My Thaumaturgy House Rule

[Sanctaphrax]

On the other hand, there is quite a bit to say for 8+ shift skill replacement rituals without prep.

I don't really see them as houserules as such.

The 20 shifts/body thing is explicit, and changing it is totally a houserule.

Recovery is slightly more arguable, but there's nothing in the RAW (as far as I know) that even implies that Recovery wouldn't apply fully to consequences taken to fuel spells.

Yes, it explicitly states the "20 shifts per dead body" thing, which is incredibly broken for powering a spell, but on the other hand it will push the wizard over the edge for good, no matter what he is using the spell for.

Not necessarily. A wizard could sacrifice a faerie for 20 shifts. That would not involve Lawbreaking at all.

I think we mean a different thing, when we say time constraints. You are saying, that the ritual itself, the gathering of power, actually casting the spell should take up a fixed amount of time. I am saying, that the preparation is a much bigger part of that, both supported by the RAW and the novels.

By the RAW, preparation can take a few seconds. This is a problem, I think. We all agree that Thaumaturgy should take a while, but the rules don't support that.

On the contrary, I talked about the Earlking summoning twice, and it is a very good example of an unopposed ritual. But that happens at the "speed of plot", I don't see the need of putting up a time constraint there. Depending on the rules proposed in this thread, it would have taken Harry weeks to perform this ritual, if he would have been able to do so at all. I just don't see the ritual itself all that interesting. It is everything around it, that makes it interesting. Look at it. Harry talks a whole lot about preparing the spell, putting down the barbed wire ring, the items he has chosen to represent himself and the earlking, the energies of the day fading away and the night coming in all wild and untamed, those are all great declarations and maneuvers that help to reach the high complexity he needs. All of that takes up way more pages than when he is actually gathering up the energy for the spell.

What does this have to do with anything?

What I meant with what I said is, that if you are not opposed, nothing is going to stop you from casting the spell. You can take your time and play it safe. There is no need to know how much time casting the spell is going to take. 5 minutes, 20 minutes, 2 hours, is it really going to make a difference, if you are not working against a clock?

Yes.

Time is valuable. And I'm not talking about the difference between 5 minutes and 20 minutes here. I'm talking about the difference between 5 minutes and 5 years.

Ideally, the response to something like "I want to blow up the moon with a ritual" would be "that'll take a lot of work". Not "your character is easily capable of that, but I'll use my GM powers to make it hard for you".

Think of the time when

Eb drops a satellite

in the novels. Nothing was opposing him, as far as we can tell. But a normal wizard couldn't have done it. At least not fast enough for it to matter without making massive sacrifices.

The rules should support that.

Yes, but the more open a system is, the more the balance relies upon the open discussion between the involved parties. A system like D&D, where every possible spell is listed in the books, and there is nothing besides that is a way to balance a magic system without involving the GM. A spell can do what is listed in its writeup, and that is that, there is nothing to argue. For both sides, actually, if a GM doesn't like a spell, there is little he can do beside the ban hammer.

D&D does not work that way at all.

That aside, discussion still needs guidelines.

I know I'm nagging on this, but would you mind providing an actual example of this happening? At the moment I imagine something like this:
GM: So you hear about this vampire nest in New Orleans
P1: Nah, I'd like to go and destroy Baltimore with a giant ritual, who's game?
P2: I'm in.
P3: Yeah, let's do that!

Which is very odd, and I can't imagine it happening quite like this, that's why I'm asking.

It was more like "Huh, a field of dead giants. I think I'll resurrect them all. The other PCs aren't here, so I'll just take a couple hours to do it myself."

(The mechanics of said spell were PMed to me, if I recall correctly. But I seem to have deleted that message.)

Then I, as a GM, think: "I don't think that this should be so easy, but the rules are what they are and changing them on the fly to stop my player's plan would be unpleasant for everyone involved."

The character in question here crushes most of her problems with overwhelming magical power. It's a big part of her personality. This is fun and cool, but it puts a lot of stress on the Thaumaturgy rules.

If a part of the game is lame, then why would you even use it?

Because it's a big part of the setting, and a big part of many characters too.

But I'd rather not use something lame, so I'd like to make it less lame. (Honestly, though, I feel bad calling Thaumaturgy lame. It has big problems, but much of its design is pretty awesome.)

[crusher_bob]

The problem with 'the GM and players will figure something out' is manyfold:

1
The vast majority of GMs and players are not good at system design, so any system they are likely to come with on the fly is going to be broken in one way or the other.

2
The GM and players have very few 'things' to hang any self designed system on.  Can my 10 refresh wizard blow up a city?  What about my 20 refresh wizard? or by 30 refresh wizard?  What about, say, building a house out of grass clippings?  How hard is it, compared to doing it in a more conventional way?  After all, things moving at the sped of plot is a fine way to write a book, but not really a fine way to write rules for a game.

3
Any time spent making up your own rules is time not spent playing the game.  Many people will just look at the mess the rules are in and decide to solver their problems some other way.  After all, shooting the bad guy in the face is already well covered by the rules, why don't you go out and do that instead?

in the novels. Nothing was opposing him, as far as we can tell. But a normal wizard couldn't have done it. At least not fast enough for it to matter without making massive sacrifices.

The rules should support that.

Why couldn't a normal wizard have done that?  For example, I could have borrowed a horse, filling a cart up with explosives and roofing nails, taken my cart bomb through the never-never, dropped off my veiled cart bomb next to the house, and rode my rented horse into the sunset.  And that doesn't take much thaumaturgy at all.  As destructive power goes, blowing up a house is not really a big thing.

Compared to the other stuff attributed to Ebenezar:

Karakatoa:
Wikipedia:

The explosion is considered to be the loudest sound ever heard in modern history, with reports of it being heard nearly 3,000 miles (4,800 km) from its point of origin.
... the eruption was equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT ...

Tunguska

Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 5 to as high as 30 megatons of TNT (21–130 PJ),[7][8] with 10–15 megatons of TNT (42–63 PJ) the most likely

Pulling a satellite down out of orbit and blowing up a 'house' is a very measured and limited response.  Certainly stronger than a stiff diplomatic note, but much smaller than a full out attack would have been. 

[Sanctaphrax]

I agree with most of what you said, but I was under the impression that

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the satellite drop destroyed an entire village. That, combined with the fact that it could be aimed without difficult-to-acquire symbolic links and the fact that it completely bypassed the no-doubt powerful protections of the Red Court stronghold, led me to believe that it was an extremely powerful effect.

If you think otherwise, replace it with some other spell. The point is the same regardless.

[Haru]

Ok, see that is one of the things that I am talking about (well, trying to poorly, rather). Yes, the satellite did a lot of damage, but it was an offscreen thing. I would probably have let the player do this by spending a fate point on the "Blackstaff" aspect and be done with it. He is the blackstaff, he can do things like that simply by being the blackstaff. Especially, since Ortega had already been defeated, it was nothing more than a finishing move, which helped the story along.

I would look at a lot of thaumaturgy rituals this way, meaning having a look at the end rather than the means. For example Harry calling ab the wikipedia demon, you could go and make it a full fledged "summoning a demon and trapping him inside a circle" spell (means), or you can treat it as a contacts replacement ritual to gather some information (ends). They will be the same on the narrative end, but the mechanics would be entirely different.

And I see nothing wrong with the field of giants resurrection. It was a well written ritual from prep to finish, I see nothing to object. Plus she left her blood on every last one of them, and I would love to have that turn around on her. Yes, you could set it up to be a hundred shifts or more, but how much is the actual accomplishment worth? Would it bring her into debt with her sponsor? In trouble even, if the giants do something wrong?
Did it hurt the story? That would be my only objection. I haven't read the whole story, only a short section before and after the ritual, and it seemed to fit into it rather nicely.

If you look at it from a "how many shifts do you need to raise a thousand dead giants", then I agree, the preparation alone should have probably taken weeks. But if you look at it from another perspective and treat it as a presence replacement to convince them to join the fight, it is going to go down in numbers rather drastically. The need for a ritual would still be the fact that they are dead, so you wouldn't be able to talk to them, and they wouldn't be able to help otherwise. But raising them is not the interesting part here, at least in my eyes, so it should be alright to just gloss it over with a good description.

I stressed the earlking ritual as an example of a high complexity ritual cast in a few moments. But this, too, could have easily been done without any numbers involved by Harry accepting a compel. The GM and Jim agree to let him do the ritual successful, but the Earlking will still get loose and roam through town, due to Cowl and Kumori interfering.

With all that in mind, it should be possible to limit any actual thaumaturgy to sane numbers and treat the big rituals as plot devices. That's kind of what I had in mind the whole time, it just took a while to shake it loose.

It can ease a whole number of things, actually. For example I think it would be highly annoying to roll and roll and roll on the zombies throwing themselves against Harry's wards to get in. First of all, you'd need to determine a strength value for Harry's wards, which would probably be rather high, but how high exactly? Doesn't really matter, they are going to get through eventually, so you can just say something like "At the rate the zombies are throwing themselves at your wards, you have 5 exchanges to come up with a plan, that is equal to your complexity for wards. The clock is ticking."

And this is sort of what I meant by "unopposed", too. If a ritual is unopposed, the only reason you are doing it is its importance to the story for one reason or another. And if the ritual isn't even important to the story, then it can most often than not fall under the "mundane effects" category. I don't roll on background rituals as well. The big bad summoning a demon, killing someone remotely, etc., all of that happens, because the story demands it to. So if the story demands something of the PC, why not let them do it similarly? Now I'm not proposing to throw the rules overboard completely, they are still plenty valuable. I'm just proposing to solve this problem with an integral part of the fate rules, narrative power.

[crusher_bob]

agree with most of what you said, but I was under the impression that

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My memory claims it was a 'house' in the same sense that, say, Wayne Manor is a 'house'.  So much larger than your standard 3 bedroom, 2 bath, but nothing a 2000 pound bomb wouldn't level + plenty of collateral damage.

Personally, I'd prefer that the limits on big thaumaturgy be more social and diplomatic than rules related.  In general, any attempt to use big thaumaturgy, even if it's not directly destructive has some chance of upsetting the status quo, and there are plenty of great powers who could probably sniff out your intentions during the preparation phase and come do something about it.

So, for example, if you were planning to use power ~60 thaumaturgy to create yourself a sumptuous mansion out of random crap from the junkyard, there'd be a place nearby where the gatekeeper absolutely did not drop by to have a look at what you were doing, and some helicopters that were in no way associated with the white court might have flown by, and those little fairies who came by were just the free wee folk, and absolutely not stringers for the Summer and Winter courts.

And if you have been planning to do something other than make yourself a sumptuous mansion, then maybe that team of Red court investigators that you didn't see might have come and tried to tear you to itty bitty pieces one night. 

Of course, if you are the sort of person who can do 60 power thaumaturgy, this is probably not really a problem.  But it does express the 'grave concerns' that the other accorded nations have with what you are doing.  And it's not even that the hand of god will descend and squash you, but more like Iran trying to develop nuclear weapons, a lot of people are going to take an interest.

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Now, what about the times we've seen in the books where 'really big' thaumaturgy showed up? 
Changes (Yes, other powers involved)
Small Favor (Yes, other power involved)
Dead Beat (hmm, I'll use the excuse that a lot goes on that Harry doesn't know about)
Death Masts (well, at least two powers involved, anyway)

One certainly had the interest of other powers (Changes), the other (Dead Beat), well I'd use the excuse that there's a lot goes on that Harry doesn't know about.

[Becq]

Discussions regarding what Eb could or could not have done (or should or shouldn't have been able to do) seem fairly irrelevent to me next to what I at least consider to be the key point: under RAW, any character with discipline>=5 (including the use of specializations/focii) is capable of casting any spell -- regardless of complexity -- just by stringing together enough miniscenes.  This could include a feet-in-the-water minor practitioner capable of reproducing, for example, Eb's satellite trick.  Without the help of Demons, Outsiders, Evil Tomes, etc.

This is enough to make me think that revision of the Thaum mechanics are a Good Thing.

[Tedronai]

This is enough to make me think that revision of the Thaum mechanics are a Good Thing.

Well, they have plenty of potential to be Good Things (TM), but that doesn't guarantee that they will be.

[Sanctaphrax]

And I see nothing wrong with the field of giants resurrection. It was a well written ritual from prep to finish, I see nothing to object. Plus she left her blood on every last one of them, and I would love to have that turn around on her. Yes, you could set it up to be a hundred shifts or more, but how much is the actual accomplishment worth? Would it bring her into debt with her sponsor? In trouble even, if the giants do something wrong?

Did it hurt the story? That would be my only objection. I haven't read the whole story, only a short section before and after the ritual, and it seemed to fit into it rather nicely.

It didn't hurt the story at all, but the game's inability to model the event properly hurt my fun.

Elena spent a few hours and without any particular effort created an army powerful enough to wipe out most countries. (Every single giant is a Submerged character with 17 Refresh worth of Powers including Mythic Strength. Except for the ones that are exceptionally strong.) That's clearly overpowered.

If Elena is this powerful then it makes a mockery of the game's challenges.

The only thing holding her back is GM fiat. Which basically turns the game into Mother-May-I. She can do absolutely anything, as long as I don't feel like arguing about it.

Plus it's bad for my suspension of disbelief. Which is important.

But worse than either of those problems is the fact that there isn't much of a game involved in her rituals. They are, in themselves, dull as dry toast. Their narration is cool and their consequences interesting, but that's beside the point. We could have the same narration and the same consequences if Elena just spent a Fate Point to make a Declaration.

So a ritual is essentially a Declaration, except with pointless number crunching. Woo.

Fortunately, Belial is nice enough to powergame in fun ways. So the problem is not too drastic. But it is in fact a problem.

And this is sort of what I meant by "unopposed", too. If a ritual is unopposed, the only reason you are doing it is its importance to the story for one reason or another.

According to Your Story, rituals are stories in themselves. This is a good approach, because it accommodates wizards who try to solve every problem by retreating to a hideout to magic their problems away.

It should be fun to play a Wizard like that. Pulling off a ritual should be interesting and challenging.

The RAW don't make that so, so the RAW should step aside and let houserules improve things.

[Silverblaze]

I've always felt thaumaturgy is great for story. 

I've always felt thaumaturgy was bad for the game mechanics.

I think to some extent powerful narrative trumps mechanics.  However, Sanctaphrax has a very good point.  When a Wizard (spellcaster) can make a mockery of many combat scenarios through rituals...something with the base rules is wrong.  I'm not saying I have the fix, but I think a fix may be in order.  Frankly, ( I know I say this a lot but...) I'm  not sure there is a fix that will satisfy everyone, especially the ones advocating wizardly badassitude.  Wizards are at the core of this game and hard to balance.  They are ( apperently very arguably) unbalanced and super powered in many circumstances.  Since these two issues exist, at least in my opinion, each table will likely need to house rule Thaum for themselves.  Not saying we shouldn't work to create a "fix" for this problem, but even our "fixes" may wind up being houseruled. 

This leads me to the fact taht the section on thaumaturgy needed a chapter defining reasonable/fair limits to rituals in games included in the RAW.  Hopefully revision is incomming in future supplements.

[crusher_bob]

I think part of the problem is context.  It's like saying that a good carpet bombing can make trivial many small scale combats, and it can.  But carpet bombing is hardly the solution to everything.

So, if you are playing magic-noir cops and robbers, then you agree to keep all the big things off that table, because that's not really part of magic-noir cops and robbers.  If you instead want to play magic-noir diplomacy, or magic-noir global thermonuclear war, then the constraints you operate under are considerably different.

From stuff implied in the books, there are people in the setting who play magic-noir global thermonuclear war, or more accurately, don't play, but could.

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So, a lot of 'but I can do X with thaumaturgy, and that's totally overpowered' is a bit like players in a game about competing organized crime interests in Chicago in the 1920s saying 'I could have my mechanics make up some armored cars, and I could load up some crop dusters with jelled petrol bombs and take over all the organized crime in the city! (mwa-ha-ha-ha!), because the cops don't have any airplanes at all, and what are they going to do to something that is bullet proof?

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So, as long as the thaumaturgy rules generally prevent chumps from brewing up nukes in their bathtubs and don't let BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner cost the same amount of refresh, I'll be happy.

[UmbraLux]

I think part of the problem is context.

This.

Play with friends who buy in to your game's intended theme. 

[Haru]

It didn't hurt the story at all, but the game's inability to model the event properly hurt my fun.

Plus it's bad for my suspension of disbelief. Which is important.

Now this I can understand, even if I don't feel like this myself.

The RAW don't make that so, so the RAW should step aside and let houserules improve things.

Absolutely. Like I said before, my main goal was to understand where exactly your problems are with this, and I think we finally arrived at that point. Thank you for the discussion.

I've been trying to work out something, but all I got are some half baked ideas that I don't really think would work. Sorry I can't contribute anything more useful.

[Becq]

Even balancing thaumaturgy against the novels would be an improvement over RAW.  As it is, the rules make it eminently feasable for even a feet-in-the-water minor practitioner (let alone a snorkling wizard/sorcerer) to duplicate Blackstaff-level feats of thaumaturgy (or much, much, worse).  All it takes is a net control (discipline + spec + focus) of at least 5 and a sufficiently long string of mini-scenes strung together...

[Sanctaphrax]

I think part of the problem is context.  It's like saying that a good carpet bombing can make trivial many small scale combats, and it can.  But carpet bombing is hardly the solution to everything.

So, if you are playing magic-noir cops and robbers, then you agree to keep all the big things off that table, because that's not really part of magic-noir cops and robbers.  If you instead want to play magic-noir diplomacy, or magic-noir global thermonuclear war, then the constraints you operate under are considerably different.

Context is only a small part of the issue, so far as I'm concerned.

Even if you're playing at cops and robbers level, many characters will be forced to purchase the ability to do the big things for certain concepts. Barring Compels, everybody with Ritual can do the 100-shift thing.

And the threat of nuclear war is unconvincing to me, because the best rituals are not all that offensive. If I want to Conjure a private island with an 80-shift Ward that lasts 200 years and checks everyone to see if they should be allowed in with a 40-shift Divination, that's not going to make people want to kill me.

Regardless, the balance concerns are secondary. I care more about the other issues.

So, as long as the thaumaturgy rules generally prevent chumps from brewing up nukes in their bathtubs and don't let BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner cost the same amount of refresh, I'll be happy.

As written they fail both those tests, but as I understand it your revision passes them. So congrats.

PS: IIRC, wyvern actually lost a player to the Thaumaturgy rules. The player in question was problematic to begin with, but the rules brought the problems out. You may want to talk to him, Haru.

[crusher_bob]

And the threat of nuclear war is unconvincing to me, because the best rituals are not all that offensive. If I want to Conjure a private island with an 80-shift Ward that lasts 200 years and checks everyone to see if they should be allowed in with a 40-shift Divination, that's not going to make people want to kill me.

I'm not saying that any use of 'high power' thaumaturgy is the equivalent to setting nukes off, but more that there are a lot of great powers with a very vested interest in the status quo.  If your use of big thaumaturgy doesn't upset the status quo, they'll just investigate and quietly leave.  But, then again, you've declared yourself a nuclear power, and they'll probably try to control you in some way or the other, even if it's just by engaging you in diplomacy.

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Now, problems with my thaumaturgy revision:
1
I didn't solve the bodycount problem.

I don't have an idea for a quick fix for this one.  The first person you kill for bonus complexity should be a big deal, otherwise, why do it?  But the 347th person you kill for a ritual should probably matter a lot less.

2
I made no real provisions for other people to help you with ritual preparation, only during actually casting the ritual

I was mostly trying to come up with a rules set that the wizard;s player could go off by themself and do, and not something to really drag the other players into.  Of course, there's hardly any cooperative thaumaturgy in the books that's not done by very low power people.

3
When I wrote it, I was more interested in limiting the complexity you could do in minutes/hours because I saw those time periods as the two most likely blocks of time you'd have available during a story.  So, for example, I didn't change how added complexity from refinement works because it increased the complexity of the stuff you could do quickly, and I thought that that was the thing people would be most interested in.

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So what was I trying to solve when I wrote them?

As best as I can remember:

To reduce the amount of GM face time needed every time thaumaturgy gets brought out. 

To provide clear limits on how much complexity you could get in the generally limited time period I though you'd have available (minutes or hours).

To limit the available complexity of lower refresh characters who had access to thaumaturgy, without requiring higher refresh characters to spend all their points into thaumaturgy power ups just to do some of the stuff we see Harry do.

To let nominally low powered bad guys still be able to produce powerful effects by inflicting consequences or sacrifices.