It occurs to me that a lot of The Mighty Buzzard's argument is that it says "Offensive Block, adjudicated as a grapple." How would you respond then if we just made a magic grapple? There's other RAW supporting that.

Nah, my main beef is the description is ignored in favor of a vague and largely unhelpful line later in the spell writeup.  I'd be peachy with it if the description stated or even implied that it limited actions as extensively as a grapple.

Can a player or NPC without a spellcasting high concept or power have a lawbreaker stunt?  The only two this applies to is time travel and outer planar stuff.  Both of which can happen without the player or PC casting the spell to inititiate such actions.  One can be cast into the time stream or planes...one can research the outisde.  Spells are not needed.

In those cases, I don't see why not.  Since neither necessarily require a spell be done by the player, you could allow them to take the +1/+2 to any unquestionably and directly applicable roll.  You'd have to extend this to spellcasters too though or you'd never hear the end of it.

Weird.  Looks like their parser needs as much work as mine then.  I'm still going to see about adding toughness stress boxes to the script tomorrow just because it bugs me.  When I get that done, I'll post an updated zip file. 

Stunts, not stats, that add extra consequences are too differently worded to script for without taking more time than doing it manually though, so that's where I'm leaving that.

EDIT: I read that entirely backwards the first time.  An afternoon and evening of abusing players then drinking will do that to you. 

However, a group of 9 characters with 25-30 skill points WILL take out a heavyweight bad guy just due to the combat system. I've had to fudge that quite a bit to have "boss fights" ... the bosses always have to get extra attacks. Once the group was over 6, there were times the enemy would get one or two shots, then done. A creative group of folks with fate points will ruin your boss in an exchange that is 6 of them, 1 boss, 6 of them, 1 boss ... repeat until one of them might be scratched and/or the boss is dead.

This is where a buttload of minions working in concert with the boss come in handy.  If the boss is alone and massively overpowered, he should shag ass without firing a shot.  Three good mercs or a pair of ghouls per player as minions should liven up any boss fight.  I like having roughly a third of them doing the actual attacking and the other two providing supportive maneuvers like Covering Fire and Spotter or such.  Tag, Tag, blammo, repeat each exchange.  If you're stomping them worse than you'd intended, just play sloppier.

Looks good.

Final count: 214 NPCs.

Will start copying onto wiki tonight.

Hopefully, the *s will translate into appropriate formatting.

Fun fact: The more powerful the NPC, the larger the file. The Deep Ones are all 3-4KB.

Should probably copy the dropbox link into a few places too.

Dropbox keeps previous version copies in case you accidentally break something.  It is my boon companion.

On editing the wiki... up where it says Save, hit the little down-arrow right next to the word and click WikiText Editor.  Lets you paste directly and the formatting should be correct.

PS: I think that all wizards are legally members of the White Council, regardless of what they or the Council would like. This might be a problem.

It's more along the lines of "must join" than "already are" by my reading.  Elaine is, by Harry's judgment, a full Wizard but not a member of the Council.

As far as who gets the blame if they screw up on the political front?  I'm not sure if it's specified in the Accords.  I'd have to reread WN and see what was said about the Minor Talents.

Orbius is specific in being adjudicated as a grapple.
Grapples are blocks against (almost) all actions.
Orbius is, thereby, specific in being a block against (almost) all actions.
But then, we've been over this before.  You have your interpretation; I have mine.

Dandy, so you have to recast it every exchange the same as a physical grapple.  Adjudicated as a grapple...  Oh, and you'll be using Might rather than Discipline.  Adjudicated as a grapple...  You won't be taking any other standard actions while maintaining it either.  Adjudicated as a grapple...

See how nifty it is when you can directly contradict something you don't like about a spell with that phrase?

You must be specific + being specific is not likely meant to be directly contradicted by a later vague statement.

If you want to write a different spell that blocks all actions and grapples, by all means.  You'll need to rewrite the description though.  Hell, you could even call it Orbius.  Orbius as written is not what you want though and I've got extremely solid ground to say it was not intended to be interpreted to as such from both canon and RAW.

A few disordered points:

1. You can't take someone out with a normal block. If Elaine's air shell took Harry out, it was an attack inflicting stress. A 100000 shift block with 10000000 exchanges of duration won't take out a pixie.

2. If you can immobilize an opponent for 8 exchanges, you've either won or had no hope in the first place. The stress inflicted by Orbius is just not that significant compared to its ability to block everything.

3. There was no typo in my earlier example. 8 shifts base, take mild mental and tick off 4th mental stress box to get +5 power. Eat 5 points of backlash, taking a mild physical and filling in 3rd physical stress box. 13 shifts.

4. Wish I had my books on hand to check out this zone block stuff. I was under the impression that evocations of all kinds could be made zonewide for 2 shifts of power.

5. I have no idea what the "resisted by Endurance" thing in Orbius's stats means. As far as I know, blocks are never resisted with anything.

Ahh, didn't see where you were getting it from.  And yeah, its primary usefulness is in the all-actions block that directly contradicts the spell description.

As for resisting? I think that was a bone thrown in to mitigate the vileness a bit.

The zonewide for two shifts thing is a general rule for spells.  Blocks have their own specific way of dealing with zone-wide-ness though.  This is why I store my pdfs in my Dropbox Private folder.  Always have them wherever I go and there's case law giving me the OK copyright-wise.

Heh, 10000000 exchanges of duration on a pixie will likely result in you being taken out by old age while the pixie twiddles its thumbs.  Pixie: 1  You: 0

To be purely technical the RAW doesn't allow you to extend offensive blocks zone wide.

Actually, it does allow zone-wide offensive blocks.  Unfortunately:

Generally speaking, if the block can affect more than one person, it can only prevent one type of action.

Pew, pew, pew, no zone-wide grapples.  Ever.

Speaking of... Orbius = pwned.

When you create a block, the block has to be specific and clear in two ways: who it's intended to affect, and what types of action (attack, block, maneuver, move) it's trying to prevent.

Orbius is specific in the description on preventing breathing, therefore that is all it prevents.