Howdy, y'all. I'm about to start GMing some urban fantasy games with the DFRPG as the basis, and it seems to me that one of the things that makes Evoking the best choice for dealing damage is that the Discipline roll to control the spell is also the attack roll. The result is of course, that a 10 shift blast of flame will also generally have a targeting roll of 10 or more. So I'm thinking that instead I'm going to require that targeting rolls for Evocations have to be with an appropriate attack skill. Anyone try this? Anyone have an opinion positive or negative about it? For non Rote spells this will of course require an extra dice roll, but having just come home from an Solar Exalted game, an extra 4df does not seem like that big of a deal.

The other thing I'm not crazy about is that Evocation spells have a range of "sight," so I'm thinking about requiring shifts of power to be put into increasing the range. Probably 1 shift for every zone. Thoughts?

I think the aspect change and possible Warden attention would be reasonable for a non-practitioner engaging in black magic, becaue there should definately be consequences for engaging in such behavior and associating with such company.

I feel that as sacrifices go, there should be diminishing to no returns on creatures/beings that have no link to your target. Ie. gacking random homeless guys will not help you prepare a spell to target the Merlin. Which we maybe see in action at Chicken Pizza.

Another thing that sort of bothers me about the magic system is that it doesnt really take range into account. I'm working on a distance scale for my games which wouldnt really decrease the power of thaumaturgy, but it does put extra potential shifts of backlash/fallout into play. Does anyone else require shifts of power to increase spell range?

While I wouldnt tell Morgan about the second one, I dont think so. But the first one, yeah.

But here's a question: what if the assistant isnt a practitioner themselves? I get the sense that the laws are really to prevent people from becoming moustache twirling puppy stomping warlocks (amongst other things) so if the assistants dont have any magical talents, I'm not sure Lawbreaker is relevant. And looking at OW, neither of the Beckitts have a Lawbreaker.

I'm going to echo what a few others have said. Were I the DM in that instance, I would've let Thomas's player invoke his High Concept as a wampire and called it a day, since the scene wasnt really about Thomas bending dumbells.

Also, I get the impression that the OW stats are often incomplete/left for individual groups to fill in.