Drawing Energy for Spellcasting

[Remi]

In Small Favor and other books, Harry "draws in energy from the environment" that he stores up large quantities and then uses later to power several of his spells, which mostly seem to be evocations (Forzare, for example). I haven't seen anything in the spellcasting rules that supports such a mechanic. Harry does this pretty casually without the usual caveats he spouts whenever he does something tricky with his magic, making it seem like this is no big deal.

In general, the rules seem to limit the number of evocation spells you can cast to two to four per scene (your Mental stress, which depends on your Conviction), plus whatever similar effects you might cast from enchanted items such as Harry's force rings. When those are exhausted you can start dipping into consequences, which gives a flavor similar to the books, where Harry talks about being tired after casting some spells.

The spell mechanics on p. 255 of Your Story speak of gathering power, but it is essentially limited to your Conviction, and is only used for the next spell. You can't suck in a bunch of power at no risk, and then meter it out spell by spell.

Obviously the ability to do this would greatly expand the spellcasting abilities of wizards who have time to prepare this way, and thus increase the potential for abuse of magic in the game. Novels by necessity work by different kinds of rules than RPGs. But the attraction of the Dresden Files RPG is that does a pretty decent job of making the RPG feel more like the novels than your average D&D clone.

Have I missed some rules that model this kind of power gathering? Does the new Paranet Papers book address this type of casting? Has anyone else come up with a set of homebrew rules that do this while limiting the potential for abuse?

Fate points can, in a sense, be spent to power thaumaturgy spells. Perhaps that might be the basis for a mechanic that allows wizards to pre-gather power for multiple spells or somehow manage to cast more spells after they're completely exhausted (which Harry does time and again).

[Taran]

I let wizards use aspects, if appropriate, to power spells.

Having a 'bonfire' aspect on the scene might let you boost your power by 2 shifts without using up more mental stress.  You still have to control it, though.

I also allow fate point expenditure, as long as an appropriate aspect is invoked, to boost power.

I limit this, though, since wizards are pretty powerful, in general.

So, maybe, Harry created a whole lot of aspects and invoked them for power?  There was a thread about this...

Or, maybe he just drew the power ahead of time.  So, in a sense, his mental stress boxes were already filled before he even went into the fight.

[Cadd]

The "simplest" mechanical explanation for what Harry did at the Shedd is Conviction and/or Discipline maneuvers. I'm not sure I feel that can fully model what happens in the book, but it's a start. There has been some discussion here on the forums about just that scene.

I'd say the various ways Harry draws in power can be roughly spread nto three categories:
1) Regular drawing of power for a spell. This is either a flavorful description of the 'deciding Power' part of spellcasting or a Conviction maneuver if it's a moment a head of time. Mostly the former.
2) Drawing from the environment - White Night's 'berjillion teakettles' moment. This is creative use of declarations and tags, but I think it's mostly used to create unconventional effects rather than actually stronger effects.
3) Shedd - a deep breath before being cut off. This is sort of a special case, and I'm not sure how I would want to model it fully.

[Mr. Death]

I'll typically do one of two things -- let a caster do a "gathering power" maneuver on themselves they can tag for a +2 to power or control, or let them invoke some aspect of the current scene for either a straight up bonus or as a 'free' spell of a specific strength (i.e., they don't get to choose how much power they're channeling, therefore they might get more than they can chew).

[Haru]

Ah yes, that scene. There's been quite a few discussions about that, I think.

And I think my answer today is pretty different from what it was/would have been some time ago.

To me this is either not relevant enough to put a mechanic around, it's just fluff, or I'll make it a gimmick of the scene and model everything around that.

Especially in this case, I think it would be a dangerous precedent to allow someone to draw in power beforehand and use it during a subsequent scene. Because players (and I include myself in that) tend to want to do that in any scene, because being able to cast more spells will give them an edge every time, without too much of a drawback.

So in this case, the gimmick should first limit spellcasting in some way. That's what the greater circle is for, after all.
For example, casting a spell costs 2 shifts of casting stress more than it would usually cost. That's easily done, you basically can cast 2 spells less this way, since you can't use your 1 and 2 stress box by this.
But since Harry is aware of that, he gathers his power beforehand to counter that. Now he makes a discipline check against +4 (drawing in all that power is pretty hard), and for every shift over that he gets to reduce the additional spell cost by 1. If he gets a +6 or better on his roll, he doesn't pay any additional cost and casts his spells normally.

[Cadd]

So in this case, the gimmick should first limit spellcasting in some way. That's what the greater circle is for, after all.
For example, casting a spell costs 2 shifts of casting stress more than it would usually cost. That's easily done, you basically can cast 2 spells less this way, since you can't use your 1 and 2 stress box by this.
But since Harry is aware of that, he gathers his power beforehand to counter that. Now he makes a discipline check against +4 (drawing in all that power is pretty hard), and for every shift over that he gets to reduce the additional spell cost by 1. If he gets a +6 or better on his roll, he doesn't pay any additional cost and casts his spells normally.

That was a really neat way of handling something like that scene!

[PirateJack]

I have a different way of looking at the aquarium scene.

I see it as Harry refusing a compel against the Hellfire Circle stage aspect, which would have limited him to only two/three spells (or weaker ones) if he had accepted it. In this case, however, he's given up a Fate Point to let him have his full range of spellcasting ability for the scene, right up until he gets hit with a Paralytic Gas compel (which he accepts due to lack of Fate Points) and smashes the tank window.

[Taran]

I have a different way of looking at the aquarium scene.

I see it as Harry refusing a compel against the Hellfire Circle stage aspect, which would have limited him to only two/three spells (or weaker ones) if he had accepted it. In this case, however, he's given up a Fate Point to let him have his full range of spellcasting ability for the scene, right up until he gets hit with a Paralytic Gas compel (which he accepts due to lack of Fate Points) and smashes the tank window.

I like this the best!

[Sanctaphrax]

Ah yes, that scene. There's been quite a few discussions about that, I think.

I found one.