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The Dresden Files => DFRPG => Topic started by: Chee on December 17, 2013, 11:34:42 PM
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Okay, so I'm starting up a new game soon, and one of my players asked me about sanctums. Now, in the Resources, it talks about how to get the rating for it, but what does the rating mean? What is the difference between a +1 Sanctum and a +3? How does that interact with doing rituals and such at home? For that matter, what can you do in a +3 Lab that you can't in a +1?
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Your World, p 142:
Academic research requires a library (page 140), while research through experimentation requires a laboratory. The quality of these workspaces determines the hardest possible question you can answer within them (so a question of Good difficulty requires a Good library or better). If you attempt to answer a question in a library that’s not equipped to answer it, the GM is encouraged to be up-front about its shortcomings.
The rating on your laboratory/library/etc. limits the difficulty of questions you can ask without leaving the laboratory. Anything above that rating means that you need to find answers elsewhere.
As for Rituals/Thaumaturgy, I don't know that it has any impact. Your Lore skill already determines what you can do without preparation.
Has anyone else used laboratories in their games to restrict/complement Thaumaturgy?
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In my experience, people just ignore those rules completely.
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In my experience, people just ignore those rules completely.
Page 140 lists the various workspace types and their uses (including "Lore: Arcane Research - Arcane Library" and "Lore: Arcane Spellwork & Ritual - Arcane Sanctum"), but I cannot find any explicit mention that a given Thaumaturgy spell needs a sanctum/workspace/etc., or how it fits in.
Logically, I imagine it would fit into an implicit "research" phase to developing rituals, but I suspect that most of us gloss over as part of the "Ritual Declarations" phase.
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In my experience, people just ignore those rules completely.
Side note: in my Bulldogs! game, I was ignoring a similar set of workspace/crafting rules. Thankfully, the players were alright with me retroactively asserting that subsystem. And luckily they managed to legitimately acquire a number of quality +6 workspaces.
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Meh, oh well, then. I've ignored them for this long, I can ignore them a while longer. Thanks guys.
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In my experience, people just ignore those rules completely.
That's what I do as well. Haven't found a good way to use those rules yet.
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This is how I use them:
Question: "hey what does this ancient relic do?"
GM: make a roll to see if you know. The difficulty is 6
Player: I fail.
GM: O.k...so you don't know off-hand. You'll have to research it. Do you have a quality 6 library? No? O.k....ADVENTURE!
There's a quality 6 library in the Nevernever owned by a Winter noble.
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Has anyone else used laboratories in their games to restrict/complement Thaumaturgy?
Yes but just as an aspect ("Well Stocked Lab" or equivalent) to use for the spell. A Resource declaration in other words.
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Logically, I imagine it would fit into an implicit "research" phase to developing rituals...
What implicit research phase?
This is how I use them:
Question: "hey what does this ancient relic do?"
GM: make a roll to see if you know. The difficulty is 6
Player: I fail.
GM: O.k...so you don't know off-hand. You'll have to research it. Do you have a quality 6 library? No? O.k....ADVENTURE!
There's a quality 6 library in the Nevernever owned by a Winter noble.
A whole adventure just to get permission to spend extra time on a difficulty 6 roll?
Wouldn't it be easier just to spend a Fate Point or three to succeed at knowing off-hand?
Maybe if it was a difficulty 12 roll or something, but...for some incomprehensible reason, only the best libraries in the world contain information that your average university professor doesn't know off-hand. And the internet is apparently a rating 0 library, and therefore basically useless.
Library ratings are crazy low across the board, honestly.
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Yes, you wouldn't do it for every roll, only when it would be fun. And yes, a 6 would just be the justification for spending time based on time chart finding a place to do the research or making a resource check to rent a facility that you could tag for a boost. The 12 could be full out adventure. I was just picking an arbitrary number.
The point is that you have to go out and find a place to do the research which may or may not complicate a characters life. They can't cloister themselves in their home and have every answer.
I agree with you with the ratings, though.
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I'm in a group that has three different GM's rotating as need be and this has yet to come up. Usually it's hand-waved by the GM in the chair on that particular night, though sometimes when Lore fails and the party is willing, a point of Summer Fae debt might be accrued to discover something...
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One way to handle it (this coming from yet another GM that outright ignores it--the characters having access to Monoc and Edinburgh helps) is to have the Sanctum/Library rating modify the relevant skill. So a character with a 3 in Scholarship normally has a 4 when she's working in her Superb library. A wizard gets to bump his Lore rating up to 5 from 4 when he's doing his thaumaturgy in his personal, well-stocked Sanctum.
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That's a neat idea.
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What implicit research phase?
In the narrative fiction behind creating a ritual, I feel that usually there is some research involved about how to go about something. I meant implicit (implied) as opposed to explicit, because research isn't explicitly mentioned in Thaumaturgy (but it is implied by the entries I mentioned earlier about workspaces and their uses). It could be an error of omission, or an item that wasn't cut from the final product, but wither way, there is a tiny little conflict in the rules between those two items, and it falls down to (what I feel is) an implied research component to Thaumaturgy.
A whole adventure just to get permission to spend extra time on a difficulty 6 roll?
Wouldn't it be easier just to spend a Fate Point or three to succeed at knowing off-hand?
Gotta have the Fate Points to do that, but it is certainly a good point. That said, the RAW indicate that the quality of your library/workspace/etc. represents the top difficulty of the problem you can solve at your library/workspace/etc., so having a +3 library but needing to answer a +6 question wouldn't be helped by additional time: the +6 question is narratively outside of the permissions given by the +3 library.
All of this, of course, is if you bother to use those rules.
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That said, the RAW indicate that the quality of your library/workspace/etc. represents the top difficulty of the problem you can solve at your library/workspace/etc., so having a +3 library but needing to answer a +6 question wouldn't be helped by additional time: the +6 question is narratively outside of the permissions given by the +3 library.
But you're only limited by the library if you need to do research, and you only need to do research if you failed the original roll.
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But you're only limited by the library if you need to do research, and you only need to do research if you failed the original roll.
That's true!
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Maybe if it was a difficulty 12 roll or something, but...for some incomprehensible reason, only the best libraries in the world contain information that your average university professor doesn't know off-hand. And the internet is apparently a rating 0 library, and therefore basically useless.
Library ratings are crazy low across the board, honestly.
Yes, this is kind of ridiculous.
It would be a bit more sensible in maybe a game set before 1995-2000 or so (though the ratings are STILL too low) but in the modern world as of 2013, I'd say the internet has better info (IF you know how to find/distinguish good info... but someone with a decent Scholarship WILL) than most paper libraries. I can see that you would certainly have better access to e.g. technical journals in the library of a large university... but that's a very good library. And if all you want is to find the answer rather than have the right literature citation...
The internet should be at LEAST Good rating, probably Great, IMO, for mundane (Scholarship) research.