I was thinking yesterday, and came up with a situation using Soulfire that I thought might be hard to model using the rules as written.
Fortunately, I also came up with a possible solution
So, we have a Soulfire user facing off against a couple of Black Court and Renfields with a friend. Due to the dire nature of the situation, he uses some of his soul-stuff to 'reinforce' a Spirit (force) evocation and manifest two giant silver hands
Over the next three exchanges he uses one of the hands to shield his friend from the Renfields gunfire, and the other to crush one of the vampires to Soulfire-burned paste. On the fourth exchange, he stops both of those things and uses both 'hands' to rip the other vampires head off.
Now, the effects of that aren't out of the scope of the evocation rules as written (one block/armour spell with additional duration, one 'magical grapple' similar to the Orbius spell, and one straight (if powerful) attack) but according to canon interpretation, that's all
one spell with a single power input...
So, how to model this without it being horribly overpowered? I was going to put it to the forum, but then I had my own idea. Using Archmage_Cowl's variant Soulfire rules (which I would rather use anyway, as I think they are more true to the books) we can consider this:
The Soulfire user's player wants to do the above effects with four shifts of power going into each 'hand'. Ignoring the duration factors for now, this gives him a +4 block/armour 2 on his friend, four shifts worth of 'grappling' each exchange on the first vampire (adjudication of exactly how this would work is likely to vary between GMs) and finally a single Weapon: 8 attack on the second vampire at the end. Now, my idea is that he can do this, and make the effects persistant for a total of four exchanges, by first summoning 8 shifts of power and successfully controlling it, then sacrificing two aspects for the length of a moderate consequence, as described in Archmage_Cowl's system. This works on the basis that instead of sacrificing for additional shifts of power, you can sacrifice to create effects of equivalent power but lasting for a number of exchanges equivalent to the shifts of power you would have gained. In this case, 4 per 'hand'.
To give an example from the books:
The way Harry's fight with Thorned Namshiel works with this idea, Harry casts a force spell with X shifts of power, and also sacrifices one aspect for a moderate consequence's length of time (until the end of the book) This means he can smack the denarian around for three exchanges, doing a Weapon: X attack each time with no additional power input, and then still block the Hellfire beam with the hand in the fourth exchange just long enough to avoid being vapourised. The cost of this power is that he cannot invoke that aspect until the end of the book, and any compels against it cannot be bought off (plus his hand is numb
)
So, what do people think?
Also, on the question of what a death curse backed by Soulfire looks like... Again using Archmage_Cowl's variant Soulfire system, let's run the numbers. Say a soulfire user has Great conviction, has taken all possible physical consequences, and their entire soul is currently fresh and ready to be used. So that's a maximum of 7 shifts base (4+3 is the most power they can summon at once, tekes them to the end of their mental stress track), plus 20 for mental consequences including extreme (I'd say a death curse justifies taking an extreme consequence!), plus 6 for tagging all the physical consequences (that's all normal death curse territory so far, any caster could do that... Think about it
). Now for the Soulfire... 6 aspects at Severe each gives an additional 36 (!) shifts of power.
So, that's a total of 69 shifts of power for this particular Soulfire death curse... Enough to permenantly banish a Denarian from its coin, you think?
