I think recklessness with magic counts.

I think that's why some people, Morgan for example, are so hardcore when it comes to the Law.

If you let people be reckless with their magic and use excuses to worm their way out of the consequences, then what's the point of the Law? Incinerating a building that you believe to be empty... but you don't know for sure? That's reckless and claiming ignorance or accident if someone gets killed by that recklessness is practically begging to be killed. "Kill me now because I'm too stupid for magic."

The White Council will just take off your head but that doesn't decide whether or not you get Lawbreak (the metaphysical punishment for breaking the Laws). If there is no intent to kill then there should be no Lawbreaker (and especially if there is no intent to do harm to another human); but the White Council will still take off your head if you kill with magic regardless of circumstances or any extenuating information.

Cause the death of another human with magic and don't have someone willing to take on the Doom for you and a sympathetic Senior Council? Then you are a head shorter. Self Defense (and anything else you want to try) is no defense at all.

Or Wardens like Harry that refuse to kill people.

Um Harry has no problem with killing people. He doesn't like it (and even less likes killing kids who have gone Warlock pretty much just out of ignorance and might be salvageable) and it grateful that the warden commander generally doesn't assign him to anti-warlock duty but he doesn't refuse to kill people.

Even Warlocks.

All you are doing with those thousands and thousands of aspects is have an "I Win!" Button ready for everything. Rampant werewolf clan in town? Stomped. Black court scourge? Stomped. All in 2 minutes, game night is over, now what?

Except that you only have that one "I win!" button and once it is used it is gone. So you press the button to deal with the rampaging werewolf clan and then what do you do three days later when the town suddenly has a couple of dozen higher end Red Court vamps, three Wardens investigating, Summer and Winter spies in town, and a White Court delegation show up; all attracted by the giant amount of power that was thrown out a few days ago and trying to learn exactly what happened and who did it. Or just showing up randomly.

Or maybe you are faced with your significant other being kidnapped and being used as a ritual sacrifice but the wards protecting the site are fifty or so shifts strong. If you hadn't blow all your power to stomp those werewolves then you would be able to spend it to bring down this ward but now you are faced with either resorting to necromancy, finding some other way in at possibly equally extreme cost, or letting your SO die and be sacrificed.

Plenty of story potential.

I understand where you are coming from, I know that mechanically it is absolutely no problem to do what you are proposing, I am just saying, that it doesn't make sense if you look at it as a whole. I mean, you say so yourself, Harry has enough downtime to do exactly what you propose. Hell, if power was all he needed to free Susan from being a red court, he'd have that ready in the year he's been studying it. No, there is, and there should be, more to it.

Except he doesn't have the power. Mother Winter had the power. Want to reverse Red Court infection? Well then you need enough power to overcome the "Red Court" mantle that has been placed on the infected.


Or you can understand the magic well enough to actually disconnect the "Red Court" mantle from the host and maybe be able to do it with far, far, less power.

And Dresden theoretically could have saved Susan at any time. Changes showed that. All he had to do was wipe out the Red Court. A few thousand sacrifices, a couple of ley line taps, and a ritual that he knew how to perform by the end of Storm Front (Sells ritual being incredibly close to the Red Court ritual except in terms of power). But 1) Dresden didn't know this and 2) it involved a cost that he would not be willing to pay.

If any spell you want to cast can be cast with generic "Ritual preparation aspect #1-#20", then any spell you do is interchangeable, and there is no story to it.

Nah, those weren't generalized aspects. They were for a specific ritual. Such as "Ward Breaker part 1" through "Ward Breaker part 20". Those aspects only being useable for the "Ward Breaker" ritual and not to, say, turn a fly into a pony. You need different aspects if you want ones that can be generalized to any ritual.

That's pretty much what I am trying to get across: Not all aspects are created equal. Yes, mechanically, you could get a +2 from a blessed cross or from an unplugged phone. For that matter, you could pick your nose and declare that an aspect, but that doesn't mean it is a GOOD aspect for the story of the spell.

I never said otherwise. The point is that you can fluff aspects pretty much however you want and is in large part table dependent. Maybe a lucky aspect is tagged and the story effect is "got really lucky that today happens to be the one day every century with this specific stellar alignment that benefits this ritual" or maybe it is "sees X ingredient sitting by the side of the road".

What's more, if you do it, so can I as the GM, and we are in sort of an irresistible force meets immovable object situation. On the other hand, there is a rule of "if everyone has it, nobody has it". And the differences that are still there are well represented within the scope of Items and Specializations.

Which is a problem solved by story telling and the narrative. I would say that every major power has done things like this. If you want to fight at the "god" tier then the gloves come off, you only make it to that tier and survive by doing things like this and having your own counters to them. Does this mean every Red Court vamp has something like this? No, but the Lords of the Outer Night sure as hell do; and if you start blasting through rank and file Red Court vamps in job lots then one of the LotON is dispatched to deal with you and you find out just how thoroughly outclassed you are with your twenty years of life against the LotON's two thousand years of life.

That's why the Merlin can throw up a ward like he did, he has tons of specializations and focus items for it, because that's what he's been doing for all those years.

Then his refresh is in the -100+ range.

With your aspect-avalanche, he could have simply obliterated everything in sight.

Except that those he was facing have the same things. They could have spent their stored power to bring down his ward but then they are faced with being greatly weakened in the future (or maybe they had already spent a large portion of it), or they can let the White Council escape and save that power for another day.

Even against a vampire army, a block doesn't necessarily have hundreds of shifts. 10-12, maybe 15 should be more than enough to buy enough time to escape, and that's easily done with skill+specialization+focus items. Maybe a consequence to boot.

Fifteen shifts shouldn't last even a single exchange. Red King + LotON + RC Nobles working together and they can easily throw out enough power to rip down such a ward.

Or maybe even easier, you can do it as a concession. Instead of fighting it out to the bitter end, you agree to end the fight, maybe the Merlin's player throws in a fate point and declares, that since he is the "Master of Wards", he raises a ward to help his side get away, even if that means leaving behind 3 wardens, because they are too far away. Because that's pretty much what the ward in this moment is, a way to end the fight without too many losses.

And if you can concede in that manner then you should be able to raise the ward in a similar stretch of time without spending a fate point. Conceding by essentially saying "I'm spending a fate point to throw out a 30+ complexity ward in one to two exchanges" really doesn't seem inline with the game.

And if you really want or need a spell THAT powerful, I think it is better served to be a plot device, rather than something with incredibly high numbers on it.

It is a plot device. Seriously, I would let a player do it a few times and then hit them with a compel in their next fight along the lines of "you triggered a ward upon entering that removed all standing magic effects", no potions, no enchanted items, no ritual boosts, no focus items. Unless they have the four or so fate points to buy off the compel then they are suddenly in deep shit and the character should learn to not always depend on such external aids.

Where is your problem with enchanted items, potions and focus items? I feel that that is a part of the magic rules that actually works pretty well.

The fact that you can't create enchanted items with standing magical effect is a big one. It's literally impossible under the enchanted item rules to create a magic light bulb that will stay active for weeks straight, despite that requiring far less energy than (say) blowing a car through a skyscraper. One of those can be done under the enchanted item rules, the other can't.

Then there is the fact that in setting you can do something like enchant your duster so that it drains the kinetic energy of anything that hits it and transfers it into rings to be later discharged as force attacks but under the rules you can't. The best you get is lowish level armor for one or two scenes and no ability to use that absorbed energy for anything else.

It's a system that is decent for modeling Dresden, it's not a system decent for modeling the Dresden verse magic system.

You have the inability to stockpile potions, despite the fact that not being able to do so makes absolutely no sense. You literally have to spend more refresh to stuff an extra vial into your backpack. Under the rules stuffing four extra vials into your back pack is worth as much as inhuman toughness irrc. Please tell me how that makes sense?

A potion focused character is better off playing Morrowind alchemy with potions to produce single massively powerful potions than they are producing a couple dozen or hundred potions that they keep sitting in their closet at home (or in their potions belt) to select from for the situation that they expect to be facing.

From a balance perspective they might work alright but from a fluff/in setting perspective they absolutely suck.

I can in fact do this under Sanctaphrax's interpretations (at least as I understand them), I'm immediately burning the tags at the end of the ritual, specifically for the purpose of paying for the 'first scene in which this powers are relevant'. The tags aren't hanging around, though the aspects may be. That is part of why the downtime preparatory thaumaturgy doesn't really work, as you will have had to spend the tags on something specific (or have lost them) by the time downtime ends.

And if you can do "first scene in which these powers are relevant" you can also do "first scene in which ritual XYZ is cast" or the like. Exact same end effect.

Also, with regards to chaining rituals, the sequence:
Xn+1 = S+floor[(Xn-1)*2/3]
is convergent, limited to Xinf < S*3, and generally rather close to S*2 for the values of S in the range of normal practitioners effective lore (even at effective lore of 8, you hit a cap of 22 complexity after 5 iterations, having has to channel and control 96 power).

Except that you don't. Nothing is stopping you from casting twenty rituals that will each hang around for a month and then using them to cast a 40 complexity ritual at the end of the month.

Yes, you end up casting 20+ complexity rituals to provide +2 complexity to a future ritual. You spend a lot of time and in real terms end up wasting a ton of power but you can do it with no real cap.

It rarely makes sense, effectiveness wise, to do more than a single preparatory ritual per practitioner.

No, it rarely makes sense to do more than three or four. Because that's about the most that you can get with a duration long enough to cover the final ritual, But that lets you spend a day to cast a ritual that will hang around for a few weeks with an aspect to be tagged. Do that every day for two weeks and you have +28 complexity to use, giving you a ritual that is good enough to provide 2-3 such aspects and will last a mortal lifetime. Make it last a year and it's good for 4-5 such aspects.

Now do that twenty six times and at the end of the year you can tag all of that for +206 complexity. That is 38 or so such aspects hanging around for a decade, or +76 complexity.

Now do that for ten years and at the end you can tag it all for a ritual that will last a mortal lifetime and provide 408 such aspects, or +816 complexity.

The only limit is the time that you have to invest. If you are willing to blow a decades worth of investment on something then that is more than fine. That's how you get things like the Merlin throwing out a ward during battle that can stalemate the entire Red Court, Lords of the Outer Night and the Red King included; he burned a decades (or more) worth or stored power to do it. Now what happens if he has to fight Kemmler Reborn three days later?

Nope, it isn't. Killing someone to fuel your magic is a hell of a story to tell.

Not really, at least not if you are actually playing someone with the mind set to really be a good warlock or necromancer. Do you think that Kemmler angst over the fact that he is sacrificing a few hundred people for whatever ritual he wants to do? For him it's "ok, go on to town, grab the first dozen people I see, sacrifice them to put the whole town to sleep, stack them up like cordwood to power uber ritual number 1. now what should I have for dinner?"

Besides, not all people are created equal in this context, either. Getting any regular Joe from the street will not help the necromancer nearly as much as getting someone close to a named character, or even a friend of the PCs.

The rules don't say that. It's just as hard to kill a PC (assuming that the PC is outside of wards and lacking relevant powers) as it is to kill any random vanilla mortal. The reason that most rank and file NPC's don't get consequence tracks is that they are rarely willing to fight to the bitter end and concede early.

I'm not saying you can't, you misunderstand me. I'm saying it's boring. From a mechanical standpoint, you are absolutely right, you could clearly stack yourself up to the rafters with whatever aspects you like. But Fate isn't all about mechanics, it is about narration as well. That's why I try to look at the aspects not as +2 mechanical things, but as objects I use in the ritual. The whole drawing of power comes entirely during the casting of the spell itself.

And from a narrative perspective this works just fine. "I've spent weeks building up this power to cast this major ritual but I really have to get through these wards if I want to prevent the Red Court from doing Y and the only way I can bring those wards down in time is to spend up all my stored up power. But that will delay my ritual and tell everyone within fifty miles that I have this kind of power to throw around. should I do it?" That's just one example. There are tons of ways to have it work in a story.

Time should always be an issue. If not, then there isn't really any tension in the story.

Dresden averages one to two major cases per year. There is tons of down time in there where he could be stacking up useful things for later cases. It's the same kind of thing.

And Killing someone to fuel a spell should have an even bigger impact on the story. It shouldn't just be a convenient way to get the spell done quicker.

That should depend entirely on the story.

That would be where specializations come into play. You do something for a long time, you get good at it.

Your specialization would be "hiking in mountains" the ritual would be "preparing myself to hike at these altitude for a long duration in these temperatures, learning the routes, studying previous peoples hikes, etc."

Not at all. Shoving more power into your spell will require more control of you, or you will go boom. Or maybe look at it this way: You may be able to use your aspects on the casting part of the spell, but you would not be able to use them to increase the complexity of your spell.

Except all complexity is is short hand for the power, control, etc. of the spell. You can slit a guys throat (which fluff wise does nothing but provide power) to reduce complexity. You can slit another guys throat to power the actual casting the the spell and you can dump the backlash on a third guy to control the casting of that spell.

If you have a sufficient power source that reduces complexity.

We also see Dresden in changes; all that is required for any ritual is will, power, and control and all of the external factors just stand in for one of those three things. Everything from the circle to the symbolic link is technically optional (even if practically required) in the fluff of the setting.

And if you have enough time to gather that many aspects to cast the spell, I wouldn't make you roll on casting it anyway. The complexity of a thaumaturgy spell is what I called a lever in my simile before. No matter how you do it, you have to have an understanding of what you are doing. A plan, a shape that you can pour your magic into. That's the interesting part of the spell, and to me it is the important one. If you are then casting the spell under pressure of time, because a horde of bad guys is coming your way, then it is getting interesting, and we will start rolling.

And then I tag "ritual X part 1" through "ritual X part 20" aspects that I have precast along with "power storage X part 1" through "power storage X part 20" to provide the power in one round and "power control X part 1" through "power control X part 20" to provide the control.

Entire massive ritual done at the drop of a hat and in one exchange (or one minute). Why was that doable? Because I spent a decent amount of time previously making it possible.

And that I would simply not allow. Creating aspects or magical equipment in your downtime is covered far and good by enchanted items. If you want more, get more enchanted item slots. If you need something on the fly, leave some potion slots open and declare a night vision potion.

Leaving aside the fact that the enchanted item rules (and potion rules) suck, that makes no sense. If you can put some aspect on one character to trigger later then you can put some aspect on yourself to trigger later. Whether that aspect is good or bad for that character is irrelevant.

Again, this is already covered with focus items.

Which doesn't really matter.

Anything like you described above is downright cheating.

Which is what magic is all about. Tracking someone after an hour through an entire major metropolis with nothing more than a single hair is "cheating" as well.

Besides, where do you want to store all that power? Harry got a headache from the power he was able to draw in within one minute. His head would explode from a weeks worth, let alone a year

Because Harry was storing that power in his head and wasn't drawing it through ritual, making a battery, or anything else. Where you store it and how you store it depends entirely upon the table and the wizard.

Items? Let's say every aspect is equal to an enchanted item slot, that means those are 100 item slots. There is box on page 281 that suggests sizes for enchanted items. If we scale this up to 100 item slots (roughly doubling in size every 4 slots), we are at about the size of a mid sized town. Or he could carry 100 rings, which doesn't make it any more plausible.

Again, the rules should treat identical situations identically. If you can dump a curse on someone to give them a hundred +2 "Bad Luck" aspects that will last ten years (and you explicitly can do this) then you can do the exact same thing with "good luck" aspects or any other aspect.
I know what you mean, but to me, that is a big deal.

And like I said above, while I would allow "Empowered Ruby" to power the spell, I would not necessarily allow it to add to the complexity.

And that shows a distinct misunderstanding of what complexity represents. That the rules let you slit a persons throat to reduce complexity; or tap a thunderstorm; or tap a leyline (all of which are called out as examples of ways to reduce complexity) means that "Empowered Ruby" is just as viable a choice.

+2 Complexity comes just as easily from "rare cross that was blessed by a saint and is touched with true faith" as from "unplugged the telephone to remove distractions". Both can be provided by making declarations with skill rolls (say Resources and Discipline) and both reduce complexity by +2 but they they provide totally different things story wise. One is maybe the critical component of the ritual so that you attack ritual can get through the Outsiders toughness while the other is just removing one potential distraction when you get around to casting the ritual.

I quote:

You can delay the maneuver, but you can't just have it hanging around until you need it.

"Or triggered".

"I say bippity boppoity boo" is a careful trigger.

I think Tippy is talking about aspects created by thaumaturgy.  If so, you simply up the difficulty to move it into the appropriate time scale.  Not free but not all that hard either.

Pretty much. If you don't up the time then it lasts a scene but if you push the time scale up then it lasts until the time runs out or it is first tagged (at which point it hangs around until the time runs out as something that you can spend a fate point to invoke).

Sure they can, it's just they aren't free hanging. If I do a ritual for 4 refresh in temporary powers, I could include 12 complexity worth of maneuvers to immediately pay for the first scene of use of those temporary powers. If I do a preparatory ritual in support of a larger ritual, I can immediately burn the tags from the preparatory ritual into complexity for the larger ritual.

Except that no you couldn't under the rules interpretation that Sanctaphrax is using. Those 12 complexity worth of maneuvers must be tagged in the scene that they are created. If you rule that you can have them hanging around for later use to power one thing then you can have them hanging around for later use to power another thing.

A thaum maneuver applied aspect is either good for 1 tag within the duration of the ritual, good for 1 tag within the scene after it is triggered (if said triggering occurs within the duration of the ritual), or good for the scene that the ritual takes place in; one of those three has to be true.

My opinion is that the first is true, but if either the first or second is true then you can stack tags virtually indefinitely for later use (subject pretty much just to the amount of time you have to devote to doing so).

If the third is true then the entire "act like maneuvers and apply aspects" part of thaum is utterly worthless. You can't use it and then go across town for a battle and take advantage of the maneuver, for example. This also conflicts with the section specifically calling out that the whole reason for this part of the rules is to "As wizards are usually low on fate points, this option allows you a little more  mileage  without  having  to  worry  about impacting your fate point budget."

Maneuvers certainly don't work that way and tags in general don't. Declarations for Thaumaturgy Complexity may work  like that (though they usually aren't interchangeably), but at that point it's no longer downtime and you are burning your retroactive deceleration window; it's also really good justifications for your potion slots and enchanted items not refreshing.

If thaum applied maneuvers can't do this then they are utterly worthless and don't actually do what the section in YS says that they are supposed to do; save the wizard fate points.

You can't cast a ritual and then go across town and take advantage of it under that ruling.

That said, if you don't go into too much detail, these sorts of rituals can make good background for the main story, and can usually be hand-waved as aspect shifts or as a reason for having a particular location with better wards than the default.

If you allow it in back story then it should be allowed in the main story. It's the same world. That it is rare that the characters will have the time to really take advantage of this during the main story is irrelevant. Take a look at most of the Dresden books, they take place entirely over a day or two. Cold Days (from the birthday party to the end) took less than 48 hours.

As an example I caused in a game, a Biomancer augmented the local Seagull population with divination networked biological spy ware over the course of a year's downtime. Done in play with immense detail, the ritual to augment one flock could have easily required complexity 20+. Done as a background ritual, it resulted in the City acquiring the sticky aspect of "Avery's Seagull Panopticon", justified a much lower complexity divination ritual for unreliable short term post-cognition scrying of places where seagulls were in the city, and a separate ritual for similar real time over-watch. Oh, and many many compels.

And I create my divination networks in play and over time. Granted, I also take blood from every enemy that I defeat and have the few minutes required to get it and get tons from blood banks (complete with names, addresses, and telephone numbers).

It might take a bit of time but being able to get full, real time, audio and visual from say the Chief of Police can be so useful.

Then there is the network of magical spy cameras who's take is displayed as a holographic 2d image directly in front of a very good quality camera that is inside a circle and then linked off site to a server farm where all of the best in modern surveillance software and data analysis technology is running. It might take a year or two but you can wire an entire city in a manner that is either virtually impossible to detect and (if detected) virtually impossible to back trace.

Those values sound ridiculously high to me. If that were the case, no one would be able to get through Harry's wards, or anyone attempting to would be instantly killed.

Unless they did the exact same thing.

Besides, Harry really doesn't have the right temperament to make a good wizard. He's too straightforward and direct and it shows in pretty much everything he does.

Just look at the difference between how he shields and how McCoy shields. Dresden fights force with force, although now he tends to say deflect bullets instead of stopping them cold. McCoy has enchanted his robes to absorb the kinetic energy of any bullets that hit them (see Changes). What is the end result of these two approaches? It costs Dresden energy to stop bullets from hitting him, it gives McCoy energy when bullets strike him.

Dresden rarely "cheats", and it hurts him significantly as a wizard. It's honestly perhaps his biggest weakness. He's been getting better at it and he is young but he is still too direct.

The idea of using dozens (or hundreds) of prefatory rituals just to be able to use a greater ritual in the end? Does that sound like something Dresden would really do to you? Not that he can't do it, just that it would never occur to him to do it.

True Love will protect you from the Raiths, and from the Lust that they typically incite.  It will not likely protect you against Despair, unless, perhaps, incited by a (deviant) Raith.

Borrowed Courage then.

Aha!  Here is the solution!  So simple.  Thank-you.

Might want to fluff it differently though. Like maybe it makes anyone who doesn't have the proper token be highlighted in bright green flames that don't burn or something similar.