I know that there is almost always someone asking about this topic, but I am still trying to get a better feel for it so I can be better suited to work with my players during the upcoming games.
Currently, I have one PC that specializes in summoning and one PC who is an ectomancer. So far, they haven't done anything with those set powers beyond prep and cancel when a party member did something to change things, but it did make me wonder if I was making things too difficult.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I am under the impression that, with both of these options, the players can use their set magical ability to gather information at a difficulty equal to what it would be to actively walk out to get the info, even if it would be impossible. An in-game example was the ectomancer summoning a spirit to learn of an NPCs lineage; I set it at a 6 Shift difficulty, as that would be the difficulty if a character had gone to the library to find the same thing. Does this seem correct?
Another question that came up was the limitations of summoning spirits and demons; what if they wanted to do a full blown seance or ritual to bring in the entity for multiple questions. Would that add to the difficulty, become a contested roll over time, or be scaled at the strength of plot?
One concern I had: summoning for purposes of possession. I know the ectomancer wouldn't force a spirit into another body, but I have to wonder if our Demonologist would summon a demon to be placed into a body. How would you scale that for the summoning and control? I would assume another, rather difficult spell would be needed to "take out" the victim, but as I haven't had the chance to really run into the situation, I thought I would present that here.
I remember that there were notes on summoning over at the Dresden Files RPG Website, with different ways to scale the difficulty and options for everything ranging from a scene's worth of help to permanent dominion, and while I found some of it to be interesting, I found the difficulties to be rather high to consider using, even for information purposes. Has anyone used that rules variant to any degree?
Finally, any notes or samples of summoning/binding that you've used in game would be greatly appreciated. Seriously. This is something that is rather different and, to me, feels more like a plot device for NPCs, but difficult for me to scale for PC use.
Thanks in advance for any input or help!
--Crion