So, Simmons tried to Intimidate Castillo. The mechanics are the same for any attack.
Simmons' Intimidation is Good +3. Castillo's Discipline is Fair +2. Simmons rolls his dice ++[]- for a total of +4. Castillo rolls ++-- for +2. He's doing something he feels is really important, so he tags an aspect which I'm not going to reveal right now to get +2, spends one of his 3 available fate points and gets a tie. Since Simmons isn't using some kind of mind magic, his intimidation is a 0 power weapon. So no damage.

Tags don't cost Fate Points; that's what separates them from normal invocations. I'm guessing this is meant to be a standard invocation.

Generally not worth it to use an Aspect just to avoid stress, for what it's worth.

Castillo tries to reason with Simmons, but without throwing another fate point in, he has 0 chance of convincing a Wizard to do anything the Wizard didn't want to do. While this was happening, Eric fired up a shield, and as a supplemental action, threw an insult.

Pissing someone off is another use of Intimidate. Eric has a stunt that makes him really good at it. Eric isn't trying to do mental stress with this insult. He's using a Maneuver to put a (MUST KILL ERIC) temporary aspect on Castillo.

Eric has an intimidate of Fair +2, plus a Stunt, Infuriate, which gives him +2 for this kind of thing. Making his attack Great +4. He's Great at making people want to choke him. Eric and Castillo both roll even, so Eric wins and puts that aspect on Castillo.

Neither maneuvering nor shielding is a supplemental action. Both take your turn.

Castillo still gets to take an action, even if his skills aren't good enough to make it worth much.

Also, you generally have to roll to put up a shield. Spellcasting is actually a multi-step process, involving gathering power and then controlling it.

On a tied maneuver roll, the resulting Aspect is fragile.

Simmons attacks with his warden's sword. His Weapons skill is Superb +5. He rolls 0. Castillo is also an expert with a Superb weapons skill, and rolls a +1 giving his +6 on his defense roll. Eric passes the free tag on the new (must kill eric) aspect to Simmons who invokes it for +2 giving him +7. With his Warden's sword, Simmons will do 4 points of damage as it stands. Castillo says screw this and does a full defense. Giving him +8 but no action this round.

Given that Castillo has Athletics 5 and some level of Speed, he'd be better off defending with Athletics. Also, being a vampire, Castillo should have some amount of armour.

Eric again insults him, again succeeding and giving Castillo a new temporary aspect (AAaarrrrgggghhhh). Castillo attacks Eric, and rolls even, giving him +5. Eric dodges using his athletics of 4 and rolls 0 giving Castillo +1. With his sword and supernatural strength Eric is looking at 6 points of damage. His shield absorbs 4 points, and Eric’s kevlar lined overcoat absorbs the other 2. So he takes no damage.

So the shield provides armour 4, with sufficient duration to last through the round where Castillo didn't act? Quite a powerful spell.

Did you mean Inhuman Strength when you wrote supernatural?

Armour usually doesn't stack. Actually can't remember whether armour from an Evocation is an exception; it hasn't come up in my game for quite some time.

Simmons attacks again, rolling even +5. Castillo also rolls even so Simmons hits, and will do the 3 points of damage his sword does. But he tags the AAaaaarrrrgggghhh aspect, saying “I’ve got a clear shot at his back as he’s completely focused on murdering Eric”, and adds 2 more to his roll for a total of 5 points of damage. Castillo has 4 dots, so if he takes it all, he’ll drop. Instead, he takes the moderate consequence “sword through the chest” which soaks 4 points and takes his first dot of damage.

Again, Castillo should have armour and a better dodge roll. And with Toughness, I'd expect him to have more than four stress boxes.

Also, I don't see any reason to take a moderate consequence rather than a mild here.

Might be worth letting the other characters re-arrange their powers a bit.

Spellcasters aren't always the best, even at high Refresh levels, but they have a bit of an optimisation advantage. If you just buy Refinements, allocate them intelligently, and keep your casting skills as high as possible, you're building more or less optimally. Other character types are a lot more likely to accidentally weaken themselves. And they can sometimes have a hard time justifying buying the most optimal stuff.

WCVs actually get the worst of it, if you ask me. Their Template inherently pulls them in multiple directions and that's generally a recipe for weakness. Not surprised that that PC is having trouble spending their Refresh effectively.

So it's possible that your non-spellcasters could get a fair bit stronger just by re-allocating their Refresh. Might take some narrative trickery to make it justifiable, though.

I've run a game with Refresh in the high teens for a long time, and all sorts of characters have proved effective in it. But I think the fact that the characters were created at such a high power level from the start (or in one case, jumped straight from a much lower level to this one) helped a lot with that.

Well, the classic is a bonus to Weapons when you're wielding a sword. Bit boring, but it's logical and effective. Might even be a bit too effective, if circumstances never push you away from using your weapon of choice. And if your Athletics isn't too good, the ability to defend against ranged attacks with Weapons is good to have.

Apart from that, it depends on who your swordsman is. Do they fight aggressively? Defensively? Do they have any special tricks?

Awesome!

One more question we are unsure about: If someone takes "Unseelie Magic" (again without evocation etc.), does she get focus item slots? I figured "no", but not sure at all.

Yes, she does.

If you're paying full price, you get four focus item slots with this ability.

I'm pretty sure that I get focus items when choosing sponsored magic.

Yep.

How do I build those focus items? The usual formula "Offensive/defensive" + "power/control" + "element" (as in offensive power fire for a blasting rod) does not work for a PC with only sponsored magic - they don't seem to think in elements. If my magic is given to me by a germanic god of wisdom... how do I create the focus items?

A sponsor is an element, more or less. So you can basically have universal foci. Like the ring on page 302 of Your Story.

Finished Powers and Templates. That just leaves Characters.

Never heard of her. Or him.

Incidentally, g33k, I'm still willing to make Donatien.

As you may have noticed, the Wiki's down. Wikispaces has closed.

Fortunately, it has a new home. Hosted alongside this forum, in fact. Here's the URL: https://dfrpg-resources.paranetonline.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Unfortunately, I haven't finished copying everything over. Attempts to automate the process failed so I'm doing it by hand. It's not a ton of fun.

Fortunately, I started before the wiki went down and the new wiki is actually perfectly usable.

Unfortunately, it looks ugly. Can't upload images at the moment. Hopefully that'll be fixed soon.

There are four things left to do: The Template pages, the individual Power pages (the Powers are there, they just don't each have a page to themselves), the individual character pages, and some random pages in the Liverpool setting. I left these for last because there are a lot of pages in each category and each page is pretty low-priority. But I'll get them done.

I've corrected the link in my sig, but other links on this forum are broken. If you want one fixed, report the post and I'll edit it for you.