One important thing to remember: Characters don't have to take consequences. You say a number of times "I ruled that he takes a consequence", but that's for the player to decide. If you take 10 shifts of stress in one hit and don't want to take a consequence, you are simply taken out. Taking consequences is a way to stay in conflict, but you can always just call it a day and be fresh for a new fight.

Another thing would be the setup. Why did the WK attack the Wizard? There might be some factors that could put the conflict in a different light and it could have been handled entirely different. For example, did the WK want to kill or abduct the wizard? In the former case, I would have probably fought as hard as I could in place of the wizard. But if he wants to abduct me, maybe present me to his Lady, hell, that could be an interesting complication, I'll just let it happen. Better yet, grant the player of the wizard a compel and do it without any roll at all.

One thing I see that seems entirely wrong:

The Wiz threw an Air spell to create a powerful wind barrier holding back the WK against the wall using 5 Shifts (Conviction 5, Discipline 4) and rolled a Great (+4) on his control, he took the backlash and totaling 2 Mental Stress. This put I ruled a Maneuver and gave him the Aspect of "Pinned Against Wall".

The WK rolled a Might check and I factored in his Inhuman Strength and resulted in a Fantastic (+6), which I allowed to negate the maneuver and that was his turn for the round.

You can always defend against an action targeted at you. So the might roll should have been the defense against the wind spell and the WK would have had his action left. Would have made all the difference, since from here on out the WK was in the defense.

Another thing: The way you describe it, a "powerful wind barrier", this sounds more like a block, not a maneuver. It can work as a maneuver, but still, the description suggests it's a block.

That would mean it's a 5 shift block either on the WK (which he could defend against) or on the wizard to help him defend against the WK.

Sever Consequence of "On Fire"

Doesn't work. A consequence is something lasting. It's what happens as an injury from the fire, it isn't the fire itself. As a severe consequence, you could have "third degree burns", but you are not "on fire" as a consequence. You could do a maneuver to create the "on fire" aspect on someone, but that's something else. Again, this cost the WK his action, which lead to his defeat.

So yes, the WK would have had a lot more chance, but he didn't get to take it.

Anything below the 7 refresh template is, technically, not a wizard. But there are still some spellcaster options out there.

As rientelfon said, channeling and ritual would be the first option. You're either a focused practitioner or an apprentice that hasn't learned all that much yet and is limited in what he can do. You can later replace channeling with evocation and so on, once you have the necessary refresh.

You could also look into sponsored magic. Maybe your magic doesn't come from yourself but rather an outside source. Maybe the land you live on is a special place, so you only can cast spells inside the city limits. Or a powerful Sidhe Lady or one of the gods has granted you some powers, as long as you work for them.

Another option could be to link some powers to an item of power. Maybe you were injured in the war and now you can only ever cast spells when your staff is around. That could be an item of power worth +2 refresh that would allow you to drop the refresh cost down to 5 for the wizard template. But if you lose your staff, you're just a grumpy old guy that rambles a lot.

For your "brawler" character, maybe you can go another way altogether. Maybe he is so specialized that he only knows one or two spells of biomancy that allow him to transform himself a bit. You could say that your spells are giving you the strength of 10 men, and you just take inhuman strength and attach it to human form. Casting the spell would merely be the way you access the powers hiding behind "human form". You can, of course, add other powers to that as well, as long as they make sense to you and your GM.

I wouldn't go with a modifier like that. Even a +1 modifier is really powerful. Hell, the free invoke on the consequence can be enough to send you down a spiral you can't recover from.

Though, adding to that:
Fate is rather robust towards hacking. I wouldn't do too much to the DFRPG, but if you want to play around with it, there's nothing stopping you. There's also the Toolkit, which suggests a lot of very interesting hacks for Fate:
http://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-system-toolkit/

Also, a version of the DFRPG based on Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE) is going to come out next year. I had the privilege of being able to playtest it, and so far, it works really good.

b) What happens if a PC or NPC is being afflicted by multiple consequences of the same type? Mechanically.. does it work? Do you just upgrade the consequence until you find a free one and then they are taken out? Do you assign stress instead? Regardless of the conflict source... lets say you arm is broken, then something happens to blind you, and your leg may also get broken. Am I making sense?

Yes and no. Fate is a bit funny there.

When you are in a conflict, you take a consequence in order to stay in the fight. You don't just get one pushed onto you. There are situations where the negative outcome can be pre-determined. For example if you want to jump from a moderately tall building, the GM could say "well ok, that's an athletics roll with a difficulty of 5, but if you don't make it, you'll need to take a moderate consequence, since your leg will be broken."

That's basically the only way you can take consequences, conflicts and situations like that.

In a conflict, you take stress. If the stress overflows on your stress track, you are taken out. You can choose to take a consequence and reduce that stress (for example a moderate consequence reduced the incoming stress of one attack by 4 shifts), but you can't be forced to take a consequence. You can always say "that's it, I'm taken out", and that's that. If you take 1 shift of stress and you don't have your mild and moderate consequence, and you need to take a consequence to not be taken out, you would have to take your severe consequence. It reduces the attack by 6 shifts, but since there is only 1 shift in the attack, it might be a bit overkill. And yet, sometimes you just need to do this.

Keep in mind, absorbing 1 shift of stress with a severe consequence is still a severe consequence and should be something severe happening to the character. It's not a 1 shift hit, it's a severe consequence.

I'd like to add a third question:

c) Thaumaturgy/rituals seem very powerful (rightfully I guess), as they both bake-in defeating the opposed roll (so basically skill level +4). However... this probably isn't very effective against powerful NPCs or players correct? They may be covered by a ward, happen to have a block up (fudge-spirit shield), enchanted items with blocks built in, or perhaps can even spend fate points... is that a valid understanding?  Or mechanically unable to improve your resistance to thaumaturgy/ritual ... (I hope you can).  This would at the very least downgrade the intended consequence/aspect/result if not cancel it outright.

A thaumaturgic ritual is, by and large, simply a scene to resolve a problem.

Take Fool Moon. When Harry tries to find out something, we get a scene about him doing a ritual to summon up a demon and ask questions.
If Murphy was the one looking for information, we would have gotten a similar scene, but with her going through Wikipedia and some police databanks in order to retrieve the information.

You can do the same here. You could have a scene with the characters fighting someone, or you can have a ritual scene to do that.

Personally, I don't think the high numbers for a ritual are all that interesting. What's far more interesting to me is having the right components at hand. So instead of saying "he's got a +4 ward around himself", I would rather say "he has a ward around himself, what are you going to do to counter it?"
If they have a vial of his blood, I'd just say the ward is null and void because of the good connection. With a piece of hair, it might be different.

Basically, set the scene of the ritual in a way that makes it awesome. Counting numbers rarely does that.

Determining whether or not you can kill someone with a spell can be done by other means. On the side of the player characters, that's usually a line that's not going to be crossed. And if it is, I will gladly accept that and explore where crossing the line leads, rather than try to figure out where to get the last 2 shifts of power from.

And after all that, I would give it a fixed difficulty. That can still be somewhat high (say 12-16 shifts), but not as high as I've seen some rituals be. Because everything has been accounted for and you can't really actively oppose a spell when it comes flying at you.

Well, unless you're a player character, then I would set up the scene for your to be able to counter it and fling the turkey into the vampire.

Hello all, I've got a couple of questions that I believe you ladies/gents can help me with

Welcome.

a) How do you generally deal with "sticky aspects", lets say like blindness, which make sense that they should be constantly affecting the afflicted, rather than requiring a fate point to take "advantage" of? The same goes for things like "knocked prone" or "stuck" or "mouth sealed shut".   These are aspects that would result from thaumaturgy as an example (This is probably more of my lack of experience here).

Aspects are true. They are not just a phrase that's stuck somewhere, it's describing a situation in the story. If someone is "blinded", they can't really do anything they would need their eyesight for. You can simply not allow a certain action if an aspect is in play that might prohibit it.

On the other hand, I would discourage "I win" aspects. If you "blind" your opponent, he's not incapacitated, he's just temporarily blinded. You can use the free invoke or spend Fate points on it to get an advantage on it, but you don't get a blanket bonus. Remember that the idea of Fate is not so much to emulate physics but story. When you use an aspect, it's kind of like mentioning it in the story you are telling, highlighting it. Now once or twice in a paragraph, it's fine to mention that your opponent is blinded. But mentioning it every sentence? That's going to sound really daft. It's assumed that if an aspect isn't invoked, it doesn't affect the scene. He might be blinded, but he is such a good fighter that he can still defend himself or even attack you. But you can, of course, invoke the aspect to work against him.

Since DFRPG was released, Fate has gone through quite some evolution. The current version is "Fate Core", which you can get on a pay what you want basis from Evil Hat. It explains the whole Aspects thing far better than DFRPG does, so you might want to check it out, I think it really helps.

b) What happens when you are forced to take a consequence but you don't have the slot for it? Lets say you have a consequence from any of the various triggers that can cause it (thaumaturgy, conflict, etc...). You're stress track is empty, but you have a severe or moderate consequence, and some other conflict/effect/whatever forces you take a couple of more. What happens? You're not taking stress, you're just forced to take more consequences... are you taken out?

Usually in a case like this, the price should be known upfront, when you set the scene. When you do that, the players involved can say that they wouldn't be able to pay that price if it comes to it, so you can change it or take it to the next level. If you can't take a mild consequence, you'll need to take a moderate. And so on. If you are all out, come up with something else together. The cost of a scene doesn't always have to be consequences, there are lots of things that can happen to a character. Take their weapons, their loved ones, themselves.

Emphasizing this, for the opposite reasons stated by others. If you create a singular way to "win" a scenario, there's a very strong chance that your players will simply never see it. They will try everything else besides the "obvious" solution that you set up, and if you stick to it too strongly, it'll only lead to frustration for everyone.

In a way, Fate makes this incredibly easy to deal with.

- Problem
- Approach
- Resolution
- Aftermath

Hey, that could be a cool new acronym. Yay!

Sorry, I'll focus.

Basically, you present a problem to the players. You can have a solution in mind, but don't fixate on it. If the players go another way, roll with it. Once the problem is presented, the players describe how they want to approach it (or IF they even want to). Do they want to fight, sneak, talk, do a spell, etc.
Once that is set up, you know what both parties (Players and opposition) want and how they will go about it. At this point you can choose the resolution mechanic. If your players want to sneak past someone, a simple roll or a contest could be enough, no need for a conflict. They could go and talk in a social conflict (or a simple roll again, if the person isn't too important in a talking way). You then go and resolve the scene the way the resolution mechanic demands.
And finally, you deal with the aftermath. Different things happen depending on the outcome of the scene.

The approach bit is an important one (and one I sometimes forget myself. If you set up a cool opponent for a fight, you're kind of primed to go for a fight. But if the players have a cunning plan to sneak around that, you'll be robbed of that fight. At least sometimes it feels like it. So this is something to look out for and keep an open mind about. A non-conflict scene can be just as cool as a conflict, but it works very differently.
It also means that depending on the approach taken, the difficulties can be quite different. The two thugs might be pretty tough but rather dumb. You might be able to talk your way past them fairly easily, while fighting them would be a very bad idea. And other approaches to solve the problem can lead to scenes you might have never thought about.

I've long held with the old military axiom "No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy," which can also be read as "The best laid plans of mice and men oft times go astray."

I know it as "No GM plan ever survives the first contact with a player character", but the principle still stands.

Last week I was in a group playtesting the John Carter from Mars alpha. We managed to derail the sample adventure with the first action after the intro. That's a personal best.
We got attacked by sky pirates. The author of the story thought the players would flee, which is the only logical action to take. Our pilot decided to ram the pirates' carrier ship. Hilarity ensued. And battle. Mostly battle.