Author Topic: How can a wizard fly?  (Read 6305 times)

Offline g33k

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How can a wizard fly?
« on: November 14, 2013, 02:36:29 AM »
Offhand, Air and Spirit (pure force / kinetomancy) look like the obvious solutions.

Evocation is too quick&dirty, too hard-to-sustain-control, for anything sustained.... right?  So Thaumaturgy for sustained flight... right?

For (very rough) example:
 - Evoke a flight to the top of a 3-story building, probably OK.
 - Evoke a flight across a 50' river, probably OK.
 - Evoke a flight to the top of a 50-floor skyscraper... expect LOTS of extra rolls and likely failure.
 - Evoke a flight across the Mississippi river... expect LOTS of extra rolls and likely failure.

Does this seem about right?

What about thaumaturgic flight?  I'm a bit adrift on the difficulties of this one...

Magicpockets

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #1 on: November 14, 2013, 02:56:37 AM »
The obvious and fair solution: purchase the Wings power. Everything else should be temporary at best, such as a Thaumaturgical ritual allowing a wizard to ignore height based borders up to a certain value.

For Evocation, you create maneuver aspects and then roll Athletics.

Offline Taran

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #2 on: November 14, 2013, 03:02:21 AM »
I equate evocation flight to being shot out of a cannon.  If you can aim properly and survive the landing, it should work o.k.  If you have physical immunity or something, that'd be useful.

Maybe represent it as ant an attack on yourself using air or spirit.  Your athletics to dodge represents your ability to land without being injured.  The power (and weapon value) would be based on what it would take to pick up your weight using Might (5 shifts for an adult) plus more shifts if you're going more than one zone.

As you can see, I'm not a big fan of flight via evocation.

Thaum flight would be setting up aspects to gain Wings temporarily.  If you're going to do this often enough, you should just buy the power.  Attach it to human form(to represent spell-casting), if you want.
« Last Edit: November 14, 2013, 03:16:28 AM by Taran »

Offline Haru

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #3 on: November 14, 2013, 03:09:11 AM »
Well, evocation has the extremely bad side effect, that it is more akin to a rocket jump than actual flight. Sure you can push yourself with enough force to fly up a 50 floor skyscraper, but that should be enough force to do some nasty damage (if you like, I can calculate that for you later. ;) ).
Not to mention that you need to land somehow, and depending on how your trajectory was, you will just smash into the ground.

There is another thing that sort of makes using evocation for movement rather complicated, and that's the fact that there is simply not a good rule for moving someone in a conflict, other than a grapple and running with athletics.

Now Thaumaturgy is another deal altogether. With thaumaturgy, we have the ability to get us access to temporary upgrades, and that's the most elegant solution to this and similar problems. What you do is a ritual to take yourself out. That requires 5 shifts of power, since you will have at the most a stress track of 4 boxes, and need one more to take yourself out. Since it is self inflicted, the catch for any toughness powers can be seen as satisfied and you wouldn't take any consequences to keep yourself from being taken out, either. Once you have yourself taken out, you can dictate the taken out result, in this case it would be growing wings or controlling a stream of air or using fire magic to fly on jets of fire from your outstretched hands and feet like Iron Man (only without the suit). In any case, you can spend a Fate point to buy the "Wings" power for 1 scene, and you can pretty much ignore any other numbers afterwards.

If you have enough time to prepare yourself, you could even go on a quest to get an ingredient like a gryphon's feather or something similarly rare. You could then use the free tag on that aspect instead of a fate point to buy the power. However, if you do so, you should make sure the aspect you use for a spell like this matters. If you allow any old aspect to be tagged for this, it will become pretty meaningless.
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Magicpockets

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #4 on: November 14, 2013, 03:32:58 AM »
Taking yourself out via Thaumaturgy seems somewhat... abusive?

Offline Taran

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #5 on: November 14, 2013, 03:36:14 AM »
Taking yourself out via Thaumaturgy seems somewhat... abusive?

It seems to be the agreed-upon method for doing transmutations.

Offline Haru

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #6 on: November 14, 2013, 03:47:22 AM »
Taking yourself out via Thaumaturgy seems somewhat... abusive?
Taking someone out gives you the right to narrate what happens to the character you take out. That does not have to mean you actually knock him out or something like that, it just means that you get the right to decide over his fate. If you do a ritual to turn someone into a rabbit, you wouldn't first nearly kill them, then transform them, the transformation is all that is happening, it is the taken out result. Transforming yourself pretty much follows that logic, only that it is easier to take yourself out, since you can bypass a whole lot of stuff.
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Offline Mr. Death

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #7 on: November 14, 2013, 03:47:17 PM »
It gives you the right to dictate it within reason. And I don't think a Taken Out result is necessary, anyway. The way I've handled it (one character had a flying broomstick...okay, it was actually a floor steamer, but anyway) is make it a thaumaturgy skill replacement of a driving roll. So in her case, she could burn one use of it to get anywhere within a Driving roll of 4. But it didn't have the dexterity of, say, allowing her to fly around the battlefield, it was strictly for distance travel.
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Offline Taran

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #8 on: November 14, 2013, 03:52:18 PM »
It gives you the right to dictate it within reason. And I don't think a Taken Out result is necessary, anyway. The way I've handled it (one character had a flying broomstick...okay, it was actually a floor steamer, but anyway) is make it a thaumaturgy skill replacement of a driving roll. So in her case, she could burn one use of it to get anywhere within a Driving roll of 4. But it didn't have the dexterity of, say, allowing her to fly around the battlefield, it was strictly for distance travel.

That's a very cool way of doing it!  And it makes lots of sense, too.

For evocation fly, I was just thinking of the fly spell in Morrowind where the spell let's you jump very, very far and very, very high.  It just doesn't let you land it without getting hurt.  I still remember the NPC falling from the sky and the first time I tried the scroll he had.  Good times.

Offline AstronaughtAndy

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #9 on: November 14, 2013, 04:33:52 PM »
This makes me think that it might be fun to do a character who uses modular abilities to represent different transmutations/"buff spells" that he can cast on himself. Because I think that taking the Wings power is really the way to go if flying is going to be a regular thing for the character.

Offline PirateJack

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #10 on: November 14, 2013, 09:24:10 PM »
Question: How can a Wizard fly?

Answer: Very briefly.
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Offline Gilitine_Memitim

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #11 on: November 15, 2013, 12:36:10 AM »
They throw themselves at the ground and miss.

Offline vultur

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #12 on: November 15, 2013, 12:56:09 AM »
I agree that Evocation flight is more like being shot out of a cannon or a "super jump" -- not controlled while you're in flight -- but I don't think short ones should be very deadly, Harry did a small "super jump" at maybe 12, so it's probably not super tricky.

The obvious and fair solution: purchase the Wings power. Everything else should be temporary at best, such as a Thaumaturgical ritual allowing a wizard to ignore height based borders up to a certain value.

For Evocation, you create maneuver aspects and then roll Athletics.

Yeah, I agree. A super jump is a maneuver tagged to boost an Athletics roll; thaumaturgic flight is either an Athletics skill replacement e.g. to "climb" a building, or a ritual which gives you Wings as a Temporary Power; a wizard who flies all the time (which should be very rare in-world, IMO) should have Wings as a power, just described as magical flight rather than physical wings.

Offline Taran

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #13 on: November 15, 2013, 01:31:40 AM »
but I don't think short ones should be very deadly, Harry did a small "super jump" at maybe 12, so it's probably not super tricky.

I don't remember this happening.  Which book?

A short evocation jump would be, as magicpockets said, a maneuver tagged to give you a boost to athletics.  Anything more, I think, would be fairly dangerous.

They throw themselves at the ground and miss.

It just means they landed safely...not that they missed.

Offline vultur

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Re: How can a wizard fly?
« Reply #14 on: November 15, 2013, 03:05:38 AM »
I don't remember this happening.  Which book?

In the memory parts of GS. It's one of the first, if not the very first, magic things Harry did. It was in some sort of school competition IIRC.

EDIT: I would imagine current Harry could do pretty big ones safely given what his shield is capable of absorbing; he's used an "elastic" shield version to absorb force a couple of times.