Thoughts/questions/houserules on rules extremes.

[Belial666]

OK, here's an assortment of questions/rules situations I have come up with after using the rules for a few days or so. They mostly concern extreme, impressive or otherwise cool stuff;


One-hit-kills
A good sniper aiming at a target from half a mile away is an interesting situation. We have a weapon 3 attack at skill +3, in my sights +2, a sniper aspect +2 (snipers rarely get to shoot more than 1/day so they should spend their fate pts), and the target's active defenses are at mediocre (+0). Assuming equally lucky rolls, that is 10 shifts of damage. Assuming best roll for sniper and worst roll for defender (a 1 in 65536 chance), that's 18 shifts of damage. The problem here is that if the target is a PC or equivalent (say, Harry Dresden), there is no way one can kill them with a sniper rifle; without extreme consequences they'd need 17 stress to KO, with the extreme consequence they'd need 26 stress. Even if the attacker is Kincaid (superb skill) and uses three aspects, the PC only dies in the worst possible roll.
How would you adjudicate a sniper vs PCs? A sniper PC vs an important antagonist?

Armor vs light weapons
You have this very tough demon guy(armor 2-3). He won't be undamaged by a grenade or a high-powered rifle but he would laugh off light weapons. Then comes a little girl and smacks him bare-handed from behind. He is surprised so mediocre defense and the girl with fists 2 rolls well for a great result. Suddenly the bullet-proof demon takes stress from being hit. By a girl.
In short, light weapons-especially human fists, a tiny knife or a BB gun-doing damage vs armored targets does not make much sense. How would you fix that? Does it need fixing?

Death Curse strength
Flavor-wise, a weak spellslinger would do a small curse. A more powerful spellslinger would do a significantly stronger curse. Rules-wise though, your curse is a one-action ritual with complexity equal to all your consequences (tagged or inflicted) plus your Lore. That's 40 shifts for the weakest practitioner, 50 shifts for someone like the Merlin. 40 shifts obliterate just about any mortal outright, and most non-mortals. 50 shifts do the same on 5 zones at once. Shouldn't there be a bigger difference between the two, especially at the low end? As is, it is almost impossible to avoid even a minor death curse. (Unless you're Cowl)

Massive Area Spells
Most effects progress at a +1 means double the strength or even +2 means plus one order of magnitude. I.e. conjured object size, lifting weight, weapons equivalent to a certain weapon rating, strength of enchanted items and so on. Time has a similar scale. So it is doable to blast apart something really tough (see below) or engineer a curse lasting for generations.
Area of Effect on the other hand is pretty linear. 2 shifts for 1 extra zone. This means it is almost impossible to cause damage or effects on a more than building-sized area. Even a strong ritual prepared for a day or two and with some aid (about 40 shifts) could at best blast 15 zones for a strong effect. So how do effects like hexing an entire city, causing a volcano to erupt, killing two hundred enemy minons in one blow, killing non-necromancers within a mile and so on work?

Taking out buildings
That was one of the first things that came to mind. How do you adjudicate intentionally taking down buildings and barriers? One rules-relevant way I thought of was this: Take the building's weight and/or size. Calculate the Might level to lift/move that weight (I believe +1 might means twice as heavy weight, right?). Applying force equal to its own weight on the average building would make it collapse, if slowly. +1 for heavily built buildings and those that can handle massive weights or earthquakes, +2 for unfortified metal or fortified concrete, +4 for unusually resilient buildings like nuclear bunkers, the pyramids, very large dams and Arctis Tor. That's the roll you need to take down the building either with might or with appropriately humongous damage. Buildings do not have a defense (unless warded) but don't take extra shifts of damage for high success rolls either. Shifts for taking out well-known buildings in one blow according to this:
Brick House: 11 shifts
200 m skyscraper: 16 shifts
The Empire State Building: 22 shifts
Hoover Dam: 28 shifts
Do note that buildings won't be considerably damaged by minor effects. If you want to adjudicate repeated blows, give them a stress track equal to half the shifts (round up) and armor equal to what remains. A house won't be damaged much by less than Weapons 5, a skyscraper by less than weapons 8 and the Hoover Dam by less than weapons 14. Damage still happens but not enough to threaten the building's integrity in a reasonable number of blows.




Custom Powers (please critique)

Multispell [-2]
Requirement: refinement 5
Benefit: when targeting multiple enemies with magic, either keep your full success roll and spread shifts for effect strength, or keep effect strength and spread your success roll. You're effectively casting one effect of undiluted strength and attempt to hit all targets by shifting the power to arc through them or divide the power and cast a smaller effect multiple times.

Greater Multispell [-2]
Requirement: Multispell
Benefit: when targeting multiple enemies with magic and spreading the shifts for effect, you may affect some targets differently than others. Make a control roll against the total power of the spell -1 for every target you want to affect differently. If successful, you can channel the energy into other effects as you cast. I.e. you call up 8 shifts of power at control +10 and successfully cast. You divide evenly on 4 targets for a weapon 2 effect but you decide you want to blast two normally, inflict an aspect on the third and use a block against the last. You roll again at control 8 (-2 for 2 additional effects) and succeed. The final effect of your magic is 2 blasts at weapon 2, a minor block at strength 2 and the "off-balance" aspect on the last target.
Effectively, you are using energy for one big spell to cast multiple minor magics.

Extended Reserves [-1]
Requirement: Superb conviction, High Aspect involving magic.
Benefit: You have one additional minor mental or hunger consequence. You can only use up this consequence to fuel the use of powers needing mental stress expenditure within one scene, usually Evocation magic.
Special: You can take this ability up to 4 times. You can only take one such consequence per spell. However, those consequences are tagged or compelled as one; if you have taken three of them to keep casting magic, an enemy compelling would get a +6 against you. Effectively, you are learning to draw deeper on your own reserves, pushing your mind at the cost of greater fatigue.

[Deadmanwalking]

One-hit-kills
How would you adjudicate a sniper vs PCs? A sniper PC vs an important antagonist?

You can actually stack Aspects ALOT higher than that (though I might not do that to PCs), check out the Stealth Ambush rules. You can stack ten or fifteen Aspects with Guns and Stealth fairly casually as a sniper.

Armor vs light weapons
In short, light weapons-especially human fists, a tiny knife or a BB gun-doing damage vs armored targets does not make much sense. How would you fix that? Does it need fixing?

Every armor has weak spots, ones that are easy to target if your opponent isn't paying attention. She didn't hit it, she kicked it in the balls or or punched it in the throat.

Death Curse strength
Flavor-wise, a weak spellslinger would do a small curse. A more powerful spellslinger would do a significantly stronger curse. Rules-wise though, your curse is a one-action ritual with complexity equal to all your consequences (tagged or inflicted) plus your Lore. That's 40 shifts for the weakest practitioner, 50 shifts for someone like the Merlin. 40 shifts obliterate just about any mortal outright, and most non-mortals. 50 shifts do the same on 5 zones at once. Shouldn't there be a bigger difference between the two, especially at the low end? As is, it is almost impossible to avoid even a minor death curse. (Unless you're Cowl)

Well, you only get to tag your unused Consequences, so the base is actually Lore + 8 if all your Consequences are filled, Lore + 16 if you save your Extreme Consequence (as most experienced Wizards are likely to do)...and that Lore includes appropriate Thaumaturgy Specialties. So actually, that sounds about right to me. If you think Cowl won't do a minimum of a 26 shift death curse, you are underestimating the bastard.

Massive Area Spells
Area of Effect on the other hand is pretty linear. 2 shifts for 1 extra zone. This means it is almost impossible to cause damage or effects on a more than building-sized area. Even a strong ritual prepared for a day or two and with some aid (about 40 shifts) could at best blast 15 zones for a strong effect. So how do effects like hexing an entire city, causing a volcano to erupt, killing two hundred enemy minons in one blow, killing non-necromancers within a mile and so on work?

Well, for indiscriminate destruction, bear in mind that Zone size is arbitrary. It's clearly maybe a block or three in size...but in army-battles that area might contain dozens or hundreds of foes. For specific targets, I'm pretty sure you don't need to hit every zone between them, I don't think, just every one they're in.

And for wholesale destruction, you can actually, given a few days, easily work out 100s of Complexity if you're protected well enough.

Taking out buildings
That was one of the first things that came to mind. How do you adjudicate intentionally taking down buildings and barriers? One rules-relevant way I thought of was this: Take the building's weight and/or size. Calculate the Might level to lift/move that weight (I believe +1 might means twice as heavy weight, right?). Applying force equal to its own weight on the average building would make it collapse, if slowly. +1 for heavily built buildings and those that can handle massive weights or earthquakes, +2 for unfortified metal or fortified concrete, +4 for unusually resilient buildings like nuclear bunkers, the pyramids, very large dams and Arctis Tor. That's the roll you need to take down the building either with might or with appropriately humongous damage. Buildings do not have a defense (unless warded) but don't take extra shifts of damage for high success rolls either. Shifts for taking out well-known buildings in one blow according to this:
Brick House: 11 shifts
200 m skyscraper: 16 shifts
The Empire State Building: 22 shifts
Hoover Dam: 28 shifts
Do note that buildings won't be considerably damaged by minor effects. If you want to adjudicate repeated blows, give them a stress track equal to half the shifts (round up) and armor equal to what remains. A house won't be damaged much by less than Weapons 5, a skyscraper by less than weapons 8 and the Hoover Dam by less than weapons 14. Damage still happens but not enough to threaten the building's integrity in a reasonable number of blows.

That sounds right-ish, sure. Though I think building destruction should usually be more abstract than that, if you're doing focused demolition this seems the way to go.

[KOFFEYKID]

One-hit-kills
A good sniper aiming at a target from half a mile away is an interesting situation. We have a weapon 3 attack at skill +3, in my sights +2, a sniper aspect +2 (snipers rarely get to shoot more than 1/day so they should spend their fate pts), and the target's active defenses are at mediocre (+0). Assuming equally lucky rolls, that is 10 shifts of damage. Assuming best roll for sniper and worst roll for defender (a 1 in 65536 chance), that's 18 shifts of damage. The problem here is that if the target is a PC or equivalent (say, Harry Dresden), there is no way one can kill them with a sniper rifle; without extreme consequences they'd need 17 stress to KO, with the extreme consequence they'd need 26 stress. Even if the attacker is Kincaid (superb skill) and uses three aspects, the PC only dies in the worst possible roll.
How would you adjudicate a sniper vs PCs? A sniper PC vs an important antagonist?

If you are doing an ambush you can set up circumstances to be in your favor. This allows you to place scene aspects on the zone that you can tag for free to get a stronger effect. Hard to do with sniping from a mile away, but feasible, I just cant come up with any aspects that would improve sniping at the moment its easier to do with just a normal ambush, sans sniping, you could put an aspect of "From Above" on yourself, knock out some street lamps to put an aspect of "Pitch Black", and set up a distracting noise to put an aspect of "What was that". You could tag "From Above" and "What Was That" to get a bonus on your attack, and "Pitch Black" for a bonus on your stealth roll.

Armor vs light weapons
You have this very tough demon guy(armor 2-3). He won't be undamaged by a grenade or a high-powered rifle but he would laugh off light weapons. Then comes a little girl and smacks him bare-handed from behind. He is surprised so mediocre defense and the girl with fists 2 rolls well for a great result. Suddenly the bullet-proof demon takes stress from being hit. By a girl.
In short, light weapons-especially human fists, a tiny knife or a BB gun-doing damage vs armored targets does not make much sense. How would you fix that? Does it need fixing?

Unless you are physically fit and a skilled pugilist, it is assumed that the average fists skill for a person is zero, a little girl would most likely have a "Terrible" fists skill, giving her a rating of -2, or even -3 (God Awful?). Also, when you ambush somebody their defense skill is set to 0, they can still roll defense. So in this case the Demon could roll a 4.

Death Curse strength
Flavor-wise, a weak spellslinger would do a small curse. A more powerful spellslinger would do a significantly stronger curse. Rules-wise though, your curse is a one-action ritual with complexity equal to all your consequences (tagged or inflicted) plus your Lore. That's 40 shifts for the weakest practitioner, 50 shifts for someone like the Merlin. 40 shifts obliterate just about any mortal outright, and most non-mortals. 50 shifts do the same on 5 zones at once. Shouldn't there be a bigger difference between the two, especially at the low end? As is, it is almost impossible to avoid even a minor death curse. (Unless you're Cowl)

Remember that most wizards throwing out a death curse are going to be pretty banged up already, that means consequences you can use. Give your example of a wizard on the High Council, and your average joe white council member, that would put somebody at maybe 15 shifts, and a high council member at 25, just off the top of my head, I didn't do any math just making a guestimate, but the point is still valid.

Massive Area Spells
Most effects progress at a +1 means double the strength or even +2 means plus one order of magnitude. I.e. conjured object size, lifting weight, weapons equivalent to a certain weapon rating, strength of enchanted items and so on. Time has a similar scale. So it is doable to blast apart something really tough (see below) or engineer a curse lasting for generations.
Area of Effect on the other hand is pretty linear. 2 shifts for 1 extra zone. This means it is almost impossible to cause damage or effects on a more than building-sized area. Even a strong ritual prepared for a day or two and with some aid (about 40 shifts) could at best blast 15 zones for a strong effect. So how do effects like hexing an entire city, causing a volcano to erupt, killing two hundred enemy minons in one blow, killing non-necromancers within a mile and so on work?

You wont be pulling off any huge mass destruction spells with evocation, you will be doing them with Thaumaturgy, and you would set up a bunch of declarations and possibly be able to affect multiple zones at no penalty to begin with. Sort of how you can veil a whole zone with a evocation veil for a -2 penalty, but thaumaturgy veils are by default a whole zone, at least.

Taking out buildings
That was one of the first things that came to mind. How do you adjudicate intentionally taking down buildings and barriers? One rules-relevant way I thought of was this: Take the building's weight and/or size. Calculate the Might level to lift/move that weight (I believe +1 might means twice as heavy weight, right?). Applying force equal to its own weight on the average building would make it collapse, if slowly. +1 for heavily built buildings and those that can handle massive weights or earthquakes, +2 for unfortified metal or fortified concrete, +4 for unusually resilient buildings like nuclear bunkers, the pyramids, very large dams and Arctis Tor. That's the roll you need to take down the building either with might or with appropriately humongous damage. Buildings do not have a defense (unless warded) but don't take extra shifts of damage for high success rolls either. Shifts for taking out well-known buildings in one blow according to this:
Brick House: 11 shifts
200 m skyscraper: 16 shifts
The Empire State Building: 22 shifts
Hoover Dam: 28 shifts
Do note that buildings won't be considerably damaged by minor effects. If you want to adjudicate repeated blows, give them a stress track equal to half the shifts (round up) and armor equal to what remains. A house won't be damaged much by less than Weapons 5, a skyscraper by less than weapons 8 and the Hoover Dam by less than weapons 14. Damage still happens but not enough to threaten the building's integrity in a reasonable number of blows.

It should be considerably easier to take out buildings, you are talking about pancaking a building with excessive force. For most structures it should suffice to destroy their load bearing support structures. Harry can destroy a building with a stray fuego. Though most of the time such things are going to be compels against an aspect. You could argue that evocations that effect a whole zone do more damage to a structure than ones that affect a single target, that would make sense.

Custom Powers (please critique)

Multispell [-2]
Requirement: refinement 5
Benefit: when targeting multiple enemies with magic, either keep your full success roll and spread shifts for effect strength, or keep effect strength and spread your success roll. You're effectively casting one effect of undiluted strength and attempt to hit all targets by shifting the power to arc through them or divide the power and cast a smaller effect multiple times.

Greater Multispell [-2]
Requirement: Multispell
Benefit: when targeting multiple enemies with magic and spreading the shifts for effect, you may affect some targets differently than others. Make a control roll against the total power of the spell -1 for every target you want to affect differently. If successful, you can channel the energy into other effects as you cast. I.e. you call up 8 shifts of power at control +10 and successfully cast. You divide evenly on 4 targets for a weapon 2 effect but you decide you want to blast two normally, inflict an aspect on the third and use a block against the last. You roll again at control 8 (-2 for 2 additional effects) and succeed. The final effect of your magic is 2 blasts at weapon 2, a minor block at strength 2 and the "off-balance" aspect on the last target.
Effectively, you are using energy for one big spell to cast multiple minor magics.

The first one seems, powerful but reasonable, I think. Im not sure about the second one.

Extended Reserves [-1]
Requirement: Superb conviction, High Aspect involving magic.
Benefit: You have one additional minor mental or hunger consequence. You can only use up this consequence to fuel the use of powers needing mental stress expenditure within one scene, usually Evocation magic.
Special: You can take this ability up to 4 times. You can only take one such consequence per spell. However, those consequences are tagged or compelled as one; if you have taken three of them to keep casting magic, an enemy compelling would get a +6 against you. Effectively, you are learning to draw deeper on your own reserves, pushing your mind at the cost of greater fatigue.

Im going to say no to this, because most powers dont stack (the only one that does, that I'm aware of is Refinement), and there are already enough ways to get extra mild consequences (skills, and stunts).

Also, Grettings and Salutations from Ramaloke, Welcome to the Jimbutcheronline.com forums LordBelial,

[Kordeth]

OK, here's an assortment of questions/rules situations I have come up with after using the rules for a few days or so. They mostly concern extreme, impressive or otherwise cool stuff;


One-hit-kills
A good sniper aiming at a target from half a mile away is an interesting situation. We have a weapon 3 attack at skill +3, in my sights +2, a sniper aspect +2 (snipers rarely get to shoot more than 1/day so they should spend their fate pts), and the target's active defenses are at mediocre (+0). Assuming equally lucky rolls, that is 10 shifts of damage. Assuming best roll for sniper and worst roll for defender (a 1 in 65536 chance), that's 18 shifts of damage. The problem here is that if the target is a PC or equivalent (say, Harry Dresden), there is no way one can kill them with a sniper rifle; without extreme consequences they'd need 17 stress to KO, with the extreme consequence they'd need 26 stress. Even if the attacker is Kincaid (superb skill) and uses three aspects, the PC only dies in the worst possible roll.
How would you adjudicate a sniper vs PCs? A sniper PC vs an important antagonist?

The reason the game doesn't model "sniper from a half-mile away" well against PCs and major antagonists is because "sniper from a half-mile away" is a) a huge dick move on the part of a GM when used against a PC and b) not really a satisfying way of resolving conflict with a major antagonist. That said, it can be done, you're just not thinking nearly big enough. First of all, a military-grade sniper rifle of the type necessary to take a killing shot from a half-mile away is probably at least a Weapon 5 or Weapon 6 weapon. Second of all, no one ever said you're limited to one maneuver-placed Aspect on the target. In My Sights is good. In My Sights, Taken the Wind, Perfectly-Ranged Scope, Controlled Breathing, No Distractions, and Perfect Angle all together are even better. That's 10 completely free shifts right there, plus any character Aspects you invoke, plus skill ranks, plus roll, plus 5 or 6 stress on top of that for the weapon.

That said, it's a dick move to use on PCs. Don't do it.

Armor vs light weapons
You have this very tough demon guy(armor 2-3). He won't be undamaged by a grenade or a high-powered rifle but he would laugh off light weapons. Then comes a little girl and smacks him bare-handed from behind. He is surprised so mediocre defense and the girl with fists 2 rolls well for a great result. Suddenly the bullet-proof demon takes stress from being hit. By a girl.
In short, light weapons-especially human fists, a tiny knife or a BB gun-doing damage vs armored targets does not make much sense. How would you fix that? Does it need fixing?

Stress does not equal damage. The little girl miraculously beating the demon's armor and his defense roll has done something to discomfit the beast, she hasn't necessarily damaged it. Also, a "little girl with Fists 2" is not just a little girl: she's a little girl with at least a modest amount of talent and/or training in unarmed fighting, and she's just overcome a bulletproof demon's Defense roll by at least 3 or 4 points. That's a damned impressive bit of luck, and it's worthy of being described as something like a lucky elbow to the demonic-equivalent of the junk or something like that.

Death Curse strength
Flavor-wise, a weak spellslinger would do a small curse. A more powerful spellslinger would do a significantly stronger curse. Rules-wise though, your curse is a one-action ritual with complexity equal to all your consequences (tagged or inflicted) plus your Lore. That's 40 shifts for the weakest practitioner, 50 shifts for someone like the Merlin. 40 shifts obliterate just about any mortal outright, and most non-mortals. 50 shifts do the same on 5 zones at once. Shouldn't there be a bigger difference between the two, especially at the low end? As is, it is almost impossible to avoid even a minor death curse. (Unless you're Cowl)

I disagree with your premise. A more-powerful wizard can and does have a more-potent death curse, but all throughout the novels it's made pretty clear that even minor wizards can throw down pretty deadly death curses. The really scary-powerful ones don't just kill you, they curse you and your lineage unto the 7th generation, make your life a living hell, or otherwise do things that remind you that "a fate worse than death" isn't a metaphor. Even weak practitioners should be able to kill someone with a death curse; those extra 10-15 shifts should be reserved for annihilating entire city blocks or making really nasty, lingering effects.

Massive Area Spells
Most effects progress at a +1 means double the strength or even +2 means plus one order of magnitude. I.e. conjured object size, lifting weight, weapons equivalent to a certain weapon rating, strength of enchanted items and so on. Time has a similar scale. So it is doable to blast apart something really tough (see below) or engineer a curse lasting for generations.
Area of Effect on the other hand is pretty linear. 2 shifts for 1 extra zone. This means it is almost impossible to cause damage or effects on a more than building-sized area. Even a strong ritual prepared for a day or two and with some aid (about 40 shifts) could at best blast 15 zones for a strong effect. So how do effects like hexing an entire city, causing a volcano to erupt, killing two hundred enemy minons in one blow, killing non-necromancers within a mile and so on work?

They work via plot device. Seriously, we've never (that I can recall) seen a wizard that would be considered a PC do anything of that magnitude. The rare times we have (e.g. the Darkhallow), it's purely a plot-device level magical McGuffin.

Taking out buildings
That was one of the first things that came to mind. How do you adjudicate intentionally taking down buildings and barriers? One rules-relevant way I thought of was this: Take the building's weight and/or size. Calculate the Might level to lift/move that weight (I believe +1 might means twice as heavy weight, right?). Applying force equal to its own weight on the average building would make it collapse, if slowly. +1 for heavily built buildings and those that can handle massive weights or earthquakes, +2 for unfortified metal or fortified concrete, +4 for unusually resilient buildings like nuclear bunkers, the pyramids, very large dams and Arctis Tor. That's the roll you need to take down the building either with might or with appropriately humongous damage. Buildings do not have a defense (unless warded) but don't take extra shifts of damage for high success rolls either. Shifts for taking out well-known buildings in one blow according to this:
Brick House: 11 shifts
200 m skyscraper: 16 shifts
The Empire State Building: 22 shifts
Hoover Dam: 28 shifts
Do note that buildings won't be considerably damaged by minor effects. If you want to adjudicate repeated blows, give them a stress track equal to half the shifts (round up) and armor equal to what remains. A house won't be damaged much by less than Weapons 5, a skyscraper by less than weapons 8 and the Hoover Dam by less than weapons 14. Damage still happens but not enough to threaten the building's integrity in a reasonable number of blows.

Seems like a reasonable guideline.

Multispell [-2]
Requirement: refinement 5
Benefit: when targeting multiple enemies with magic, either keep your full success roll and spread shifts for effect strength, or keep effect strength and spread your success roll. You're effectively casting one effect of undiluted strength and attempt to hit all targets by shifting the power to arc through them or divide the power and cast a smaller effect multiple times.

This makes multi-target evocations way more powerful, if I'm reading this right. So, if I channel 8 shifts of power successfully and roll +9 on the control/targeting roll, I can split that up into three +3 Weapon:8 attacks? That seems way too good.

Greater Multispell [-2]
Requirement: Multispell
Benefit: when targeting multiple enemies with magic and spreading the shifts for effect, you may affect some targets differently than others. Make a control roll against the total power of the spell -1 for every target you want to affect differently. If successful, you can channel the energy into other effects as you cast. I.e. you call up 8 shifts of power at control +10 and successfully cast. You divide evenly on 4 targets for a weapon 2 effect but you decide you want to blast two normally, inflict an aspect on the third and use a block against the last. You roll again at control 8 (-2 for 2 additional effects) and succeed. The final effect of your magic is 2 blasts at weapon 2, a minor block at strength 2 and the "off-balance" aspect on the last target.
Effectively, you are using energy for one big spell to cast multiple minor magics.

This seems do-able, but I'd add one shift of power cost for each extra effect.

Extended Reserves [-1]
Requirement: Superb conviction, High Aspect involving magic.
Benefit: You have one additional minor mental or hunger consequence. You can only use up this consequence to fuel the use of powers needing mental stress expenditure within one scene, usually Evocation magic.
Special: You can take this ability up to 4 times. You can only take one such consequence per spell. However, those consequences are tagged or compelled as one; if you have taken three of them to keep casting magic, an enemy compelling would get a +6 against you. Effectively, you are learning to draw deeper on your own reserves, pushing your mind at the cost of greater fatigue.

Requiring Superb Conviction seems unnecessary, and I'd ditch the complication of "all counting as one" as overly complex. Cap the number of selections at Conviction, and technically it's more of a stunt than a power.

[KOFFEYKID]

AAAAAAAAAHHH, THEY ARE IN MY MIND.

Wow, both of you, stealing my thoughts. How dare you.

[Belial666]

@curse strength:

all of the consequences he has can be tagged, and he can inflict more upon himself if he’s got the space,

So even if you're beaten up, you still get a minimum of 40 shifts + Lore since you tag everything. So the difference is only a higher Lore plus any bonus consequences from high skills. Minimum 40, 50 for the Merlin (54 if his complexity bonus counts). A 36-shift blast flattens any unarmored mortal outright.

@multispell:
You're already throwing 9-10 shift evocations at +10 control by that time. That's 15 shifts effect on average against superb defenses. If you split it to Weapon 10 at +3 for 3 targets, you only do 10 shifts and hit half as often. Compare to taking -1 for moving out of the zone, spending 2 to hit the zone and doing 13 shifts vs superb defense. Multispell is not intended so much as a power boost as a stepstone for Improved Multispell. (I've been trying to stat Ivy lately )

@sniper rifles:
Weapon 3 is equivalent to a shotgun blast, a rifle shot or a full barrage from an automatic weapon. Weapon 4 is a grenade so maybe high-power rifles are weapon 4. But weapon 6 is having a truck thrown at you; even a massive rifle is still held by human strength on a human shoulder-if they had that kind of power, they'd snap the shooter's bones and throw him off his perch when the trigger was pulled.
Thanks for pointing out the multiple aspect thing though.

[luminos]

I might be repeating a lot of what's already been said, but here goes:

One-hit-kills
How would you adjudicate a sniper vs PCs? A sniper PC vs an important antagonist?

The important thing to remember is that the cinematic presentation of what happens sometimes overrules the purely logical presentation of what happens.  You can pull off one hit kills against armored mooks all day long with a sniper rifle, but you can't do that against their leader, because he gets to have a more cinematic death.  This might just mean that your shot perfectly aimed for his head misses with a very good roll, and hits him in the legs so he can't move very well.  Then either a second shot, or another group designed for closer range, finishes him off.  

I'd never do sniper vs PCs unless the PCs knew there was a sniper and the conflict was about getting to him/away from him while staying in cover so they don't get shot.  And it makes perfect sense, cinematically, why a shot from a sniper doesn't end with a one-hit kill on a PC.  They will be just lucky enough to be severely wounded by a high roll from the shooter.

Armor vs light weapons
You have this very tough demon guy(armor 2-3). He won't be undamaged by a grenade or a high-powered rifle but he would laugh off light weapons. Then comes a little girl and smacks him bare-handed from behind. He is surprised so mediocre defense and the girl with fists 2 rolls well for a great result. Suddenly the bullet-proof demon takes stress from being hit. By a girl.
In short, light weapons-especially human fists, a tiny knife or a BB gun-doing damage vs armored targets does not make much sense. How would you fix that? Does it need fixing?

It might not make much sense in a pure simulation, but cinematically, a little girl hitting that one spot that was weak and unprotected is a perfect way to model a good dice roll from a fists attack.  

Death Curse strength
Flavor-wise, a weak spellslinger would do a small curse. A more powerful spellslinger would do a significantly stronger curse. Rules-wise though, your curse is a one-action ritual with complexity equal to all your consequences (tagged or inflicted) plus your Lore. That's 40 shifts for the weakest practitioner, 50 shifts for someone like the Merlin. 40 shifts obliterate just about any mortal outright, and most non-mortals. 50 shifts do the same on 5 zones at once. Shouldn't there be a bigger difference between the two, especially at the low end? As is, it is almost impossible to avoid even a minor death curse. (Unless you're Cowl)

Good roleplaying fixes this a bit.  If an NPC gets off a death curse, then the GM should narrate a death curse that is appropriate for the badassness of the NPC.  If the PC gets off a death curse, feel free to let them unleash devastation, even if their character is very small fry on a magical scale, because after all, the PC is dead, so might as well let the death be a moment of glory.

What others say about consequences they already have is true as well.

Massive Area Spells
So how do effects like hexing an entire city, causing a volcano to erupt, killing two hundred enemy minons in one blow, killing non-necromancers within a mile and so on work?

Plot device.

Taking out buildings
That was one of the first things that came to mind. How do you adjudicate intentionally taking down buildings and barriers? One rules-relevant way I thought of was this: Take the building's weight and/or size. Calculate the Might level to lift/move that weight (I believe +1 might means twice as heavy weight, right?). Applying force equal to its own weight on the average building would make it collapse, if slowly. +1 for heavily built buildings and those that can handle massive weights or earthquakes, +2 for unfortified metal or fortified concrete, +4 for unusually resilient buildings like nuclear bunkers, the pyramids, very large dams and Arctis Tor. That's the roll you need to take down the building either with might or with appropriately humongous damage. Buildings do not have a defense (unless warded) but don't take extra shifts of damage for high success rolls either. Shifts for taking out well-known buildings in one blow according to this:
Brick House: 11 shifts
200 m skyscraper: 16 shifts
The Empire State Building: 22 shifts
Hoover Dam: 28 shifts
Do note that buildings won't be considerably damaged by minor effects. If you want to adjudicate repeated blows, give them a stress track equal to half the shifts (round up) and armor equal to what remains. A house won't be damaged much by less than Weapons 5, a skyscraper by less than weapons 8 and the Hoover Dam by less than weapons 14. Damage still happens but not enough to threaten the building's integrity in a reasonable number of blows.

ummm, sure.  I'd say for deliberately taking down buildings, Craftsmanship is the skill to use.  For doing so quickly, a stunt like demolitions is good.  

Multispell [-2]
Requirement: refinement 5
Benefit: when targeting multiple enemies with magic, either keep your full success roll and spread shifts for effect strength, or keep effect strength and spread your success roll. You're effectively casting one effect of undiluted strength and attempt to hit all targets by shifting the power to arc through them or divide the power and cast a smaller effect multiple times.

Greater Multispell [-2]
Requirement: Multispell
Benefit: when targeting multiple enemies with magic and spreading the shifts for effect, you may affect some targets differently than others. Make a control roll against the total power of the spell -1 for every target you want to affect differently. If successful, you can channel the energy into other effects as you cast. I.e. you call up 8 shifts of power at control +10 and successfully cast. You divide evenly on 4 targets for a weapon 2 effect but you decide you want to blast two normally, inflict an aspect on the third and use a block against the last. You roll again at control 8 (-2 for 2 additional effects) and succeed. The final effect of your magic is 2 blasts at weapon 2, a minor block at strength 2 and the "off-balance" aspect on the last target.
Effectively, you are using energy for one big spell to cast multiple minor magics.

Extended Reserves [-1]
Requirement: Superb conviction, High Aspect involving magic.
Benefit: You have one additional minor mental or hunger consequence. You can only use up this consequence to fuel the use of powers needing mental stress expenditure within one scene, usually Evocation magic.
Special: You can take this ability up to 4 times. You can only take one such consequence per spell. However, those consequences are tagged or compelled as one; if you have taken three of them to keep casting magic, an enemy compelling would get a +6 against you. Effectively, you are learning to draw deeper on your own reserves, pushing your mind at the cost of greater fatigue.

Multispell isn't bad, greater Multispell is inherently unbalancing, and Extended reserves, I'm not sure about.
That being said, its all a moot point, because these powers strike me as things only the super elite would have, and thus restricted to NPCs.  

[CableRouter]

Death Curse strength
Flavor-wise, a weak spellslinger would do a small curse. A more powerful spellslinger would do a significantly stronger curse. Rules-wise though, your curse is a one-action ritual with complexity equal to all your consequences (tagged or inflicted) plus your Lore. That's 40 shifts for the weakest practitioner, 50 shifts for someone like the Merlin. 40 shifts obliterate just about any mortal outright, and most non-mortals. 50 shifts do the same on 5 zones at once. Shouldn't there be a bigger difference between the two, especially at the low end? As is, it is almost impossible to avoid even a minor death curse. (Unless you're Cowl)

You can tag your consequences, that's only +2 per consequence; not the stress value the consequence could absorb.  Just like tagging someone's severe consequence (Broken Leg) only gives you +2 instead of +6.  So if a wizard has already taken all four levels of consequence, he's only at +8.  On the other hand, you could get +20 if you're fresh and inflict all four levels on yourself as you're taken out; but it's not likely that many wizards are going to just fall over and die without using any of their consequences first.

Of course that 8 + Lore is the baseline for a wizard beaten all the way to death.  More likely is a wizard who's taken his Mild, Moderate and Severe consequences and is taken out.  Realizing that using the Extreme consequence to live just one more round is pointless, he just accepts being taken out so he can inflict the Extreme on himself.  +6 for Consequences, +8 for Inflicting his Extreme on Himself, +4 (or so) for Lore; now we're up to ~18 plus any remaining Fate (keeping in mind that the wizard is going to gain 1 Fate per consequence taken in the fight via the Cashing Out rule the moment he's taken out).  It's very likely that a Wizard is going to find enough aspects to use all four of those fate points, so we're talking ~26 or so points.  Being able to take extra consequences is going to add +2 for each, with another fate point for cashing out and another aspect tagged.  ~26 is probably going to kill or cripple anything short of a major character in any case, see also: Falling Frozen Turkeys. :-)

[Deadmanwalking]

What Cablerouter said, though I'll note that you can sacrifice a consequence, then Tag it, so his example should really be 2 points higher than it is.

[Belial666]

@consequences:
I'd missed the tagging only giving +2 - thanks for the clarification. Still, you can use both mental and physical consequences in the Death Curse so even if you're beaten down to severe in both, that's still tagging 6 conditions for a +12, inflicting 2 extremes for a +16 plus Lore plus any Aspects you can tag since you won't be around to use the Fate Points later. That's a minimum of 28 shifts, enough to blast apart a large building or kill most people outright.

[Wordmaker]

Dang, looks like everything I would have said has been said.

Yeah, this game simulates movies, TV shows, and novels, not reality. Important characters do get plot protection.

And most mega-blast results of magic should be plot device effects, if being done by NPCs.

[CableRouter]

@consequences:
I'd missed the tagging only giving +2 - thanks for the clarification. Still, you can use both mental and physical consequences in the Death Curse so even if you're beaten down to severe in both, that's still tagging 6 conditions for a +12, inflicting 2 extremes for a +16 plus Lore plus any Aspects you can tag since you won't be around to use the Fate Points later. That's a minimum of 28 shifts, enough to blast apart a large building or kill most people outright.

You don't have separate mental and physical consequences.  You have separate stress tracks, but mental/physical and social stress tracks all share your consequence slots between them; that's what the "Any" means on the character sheet.  Some Superb skills, stunts and powers will give you bonus consequences but they will always be of a specific type.  For example Harry's Superb Conviction gives him an extra Mild Mental Consequence (YS 68 and his character sheet on the preceding page).

What Cablerouter said, though I'll note that you can sacrifice a consequence, then Tag it, so his example should really be 2 points higher than it is.

I was looking at it with the view of Tagging of your consequences as a bonus for a specialized form of necromancy and inflicting consequences on yourself is backlash which you take the moment the spell is cast, so you can't tag them afterwards for a retroactive bonus.  Tagging unused minor consequences for 4 shifts of power seemed a bit too powerful but every GM can make his own call on that.  It's not like it's a huge deal, a couple or four extra shifts aren't likely to make too much of a difference to the target.