Then you wouldn't be playing dresden files, you would be playing something else. Magic is that powerful, as JB describes it " as the fundamental forces of creation". I've always thought that the game severly understates the power of a wizard in the dresden files. If you uread the majority of my posts I whine about this constantly.  When I picked up my copy of dresden it was to play a wizard like dresden, not his brother the vampire or a plain jane mortal like murphy. Plenty of games out there that already "balance" magic against other things, i've never been one to think that magic should ever be balanced otherwise its not magic its something else.

You're absolutely entitled to want to play a Wizard character. I'm not arguing that at all. What I'm saying is that OUT-OF-CHARACTER, Wizards just dominate in a way that isn't fair to people who DON'T want to play a Wizard. I know plenty of players who find the idea of a Changeling compelling and interesting, and that's great. They should be able to play in a game with someone who wants to play a Wizard without feeling constantly overshadowed. The way that happens has nothing to do with which group is more powerful in the game world ON AVERAGE, because PCs are, by definition, not average instances of their template. They are almost always more clever, more powerful, or more resourceful than their average counterpart.

Thus, an example of a balanced group who can all get the right amount of attention without undoing power-levels: a Warden, the son of the White King, and a mortal cop with so many Fate Points that she can get a major creature of faerie to back down just by threatening him. The son of the White King is EXPECTED to be awfully powerful for the White Court vampire template-- he's PC-level in this case. The cop in question is just the most awesome cop ever written-- she's PC-level. They all get their moments in the series, and you could probably argue that they all have the same number of Refresh Points and Skill Points. This is how a balanced tabletop should run: out-of-character, everyone is balanced, while in-character, their average templates could vary significantly.

If magic is really that powerful, then it should cost more out-of-character points to choose it, so that other PCs can compensate accordingly. My argument is thus: I don't WANT to nerf magic. I just want to make it cost the right amount of points for how powerful it already is, so other PCs can use those points for other things, and play more awesome pinnacle-versions of their own template.

I hope that clarifies my position a bit more. It's a difficult topic to make clear sometimes.

You could have your players play sorcerers or some one trick pony like Bender. Make sure your games stay at the low end. But expect them to get trounced should they go up against a white council wizard or "gasp" a warden. In the magical community and beyond the WC is supposed to be that bad ass. You really aren't meant to be able to fight against a preped wizard and that prep incudes the use of magic items; that is part and parcel of the wizard template. Magic items are what allow the wizard to be ready for anything, they allow him to focus on offense and leave the defence to a sheild ring or a coat with defensive ruins.

I've actually experimented quite a bit with many of these ideas already in my games, but I don't enjoy telling my players things like 'you can't play a Wizard.' That, too, can feel unfair to players, especially when there are ways to help everyone have fun while still making character choices they enjoy.

TL;DR version: Out-of-character, one PC should be just as powerful as another PC, no matter what template they are playing. In-character, you can explain this away in whatever manner you must in order to make it work. Increasing the cost of Wizard abilities keeps them just as powerful in-character, but makes them more expensive out-of-character, thus resolving this situation perfectly.

Part of the bathtub mythos involves the following, which gave us all kinds of gruesome ideas: the Countess of Bathory, often used in mythos as a historical figure that might have been a vampire, bathed in the blood of virgins, convinced that it would make her immortal. Therefore, we decided that the tub required the blood of virgins in order to work. Filling a tub requires an AWFUL lot of blood.

The main source our villain considered for this was actually children, since they're pretty much guaranteed virgins. He summoned up a spirit to go sniffing out virgins and stealing their blood, then carry it all back to the tub. As a result, a higher-than-usual number of children were dying at the Children's Hospital, and a PC who happened to still be a virgin ended up in a problematic spot-- especially when the villain realised he now had a sample of her fresh blood for Thaumaturgical use, if he could only separate it out.

All food for thought.

I will agree with one of the further up posters-- DFRPG specifically has some rough edges due to the sheer power of magic and the use of weapons and armour. Our games have generally run pretty brilliantly in spite of those edges, but I'm still looking forward to seeing if Dresden Lives! smooths some of them out.

We used the tabletop DFRPG system, actually. We've run a Dresden LARP at GenCon for the past two years now-- last year was 'City of a Thousand Cross-Roads,' while this year was 'City of Abandoned Hope.' Our games were 3 nights in a row, around 50 players each, and the system handled beautifully. Both games have been, hands-down, some of the best games I've ever had the pleasure of running-- a lot of that has to do with how positive and collaborative the FATE system is, and how it encourages good player interaction.

Before I ran DF, I was involved with Darkness Remembered White Wolf LARPs for a number of years, and before that, I spent some time as a player in Dark Duality LARPs-- if you spent any time with either group, we may have crossed paths.

As far as what you're saying, firegazer...  This is just my opinion, but I wouldn't call those systemic problems.  Those come across as people problems; some folks naturally hog attention, some folks see flaws as bad things, and some folks don't think figuring out how things will go down out-of-character is the right way to go.

You could add a lot of the useful out-of-character resolution rules to any game you wanted-- but most of them don't inherently have those rules, and a lot of them explicitly argue that you should *punish* players who step out of line using in-character punishments, rather than just... you know, talking to them about it reasonably. This is one of the main reasons I've seen LARPs fall apart, among others.

From a purely experimental standpoint, I can tell you this: using the exact same set of GMs and the exact same set of players each year, I have had 'okay, I guess that was fun' White Wolf games and 'my god that was the best thing I've ever played' Dresden games. Heck, we even played the game in the exact same conference room at the exact same hotel at the exact same convention. The use of FATE is literally the only thing we changed in this equation, which is why I strongly suspect that it's the game system at work.

This year, we had a lot of potentially bad situations based on player personality which normally would have blown up and made for bad feelings in a White Wolf game. Because we were using partially out-of-character resolution, though, everyone had fun with the situation instead. This part, I can tell you with 100% certainty-- I saw the situation brewing, and I saw when it was naturally and handily disarmed by the FATE rules in play, without any intervention on my part. That was... very, very cool to watch.

Do... do I know you? I mean, in real life? Were you maybe one of my players or STs?

I just ran a 50-person Dresden Files LARP at GenCon. I've got oodles of advice for you, if you want it. PM me and I might even be able to put you in touch with the rest of our existing group. Our player-base is awesome, and we always need more STs.

To the OP: this is pretty on-topic for me right now. I just ran a giant DFRPG LARP at GenCon, and it was possibly the most successful game I've ever had, for a lot of reasons. Some of them have to do with the quality of players we had, but I suspect that a huge part of the success had to do with the system itself.

After running White Wolf LARPs (and tabletops) for years, the below were problems that constantly cropped up for me as a GM:

• Unbalanced attention to certain players: Everyone knows the stereotype (or at least, they'll now know the stereotype) that players are mostly interested in backstabbing each other physically and politically in Vampire: The Masquerade. Some will argue that players should know this will be the case walking into the game; that they shouldn't get huffy when their guy dies, because that's just how it works. But in practical reality, certain players are just better at backstabbing their buddies, and this eventually leads to a game where certain players constantly get the short end of the stick and are told to 'suck it up.' Even in a best-case scenario V:tM LARP, I almost always had some players walk away from the experience feeling angry, hurt, and ultimately overlooked.
• No incentive to roleplay: In D&D and, to a lesser extent, in White Wolf games, there is literally no benefit to playing out your character's flaws on a session-by-session basis. As such, it's arguable that whatever excruciatingly-detailed background you draw up for your character will actually be a mechanical drawback for you; the more you roleplay your flaws, the more NPCs and other PCs take advantage of them, and you get nothing in return. After a time, this lack of reward (and actual punishment) for playing your character as-written tends to push large groups ever-so-slowly into the mindset of avoiding real roleplay if it disadvantages them.
• No meta-game release valves: This is a complicated one, but bear with me. In a game like D&D or V:tM, you're generally encouraged not to metagame under any circumstances whatsoever. This leads to lack of communication and lots of player upsets that could easily be avoided. Your player characters might die without warning, when the entire group might have told you they prefer more choice in the matter. These player character deaths result in a few big problems: interesting storylines get cut short, the GM has to flail around a bit to figure out how to continue them or make them suddenly unnecessary, and sometimes the GM ends up designing the game such that no player character actually matters to the plot that much, so that if they die, the plot isn't lost. This leads to a story where your players feel less invested because they KNOW that their PC could be replaced with another PC, and the game would simply keep rolling along without incident. Another time that officially-sanctioned metagaming is useful is when two player characters get into a disagreement in-game; when the two players are encouraged to compromise with one another, the game runs more smoothly. V:tM doesn't have that, and neither does D&D. It's a player-eat-player world.

These are actually the biggest issues I've had in more than a decade of running LARPs. FATE solved all of them, with plenty of style to boot.

• Unbalanced attention to certain players: FATE is a collaborative game. Everyone contributes to the story, and there are metarules in place to make sure that major betrayals and PC death only happen when everyone is on-board and fully-informed about how it's going to go down. We've written hostile conflict into our characters in FATE, and it's actually been ENJOYABLE for once, instead of leading to inevitable player misery. Players also tend to each get their own moment in the limelight when we run FATE, though I couldn't tell you exactly which rule in the system contributes to this. It may just be a result of the holistic whole of the game system.
• No incentive to roleplay: In FATE, playing out a character flaw gets you a cookie. I mean a Fate Point. The basic fact of the matter is that we get WAY juicier conflict and complication out of FATE than we ever did out of White Wolf. In White Wolf, people cautiously weigh the advantages and disadvantages of every action, regardless of whether their character would actually do it or not. In FATE, our players throw caution to the wind for a Fate Point, and cheer each other on when they make huge errors in judgment based on their Aspects. Players don't get angry at each other for roleplaying their flaws; they say 'ah, I see, you needed another Fate Point. I will respond by doing something dumb based on one of MY Aspects, and make the situation even more tense. Let us enjoy this character stupidity to the fullest! Fate Points for all involved!'
• No meta-game release valves: Players negotiate out-of-character in FATE. In our most recent LARP, we wrote in an undercover FBI agent who had signed on with the Italian mob and discovered the supernatural through interaction with them. On night two, he was outed to his fellow mafia boys as an undercover FBI agent. In-character, the mob boss threatened to kill the agent if he ever showed his face again. Out-of-character, the two players negotiated how to reconcile their characters in an interesting way. 'I'll give you a Fate Point and tag your Aspect 'Loyal to the Family' if you accept my character's offer of continued help' said the player playing the FBI agent. 'I'll show up at the restaurant, knowing full well that you've already threatened to kill me, and remind you that we have a huge common enemy right now that both of us want taken care of. The Family will benefit if you trust me on this one.' The person playing the mob boss accepted the Fate Point, and the scene they role-played out afterward was pretty awesome. The ability to give each other Fate Points to resolve situations is not to be underestimated-- it mollifies players to know that they will get something concrete when they agree to help keep the story fun for everyone, and this idea that they should all work together to help each other have fun can become a pervasive, positive attitude throughout the rest of your game.

So, to be short: I've run a LOT of gaming systems over the course of my lifetime. FATE has beaten them all out, hands-down, for making things fun, equal, and positive for every player at the table.

I'd suggest you look up some traditional demons, even just on Wikipedia. It should be fairly easy to find one with a reputation for eating kids, and I'm sure the name will be suitably terrible.