1.Laws of Magic
2. Governing body of human magic. Stops wizards and humans with magic getting involved in mortal international affairs.
3. International Supernatural Politics. Mainly to do with the Accords. Luccio had to intervene with the Accord and the Denarians. Albeit with Dresden implying Mab's wrath.
4.Fighting other supernatural threats: The Black Court Purge, Kemmler and his disciples (including WW1), The Red Court, The Fomor, White Court on and off, The Rakshasa thing.
5. Miscellaneous Important roles in Supernatural Circles: The Gatekeeper, The Blackstaff, The Warden.
Number 4 has atleast half a dozen examples. Seems to be their main purpose other than the laws.
Plus according to Luccios lengthy discussing/debate with Harry. Stopping Wizard's from getting involved in mortal international affairs. This is also corrobaratted by WOJ that one of the White Councils purpose is to stop Wizards from advising/becoming kings and emperors. @Serack any help with that quote.
They kinda /do/ win. It’s one reason the White Council thinks of itself as something so ohmygodmighty important. But bear in mind a few things:
1) The White Council /exists/ in order to limit the power of wizards. These days, it’s mostly about keeping wizards out of the black magic–but in the past, it was also to keep wizards out of politics. They would show up as advisers, rarely (most “court wizards” were charlatans or underpowered schmucks), but the Council itself was very much against getting involved in things.
That’s mainly because if the Council threw its weight in anywhere, it was all but guaranteeing a civil war among its own members. (Remember, it’s very Euro-centric.)
The original Merlin learned a lesson about wizards involving themselves in politics. They already have too much power to use wisely, from his point of view.
There's a few other relevent things about the White Council their powers in that WOJ as well. How Wizards were rarer in the past yet could travel faster then most using Ways up until Cars, Trains and Planes.
2) Wizards were a hell of a lot more rare in centuries past. Their numbers have increased along with the world population, but back then a given country was lucky if it had produced a single wizard-level talent more than about one generation in three.
3) Travel in general was a lot harder. Disease, in general, was a lot more rampant and likely to kill you. Yeah, wizards have the capacity to recover from things, but they don’t have any particular increased resistance to contracting a disease. They just come back from it in better shape than regular folks. For example, if you get a good case of pneumonia (like I did), you’ve got a reduced capacity to resist subsequent similar infections. And that’s it. In fact, having gotten pneumonia once gives you a pretty darn big mathematical probability that you’re going to die of pneumonia in the future. (Pneumonia being one of the main things that actually does the killing when you’ve got cancer or other serious medical issues.) Wizards don’t face that same danger. If they beat it, they beat it, and it isn’t of any more consequence than getting over a cold.
But even so, before antibiotics, wizards were as worried about disease as everyone else was. And a great way to not get diseases was to STAY HOME. Which most of them did. That kinda limited how much conflict they would actually get involved in.
4) The Inquisition. Fact of the matter is that the Inquisition, for better or worse, made everyone REALLY aware of practitioners. If a wizard started slinging his power around willy nilly, it would attract attention. Probably /hostile/ attention, at that. Which leads us to…
5) Wizards have to sleep. Yes, an enraged wizard could probably kill just about anyone he wanted to, flatten towns, all the mighty wizard stuff. But… there are about a million humans to every full-blown wizard talent. A strong wizard can kill a mortal with about as much effort as it would take you to pick up a piece of gravel and toss it twenty feet. Now, go out to a gravel pile and do that a MILLION times.
More on the ability to travel giving them power and influence
Of course, that leaves many, many other things they could do to influence events. The most powerful such was the gathering of information and rapid communications. Their ability to travel rapidly, to gather information and send it elsewhere was something that didn’t really get beat until a Mr. Ford, Mr. Marconi, and some guys named Orville and Wilbur came along. And they were basically in the information business, which is an excellent way to guarantee security.
There's this important bit that kinda counters stopping wizards from having influence but I think shows the delicate game they play with Mortal history and culture
They were also largely responsible for the Renaissance, in the Dresden universe. Not directly, but by going out and finding the best and brightest minds and seeing to it that they got the education and the chances they needed to succeed in life. Some wizards even did direct mentoring of various brilliant figures of European history (DaVinci and Gallileo were two prime examples).
But they stayed out of direct involvement in wars and politics, instead focusing on becoming involved in the intellectual progress of society. Wizards from France and Germany, for example, would treat each other much the same way as opposing lawyers in a big case. Even when their clients were tearing each other to bits, that didn’t meant that the two wizards were foes. They were, in fact, professional colleagues, who were likely to go off and get a beer and roll their eyes at their clients’ foolishness.
and finally how they lost alot of there power or were kept in check.
(All of this is mostly focused on the White Council, which was centered in Europe. Wizards in other areas of the world, such as the Americas, eastern Asia, and Australia have far different histories.)
But that factor–the sheer weight of numbers of mortals–dictated the role they had to assume to survive and prosper. They hoped that a more advanced, less warlike culture would provide a better place for wizards to live. In fact, it did. But it also robbed them of the extreme power they’d possessed until that time, relative to vanilla mortals.
6) PEOPLE BELIEVED IN MAGIC AND IT SCARED THEM. I mean, there was none of this “but there’s no such thing as magic” nonsense involved. And not all the witch hunters were in it for the money. There was a class of men who knew all about the various forces of the supernatural, out there in the darkness, and who made themselves as able to contend with them as any mortal could be. If a wizard went all kaboomy on mortals, he knew that there was someone who was going to hunt him, striking in a moment of vulnerability.
(I’ll leave it to you to deduce who they grew up into, eventually. It isn’t complicated or hard to see.)
End of the day, even wizards bleed. And as the wise Governor of California says, if it bleeds, you can kill it.
Sorry for the quote dump.
