens.  Warn the player that this will happen, before they start doing this magic.  If they continue, have Wardens show up and end him/her.  Doesn't balance it but it sets up a deterrent system.

2.) Make your scenes tak a long time, players won't likely want to sit out several games for one ritual, especially if the problem thye are trying to solve is already solved.

3.) Give them a law breaker for killing for a ritual.  Justify this by saying killing for magic is a short step away from killing with magic. (Shody way of doing it, but it may deter this stuff)

4.) Limit the number of declarations for spells in your games as a house rule at the beginning.

[wyvern]

I wouldn't balance against that.  I would not allow a PC to pull off a 100 shift ritual in the first place.  Worst case scenario, somewhere around 50 shifts in, every single local major power would converge on your location to see who's throwing around stupid amounts of power and shut you down.  But in practical terms, I wouldn't even let a PC try such a ritual in the first place.

Kill 5 people: Congrats, you are now an NPC warlock with too many lawbreaker powers.  While there may be some game concepts where this would be acceptable ("Hey, lets play as evil monsters!"), those aren't the sorts of games I run.  Such games would need other balancing factors, like attention from mortal authorities and/or wardens.
Kill 50 animals: I wouldn't let this work; at best you'd get just a few aspects, like "animal sacrifices", "too much blood", "hecatomb"; I wouldn't give just two shifts per animal.
Make ludicrous piles of declarations: Also wouldn't work; declarations are against whatever target number the GM thinks is reasonable, and after the first few, I'd start adding in stacking penalties.  Or, better yet, as you start to declare how conditions are coincidentally just perfect for your uber-ritual, I'd start throwing compels at the aspects you've declared - as every other major power in the area wants to make use of the same conflux of energies you're declaring exists.
Spend 99 scenes doing nothing: If you've been gone for 99 scenes, you're not a player in my game anymore; that's over a year of real-time not playing.

[Silverblaze]

I wouldn't balance against that.  I would not allow a PC to pull off a 100 shift ritual in the first place.  Worst case scenario, somewhere around 50 shifts in, every single local major power would converge on your location to see who's throwing around stupid amounts of power and shut you down.  But in practical terms, I wouldn't even let a PC try such a ritual in the first place.

Kill 5 people: Congrats, you are now an NPC warlock with too many lawbreaker powers.  While there may be some game concepts where this would be acceptable ("Hey, lets play as evil monsters!"), those aren't the sorts of games I run.  Such games would need other balancing factors, like attention from mortal authorities and/or wardens.
Kill 50 animals: I wouldn't let this work; at best you'd get just a few aspects, like "animal sacrifices", "too much blood", "hecatomb"; I wouldn't give just two shifts per animal.
Make ludicrous piles of declarations: Also wouldn't work; declarations are against whatever target number the GM thinks is reasonable, and after the first few, I'd start adding in stacking penalties.  Or, better yet, as you start to declare how conditions are coincidentally just perfect for your uber-ritual, I'd start throwing compels at the aspects you've declared - as every other major power in the area wants to make use of the same conflux of energies you're declaring exists.
Spend 99 scenes doing nothing: If you've been gone for 99 scenes, you're not a player in my game anymore; that's over a year of real-time not playing.

This is the only point I have any issue with.  Scenes much like zones vary in time.  I really don't see 99 scenes being that long.  99 scenes shouldn't be more than 99 in game days at maximum.  (Just my opinion mind you).

However, since scenes have variable length, it becomes hard to assume how long hte spell caster is out of play for.

Though I will say your way of telling them that that takes too long works fine as a balance factor/deterrent.

[ways and means]

Sorry I was running on the assumption that no one would try a sacrificial ritual without lawbreaker 2 (any +2 control is nice), I was also assuming any pc trying such a ritual would have high contacts , resources and would know how to cover their own tracks or have the right people to do it for them. Making 5 people disappear without a trace is hardly a hard trick to pull off for someone with a reasonable contacts (for example the Red court party).   

[Mr. Death]

I have a PC in one of my games that pulled something like this in the backstory: clearing a building of Red Court vamps out with a ritual, using New York's garlic festival as a source of power--there were somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people there the year the player picked for it, and the player liked the idea of killing vampires with a celebration of garlic.

Much of the power gathered was by the character sneaking into the building every day for months, getting materials to make sort of a Little Chicago-esque focus in order to make sure the spell only hit the vampires in the building. In fact, the vast majority of the power for the ritual probably went into excluding targets while the actual "attack" portion of the spell was comparatively small.

Naturally, the character's ability to do something like this scared the crap out of pretty much everyone who knew about it, which is why the Big Apple is more or less off limits to her now.

But, like I said, it's the character's backstory--I almost certainly wouldn't allow it to go off--not easily, at least--if the player tried something like it in-game.

[wyvern]

This is the only point I have any issue with.  Scenes much like zones vary in time.  I really don't see 99 scenes being that long.  99 scenes shouldn't be more than 99 in game days at maximum.  (Just my opinion mind you).

However, since scenes have variable length, it becomes hard to assume how long hte spell caster is out of play for.

Though I will say your way of telling them that that takes too long works fine as a balance factor/deterrent.

I'm guessing based off of games I've run / played in; most sessions include about three distinct scenes.  Sometimes more (the GM is going from player to player with "It's been X months in-game since last session; what have you been up to?), sometimes less (climactic battle!).  Game roughly every other week, and that's over a year of not playing to skip 99 scenes.  The important distinction here is that, to get the "I skipped a scene" bonus, you have to miss an actual scene of play; simple passage of in-game time doesn't count.

Sorry I was running on the assumption that no one would try a sacrificial ritual without lawbreaker 2 (any +2 control is nice), I was also assuming any pc trying such a ritual would have high contacts , resources and would know how to cover their own tracks or have the right to do it for them. Making 5 people disappear without a trace is hardly a hard trick to pull off for someone with a reasonable contacts (for example the Red court party).   

Then it comes back to, with you trying to gather 100 shifts of power, everyone even vaguely nearby with a lore skill is going to notice what you're doing.  What's the perception penalty for being a dozen miles away?  I'll bet it's less than -100.  And again, that's not the sort of game I run - and if I were going to run a game where that was expected, I'd houserule down the number of shifts you can get from a sacrifice; something like, say, you can only tag consequences the character would be allowed to use in a conflict, plus extreme, and +2 shifts for doubling the number of sacrifices.  What I would not do is try to balance the game around 100+ shift rituals (edit: as a normal thing; as the occasional plot device that takes many sessions to set up they might be ok) - because the only way to do that is have enemies who also use 100+ shift rituals, and that would just get boring.

[Mr. Death]

Honestly, is 100 shifts really that much? Victor Sells' heart-exploding spell is more than 1/3 of that, and he managed to pull it off three times over the course of about a week.

[DFJunkie]

However, since scenes have variable length, it becomes hard to assume how long hte spell caster is out of play for.

Well, it's true you wouldn't know ahead of time, but since there's no such thing as a non-narrative scene it would be the next 99 scenes the group plays.  My group probably averages about 5-10 per night, so say 15 gaming sessions?  Not really doable.

[Tedronai]

Kill 5 people: Congrats, you are now an NPC warlock with too many lawbreaker powers.

Barring substantial houseruling, that's not how Lawbreaker works.  Killing 5 people with/for magic will cost, at most 2 refresh (assuming that the spell itself does not have a lawbreaking effect/purpose, which might bring it up to 3), not 5.

[Sanctaphrax]

In order of ease;
Kill 5 People (20 shifts a piece)
Kill 50 Animals (2 shifts a piece)

Stuff like this is one of the main problems with the RAW for Thaumaturgy.

Sacrificing 2 guys should not be twice as good as sacrificing 1.

Make 30-50 decelerations and sacrifice yourself up to a severe.

I approve.

If you can pull off that many Declarations, you deserve a 100-shift ritual.
 

Spend 99 scenes doing nothing.

I approve in theory, but in practice...you're not actually playing the game anymore.

Honestly, is 100 shifts really that much?

Yes.

Sells' spell was noted in-story as being unreasonably powerful. And Thaumaturgy scales exponentially in difficulty, or at least it should.

100 shifts is enough to do almost anything.

[DFJunkie]

Spend 99 scenes doing nothing. 

Technically true, but since there's no such thing as a non-narrative scene that player might have to sit out of over a dozen sessions.  Not really worth it.

[Becq]

The best solution to this issue (in my opinion) is to rewrite the Thaum rules.  My current favority concept involves increasing the control roll difficulty every several rolls, resulting in an incentive to control more than a single shift per roll and a soft practical limit on the total complexity of the spell.  (And it also rewards those taking specializations/focii that improve Thaum control.)

Short of a full rewrite, here are a couple of 'patches' that you could apply:
1)  Each of those sacrifices counts as a miniscene, so they take time.  You can't just have your victims stand in a group and then throw a grenade in amoung them, you have to slowly leech their life-force into the spell.  (This might actually be what was intented; the rules don't specify.)
2)  Sacrifices only count for the number of consequences they can actually suffer.  Minor extras count for a mild consequence only; to get 'ideal' sacrificial victims you have to steal the protagonist's girlfriend.  (This would be a change to RAW, which does say sacrifice grants a full 20 shifts.)
3)  Anyone with The Sight can detect magic, and the nearest visual anologue to detecting a spell of this magnitude would be trying to spot a nuclear bomb exploding.  The details as to how this works would need to be built, but at the root would be that 'nearby' characters with the Sight would have at least a chance to feel the power building up, and 'nearby' should scale exponentially with total shifts of power (ie, spells of a few shifts might be detectable only by people within a few zones, but spells of a hundred shifts might well be felt satewide or even nationwide).  Note that this would only require passive use of the Sight; not the full third-eye opening variety.
4)  Recall that the rules tell you to set difficulty for declarations based inversely on interest value.  Fifty declarations are unlikely to be interesting -- at least not after the first couple.

[Mr. Death]

Technically true, but since there's no such thing as a non-narrative scene that player might have to sit out of over a dozen sessions.  Not really worth it.

Yeah, the only way I can see this happening is if a player goes on an extended leave of the campaign, but for whatever reason their character doesn't. Which seems an unlikely scenario at best.

I mean, assuming a weekly game, 2-3 scenes a game, that's the better part of a year the person would be away.

[admiralducksauce]

Also, honestly, "normal" people in game aren't going to provide 20 shifts of power. IMO it's like mook opponents. You can get 20 shifts from a major NPC who, during conflict, would be willing to suffer the entire range of consequences, AND you've gotta put in the work to kidnap them so you CAN sacrifice them. Kidnapping some hobo off-screen who doesn't put up a fight? No shifts, or at best, it's a Maneuver or Declaration for 2 shifts.