Given his my friend is saying he should be plot-level powerful, but I say he should just be inaccessibly strong (like the Garou or a high-ranking Denarian).

So what do you think? I'd say Mythic-level everything (except Speed), Hulking size, and the standard Wizard powers, along with a few Refinement points. Total Refresh around 30 or 35?

Another thing to take into account is the relative paucity of pure mortals in a typical Dresden campaign. Seems to me that a typical campaign will have, what, one in every five enemies not having some sort of supernatural ability? Tops?

Sure, mortals in the Dresdenverse are plentiful, but how often do people actually want to play as them? Or the DM setting your players against them? It happens, sure, and quite often, but it seems to me in most campaigns they'll be a very significant minority.

Might as well not even take the toughness power at that point, really.

Taken out, yeah.

I'm spinning this in with the Red War and giving a reason for them to live through it, but at the cost of story-relevant complications down the line.

Rewrite it as a way to communicate with various canines, instead. You'd have some work when it comes to working the animals into your stories, but it's an idea.

(We play online, so all of this was happening in an IRC chat.)

Nothing terribly exciting in the last session, just your typical weresharks trying to eat seals while the town's local wereseal pleaded with us for help. Though there was a wereorca in the NPC group that almost brought the pier down on our heads. That was noteworthy.

The session BEFORE that, though, was a laugh riot. One of our group members "accidentally" got ****-faced drunk (claims he only meant to drink this much but ended up drinking that much and was totally blitzed) and it somehow spread to the group, since two other members started acting totally smashed, too. One of them never mentioned liquor and the other was in the room with me at the time so I KNOW she was sober but she was still acting like she was hammered. It was really weird.

Started with us going to help rescue our half-elf's friends from a goblin prison in the Nevernever on the flip side of our town. We get there and are scoping the place out, and the drunk player (a weredog whose Alertness is so goddamn amazing I can never slip anything past him) notices that the front gate is made of a very thick, but rotted wood while there's a stone sewer grate around the side they could maybe sneak through.

So he starts telling people the side grate is made of cheap wood that can be knocked down and I'm like "wait no what are you on?" He and I debated in both private chat and the main channel (seriously I'm not sure he could keep track of which window he had open) and it turned out he never noticed a distinction between "gate" and "grate", and this somehow spread to the rest of the group with me yelling the whole time,

"No, no! The GATE is wood! The GRATE is stone! The GATE is in the front guarded by goblins, the GRATE is on the side!"

They finally got that figured out and our tanking-type character, a holy man with Toughness powers and various benedictions, announces he's going to storm the front gate to draw their attention while the rest of us sneak around the side. Sure, so our powerhouse says he's going to stay with him to help thin the herd, and I choose to have my character stay there, too, since he won't be much use in the rescue and this makes it three people in one group and three in the other.

But the second the side group starts slipping through the grate (not gate :-P ), the powerhouse has some family things come up and he needs to disappear the rest of our session. Leaving the holy man and my character (a focused thaumaturgist plot-o-mancer with literally zero combat skills) to face off against a horde of goblins and, later, three giant ogres in full body armor (statted specifically so the powerhouse with his steel katana wouldn't blow past their Catch completely).

Meanwhile, the side characters try to use the Elf's Glamour to veil and hide, but his roll abysmally fails, so they're sneaking around a castle totally visible and completely drunk. They get to a hallway, at the end of which is the room with the jail cells. So suddenly our drunken dog is AT the bars trying to wrench them open and probe for weak spots (no, no, you're still in the- ah, **** it, here come the guards!). They fight the guards while me and the holy tank struggle for our lives (actually turning two ogres against each other for a short while), and eventually kill them off.

At that point the weredog is so blitzed that he actually says to me, in private chat:

"afk a bit... have to hit the porcelain throe"

So he's suddenly gone for the rest of the session, while the elf and human are struggling with the bars, trying to free the captured elves. They try smashing them down, picking the locks, jimmying the hinges, everything, until I finally roll my eyes and call for an Alertness or Lore roll. The elf makes the Lore roll, and I tell him:

"You vaguely remember reading somewhere that guards to prisons typically have keys with them."

He's like "OH! Hahahaha!" and grabs the keys and lets the prisoners out. They make their way back out through the sewer and come around the corner to see, and I swear I didn't plan this, two ogres blindly searching the woods with the third trapped in an enchanted hula hoop, while the holy man and my character are trying to break back INTO the castle.

And all this time, this was the session I'd invited another forum member to hop in and see how we do things >_<

She would log in, not quite know how to work the program, log back out just as we all finished saying "hi" to her. Then she'd log back in and get a few more drunken welcomes, and log out. Then she logged in, said a few words that half the players all thought came from another player, then told me "thanks, I totally get it now!" and logged out for the night. I was like, "Really, wha- No, no, GRATE, not GATE!!"

The session ended with the prisoners massing on the ogres and taking them down, GM-fiat-style, before finishing off the frightened goblins in the castle. And that was the most organized we'd been all night.

I'm actually playing in two campaigns right now, one of which is lock-step with the book universe, and one is a totally divergent parallel universe where nearly all our players have deviated from templates to a significant extent.

...you were there for like three minutes O_o

You didn't even see any dice-rolling or combat.

In retrospect, that's a good thing. I had to split the group and two-thirds of them were drunk on top of that so it was overall a very confusing session. You'd have had a nightmare trying to keep track of it at that point.

Anyway, glad I could help! Let me know if you need anything else!

The rules examples in the book largely focus around a single player (sometimes two), but my RPG experience tells me it's a LOT easier to keep the whole group together. So how often do you split up the party, and how do you handle it when you do?