I've got a player running an Egyptian Temple Cat, in the spirit of Mouse. Not a were; just a supernaturally intelligent animal. He's been looking at the Human Form (+1, i.e. "disadvantage") and noting that it really is a major positive, too. Sure, you don't get all your powers all the time, but you get to be *human*, which makes a huge difference in the social game. Cats aren't really known for their skill at the negotiating table, no matter *how* friendly they are. And it's a little odd that a were, with the ability to effectively move between worlds and talk (and have *thumbs*!) is actually *cheaper* than an animal. Hm.

On the other hand, neither of is quite convinced that *lack* of human form is necessary worth +1 refresh either... and yet he really is at a noticable (if entertaining) disadvantage. He's already got the "Temple Cat" high concept which will be getting tagged a lot for the inconveniences of being an animal, so there's a fate point
boost here, but he's also physically incapable of doing a lot of the default activities. (Driving, for example; thank goodness we're in New York, where even animals can ride the subway.) It's a fun schtick, and I'm not completely crippling him (as with Mouse, there's a general assumption that he can get across surprisingly complex concepts with body language) but the unacknowledged handicap does feel a little odd.

So... what would you folks do, if anything, to make giving up thumbs and a voice feel balanced?

During city creation, my players came up with the idea of having a particular area be a magical null zone, a la the ; part safe zone (there's not as much power available here), part prison. I thought I'd ask around and see if folks here had any good ideas for how to run a location like that.

1) External magic sources are cut off; you have what you came in with. How would this operate in play? A limit to how many shifts of power worth of spells you can cast? And if so, how would one set a reasonable default limit, and a reasonable "You can pull in a little bit of extra power, but you'll be casting dangerously until you bleed the excess off" effect? For the second, I'm inclined towards a variation on "you can pull in up to your conviction extra shifts of power, or roll to draw in power and control it a la thaumaturgy but without the spell; all spells that you cast have an added difficulty of the extra shifts of power you have stored over your normal threshold"; it makes holding more than a few extra shifts of power really, really dangerous, but it's possible if you're desperate. What I don't have is any idea what a reasonable base threshold ought to be.

2) Some powers probably shouldn't work as well there... but which ones? Sponsored Magic being right out unless you prepared the spell in advance would make sense. How about faerie glamours that create things out of ectoplasm pulled from the Nevernever? Or other shapeshifting, ditto? Which magics are inherent (and therefore preserved), which are penalized, and which ought to just be out of the question?

3) How do I create a feeling of "Magic is hard here?" For an actual mage, limiting the amount of power they can draw or making all spells more expensive (for more of a low-level anti-magic-field than an actual hard cut-off) seems pretty reasonable. But for powers that don't normally have a roll (like shapeshifting), what do I do? I can add an aspect to the location easily, but that will only help people trying to take advantage of it; it won't make life harder for everyone else. And... should it? Or is this really something that ought to just be color?

ahunting: The thing is, it's not already defined. That sidebar covers a particular effect of *sponsored magic*. Among other things, it allows you to cast in one round, but also *requires* you to cast in one round, and on targets in line of sight. It's very clearly thaumaturgy *with evocation methods and speeds*-- and constraints--, not just what thaumaturgy looks like if you're a master of ritual.

The question is, what breaks (if anything) if the "you can skip preparation for spells with complexity below your lore" rule is interpreted to be "preparation takes no time/happens offscreen because you're a boy scout and always prepared, and only casting time counts". So, a maneuver-only spell of complexity 3 would probably only be one round, but a thaumaturgist could also spend several rounds casting in the usual way for a spell of much higher complexity (say, 14).

Pros and cons relative to other powers I can see:
- An evocator is building up stress much faster than the thaumaturgist (evocation requires one stress per spell when building power; thaum doesn't, advantage to thaum)
- An evocator can use rote spells for zero risk casting (this is one advantage to the sponsored magic approach as well)
- A failed thaum spell is likely to hurt more/cause more problems than evocation (advantage to evocation and sponsored magic)
- A thaumaturgist can spend several rounds to build up to more powerful spells (I think this is advantage thaum; larger spells are higher-risk, though. Evocators and sponsored magic users can create maneuvers that can be tagged for Conviction and Discipline rolls for higher-powered spells, but that's an effective +2/round, versus an expected +min[Conviction, Discipline]/round; for a wizard, the latter seems likely to be higher.)
- A thaumaturgist/sponsored magician can create arbitrary effects, not just unsubtle/high force effects like Evocation (advantage thaum/sponsored)
- A thaumaturgist is not limited to line of sight, although unlike an evocator/sponsored magician he needs a symbolic link to target (....wash?)
- A thaumaturgist doesn't get to buy a power bonus, just a control bonus; complexity is going to be a ceiling for the power of the spell, but doesn't actually contribute to raising that power quickly. (Slight bonus Evocation/sponsored magic.)
- An evocator was not required to have a high lore in order to create powerful spells in combat, thus potentially saving skill points for better Conviction/Discipline (Slight bonus evocation, maybe; two relevant skills instead of three, but we're currently just looking at combat casting and the world is more complicated than that.)
- A thaumaturgist preparing an enhanced evocation effect (like a ward) can add complexity to enhance duration; an evocator has to channel power each round. Given a one-complexity-shift-per-duration-increase
- A thaumaturgist's one shift bump in spell duration for enhanced evocation is, as written, longer than an evocator's. Even assuming it is scaled back to match evocation (one shift per additional exchange) a thaumaturgist can spend one extra round to gain an expected min(Conviction,Discipline) additional rounds of effect. The evocator can do the same under the Prolonging Spells rules, but it costs stress. Then again, that extra turn for evocation won't cause the spell to explode with more power if you fail the roll, unlike thaum. (Wash?)

Outside of combat, the high-lore character is spending more exchanges building power, while the low-lore high-discipline/conviction character is spending scenes of preparation/exchanges of maneuvers to create taggable aspects.

This seems to boil down to "Evocation is much safer, but is guaranteed to wear you down"; "Thaumaturgy is very flexible, you can do it all day, and it will usually get you completely awesome effects, but will occasionally blow up in your face and cause massive damage". Sponsored magic gets you the safety of evocation and the flexibility of thaumaturgy, but constrains you to less totally awesome effects than straight thaumaturgy. (You only get one round to build power, and there's probably a limit to how much power you can gain from going into debt.) That seems to make the thaum-with-evocation-speed-and-methods power useful but not in and of itself worth 2 refresh; you're also probably getting some power boost, but it's probably a wash or even a little weaker than a point of refinement. (Kemmerlites, for example, get the equivalent of a Refinement in necromancy, although it doesn't appear to follow the usual specialization-stacking requirements; Summer, however, doesn't.) Then again, is the added flexibility and potential power of thaumaturgy in combat worth 1-2 refresh in general? (i.e, is sponsored magic from, say, the fae actually worth the cost for a wizard? Discounting the "ooh, fun plot" factor; I don't think we generally assume that plot should cost refresh.)

Has anyone run a long enough campaign with wizards in it to get a sense of how big an advantage the lack of stress from Thaumaturgy (vs Evocation) would be?
Do conflicts normally resolve in four exchanges or less, or are they longer? And if you're going to chime in with data, please talk a little about the number of players and character strength.

(Alternately, if any of the gamewriters want to chime in with a "No, thaumaturgy ought to take some minimum number of exchanges, and here's how many and why", I'd love to hear it.)

Both good points to be clearer on, thanks. We'd already been taking them into account, but putting them explicitly into the power description is probably wise.

Ophidimancer: I love the shadow PC concept, especially for storytelling purposes, but I'm worried about having to try to run five or six major NPCs in a single encounter, with highly varied skill sets. Other than "ignore minor skills", are there any good tips for how to keep from slowing things down in that case? I have a, shall we say, *creative* set of players, so I don't get to do very much accurate pre-planning. Bonus points if the tips include "How to play an NPC wizard with minimal brain space".

John Galt: Whamp or Blamp? Those I don't recognize. Cowl is actually high on my list of possible NPCs, but (just my luck) he's really not properly statted out in the book. A dragon/dragon emissary is a good idea, and one I haven't looked into much yet. We haven't even picked the setting yet, so we're *really* all over the map in terms of expectations, but it looks like "godbotherers" may end up being a good summary of at least half of the party, so convenient deities and deity servants (like a certain blond-haired bodyguard) are also high on my list.

YuriPup: Yeah. I've been practicing in the mirror. Looks like I need to do it a little more, huh.

Finn: In this crowd, I'm much more likely to need to worry about the alternate bad-GM trap of "Well, I can't see any way out of this, but I know these folks will find one". One solution is totally not an option.   You have some very good points about scenery and non-stat challenges. Thanks!