So, the limit is how much lore the caster can put together? That's not something you can just keep pumping in to the spell at intervals?The way Thaumaturgy works is:
I prefer to increase the difficulties of Declarations as players make more of them. That way they can't make them endlessly.
Do you have a formula?
I've come to realize, that the number of shifts that are reasonable for a spell can be limited by the narration of the spell better than an arbitrary mechanical number.
True enough.Honestly, by now if I have to start crunching so many numbers, I feel like I'm doing something wrong and look for a more elegant way to solve things.
Sadly, doing Thaumaturgy often involves computing a lot of numbers that don't actually matter because it all comes down to a narrative judgement.
Do you use the Thaumaturgy rules at all, these days?I do, though I am always on the lookout for alternative approaches.
Or, just have a phone ring to break their concentration. ;)If you are casting a major ritual (or really most any ritual for that matter) in an area where something like a ringing phone can be heard then you deserve to get screwed over.
Cracking discussion guys! I find that when there is no real risk, players can potentially create stupendously powerful spells and they have begun to get wise to this. Some good solutions to this. I may start all attempts to create an aspect at Mediocre, and increase the difficulty by 1 for each additional one created representing the casters fatigue. Or use Sanctaphrax's +2 Difficulty per repeated use to encourage originality. Also how do you judge how long all this takes to prepare? The rules are a little wooly on this.
Those values sound ridiculously high to me. If that were the case, no one would be able to get through Harry's wards, or anyone attempting to would be instantly killed.Unless they did the exact same thing.
If you are casting a major ritual (or really most any ritual for that matter) in an area where something like a ringing phone can be heard then you deserve to get screwed over.Screwing a player over is nothing I would want to do. But the things described are excellent points for a compel, which should make the game more interesting and more fun in the long run.
One of the final steps before casting that I recommend is to throw up a short duration low shift ward specifically stated to block noise, animals, bugs, etc. that will last the duration of your casting.If you have the time to throw up a ward like that, then you have the time to cast that spell without any hindrance at all, and if that is the case: why roll? Just have the spell be a success, and you just have to worry about if the effect you want to accomplish should be within the abilities of your character or not.
Now start stacking those up. Given a week or two of downtime you can stack up taggable aspects worth +50 or so without too much difficulty or issue. Now when you want to do your big ritual you just tag them all.The question remains: Is this really interesting? It's kind of like the "skip a scene" suggestion to add more shifts to a spell. Yes, you can do that, but if you want to fuel a big spell like that, you might as well not play at all.
Unless they did the exact same thing.
Besides, Harry really doesn't have the right temperament to make a good wizard. He's too straightforward and direct and it shows in pretty much everything he does.
Just look at the difference between how he shields and how McCoy shields. Dresden fights force with force, although now he tends to say deflect bullets instead of stopping them cold. McCoy has enchanted his robes to absorb the kinetic energy of any bullets that hit them (see Changes). What is the end result of these two approaches? It costs Dresden energy to stop bullets from hitting him, it gives McCoy energy when bullets strike him.
Dresden rarely "cheats", and it hurts him significantly as a wizard. It's honestly perhaps his biggest weakness. He's been getting better at it and he is young but he is still too direct.
The idea of using dozens (or hundreds) of prefatory rituals just to be able to use a greater ritual in the end? Does that sound like something Dresden would really do to you? Not that he can't do it, just that it would never occur to him to do it.
Given a week or two of downtime you can stack up taggable aspects worth +50 or so without too much difficulty or issue. Now when you want to do your big ritual you just tag them all.
Note, however, that if you do this then your GM is liable to have NPC's do it as well. A wizard who has been around for hundreds of years? Well expect thousands of "temporary" aspects that he can tag at any time. Thousand shift evocations are perfectly possible.
Yes, but players certainly will try this stuff.Which is fine and dandy. Do it when they aren't behind wards pretty much at least as strong as what they are casting and other entities *notice*.
Tags don't work that way. You have to use them quickly.Then the whole maneuvers part of thaumaturgy is utterly worthless and doesn't work at all. It's flat out called out at the end of the section that one of the primary uses for it is to avoid fate point expenditures and that the effects can be held for later use (either time delayed or set to trigger in specific situations).
Now start stacking those up. Given a week or two of downtime you can stack up taggable aspects worth +50 or so without too much difficulty or issue. Now when you want to do your big ritual you just tag them all.
Under your ruling you could not, say, perform a ritual to give an enemy bad luck and then go across town, enter battle with them, and tag that aspect.
For thaumaturgy to work at all and make any sense you have to be able to tag aspects that it has applied after an indefinite period of time (i.e. the duration of the ritual).
Maneuvers certainly don't work that way and tags in general don't. Declarations for Thaumaturgy Complexity may work like that (though they usually aren't interchangeably), but at that point it's no longer downtime and you are burning your retroactive deceleration window; it's also really good justifications for your potion slots and enchanted items not refreshing.If thaum applied maneuvers can't do this then they are utterly worthless and don't actually do what the section in YS says that they are supposed to do; save the wizard fate points.
That said, if you don't go into too much detail, these sorts of rituals can make good background for the main story, and can usually be hand-waved as aspect shifts or as a reason for having a particular location with better wards than the default.If you allow it in back story then it should be allowed in the main story. It's the same world. That it is rare that the characters will have the time to really take advantage of this during the main story is irrelevant. Take a look at most of the Dresden books, they take place entirely over a day or two. Cold Days (from the birthday party to the end) took less than 48 hours.
As an example I caused in a game, a Biomancer augmented the local Seagull population with divination networked biological spy ware over the course of a year's downtime. Done in play with immense detail, the ritual to augment one flock could have easily required complexity 20+. Done as a background ritual, it resulted in the City acquiring the sticky aspect of "Avery's Seagull Panopticon", justified a much lower complexity divination ritual for unreliable short term post-cognition scrying of places where seagulls were in the city, and a separate ritual for similar real time over-watch. Oh, and many many compels.And I create my divination networks in play and over time. Granted, I also take blood from every enemy that I defeat and have the few minutes required to get it and get tons from blood banks (complete with names, addresses, and telephone numbers).
Then the whole maneuvers part of thaumaturgy is utterly worthless and doesn't work at all. It's flat out called out at the end of the section that one of the primary uses for it is to avoid fate point expenditures and that the effects can be held for later use (either time delayed or set to trigger in specific situations).
Under your ruling you could not, say, perform a ritual to give an enemy bad luck and then go across town, enter battle with them, and tag that aspect.
For thaumaturgy to work at all and make any sense you have to be able to tag aspects that it has applied after an indefinite period of time (i.e. the duration of the ritual).
Because temporary aspects from manuevers are transient, these sorts of spells tend to be very carefully timed or triggered so that the aspect of effect manifests when its needed...For a more lasting effect, it's time to look at contests and conflicts.
If thaum applied maneuvers can't do this then they are utterly worthless and don't actually do what the section in YS says that they are supposed to do; save the wizard fate points.
I quote:"Or triggered".
You can delay the maneuver, but you can't just have it hanging around until you need it.
I think Tippy is talking about aspects created by thaumaturgy. If so, you simply up the difficulty to move it into the appropriate time scale. Not free but not all that hard either.Pretty much. If you don't up the time then it lasts a scene but if you push the time scale up then it lasts until the time runs out or it is first tagged (at which point it hangs around until the time runs out as something that you can spend a fate point to invoke).
Sure they can, it's just they aren't free hanging. If I do a ritual for 4 refresh in temporary powers, I could include 12 complexity worth of maneuvers to immediately pay for the first scene of use of those temporary powers. If I do a preparatory ritual in support of a larger ritual, I can immediately burn the tags from the preparatory ritual into complexity for the larger ritual.
My opinion is that the first is true, but if either the first or second is true then you can stack tags virtually indefinitely for later use (subject pretty much just to the amount of time you have to devote to doing so).I think it really depends on what exactly you are doing. If you want to curse someone as the result of your spell, the aspect can linger until you trigger it (in which case the trigger is the tag in form of an invoke for effect). If you want to give yourself nightvision to find your way out of a cave, that's better used immediately. Your preparatory aspects could go both ways, I guess.
Creating thaumaturgy aspects to do more powerful thaumaturgy to do more aspect to do more powerful thaumaturgy...Actually, it's an overly complex method of getting numbers of aspects. You could presumably get the same number by being creative with declarations. As far as your spell is concerned, there's no mechanical difference between the declared non-magical ritual of "Cleansing Yourself in Pure Water" and a previous scene's ritual of creating an "Empowered Ruby". The story of the spell is different but not the result.
I don't know, It just seems like a cheap trick. Especially if those aspects are just "stored power" or something similarly bland.
Creating thaumaturgy aspects to do more powerful thaumaturgy to do more aspect to do more powerful thaumaturgy...And necromancy isn't? That is literally "stored power" except worth +30 or so to a ritual.
I don't know, It just seems like a cheap trick. Especially if those aspects are just "stored power" or something similarly bland.
Also, it's like going to the gym for 2 hours before hiking in the Himalayas, it isn't really going to help you, you will just have less energy in you when you do the main ritual. Pretty much the same amount you just spent on the preparatory ritual. Yes, technically, the system allows for such shenanigans, as long as you don't take a consequence to represent the fatigue, but to me it just doesn't make sense, and I would be very careful in allowing it, if at all.It's more like going to the gym every day for two hours and doing this for months (or years) in preparation for hiking in the Himalayas.
Big rituals, to me, are about getting the right ingredients, the right set of mind, making a personal sacrifice, and so on, not merely the amount of power you draw or how many shifts the ritual is.Except that really conflicts with the fluff and crunch of the setting. All you need for a ritual, any ritual, is 1) will, 2) a power source sufficient to do what you want, and 3) enough control to direct that power. Everything else is just a stand in for one of those three things. And generally, the more power you have to throw at a problem the simpler the ritual is (see Sell's heart ripper for an example).
It's like... if you have a lever and try to lift a car, you can apply as much power as you want, if you lever is made of cheap plywood, it is going to break in two. You are going to need a lever that is sturdy enough to lift the car (which is the ingredients, the circle, the ritual, the symbolic link and so forth), as well as the actual force to lift the car. And it looks like you are only looking to get the power.And what if you just have the power to cancel out gravity over the area of the car? No lever required, just putting in far more power. Or you can use a ritual to set up a block and tackle and achieve the end result far more efficiently. Or you can connect a chain to a motorized crane and have that do the lifting (all your ritual does is provide the chain).
I think it really depends on what exactly you are doing. If you want to curse someone as the result of your spell, the aspect can linger until you trigger it (in which case the trigger is the tag in form of an invoke for effect). If you want to give yourself nightvision to find your way out of a cave, that's better used immediately. Your preparatory aspects could go both ways, I guess.Curse or blessing shouldn't matter. If one can hang around to be triggered later than so can the other. Maybe I have some downtime so I go and put the aspect "night vision" set to trigger when I say "night vision mode alpha 1 activate" and that will hang around for a year (or longer). Six months down the road I need night vision so I say "night vision mode alpha 1 activate" and tag for effect (or the +2).
If you want to give a wizard an edge (not that they really need them), just allow him to go in with a "drawing in my magic" aspect from his discipline, or allow him to have enchanted items with maneuvers in them, that he doesn't have to spend an action to activate. That's pretty much what this "giving a wizard an edge" thing is about, I think. Giving them the opportunity to create their own fate points, if they have the time and know what's to come, so they can link to that.And when instead the wizard goes and prepares a ritual with a hundred tags that are each "pre created form of X evocation" so that he can tag one each time he throws out that evocation for +2 to Control? Perhaps he also has a ritual that does the same thing except with "magical targeting HUD" that can each be tagged for another +2.
Except that no you couldn't under the rules interpretation that Sanctaphrax is using. Those 12 complexity worth of maneuvers must be tagged in the scene that they are created. If you rule that you can have them hanging around for later use to power one thing then you can have them hanging around for later use to power another thing.
And necromancy isn't? That is literally "stored power" except worth +30 or so to a ritual.Nope, it isn't. Killing someone to fuel your magic is a hell of a story to tell. Besides, not all people are created equal in this context, either. Getting any regular Joe from the street will not help the necromancer nearly as much as getting someone close to a named character, or even a friend of the PCs.
If you can do that then why can't you store up power in other ways and then dump it all into some major ritual? It certainly fits with the spirit and fluff of the setting and is rules legal.I'm not saying you can't, you misunderstand me. I'm saying it's boring. From a mechanical standpoint, you are absolutely right, you could clearly stack yourself up to the rafters with whatever aspects you like. But Fate isn't all about mechanics, it is about narration as well. That's why I try to look at the aspects not as +2 mechanical things, but as objects I use in the ritual. The whole drawing of power comes entirely during the casting of the spell itself.
It's the same end result of necromancy but you are just trading a greatly increased time requirement for not breaking one of the laws of magic.Time should always be an issue. If not, then there isn't really any tension in the story. And Killing someone to fuel a spell should have an even bigger impact on the story. It shouldn't just be a convenient way to get the spell done quicker.
It's more like going to the gym every day for two hours and doing this for months (or years) in preparation for hiking in the Himalayas.That would be where specializations come into play. You do something for a long time, you get good at it.
Except that really conflicts with the fluff and crunch of the setting. All you need for a ritual, any ritual, is 1) will, 2) a power source sufficient to do what you want, and 3) enough control to direct that power. Everything else is just a stand in for one of those three things. And generally, the more power you have to throw at a problem the simpler the ritual is (see Sell's heart ripper for an example).Not at all. Shoving more power into your spell will require more control of you, or you will go boom. Or maybe look at it this way: You may be able to use your aspects on the casting part of the spell, but you would not be able to use them to increase the complexity of your spell. And if you have enough time to gather that many aspects to cast the spell, I wouldn't make you roll on casting it anyway. The complexity of a thaumaturgy spell is what I called a lever in my simile before. No matter how you do it, you have to have an understanding of what you are doing. A plan, a shape that you can pour your magic into. That's the interesting part of the spell, and to me it is the important one. If you are then casting the spell under pressure of time, because a horde of bad guys is coming your way, then it is getting interesting, and we will start rolling.
And what if you just have the power to cancel out gravity over the area of the car? No lever required, just putting in far more power. Or you can use a ritual to set up a block and tackle and achieve the end result far more efficiently. Or you can connect a chain to a motorized crane and have that do the lifting (all your ritual does is provide the chain).
Each one of those requires progressively less power but requires more preparation or external factors.
Curse or blessing shouldn't matter. If one can hang around to be triggered later than so can the other. Maybe I have some downtime so I go and put the aspect "night vision" set to trigger when I say "night vision mode alpha 1 activate" and that will hang around for a year (or longer). Six months down the road I need night vision so I say "night vision mode alpha 1 activate" and tag for effect (or the +2).And that I would simply not allow. Creating aspects or magical equipment in your downtime is covered far and good by enchanted items. If you want more, get more enchanted item slots. If you need something on the fly, leave some potion slots open and declare a night vision potion.
And when instead the wizard goes and prepares a ritual with a hundred tags that are each "pre created form of X evocation" so that he can tag one each time he throws out that evocation for +2 to Control? Perhaps he also has a ritual that does the same thing except with "magical targeting HUD" that can each be tagged for another +2.Again, this is already covered with focus items. Anything like you described above is downright cheating.
Now the next hundred times he casts that spell he can throw it out with +4 to the control roll (or more, depending upon how many such rituals he wants to stack).
Of course it does nothing when he steps into a location and suddenly gets hit with the compel "block external sources of magic".
The story of the spell is different but not the result.I know what you mean, but to me, that is a big deal.
It is worth noting that I generally asked players to 'tell the story of the spell'* when creating rituals. Of course I also allowed friendly allies (i.e. other PCs) to help with their own related maneuvers and declarations. In any case, this takes up real game time and generally means the group agrees on what rituals are being attempted.+1
If one PC wizard wants to spend years on rituals, that's fine - he's an NPC now, what's your next character?And again: +1
I can in fact do this under Sanctaphrax's interpretations (at least as I understand them), I'm immediately burning the tags at the end of the ritual, specifically for the purpose of paying for the 'first scene in which this powers are relevant'. The tags aren't hanging around, though the aspects may be. That is part of why the downtime preparatory thaumaturgy doesn't really work, as you will have had to spend the tags on something specific (or have lost them) by the time downtime ends.And if you can do "first scene in which these powers are relevant" you can also do "first scene in which ritual XYZ is cast" or the like. Exact same end effect.
Also, with regards to chaining rituals, the sequence:Except that you don't. Nothing is stopping you from casting twenty rituals that will each hang around for a month and then using them to cast a 40 complexity ritual at the end of the month.
Xn+1 = S+floor[(Xn-1)*2/3]
is convergent, limited to Xinf < S*3, and generally rather close to S*2 for the values of S in the range of normal practitioners effective lore (even at effective lore of 8, you hit a cap of 22 complexity after 5 iterations, having has to channel and control 96 power).
It rarely makes sense, effectiveness wise, to do more than a single preparatory ritual per practitioner.No, it rarely makes sense to do more than three or four. Because that's about the most that you can get with a duration long enough to cover the final ritual, But that lets you spend a day to cast a ritual that will hang around for a few weeks with an aspect to be tagged. Do that every day for two weeks and you have +28 complexity to use, giving you a ritual that is good enough to provide 2-3 such aspects and will last a mortal lifetime. Make it last a year and it's good for 4-5 such aspects.
Nope, it isn't. Killing someone to fuel your magic is a hell of a story to tell.Not really, at least not if you are actually playing someone with the mind set to really be a good warlock or necromancer. Do you think that Kemmler angst over the fact that he is sacrificing a few hundred people for whatever ritual he wants to do? For him it's "ok, go on to town, grab the first dozen people I see, sacrifice them to put the whole town to sleep, stack them up like cordwood to power uber ritual number 1. now what should I have for dinner?"
Besides, not all people are created equal in this context, either. Getting any regular Joe from the street will not help the necromancer nearly as much as getting someone close to a named character, or even a friend of the PCs.The rules don't say that. It's just as hard to kill a PC (assuming that the PC is outside of wards and lacking relevant powers) as it is to kill any random vanilla mortal. The reason that most rank and file NPC's don't get consequence tracks is that they are rarely willing to fight to the bitter end and concede early.
I'm not saying you can't, you misunderstand me. I'm saying it's boring. From a mechanical standpoint, you are absolutely right, you could clearly stack yourself up to the rafters with whatever aspects you like. But Fate isn't all about mechanics, it is about narration as well. That's why I try to look at the aspects not as +2 mechanical things, but as objects I use in the ritual. The whole drawing of power comes entirely during the casting of the spell itself.
Time should always be an issue. If not, then there isn't really any tension in the story.Dresden averages one to two major cases per year. There is tons of down time in there where he could be stacking up useful things for later cases. It's the same kind of thing.
And Killing someone to fuel a spell should have an even bigger impact on the story. It shouldn't just be a convenient way to get the spell done quicker.That should depend entirely on the story.
That would be where specializations come into play. You do something for a long time, you get good at it.Your specialization would be "hiking in mountains" the ritual would be "preparing myself to hike at these altitude for a long duration in these temperatures, learning the routes, studying previous peoples hikes, etc."
Not at all. Shoving more power into your spell will require more control of you, or you will go boom. Or maybe look at it this way: You may be able to use your aspects on the casting part of the spell, but you would not be able to use them to increase the complexity of your spell.Except all complexity is is short hand for the power, control, etc. of the spell. You can slit a guys throat (which fluff wise does nothing but provide power) to reduce complexity. You can slit another guys throat to power the actual casting the the spell and you can dump the backlash on a third guy to control the casting of that spell.
And if you have enough time to gather that many aspects to cast the spell, I wouldn't make you roll on casting it anyway. The complexity of a thaumaturgy spell is what I called a lever in my simile before. No matter how you do it, you have to have an understanding of what you are doing. A plan, a shape that you can pour your magic into. That's the interesting part of the spell, and to me it is the important one. If you are then casting the spell under pressure of time, because a horde of bad guys is coming your way, then it is getting interesting, and we will start rolling.And then I tag "ritual X part 1" through "ritual X part 20" aspects that I have precast along with "power storage X part 1" through "power storage X part 20" to provide the power in one round and "power control X part 1" through "power control X part 20" to provide the control.
And that I would simply not allow. Creating aspects or magical equipment in your downtime is covered far and good by enchanted items. If you want more, get more enchanted item slots. If you need something on the fly, leave some potion slots open and declare a night vision potion.Leaving aside the fact that the enchanted item rules (and potion rules) suck, that makes no sense. If you can put some aspect on one character to trigger later then you can put some aspect on yourself to trigger later. Whether that aspect is good or bad for that character is irrelevant.
Again, this is already covered with focus items.Which doesn't really matter.
Anything like you described above is downright cheating.Which is what magic is all about. Tracking someone after an hour through an entire major metropolis with nothing more than a single hair is "cheating" as well.
Besides, where do you want to store all that power? Harry got a headache from the power he was able to draw in within one minute. His head would explode from a weeks worth, let alone a yearBecause Harry was storing that power in his head and wasn't drawing it through ritual, making a battery, or anything else. Where you store it and how you store it depends entirely upon the table and the wizard.
Items? Let's say every aspect is equal to an enchanted item slot, that means those are 100 item slots. There is box on page 281 that suggests sizes for enchanted items. If we scale this up to 100 item slots (roughly doubling in size every 4 slots), we are at about the size of a mid sized town. Or he could carry 100 rings, which doesn't make it any more plausible.Again, the rules should treat identical situations identically. If you can dump a curse on someone to give them a hundred +2 "Bad Luck" aspects that will last ten years (and you explicitly can do this) then you can do the exact same thing with "good luck" aspects or any other aspect.
And like I said above, while I would allow "Empowered Ruby" to power the spell, I would not necessarily allow it to add to the complexity.And that shows a distinct misunderstanding of what complexity represents. That the rules let you slit a persons throat to reduce complexity; or tap a thunderstorm; or tap a leyline (all of which are called out as examples of ways to reduce complexity) means that "Empowered Ruby" is just as viable a choice.
It's also worth noting, it took time to build the power and the power build-up was detectable. Which is what brought Harry in to shut it down.
Point is, building power like that will make you a target. ;D
All you are doing with those thousands and thousands of aspects is have an "I Win!" Button ready for everything. Rampant werewolf clan in town? Stomped. Black court scourge? Stomped. All in 2 minutes, game night is over, now what?Except that you only have that one "I win!" button and once it is used it is gone. So you press the button to deal with the rampaging werewolf clan and then what do you do three days later when the town suddenly has a couple of dozen higher end Red Court vamps, three Wardens investigating, Summer and Winter spies in town, and a White Court delegation show up; all attracted by the giant amount of power that was thrown out a few days ago and trying to learn exactly what happened and who did it. Or just showing up randomly.
I understand where you are coming from, I know that mechanically it is absolutely no problem to do what you are proposing, I am just saying, that it doesn't make sense if you look at it as a whole. I mean, you say so yourself, Harry has enough downtime to do exactly what you propose. Hell, if power was all he needed to free Susan from being a red court, he'd have that ready in the year he's been studying it. No, there is, and there should be, more to it.Except he doesn't have the power. Mother Winter had the power. Want to reverse Red Court infection? Well then you need enough power to overcome the "Red Court" mantle that has been placed on the infected.
If any spell you want to cast can be cast with generic "Ritual preparation aspect #1-#20", then any spell you do is interchangeable, and there is no story to it.Nah, those weren't generalized aspects. They were for a specific ritual. Such as "Ward Breaker part 1" through "Ward Breaker part 20". Those aspects only being useable for the "Ward Breaker" ritual and not to, say, turn a fly into a pony. You need different aspects if you want ones that can be generalized to any ritual.
That's pretty much what I am trying to get across: Not all aspects are created equal. Yes, mechanically, you could get a +2 from a blessed cross or from an unplugged phone. For that matter, you could pick your nose and declare that an aspect, but that doesn't mean it is a GOOD aspect for the story of the spell.I never said otherwise. The point is that you can fluff aspects pretty much however you want and is in large part table dependent. Maybe a lucky aspect is tagged and the story effect is "got really lucky that today happens to be the one day every century with this specific stellar alignment that benefits this ritual" or maybe it is "sees X ingredient sitting by the side of the road".
What's more, if you do it, so can I as the GM, and we are in sort of an irresistible force meets immovable object situation. On the other hand, there is a rule of "if everyone has it, nobody has it". And the differences that are still there are well represented within the scope of Items and Specializations.Which is a problem solved by story telling and the narrative. I would say that every major power has done things like this. If you want to fight at the "god" tier then the gloves come off, you only make it to that tier and survive by doing things like this and having your own counters to them. Does this mean every Red Court vamp has something like this? No, but the Lords of the Outer Night sure as hell do; and if you start blasting through rank and file Red Court vamps in job lots then one of the LotON is dispatched to deal with you and you find out just how thoroughly outclassed you are with your twenty years of life against the LotON's two thousand years of life.
That's why the Merlin can throw up a ward like he did, he has tons of specializations and focus items for it, because that's what he's been doing for all those years.Then his refresh is in the -100+ range.
With your aspect-avalanche, he could have simply obliterated everything in sight.Except that those he was facing have the same things. They could have spent their stored power to bring down his ward but then they are faced with being greatly weakened in the future (or maybe they had already spent a large portion of it), or they can let the White Council escape and save that power for another day.
Even against a vampire army, a block doesn't necessarily have hundreds of shifts. 10-12, maybe 15 should be more than enough to buy enough time to escape, and that's easily done with skill+specialization+focus items. Maybe a consequence to boot.Fifteen shifts shouldn't last even a single exchange. Red King + LotON + RC Nobles working together and they can easily throw out enough power to rip down such a ward.
Or maybe even easier, you can do it as a concession. Instead of fighting it out to the bitter end, you agree to end the fight, maybe the Merlin's player throws in a fate point and declares, that since he is the "Master of Wards", he raises a ward to help his side get away, even if that means leaving behind 3 wardens, because they are too far away. Because that's pretty much what the ward in this moment is, a way to end the fight without too many losses.And if you can concede in that manner then you should be able to raise the ward in a similar stretch of time without spending a fate point. Conceding by essentially saying "I'm spending a fate point to throw out a 30+ complexity ward in one to two exchanges" really doesn't seem inline with the game.
And if you really want or need a spell THAT powerful, I think it is better served to be a plot device, rather than something with incredibly high numbers on it.It is a plot device. Seriously, I would let a player do it a few times and then hit them with a compel in their next fight along the lines of "you triggered a ward upon entering that removed all standing magic effects", no potions, no enchanted items, no ritual boosts, no focus items. Unless they have the four or so fate points to buy off the compel then they are suddenly in deep shit and the character should learn to not always depend on such external aids.
Where is your problem with enchanted items, potions and focus items? I feel that that is a part of the magic rules that actually works pretty well.The fact that you can't create enchanted items with standing magical effect is a big one. It's literally impossible under the enchanted item rules to create a magic light bulb that will stay active for weeks straight, despite that requiring far less energy than (say) blowing a car through a skyscraper. One of those can be done under the enchanted item rules, the other can't.
"Or triggered".
"I say bippity boppoity boo" is a careful trigger.
Nope, it isn't. Killing someone to fuel your magic is a hell of a story to tell. Besides, not all people are created equal in this context, either. Getting any regular Joe from the street will not help the necromancer nearly as much as getting someone close to a named character, or even a friend of the PCs.
The fact that you can't create enchanted items with standing magical effect is a big one. It's literally impossible under the enchanted item rules to create a magic light bulb that will stay active for weeks straight, despite that requiring far less energy than (say) blowing a car through a skyscraper. One of those can be done under the enchanted item rules, the other can't.
Then there is the fact that in setting you can do something like enchant your duster so that it drains the kinetic energy of anything that hits it and transfers it into rings to be later discharged as force attacks but under the rules you can't. The best you get is lowish level armor for one or two scenes and no ability to use that absorbed energy for anything else.
You have the inability to stockpile potions, despite the fact that not being able to do so makes absolutely no sense. You literally have to spend more refresh to stuff an extra vial into your backpack. Under the rules stuffing four extra vials into your back pack is worth as much as inhuman toughness irrc. Please tell me how that makes sense?
A potion focused character is better off playing Morrowind alchemy with potions to produce single massively powerful potions than they are producing a couple dozen or hundred potions that they keep sitting in their closet at home (or in their potions belt) to select from for the situation that they expect to be facing.
From a balance perspective they might work alright but from a fluff/in setting perspective they absolutely suck.
I think part of the problem here, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that Emperor Tippy is looking at the mechanics as a representation of the game world's reality.That's what I've been trying to get at, yes. Thanks for the clarification.
Which is a problem solved by story telling and the narrative. I would say that every major power has done things like this. If you want to fight at the "god" tier then the gloves come off, you only make it to that tier and survive by doing things like this and having your own counters to them. Does this mean every Red Court vamp has something like this? No, but the Lords of the Outer Night sure as hell do; and if you start blasting through rank and file Red Court vamps in job lots then one of the LotON is dispatched to deal with you and you find out just how thoroughly outclassed you are with your twenty years of life against the LotON's two thousand years of life.It will play out in the narrative, and it should, but you don't have to have thousands of aspects at the ready to do so.
Except that you only have that one "I win!" button and once it is used it is gone. So you press the button to deal with the rampaging werewolf clan and then what do you do three days later when the town suddenly has a couple of dozen higher end Red Court vamps, three Wardens investigating, Summer and Winter spies in town, and a White Court delegation show up; all attracted by the giant amount of power that was thrown out a few days ago and trying to learn exactly what happened and who did it. Or just showing up randomly.So at the beginning of every game I would have to throw something at you to steal all your prepared aspects, just so we can play a game you don't just stomp? That's kind of silly, don't you think?
Or maybe you are faced with your significant other being kidnapped and being used as a ritual sacrifice but the wards protecting the site are fifty or so shifts strong. If you hadn't blow all your power to stomp those werewolves then you would be able to spend it to bring down this ward but now you are faced with either resorting to necromancy, finding some other way in at possibly equally extreme cost, or letting your SO die and be sacrificed.
Fifteen shifts shouldn't last even a single exchange. Red King + LotON + RC Nobles working together and they can easily throw out enough power to rip down such a ward.That's if you are assuming that the opposition is always fighting perfectly. I as a GM would let the red court vampires run into the ward for an exchange at first, and once they realize what is going on, they can start working together. So that ward will buy you at least one exchange, which can be plenty.
And if you can concede in that manner then you should be able to raise the ward in a similar stretch of time without spending a fate point. Conceding by essentially saying "I'm spending a fate point to throw out a 30+ complexity ward in one to two exchanges" really doesn't seem inline with the game.This goes back to what Wordmaker said. From the perspective of what the Merlin does, you are right, if I wanted to simulate him throwing up a high power ward out of nowhere, both those accounts would have to be the same. But that's not what I am doing. I am looking at it from a narrative point of view.
The fact that you can't create enchanted items with standing magical effect is a big one. It's literally impossible under the enchanted item rules to create a magic light bulb that will stay active for weeks straight, despite that requiring far less energy than (say) blowing a car through a skyscraper. One of those can be done under the enchanted item rules, the other can't.I would probably not raise an eyebrow at an always on magical light bulb. Not any more than I would charge another player something for a flashlight. It's something so mundane, that it doesn't really need anything in terms of refresh or parts there of. That's for things that really have an impact on the story. And the more impact they are supposed to have on the story, the more of your limited resources you should spend. If you want to play a wizard with tons of magical equipment, you'll have to pay for that in refresh. I know, other games don't do that, but as I (and now Wordmaker) said before, this ain't other games.
You have the inability to stockpile potions, despite the fact that not being able to do so makes absolutely no sense. You literally have to spend more refresh to stuff an extra vial into your backpack. Under the rules stuffing four extra vials into your back pack is worth as much as inhuman toughness irrc. Please tell me how that makes sense?Potions are, as Sanctaphrax says, rather short lived. You can be making fresh ones every now and again, but that takes time and effort away from other things, so you can only do that with very few. Those you pay with enchanted item slots.
It will play out in the narrative, and it should, but you don't have to have thousands of aspects at the ready to do so.
If, for example, you have 100 aspects and your opponent has 99 aspects, that would be the same as you having 1 aspect and your opponent having 0 aspects.
Tags, even if they are to a character’s detriment,
do not award a fate point like a normal
invocation would. If no fate point was spent,
there’s no fate point to pass around.
Example: Harry Dresden has just used
his wizard’s senses to discover that the
Shadowman, a dark sorcerer who sent a toad
demon to eat him and his date, is observing
events from nearby using a sorcerous scrying
spell. This knowledge is the result of a skill roll
that revealed that the aspect Shadowman
Watching was (secretly) on the scene. Harry
decides to send a spell back up the link by way
of saying hello, and since he just discovered
(“assessed,” page 115) the aspect, he is due a tag.
When he casts the spell, he uses the tag to add
2 to his roll. This is clearly to the Shadowman’s
detriment, but since the tag was free for Harry,
the Shadowman doesn’t get a fate point.
Those kind of extreme numbers reduce the conflict to a single choice: Does the GM want the players to win, or to be utterly destroyed? Because with 100 Fate points each, there is no way the players are losing, but with a pool of 200 extra shifts to draw from, there's no way the villains are losing.
Once the terms are set, you have a
choice: spend a fate point and ignore the aspect,
or accept the complications and limitations on
your character’s choices and receive a fate point.
When you accept the fate point, the aspect is
officially compelled.
Later, Harry sends another spell up the
link to shut it down. This time, Harry has
to spend a fate point for his +2. Because the
invocation here is to Shadowman’s detriment
and this time Harry has spent a fate point,
Shadowman will receive a fate point at the end
of the scene. The GM makes a note of that, and
saves that point up for Shadowman to use in
the big confrontation a few scenes later.
The only thing to keep in mind is that, if you’re
invoking an aspect on another PC or on a NPC
to gain an advantage over them, that character
will receive the fate point you spent, either at the
end of the exchange (in conflict, see page 197) or at
the end of the scene (outside of conflict).
I quote:You can if the maneuver would logically last a long time--granted, even with the power of thaumaturgy, that's typically only going to be til the next sunrise, but it doesn't have to be instant. "The transient nature of maneuvers" doesn't refer to how long you have to tag--it just means that maneuvers are by nature temporary. And temporary could mean a wide range of things.
You can delay the maneuver, but you can't just have it hanging around until you need it.
In the end it boils down to common sense and GM fiat. To put it bluntly.
You can if the maneuver would logically last a long time--granted, even with the power of thaumaturgy, that's typically only going to be til the next sunrise, but it doesn't have to be instant. "The transient nature of maneuvers" doesn't refer to how long you have to tag--it just means that maneuvers are by nature temporary. And temporary could mean a wide range of things.
Also, there are exceptions made for how long you can tag--assessments, for example, are explicitly able to 'delay' the tag until you can actually use it, since it's unlikely you'd be, for example, looking up the weaknesses of a loup-garou in the same scene that you're fighting the loup-garou.
I don't see a reason for thaumaturgy-based maneuvers to follow the same thinking, provided they'd last long enough.
That last sentence doesn't seem to fit the post. Did you leave out a "not" or something?Yeah, actually. It was probably a sentence I rewrote once or twice and it got lost in the mix.