I’ve been lurking this board for a few weeks, while keeping an eye on the blog, and a few questions have occurred to me. Firstly though, I’ll give a bit of background.
Though I’ve read a little online I’ve never actually played a tabletop rpg before. I’ve defiantly had to desire, and thanks to the internet getting hold of the materials wouldn’t be too difficult, but I’ve never been able to find anybody else who was interested. Attempts to start-up with some friends were laughed off, and my social circle wasn’t exactly the most mainstream.
So yeah- plenty of incentive no opportunity.
I have however been playing Warhammer for a couple of years, mostly thanks to the school club (considered trying to introduce them, but I’m leaving in a few weeks). Maybe some stuff from that is transferable, I’m not sure.
Anyway, after reading Harry Potter as a child fantasy novels had me hooked. Combined with an interest in the occult and dusters it doesn’t surprise me that I fell in love with Dresden before I finished the blurb of Storm Front.
I figured I might get a more positive response to something more “modern” than say DnD less of a stigma perhaps. Already I’ve got a few people interested, and the best thing is that I’ll be going to school in the city next year. Plenty of new people to meet, and a great candidate for the setting of any Dresden game we can eventually set up.
So, I’m in pretty high spirits about the RPG, and I’ll defiantly be getting my hands on a copy as soon as I can. As I said though, a few things confuse me. I have read Spirit of the Century, and for the most part I could follow it.
1)   Classes. First off, are these set in stone or are they closer to templates? Are they Final Fantasy-ish classes, solely determining what abilities you can access? Or are these more like labels, ie “the skills determine the class” rather than “the class determines the skills”

2)   One of the things in had in mind was keeping a continuous story and characters with a group, but using time-skips ala the novels. One problem I noticed with setting stories about six months apart is that the characters could get “old” pretty quickly. So to delay this a little the PCs could start in their late teens rather than as adults. Now the apparent issue is classes, I really can’t see a full-fledged white-council wizard at age 17. Starting such characters off as “last few years” apprentices is one of the solutions I thought of.-which is why I asked the question earlier about classes. Would it do to take the Wizard class and use “apprentice” or something along those lines as an aspect? Initially I thought of using the Sorcerer class instead but that struck me as a little odd because the training seems to be the real factor distinguishing wizards from other practitioners.

3)   From one of the podcasts (and sotc) I got the impression that places have aspects, including the whole setting (like Detroit, or Chicago in the canon). While the concept seems fairly simple I’m not quite sure how to put it into practice, because surely traits like “dark” or “dangerous” are going to be tied to particular areas, rather than something as large as a city. I guess something like “Fancy architecture” could work, but then again there are always going to be places that don’t have very “fancy architecture”.  The city I have in mind is more or less defined by the most impressive cathedral I’ve ever seen, but it still has its dirty modern bus stations and its bland indoor shopping centres.

4)   Am I thinking about this far too much considering I don’t even own the game yet? xD