Brought up in another thread I opined that I don't care much for the rules when it comes to magic. Why you might ask: Wizards have at best 4 spells per engagement with the possibility to flub them fairly easily. If they decide to go balls to the walls to take out some really big bad they have even less. This makes them about level 2-3 in the old dungeon and dragons system. Remember when a first level wizard could only memorize one spell and it was almost always charm person so you could have some one fight for you at for a round.(which would be breaking the laws of magic and so someone would come and cut your head off just cause you were trying to stay alive. ) Maybe you choose magic missile but either way after that you where poking things with your dagger.
I think you're misunderstanding how mental stress from spells works. Say I'm starting character Harry Dresden, from the book. I have an effective Discipline of 4 and Conviction of 6 for Fire magic.
My Mental Stress track looks like this: OOOO (+1 Mild Consequence).
Now, let's say I'm going, as you put it, 'balls to the wall' and throwing out 9 shift of power to, say, burn down a building full of vampires. I've been through some shit, and have 3 FP to spend on this, making my success pretty damn likely, so I do it, making a Weapon 7 attack at 8 or 10 shifts on the entire scene. That's pretty impressive, even for the FP expenditure, and a lot better than non-Wizards get without literal heavy artillery (Grenades are only Weapon 4, after all), and potentially kills dozens of vampires all on it's own, since it's Zone Wide and nasty.
And here's the part where I think you misunderstand, because after this my mental stress track looks like this:
OOOX (+1 Mild Consequence).
Meaning I can do three more spells easily this combat. 4 if I'm willing to take a Mild Consequence (something like 'Tired' or 'Seeing Stars' or 'I Can Taste Purple') and 5 if I'm willing to take two of those. And even more if I'm willing to really get hurt doing it.
And I can do this
every fight. Okay, the Consequences might not be available every fight, but the Stress is, and the consequences go away pretty damn quick since they're mild. I've just been re-reading the entire Dresden Files, and I can't think of an actual single encounter where Harry uses more than 4 spells and isn't tired as hell or punchy as hell afterward. That's what Mild Consequences look like.
True the DFRPG wizards can do some nifty things with the 3-4 spells they have, if they have enough power and if they roll well and if the target doesn't roll well. To many ifs. I Like magic, I like roleplaying games with magic in them, I like my wizards nice and powerful, its one of the reasons i hate MMOs the guy with the stick is always tougher then the guy who can bend nature to his will and wipe out a continent. Really who would spend years studying the arcane when a guy with the club always wins. In most role playing games this is well reflected and no game reflected it better then Ars Magicka, wizards were top and the magic system is a blast.
Yes, because Dresden always vastly overshadows Murphy, who's totally not in his league, combat-wise. And Harry's never run out of magical juice and resorted to mundane attacks. Wait, neither of those is true at all.
And those 'few shots' you get are miles better than those provided by almost anything else. Legendary attacks at Weapon 8 on a starting character are possible. Fantastic ones at Weapon 6 are
common, at least at Submerged.
I just can't get passed the idea that your limited to 3-4 spells. It doesn't matter how creative you are with them or what they can do in theory, you basically cast one defensive spell and hope it will last a few passes of the engagement. and you have 1-2 shots at taking out the bad guy.
Play someone with Sponsored Magic then. They can take a point of Sponsor Debt instead of a mental stress, if they like. This is how Harry's been managing a lot of his endurance as a spellcaster since Blood Rites.
I just can't see how the white court brought down the entire red court of vampires. This system is not meant for large scale engagements. Every few minutes the wizards have to hope their not in combat so their mental stress can reset, how does that happen in pitched battle. In the books when lucio is killing zombies with little blasts of flame very pin point stuff, harry even comments on how much control that takes. But she did it over and over again without rest, try that in the game. The game rules do not reflect what the book says these wizards can do. If we want we can describe our spells that way but the effect in no way will match what we describe. the power of the spell has to be broken up over all the targets. So a legendary effect becomes 2 good effects and a fair effect against only three targets. Maybe they die maybe they don't either way i got 1-2 spells left after that one and the defensive one i had to cast or i would have been killed at the beginning of the first pass because anything that's not human is faster and stronger.
Luccio is actually using a finger-thin whip of fire in that scene...which sounds like a great narrative for a zone-wide Evocation in context. Also, the correct way to handle major engagements is as several actual scenes, with Stress refreshing between them. The game's designers have explicitly endorsed this view, with the duel followed by the big fight in the Deeps in White Night as their example, with those clearly two separate scenes. You need to remember that Fate is narratively based and so are it's scene breaks.
Its true we have some enchanted items that really even up things but we really can't cast spells we just carry a lot of junk along with us. Then add the silly rules of magic into it and you got a lot of effects you can't even use against run of the mill bad guys. I just threw those out, what fun is playing a mage if you cant polymorph someone or read their mind to find out if there the ones your looking for. Just plain ick thats what its is.
So...you object to the Laws of Magic, too? What about the Dresdenverse's magic do you
like?
