This attitude that says that 20+ shifts of thaumaturgy is easy is terrible. Every piece of fluff that we have indicates that it isn't supposed to be that way.
It's got nothing to do with "attitude". The game mechanics are easy. If you want them to be difficult, house rule them! But don't call easy mechanics difficult 'because they should be'...not when logical analysis says differently.
Victor Sells' heart-explodey spell is supposed to be extremely powerful and impressive. And the vast majority of our canonical example rituals are weaker than 10 shifts.
The heart exploding spell, and any take-out spell, starts in the mid twenties or thirties. It's not close to a sure thing until forty or so. Victor's spell was something Harry expected would blast through threshold, wards, and a circle while still killing him. The book puts it at 36 shifts, I'd say it needed to be higher to ensure penetration of any wards & circles.
Perhaps more to the point, Victor didn't exactly make intelligent use of his power. In the OW comments, Harry states this is why he was able to take him.
And not only does the fluff say that, it's also much more sensible balance-wise if Thaumaturgy isn't easy. Because Thaumaturgy duplicates skill rolls. Skills rolls generally cap out at 8ish. Thaumaturgy shouldn't smash that barrier so trivially.
I agree...which doesn't change how it's actually written.
An ally with high skills isn't quite as good as having high skills yourself, but it's still damn good. Unless I really don't understand your control mechanics.
By these rules, you do not need a high refresh level to justify high skills. If you want that to be the case, you need to make it the case.
I still think an extra action is worth a lot...otherwise I agree.
My belief that maneuvers can only be used in conflicts was arrived at thusly:
-I was talking to someone (I think it was Belial666) about a skill roll, and he said that it would be easy because he could just maneuver+tag to hit the difficulty. Which seemed wrong to me, given that we have those spiffy time charts that you're supposed to use for skill rolls. If a ten-second maneuver could do the same thing as spending two more time increments, then something seemed very wrong.
This is a feeling, not a reason.
-So I went to the rulebook and looked up the rules for maneuvers. They were in the conflict and spellcasting sections, as a possible use of magic and as one of the basic actions in a conflict. Outside of those sections, they simply were not mentioned. Which led me to the conclusion that you cannot maneuver outside of a conflict, except with the abstracted maneuver-analogues provided by magic. Which means that aspects created outside of conflict are made through Declarations, not maneuvers.
Maneuvers are mentioned on a variety of pages. A few worth mentioning in relation to non-combat maneuvers: the Command trapping of Presence allows coordination of tasks; Craftsmanship allows maneuvers against structures via Demolitions; Contests (YS193) may be used as an "isolated maneuver action"; the section on maneuvers in the Conflict chapter also mentions Navel Gazing Maneuvers and uses lock picking as one example; YS208 explicitly states maneuvers can be used to coordinate actions outside of combat; not sure if you consider soulgazes a conflict but you can use maneuvers there; minor effects (YS259) are
"usually assumed to be within the scope of evocation maneuvers"; thaumaturgy appears capable of maneuvers outside of combat; YS299 suggests using maneuver spells for researching a scene; and Bob's love potion is a maneuver, does it count as a conflict? There are more but I'm tired of cataloging them. Outside of the book, one author states
assessment, declaration, and maneuvering are all the same action - aspect creation / discovery.
But toss all those out for a minute and consider the effects of only allowing declarations in thaumaturgy spells. Doing so presumably excludes everyone but the caster from the scene (which I find boring) but otherwise doesn't make the spell much more difficult. Declarations and maneuvers are just aspect creation.
