The comparison with grenades was to demonstrate that much power shows clear intent to kill,

Dresden's Force Ring is a Weapon: 4 attack, exactly equal to using a hand grenade on someone.  He uses it on mortals all the time, to date none of them have been blown into little pieces by an "artillery level blast of power", to use your description of it.  Not some of the time, not occasionally, never, not even once.  

Does Dresden have a clear intent to kill when he uses a force ring on a mortal?  You say it's clear he does, I strongly disagree.

not to say that it always happens.

So it's within the realm of reason that the target survives.  That completely satisfies the requirement per the rules for taking out, that means that every single target over the entire course of the players wizard constitution extended life survives if he so desires it.  A Weapon: 4 evocation isn't equal to a grenade in any case, the difference is that the grenade isn't inflicting his will on reality.  If the will of the caster is that the target not die, he doesn't, as simple as that.

It strikes me as extremely unrealistic, and counter to the very nature of the setting, for a wizard to casually use those kinds of attacks on pure mortals, without some expectation of death.

 

The setting itself disagrees with your premise.

weapon: 6 effects kill people in my game.  Grenades are merely weapon 4, and you don't throw those without trying to kill someone.

Going by that reasoning, EVERY weapon rating from 1 on up should kill people in your game.  You don't shoot people with pistols or stab them with knives without trying to kill someone.

Of course, if they were named NPC's they might take a bigger hit before going down, but that doesn't change the fact that you are trying to hit them with artillery level firepower.

The difference between a grenade and actual artillery is a couple of orders of magnitude.  "Artillery Level Firepower" is a meaningless term in this context unless you want to talk about a Wizard's Death Curse, which could pretty easily inflict a Weapon: 20 hit on 4+ zones at once.

The players have some control over taken out results, but it has to be within reason.

To use the exact quote, "it has to be within the realm of reason".  It's entirely within the realm of reason that a burst of electricity, a fireball or a grenade didn't kill the target but otherwise rendered him combat ineffective, it happens in the real world every single day.

And within reason for this is deciding whether the guy's body twitches or smokes when it gets blasted with enough power to take him out in a single hit.

So everyone ever knocked out by a grenade was killed by it?  I'll be sure to let one my buddy Jay know that he's dead now; he'll be rather shocked at the news.

Part of the point you are missing is that they aren't going to take anything more than a mild consequence, what with being unnamed enemies and all. Therefore, the mechanical effect of giving them sunburns is bypassed by the narratively appropriate result of killing them, since they did just get hit by an artillery level blast of power.

 

And just how do you figure this out?  Wait for them to take the consequence and blow up your house or kill a few dozen innocent bystanders in a hail of gunfire?

The point you're missing is that it is entirely within the realm of reason for one of these attacks to not actually kill the target.  Fortunately, it's the player who gets to decide if the target dies or not.

If he fried a group of pure mortals with that, then I'd absolutely make taken outs die.

You don't get to decide for your players what happens when they take someone out with an attack.

A six shift evocation attack is clear intent to kill, so lawbreaker would have been appropriate for deaths caused.

  Hardly a clear intent to kill on professional killers depending on the situation.  4 Mercs?  I'd have two of them start off by
moving into the zone and declaring a covering fire block on the Wizard to keep him from zapping them.  Going by averages
that's 5 points of defense (3 for skill plus dice, +2 for teamwork) right off the bat, +2 for Armor and even rolling the 8 he
needs to land that Weapon 6 hit and he's only looking at 7 stress.  At least one rank in Endurance for the Mercs, taking
the 3 stress on the track and they walk away with a Moderate Consequence, equal to a bad sunburn.  Does sunburn kill
people in your game?

Not only does it hit all four guys, it hits the zone itself with the same force.  Tossing around zone wide attacks in public areas usually results in calls to Homeland Security.  Even if no one saw it happen, it's going to look like a bomb went off and will be treated accordingly.  Look how much time Dresden wasted being grilled by the FBI and the agent was completely on his side because Murphy vouched for him.  Most players aren't going to be that lucky.

Wow, huntsfromshadow, this is awesome.  Got even better when I found out how to get rid of all that purple.  Stylesheet Tiddler could use comments to tell what colors are what.

Anyway, back to the awesome.  As a GM, one of my common tasks is to make a secret die roll.  Thanks to the Magic of the Computing elves, I've now got one on my Wiki!

It turned out, making the roll was easy, actually closing the Tiddler window when I was finished was the hard part.  Oddly enough I couldn't find a built in command to close one other Tiddler rather than hitting the button.  Not familiar enough to know if I just missed it, but this method is pretty simple and will come in handy for times when I can open a group of people (like enemies in a combat) in a single Tiddler and at the same time close any individual Tiddlers for those people I have open.

For those who are interested, here's what you need to do.

First you need a way to close a single Tiddler (including the one you're calling it from), create a new Tiddler called CloseWindow, be sure to give it the systemConfig tag as it's a javascript macro
{{{
config.macros.CloseWindow = {
  handler: function (place, macroName, params, wikifier, paramString, tiddler)
  {
      var title = params.length > 0 ? params[0] : null;
      story.closeTiddler(title);
  }
};
}}}

The triple brackets around the script blocks are a Tiddly formatting code for script and will display it in a colored box to identify it.

Next you need a way to generate and display a roll of Fudge dice, create a new Tiddler called DiceRoller, also give it the systemConfig tag as it's a macro
{{{
config.macros.DiceRoller = {
  handler: function (place, macroName, params, wikifier, paramString, tiddler)
  {
      var die1=parseInt(Math.random()*3)-1;
      var die2=parseInt(Math.random()*3)-1;
      var die3=parseInt(Math.random()*3)-1;
      var die4=parseInt(Math.random()*3)-1;
      var total=die1 + die2 + die3 + die4;
      confirm("Roll: ("+die1+" "+die2+" "+die3+" "+die4+") = "+total );
  }
};
}}}

This shows you the result on each of the four dice as well as the final result, if all you want to see is the result, change it to
      confirm("Roll = "+total );
I used confirm, instead of alert because alert beeps when called and the noise annoys me.  Click either button or hit the enter key to close the box.

Finally you need a simple way to call your roller, make a new Tiddler called FudgeDice
<<DiceRoller>>
<<CloseWindow FudgeDice>>

Lastly, to put it on your menu bar, to go the MainMenu Tiddler and add
[[FudgeDice]]
where ever in the list you want it to appear, save and reload your Wiki and you're good to go.


Now that I've got that working, my next project is a random name generator.  The macros will be pretty big so I'll have to test it and see what kind of performance hit they cause.  I hope to use the 1990 name chart from the census and make a weighted roll against the 1000 most common first and last names for both males and females.  If nothing else it will give you something to say the next time a player looks in the wallet of a nameless thug he just knocked out or wants to know the names of the patients on a hospital floor.  

Other than that, I know healing magic is supposed to be quite limited when it comes to what mortals can manage. At best, it can match mundane medical treatment. For true "healing spells" that repair injury rapidly, you'd need angelic or faerie magic.

  This isn't a restriction due to being mortal, it's a matter of skill.  You have to direct the spell.  How many people have the know how to repair a severed spinal cord if handed the means?  The book lists faerie magic, and sponsored faerie magic as being able to heal because they are supplying the know how.  I don't see any reason that a trained surgeon couldn't use ritual magic to pull off impressive feats of magical healing.

They Never Taught Us This In School...

Your studies were in depth but not very broad in scope.

Invoke: You can invoke to gain a bonus to Lore to assess or research subjects related to your initial three Evocation elements.
Compel: A compel can increase the difficulty of assessing or researching an unrelated subject by two.

alternatively

Invoke: You can invoke to gain a bonus to Lore to assess or research when the difficulty is equal to or less than your lore.
Compel: A compel can increase the difficulty of Lore checks to assess or research a difficulty above your Lore by two.

Dying is easy, living is hard