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The Dresden Files => DFRPG => Topic started by: g33k on November 14, 2013, 02:36:29 AM
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Offhand, Air and Spirit (pure force / kinetomancy) look like the obvious solutions.
Evocation is too quick&dirty, too hard-to-sustain-control, for anything sustained.... right? So Thaumaturgy for sustained flight... right?
For (very rough) example:
- Evoke a flight to the top of a 3-story building, probably OK.
- Evoke a flight across a 50' river, probably OK.
- Evoke a flight to the top of a 50-floor skyscraper... expect LOTS of extra rolls and likely failure.
- Evoke a flight across the Mississippi river... expect LOTS of extra rolls and likely failure.
Does this seem about right?
What about thaumaturgic flight? I'm a bit adrift on the difficulties of this one...
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The obvious and fair solution: purchase the Wings power. Everything else should be temporary at best, such as a Thaumaturgical ritual allowing a wizard to ignore height based borders up to a certain value.
For Evocation, you create maneuver aspects and then roll Athletics.
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I equate evocation flight to being shot out of a cannon. If you can aim properly and survive the landing, it should work o.k. If you have physical immunity or something, that'd be useful.
Maybe represent it as ant an attack on yourself using air or spirit. Your athletics to dodge represents your ability to land without being injured. The power (and weapon value) would be based on what it would take to pick up your weight using Might (5 shifts for an adult) plus more shifts if you're going more than one zone.
As you can see, I'm not a big fan of flight via evocation.
Thaum flight would be setting up aspects to gain Wings temporarily. If you're going to do this often enough, you should just buy the power. Attach it to human form(to represent spell-casting), if you want.
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Well, evocation has the extremely bad side effect, that it is more akin to a rocket jump than actual flight. Sure you can push yourself with enough force to fly up a 50 floor skyscraper, but that should be enough force to do some nasty damage (if you like, I can calculate that for you later. ;) ).
Not to mention that you need to land somehow, and depending on how your trajectory was, you will just smash into the ground.
There is another thing that sort of makes using evocation for movement rather complicated, and that's the fact that there is simply not a good rule for moving someone in a conflict, other than a grapple and running with athletics.
Now Thaumaturgy is another deal altogether. With thaumaturgy, we have the ability to get us access to temporary upgrades, and that's the most elegant solution to this and similar problems. What you do is a ritual to take yourself out. That requires 5 shifts of power, since you will have at the most a stress track of 4 boxes, and need one more to take yourself out. Since it is self inflicted, the catch for any toughness powers can be seen as satisfied and you wouldn't take any consequences to keep yourself from being taken out, either. Once you have yourself taken out, you can dictate the taken out result, in this case it would be growing wings or controlling a stream of air or using fire magic to fly on jets of fire from your outstretched hands and feet like Iron Man (only without the suit). In any case, you can spend a Fate point to buy the "Wings" power for 1 scene, and you can pretty much ignore any other numbers afterwards.
If you have enough time to prepare yourself, you could even go on a quest to get an ingredient like a gryphon's feather or something similarly rare. You could then use the free tag on that aspect instead of a fate point to buy the power. However, if you do so, you should make sure the aspect you use for a spell like this matters. If you allow any old aspect to be tagged for this, it will become pretty meaningless.
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Taking yourself out via Thaumaturgy seems somewhat... abusive?
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Taking yourself out via Thaumaturgy seems somewhat... abusive?
It seems to be the agreed-upon method for doing transmutations.
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Taking yourself out via Thaumaturgy seems somewhat... abusive?
Taking someone out gives you the right to narrate what happens to the character you take out. That does not have to mean you actually knock him out or something like that, it just means that you get the right to decide over his fate. If you do a ritual to turn someone into a rabbit, you wouldn't first nearly kill them, then transform them, the transformation is all that is happening, it is the taken out result. Transforming yourself pretty much follows that logic, only that it is easier to take yourself out, since you can bypass a whole lot of stuff.
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It gives you the right to dictate it within reason. And I don't think a Taken Out result is necessary, anyway. The way I've handled it (one character had a flying broomstick...okay, it was actually a floor steamer, but anyway) is make it a thaumaturgy skill replacement of a driving roll. So in her case, she could burn one use of it to get anywhere within a Driving roll of 4. But it didn't have the dexterity of, say, allowing her to fly around the battlefield, it was strictly for distance travel.
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It gives you the right to dictate it within reason. And I don't think a Taken Out result is necessary, anyway. The way I've handled it (one character had a flying broomstick...okay, it was actually a floor steamer, but anyway) is make it a thaumaturgy skill replacement of a driving roll. So in her case, she could burn one use of it to get anywhere within a Driving roll of 4. But it didn't have the dexterity of, say, allowing her to fly around the battlefield, it was strictly for distance travel.
That's a very cool way of doing it! And it makes lots of sense, too.
For evocation fly, I was just thinking of the fly spell in Morrowind where the spell let's you jump very, very far and very, very high. It just doesn't let you land it without getting hurt. I still remember the NPC falling from the sky and the first time I tried the scroll he had. Good times.
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This makes me think that it might be fun to do a character who uses modular abilities to represent different transmutations/"buff spells" that he can cast on himself. Because I think that taking the Wings power is really the way to go if flying is going to be a regular thing for the character.
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Question: How can a Wizard fly?
Answer: Very briefly.
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They throw themselves at the ground and miss.
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I agree that Evocation flight is more like being shot out of a cannon or a "super jump" -- not controlled while you're in flight -- but I don't think short ones should be very deadly, Harry did a small "super jump" at maybe 12, so it's probably not super tricky.
The obvious and fair solution: purchase the Wings power. Everything else should be temporary at best, such as a Thaumaturgical ritual allowing a wizard to ignore height based borders up to a certain value.
For Evocation, you create maneuver aspects and then roll Athletics.
Yeah, I agree. A super jump is a maneuver tagged to boost an Athletics roll; thaumaturgic flight is either an Athletics skill replacement e.g. to "climb" a building, or a ritual which gives you Wings as a Temporary Power; a wizard who flies all the time (which should be very rare in-world, IMO) should have Wings as a power, just described as magical flight rather than physical wings.
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but I don't think short ones should be very deadly, Harry did a small "super jump" at maybe 12, so it's probably not super tricky.
I don't remember this happening. Which book?
A short evocation jump would be, as magicpockets said, a maneuver tagged to give you a boost to athletics. Anything more, I think, would be fairly dangerous.
They throw themselves at the ground and miss.
It just means they landed safely...not that they missed.
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I don't remember this happening. Which book?
In the memory parts of GS. It's one of the first, if not the very first, magic things Harry did. It was in some sort of school competition IIRC.
EDIT: I would imagine current Harry could do pretty big ones safely given what his shield is capable of absorbing; he's used an "elastic" shield version to absorb force a couple of times.
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In the memory parts of GS. It's one of the first, if not the very first, magic things Harry did. It was in some sort of school competition IIRC.
EDIT: I would imagine current Harry could do pretty big ones safely given what his shield is capable of absorbing; he's used an "elastic" shield version to absorb force a couple of times.
Yeah. When he got blown out of the cave.
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What about thaumaturgy or sponsored magic?. Bind an air elemental and ride it like a horse. Or get yourself a wind fury...
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IIRC Harry also flies up to a balcony during the end battle in Storm Front.
Then I turned, extended my arms and roared, "Veni che!" Wind swept up beneath
me, making my duster billow like Batman's cloak, lifting me directly up to the platform
above and over its low railing into the suspended room.
Victor stared at me in shock as I landed upon the balcony, wind whipping around
me, roaring inside the small room like a miniature cyclone, knocking over potted plants
and knickknacks.
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And uses force to launch himself further than he could jump manually in Death Masks, on the train. That is also a wonderful example of "oh sh*t, didn't mean to go that far!"
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In the campaign I play in, our Genie actually summoned a flying carpet. We were going from Boston to Sao Paolo, and given that two of the characters are wizards, flying with a regular plane would be ill-advised. going through NeverNever was also not an option as both wizards are mere apprentices (even though we are at a submerged power-level), and the Nevernever bing awfully dangerous due to recent activities of some parties.
/Ulfgeir
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It just means they landed safely...not that they missed.
It's a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
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It's a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
:-[
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You can even use telekinesis to fly. It has already been done: http://dfrpg-resources.wikispaces.com/Telekinesis
Also, Storm from X-Men. If she can, why shouldn't we?
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Storm has the wings power
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Doesn't she use air to lift herself in the air?
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Doesn't she use air to lift herself in the air?
Sure, but she does it so frequently, that it is part of her character concept and not something she does every now and again. As such, it is better represented by its own power, than by any form of spellcasting ability. She doesn't actually grow wings by taking the power, her flying ability is still described as lifting herself up on a gale of wind.
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Doesn't she use air to lift herself in the air?
Which is basically a reflavored Wings power. Her flight is effortless with no activation required, so the Wings power would be appropriate.
Magneto has the Telekinesis version, with a Limitation attached to his Telekinesis.
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Actually, it makes more sense for magneto to use electromagnetic field to levitate. Jean Grey is the perfect example of flying through telekinisis and Ms. Marvel having Wings.
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It's all the same. The name is semantics.
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I'm with Taran here.
The power "Wings" doesn't mean you have actual, litteral wings, just like "Claws" doesn't mean you need to have claws.
"Claws" covers any and all ways that your unarmed melee attacks function as Weapon:2 attacks. Doesn't matter if it's by claws, fangs, hooves, horns or clouds of fire around your hands that burn people.
Likewise "Wings" isn't necessarily actual wings, but any way the character can fly with little more effort than walking or running. Doesn't matter if it's wings, telekinesis, control of winds or an Item of Power that's a Jetpack.
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Make a construct.
Soulfire maybe?
Silver Surfer Surfboard!
Done.
Witches have used brooms for a long time. Try that.
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Use thaumaturgy to encase your body in an (ectoplasm) exoskeleton with mass apropriate giant feathered wings? (Either as a skill substitution for a singular journey or as a temp power)
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I wouldn't allow true flight. Not as in properly controlled, soaring around the battlefield flight. I would allow a thaumaturgical ritual that allowed limited, probably pre-defined flight. e.g. a ritual that lets the wizard move to a specific position with magic wings. I'd do it this way because having wings and knowing how to use them are two different things.
I'd also allow a wizard to use an evocation to create a manoeuvre like 'rocket propelled,' 'power jump' or 'soft landing' to create flight lite effects.
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I'd do it this way because having wings and knowing how to use them are two different things.
If you do it often enough, you can learn how to do it. Or your spell incorporates a spirit of air that will translate your sluggish human motion into smooth and graceful flight. Or the spell speeds up your reflexes by itself, so you counter the fact that you don't usually fly. There's a lot of ways that it can work, which are relatively easy to do.
And I think air battles can be pretty awesome, so I wouldn't want to ban it outright.
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Again, I'm with Haru: Absolutely you can learn that control - and at that point the character buys Wings [-1] to represent it just like Listens-to-Wind should be statted with True Shapeshifting [-4] to represent the magical shapeshifting he does in Turn Coat.
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If you want to use Evocation instead of Sponsored magic or Thaumaturgy, there are a few possibilities.
--You could telekinetically launch yourself (harry does this more than once) but the landing might hurt.
--You could telekinetically (via Air or FIrce) solidify wings and/or an airfoil. This would be pretty straightforward, but would require something analogous to an athletics or Driving role indicating that its just a tool and you still need to be skilled. This is really more like a magic hang-glider.
--If the character is a Force specialist you could let him fly Magneto Style, but Id want to make it notably difficult even for a specialist.
--where it My Character, Id probably go for a combination of Earth and Force or Earth and Air (since controlling Opposite elements is considered especially awesome). Basically it would happen in two stages: First use Earth magic to reduce your personal gravity until you basically float, then use air or force to provide movement and direction. From a conservation standpoint its only taking a fraction of the force as a cannon-launch would. Mechanically its balanced by the danger of loosing control while remaining in Float Mode, and that outside forces like wind will be extreme impediments, so its not as useful for long-term flights.