Honestly, I don't buy the idea that the Summer Court would be opposed to genocide.
 
They're about growth and progress sure, but they don't seem to hold reverence for any particular species.  To quote Bob in Summer Knight

"A war [between the Courts] could start the next ice age, or set off an era of rampant growth."
"That last one doesn't sound so bad."
"No. Not if you're an Ebola virus. You'll have lots of friends."

The idea that every species matters is a distinctly human one, and I doubt the Summer Sidhe care.  They're not conservationists.  In fact, if anything, that would fall under the kinder aspects of Winter - Stasis. 

If a species, such as the Black Court, is no longer suited to it's environment, it's natural that it will be supplanted by more powerful, better suited creatures.  The Black Court is an evolutionary dead end, and the sooner they're cleared away, the sooner new life can replace them. 

And that's even if you accept "undead" as a form of life, which I don't think is necessarily justified in the Dresden Files. 

Europe during World War 1. 

It's got a lot more ambiguity morally speaking than WW2, and has the undead focus from what we know about Kemmler.

Spoilers up to Ghost Story:

He's not any more bulletproof than anyone else, after all.

That's true.

Having thought about it some more, the issue comes down to the Doctor not really fitting the Dresden Files.  The Dresden Files are a fairly hard magic system, and the game represents that pretty well.  Creature X has Power Y.  Power Y gives benefits Z.  Doctor Who, by contrast, is sci-fi as soft as soft-serve ice cream on a warm day. 

The best way to represent the Doctor, for me, is going to be entirely through aspects, which are the softer side of the Dresden Files.  He'd be entirely at home in FATE Core, really.  The Powers section of the DFRPG doesn't really fit, because powers in Doctor Who vary according to the demands of plot.  On the other hand, that's exactly how aspects work too. 

The Doctor is just a character with a lot of Fate points, some fairly well-rounded aspects, and a tendency to take every compel that comes his way.  His toughness is just him Invoking his "Timelord Biology" to shrug off things that would kill regular people.  He can Invoke his "Sonic Screwdriver" aspect to open doors, mess with computers, as a sensor, or as virtually anything else the player can think of (But it doesn't do wood).  He'd be frequently compelled to get involved with the troubles of other people - I'd be tempted to use "old, and kind, and the very last of his kind" (The Beast Below) as the Eleventh Doctor's Trouble, for example.  It basically sums up the beginning of season 5.  The end of Season 5 and throughout Season 6, his trouble would reference the fact that he's got a lot of people against him.  I'd be tempted to go with "And all this in fear of him", as a reference to River's speech in "A Good Man Goes to War". 

This was exactly you. All this, all of it. You make them so afraid. When you began, all those years ago, sailing off to see the universe, did you ever think you'd become this? The man who can turn an army around at the mention of his name? Doctor? The word for healer and wise man, throughout the universe. We get that word from you, you know. But if you carry on the way you are, what might that word come to mean? To the people of the Gamma Forests, the word "Doctor" means mighty warrior. How far you've come. And now they've taken a child... the child of your
best friends... and they're going to turn her into a weapon, just to bring you down. And all this, my love...in fear of you.

Having said all of that, I realise that this isn't too useful if you're actually wanting him in your game.  But I think it's still a good starting point.  And if you're in a sufficiently low power game, giving him a good spread of aspects and a ton of Fate points wouldn't be a bad way to play him.  If he's getting into combat, something has gone wrong (but in terms of Social conflicts, I'd watch out.  He's fully capable of breaking pretty much anyone By talking, and frequently concedes physical conflicts in order to give him the opportunity), so quibbling over whether he has Inhuman Recovery or Inhuman Toughness is probably not too necessary.

No it isn't.

Could you elaborate on this?

Because I was very careful to avoid saying something like "three times that deadly", or "three times that force".  But in terms of stress, it really does have three times the stopping power (in the sense of being able to "incapacitate the target where it stands"), which implies to me that it's going to convey a decent amount of force.

Sleep spells are almost violations of the Fourth Law, not the First.

Yeah, I realise I didn't specifically state that, but I'm talking in terms of all of the Laws, not just the first.

And an electricity-as-tazer spell or spirit-based blood choke should be able to take someone out without killing 'em pretty well.

I'm not sure about the blood choke, but tasers have quite a death toll.  They're not non-lethal, they're just less-lethal. 

But at heart, no, I don't think making people worry about this is unfair, but I'd suggest you're doing it the wrong way, because you're violating the rules to achieve that effect.

Which rule?  Because the rules are quite clear that it needs to be within the limits of reason.  And as the guy who's most familiar with setting and the rules, what I say is essentially going to serve as my group's limits of reason.  That's why I'm concerned about being unfair - I don't want my reading of the setting to be unnecessarily punitive, when it's essentially going to be taken as canon.

Instead, I suggest Compels on their High Concept. If they accept, using magic on those poor mortals is too dangerous and they either don't do it or risk Lawbreaker, if they refuse the Compel, they find a non-lethal spell. Do this every time it comes up and everyone has to be pretty careful, but the rules remain unchanged and there's no unfairness. You can do the same thing on a cop shooting people or other such situations, too.

I do like this take on it, and it was probably a large part of how I was going to go about it in the first place. 

The thing is, Fate mechanics are somewhat narrative. I agree that it's unreasonable to knock someone out harmlessly with a Weapon:12 fireball, but I'd suggest that a Weapon:12 terramantic spell should be able to painfully but non-lethally pin my enemies to the ground for long enough that I can either hogtie or shoot them (with a nice non-magical revolver), either of which is a taken-out result which doesn't lead to a Lawbreaker stunt.

And doing that occasionally would be fine for me.  But I think that if you're repeatedly hitting people with that degree of force (remember, shooting someone with a handgun is a weapon 2.  A grenade is a weapon 4.  Weapon 12 is three times that stopping power) crushing people seems like a serious risk.

And if you're leaving corpses that have been battered with magic before death, the Wardens would be knocking on your door. 

Something to consider with this - The Outsider backed Entropy curse in Blood Rites.

with an effort of will I caught the dark power coursing down into the girl before it could do her harm.
Pain erupted in my left palm. The power was cold—and not mountain-breeze cold, either. It was slimy and nauseating, like something that had come slinking out from the depths of some enormous subterranean sea. In that instant of contact, my head exploded with terror. This power, this black magic, was wrong. Fundamentally, nightmarishly, intensely wrong.

The other thing to watch out for is that greasy is also used a fair bit for the Red Court's bat-like form, alongside slimy (and flabby, but I suspect that's less relevant). 


So Arianna's power being greasy might just be because she herself is greasy, rather than because of an Outside influence. 

I just can't get passed the idea that your limited to 3-4 spells. It doesn't matter how creative you are with them or what they can do in theory, you basically cast one defensive spell and hope it will last a few passes of the engagement. and you have 1-2 shots at taking out the bad guy.

Can you give me an example where Harry uses much more than that, in a single fight?

Spoilers through to Turn Coat. 


There's a reason Harry carries his gun, and uses force rings.  There's a reason Wardens carry swords.  Harry pushes himself to the limit of his casting in virtually every book, and he does it with just a couple of spells per encounter.  The rules match the game system pretty damn well, as I see it. 

The same could be said of cold iron and the Fae. That one's on wikipedia. And yet, it's only a +3 Catch (+1 from knowledge, +2 from being common as dirt). That +2 from knowledge is really stingily given out in the default universe.

I'd argue there's a pretty big difference.
 
Having to look it up on wikipedia is significantly less well known than being such a significant part of popular culture.  Assuming that you're setting your game in the English-speaking parts of the West, a good amount of knowledge of Christianity (or more specifically, Catholicism, I suppose) should be taken for granted.  It's such a core, underlying part of the culture that it's pretty hard to have a good cultural awareness without picking up things, even if it's just watching the Exorcist, or reading Hellblazer.

That said, I strongly disagree with the Fae only getting +1 for knowledge.  It's explicitly stated in the rulebooks that +1 is for when it "requires
access to specific research material that could be restricted (like a wizard’s library)".  Wikipedia doesn't fit that at all, nor does the Fairy Lore Handbook, by Ashliman, or Faeries, by Froud.  Both books, by the way, mention the weakness to iron, and Amazon could have them delivered within the next 24 hours or so.  Frankly, I don't think it could get much easier for me to find out, short of having it as general cultural knowledge that I'd pick up naturally. 

The idea that they should be getting +4, but it's capping out makes a lot more sense to me.