I think I should have handled it as suggested as an aspect that they placed on the whole scene, or nothing at all. Even in the instance of them wanting to rip down the pipes and use wind or water magic to direct it toward the apparition. In thinking about it, tearing down the pipes would be fine in itself but I suppose trying to affect the running water once it was blasting out of the pipes with magic would have been at a -2 due to the threshold aspect of running water.

I also like Becq's and Taran's idea of using it as a straight block. Unfortunately at the time, my players were hoping to completely disupt the apparition with it. I ended up telling them, after a lot of page flipping that the most they could do with it that way was the damage it would have taken if it had tried to cross it as a threshold.

Richard, I'll have to check out the short story you mentioned. While I have read the books through once (working through them again), I've only read a couple of the short stories. The one you mentioned seems relevant to my interests.

I'm a new GM to the Dresden Files and had some questions to come up about running water.

We did find where running water causes a threshold that grounds out magical energies of Fair (+2) strength. We read the rules for thresholds and resolved how that should work.

The question that came up though, would a wizard using water magic to move water, or a wizard using air magic to blow water around the floor of a room constitute "running" water?

The closest answer in the book I saw was Billy asking about Water Evokers shorting out their own magic on one of the post it notes. Harry said he wondered that himself. Bob noted that he'd tried to explain it to Harry, but he just didn't get it.

This led me to believe that it didn't constitute running water, and I said as much. So the next thing they tried was manipulating water running through the pipes. I grudgingly let them do that, until I did some research on the matter. It seems to me if it were that easy then water wizards could easily dispatch a number of magical things with some evocations?

Anyone else have these things come up? How did you handle them? I'd love to hear others interpretations.

Thanks for your time, and my apologies if I missed a thread already dealing with this. I did a search but didn't find anything that fit my questions.