For the past 3 years I've been the exclusive heavy hitting wizard in our games. Recently I decided to change it up so I created a van helsing type vanilla mortal for our submerged game. I'm just having a really damn difficult time making the adjustment. I'm curious about what the place of vanilla mortals is in high refresh games. I understand that stunts are really good and in messing around with it I've found some really broken combos with guns, but nothing even relatively close to magic. Is their place in the game to just be a jack of all trades or put all stunts into a skill and make them insanely good at that  one thing thing? It all seems kind of useless when I could've easily done some thaumaturgy or made potions and boom.

How do you make useful vanilla mortals in high refresh games?

I have a couple questions that I haven't been able to get a consensus on.

1) Do multiple sponsored magics all get the +2 bonus from having evocation and thaumaturgy

2) Is Soulfire secretly still -5 refresh?

2a) Is soulfire being a "-3 refresh sponsored magic "(PP 251) before or after said +2 bonus from evocation and thaumaturgy, or does it even get the bonus at all since on PP 251 it doesn't say you get a bonus by default.

2b) The book says "you can't even take it[soulfire] if you don't have some kind of mortal magic to begin with"(PP 251). So what happens if you have only evocation or thaumaturgy which is "some type" of mortal magic? The book says it's a -3 sponsored magic, so would the cost go up to -4?

Hey guys, I recently took over the mostly dead DFRPG subreddit and right now I'm trying to breathe some life into it. I just wanted to come on here and inform people of our existence and that you're all more than welcome to visit.