Author Topic: Are Offensive Blocks Offensive?  (Read 4197 times)

Offline BumblingBear

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Re: Are Offensive Blocks Offensive?
« Reply #15 on: April 14, 2011, 09:54:38 AM »
ALL POWER COMES WITH A PRICE is probably a recurring theme only due to Harry's THE TEMPTATION OF POWER being his trouble. Frankly, in those stories in DF that do not feature Harry Dresden as the protagonist, it doesn't come up.

In fact, when the spotlight is on other characters, I feel that POWER'S LOW LOW PRICE seems to be more appropriate.

I don't know how you can possibly get that....

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Myself: If I were in her(Murphy's) position, I would have studied my ass off on the supernatural and rigged up special weapons to deal with them.  Murphy on the other hand just plans to overpower bad guys with the angst of her short woman's syndrome and blame all resulting failures on Harry.

Offline toturi

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Re: Are Offensive Blocks Offensive?
« Reply #16 on: April 14, 2011, 12:05:47 PM »
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I can see how you can make those connections from these example to that Aspect but I think that there are simply too many degrees of seperation between these issues to make a direct connection. The further removed from Harry the protagonist, the less the question of power and its price comes into play.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2011, 12:22:38 PM by toturi »
With your laws of magic, wizards would pretty much just be helpless carebears who can only do magic tricks. - BumblingBear

Offline MorkaisChosen

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Re: Are Offensive Blocks Offensive?
« Reply #17 on: April 14, 2011, 02:34:53 PM »
I've just realized the issue I have with the whole concept, or at least it's finally concrete in my head now. Here's the issue. I create a block, say I describe it as a kinetic buffering field, so that it slows attacks down. However let's say I decide to surround my enemies with it. I'm preventing one type of action so it can apply to multiple targets and to be safe I'll even spend 2 shifts to make it zone wide. It still prevents them from attacking me and my allies, but now it's a offensive (or detrimental) block. I can now throw all of my foci and specializations into offense and still have no issue defending. For that matter I can still veil, maneuver or anything else provided I target an enemy and not an ally. I think that's the part where this gets hazy.
And then that one guy that you hadn't noticed turns up behind you and shoots you in the back.

Flippancy aside, I think this is an important point. The offensive blocks you're using rely on knowing the enemy's there and being able to do things to him. Most of the time, you're fine- but there are situations where it won't work and, if I was GMing a game with someone exploiting this, word would start to get round the supernatural community about how he operates- and his enemies would start using traps and ambushes a lot more.