Oh, the things I wish I could have gotten to in more detail if I'd had just one more draft...

So, Becq nailed the essential problem to the wall - an 'exchange' is how long it takes every character in a conflict to do one significant thing. However, the scale of consideration differs depending on what people are up to. And with thaumaturgy, you have the potential for the scales to be vastly mismatched - completing any part of a ritual cannot, by any measure, happen as quickly as a dude snap-pointing a gun at you and pulling the trigger.

It's already enough of a stretch to include stuff like picking a lock vs. a gunfight, but luckily (read: totally on purpose) for us, the system is mainly designed to model narrative considerations of time, rather than actual ones.

Let me say this about the Lore prep rule: it refers to game time, not story time (see YS p. 314). Just because Harry has enough Lore for the tracking spell, it doesn't mean that doesn't have to prep the spell - he still draws the circle, prepares his symbolic link, blah dee blah. His player just does not have to engage the game's mechanics to declare he has done this.

But all that prep still takes time in the fiction, right? So, my first question when thaumaturgy during a fight comes up is, "How far are you into prep when the bad guys show up?" Because if you don't even have a circle set up when lead goes flying at your head, you can't even start calling power in.

But if you showed up and got your shit together before the attack happens? Sure, call a bunch of power, take your stress, and have your spell up in a few seconds!

So, what I might suggest as the primary avenue of resolution is making spell prep during combat an involved Challenge using Lore, to give you the permission to engage the normal power-summoning mechanics, and then you can pace everything round by round and not mess up your buddies and their gunfight. IOW, decide that the Lore = insta-prep rule only applies under non-stressful conditions, and adjust accordingly.

Doc's already backed out of the thread, but Galt, Gruff, watch your respective tones, please.

Thanks.

1) The Crafting(Frequency) specialization/bonus is dead. Crafting(Strength) is king. Long live the king.

Incorrect. Frequency spec affects the default for your items, so it applies its benefit for free across all of them, like the strength spec does. So if you have three one-use items, now you have three two-use items for one spec point.

That doesn't suck. Yeah, it's not as effective if you only plan to have one item, but if that's the case, you're clearly going to take strength anyway.

2) Just like an evocation, a item with Block:4 can be used as Armour:2. Unlike the evocation, both Block and Armour both burn a use.

Yeah, but in the case where the wizard changes his mind on a use because of how the dice roll out, I figure only a real jerk would charge him for two uses.

3) About stacking. I could enchant a Block:6 effect on a Armour:2 Kevlar jacket and if threated with a Weapon:2 attack I could choose to not invoke a use and let the jacket take the hit. If threatened by a stronger attack I could then invoke a use for the Block:6 or Armour:3 effect. When all uses have been burned it fails to jut Armour:2 until recharged.

That sounds right, yeah.

Weapon:2 is usually a pretty safe call, but I'll let Lenny speak to this; I'm clueless about firearms.

Just because I sleep with a shotgun by the bed... sheesh, Fred.

My honest gut answer is, "I'd need to know why it matters." Real-life combat ballistic performance is a hideously complicated affair, so pretty much, any attempt at verisimilitude is going to fail spectacularly.

However, I can tell you that when I wrote down "oversized pistols", I was thinking of shit like the Desert Eagle, the Freedom Arms .454 Casull, the Thompson Contender in any rifle caliber, basically any of those pistols where one might look at it and wonder about the practical wisdom of putting a round that powerful into that small a frame.

Wikipedia says, "In its full-powered form, [the .44 magnum round] produces too much recoil and muzzle blast to be suitable for a police weapon as it makes rapid fire difficult and strenuous on the users' hands; in particular for shooters of smaller build or with small hands."

Later, it also says that the round is suitable for taking out brown bears.

I leave the decision up to you.

Lenny can swing in here and speak to the matter of whether or not attacks are prolong-able. I'm not sure I'd allow it, but I want a read from him as the point man on the spell rules.

I think the OP was talking about doing it in a single roll, like with a shield spell.

As in, I want a Weapon:4 evocation, that's 4 shifts of power, but I want to extend the duration one additional exchange, so that's 5 shifts of power.

The net effect would be, I have Weapon:4 for two exchanges.

Like I said above, I don't think the logic tracks for attacks. But, you know how it is - not my everything, and I could see it working for a custom hack in a different setting, yadda yadda ad nauseum.

I don't think the logic quite tracks there - an attack is, by nature, an instant effect. You call the power up and you let it fly. So it can't really have duration by default. Even the thaumaturgy "firebomb" trap wards don't really have an effect duration, per se - they just have an amount of time that they store the energy in the trap. When they go off, though, the attack is instant just like with an evocation.

However, if you wanted to allow it anyway, my only suggestion would be to stipulate that having the energy available to make an attack doesn't mean you automatically hit with it. So if you have a Weapon:4 evocation that you're holding for an extra exchange, you still have to make an attack roll with Discipline to see if you can put it on target.

But by default, yeah, no extending duration on attacks.

There has to be some restriction for Thaumaturgy Veils that I am not seeing.

Not really, dude. I mean, the other side of it is this: do you realize how easy it is, with fate points, to just decide that you succeed at a roll?

So, let the caster have their veil until next sunrise. Whatever. It's a simple spell.

Lore +5, Specialization +1, and then ... +2 for an evocation focus item?  I don't get it.  I didn't realize you could have focus items for crafting, first of all, but also if I read your post correctly you were saying that it was a +2 for "evo".  Can you expand on that point a little bit?

Yeah, my bad. Focus Item Slots and Enchanted Item Slots are universal in application. So, you get two focus item slots from evo, you can assign them to bump thaumaturgy specializations. You don't have to keep them for evo, and vice versa.