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Messages - MrobFire

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DFRPG / Noob GM Help: Casefile Neutral grounds
« on: May 31, 2011, 05:20:33 PM »
So I'm supposed to GM Neutral Grounds tonight so that my rpg crew can give fate a test run and a couple of little things are confusing me.

1) If the PCs investigate the murder scene and find evidence that points to Damocles (poser red court, I might have the name wrong) how do they identify that it is damocles? Specifically, should I just tell them about the characters that are involved (w/o specifying who's big bad and etc.) since their characters are presumed to be "in the know" or, alternatively, should they have to make a contacts/lore/whatever role to determine that vampire bite + sword wound = that asshole Damocles?

2) The casefile hints that you could have Damocles show up at Eric's house to mess with the PCs but... my assumption based on the timeline was that that would be during the daytime. Am I missing something, is it assumed that Damocles was camped out in the building already?

3) Any hints for how the search panned out? Hints on making the final battle exciting? Any other tips and tricks / wisdom people feel they should impart to me?

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I'm going to ignore the debate of canon versus "your table, your rules" which seems like maybe it should be split into a different thread and go back to the OP's question. Also note, comments on the laws of magic are there to explain some of my reasoning, not to start a discussion of the laws themselves. Feel free to interpret those bits how you will (or discard them all together).

I've been thinking about this for a day or so and I think I've come up with the (nigh impossible) way that I would pull this off while conforming to canon (I think) and (maybe) avoiding violating the laws of magic. Basically, the process would involve three truly epic rituals.

1) A fairly straightforward ritual that would take out the BC vamp with a massive mental attack, the specified result being that the central will and subconcious of the vamp is destroyed, probably leaving the animating magical influence intact. At a guess this would be something like a 35 to 40 shift effect but I don't think excercising mental effects on a BC vamp violates the laws of magic (but I don't have the book available and could be totally wrong on that). Edit: Note that I'm leaving whether or not this leaves memories in tact an open question. Personally, I would since that leaves all kinds of role playing on the table... although having no idea what kind of monstrous things "you" did is also pretty awesome story material.
2) Another "straightforward" ritual to take a corpse and return it to life (sans moral agency [i.e. no soul]). Call this something on the close order of 40 shifts. At this step it may be necessary to expell the animating magic of the black court vamp (although you could say that the mere act of bringing the body to life destroys the death magic or that the body is essentially infected and will revert to BC vamp'ness upon death [I like the second option]). If you have to expell the animating magic add.... say another 40 shifts of effect (Doing this would kind of obviate the need for the first ritual soo... just changing the first ritual would be a smarter way to do it).
3) Now, since I would argue that performing a true ressurection (i.e. bringing a sould back from the afterlife) would require -at least- archangel level magic, and probably WG level mojo, I'm going to do an end run around that with this ritual. Instead of bringing the soul back from the afterlife I would use chronomancy to provide a bridge from the moment of death to the present thus using the awesome power of time travel to allow the soul to never have gone to the afterlife in the first place. Note that in order for this bridge to be usable by a soul would also take some pretty serious necromancy. Also note that since the soul only moves forward in time (thus swimming with, not against, time) and since the soul isn't compelled to take the bridge as opposed to 'moving on' (so we're not compelling it, just providing it a choice) I think and argument could be made in game that the White Council's laws of magic haven't been broken and can be made that the 'physical' laws of magic (involving the stunts/change of aspect/whatever) also haven't been broken. This spell is kind of hilarious and I have no idea how to guess at the number of shifts it would take.

Sooo.... that's how I would go about "curing" a BC vamp while trying to not get my head chopped off (unlikely to work) and without driving myself insane (a debate that this board has established is pretty subjective and not really worth having).

P.S. I think this method establishes the morality of killing BC vamps since, bar time travel, the BC vamp is not savable. You can only change this fact by, kind of, changing the past. If you don't change the past then the BC still isn't covered by morality and is just an evil automaton (or something). But... that is also probably a different thread.

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DFRPG / Re: First law and were creatures.
« on: February 08, 2011, 05:58:54 PM »
Well, I partially want to get a community consensus because I may be stepping in and GMing if/when our GM wants to play a character.

Plus, since everyone in my group is new to this system and I have read the book 6 times and lurked in these forums so often, I've kind of found a niche as the "rules guy".

While the GM gets final say, the sheer expedient that I've spent so much time trying to understand the rules and I don't play favorites (even with myself) means that my opinion is at least listened to.

That's actually why I post so often of late.  I'm trying to understand the community's agreement on everything - not just the things that affect my character.

Yeah, even if people are free to come to their own conclusions I agree that I do like finding the community's consensus on these topics which I think are the most interesting. My personal favorite interpretation is that Harry did get a +1 to the bonus from lawbreaker and that
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It's more interesting to me to think that you gain lawbreaker when you kill anything that has a soul and that the White Council simply hasn't realized that wampires count since they've never engaged them in large scale combat (and they tend to take the traditional view that monsters are bad).

Alternatively the ensouled and positive refresh is an ok idea but it fails when you consider that most warlocks probably would have gone into negative refresh based on how lawbreaker works. I find it hard to believe though that wardens (or ancient wizards for that matter) wouldn't eventually notice that there were no metaphysical consequences for using magic against warlocks.

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DFRPG / Re: The letter not the spirit of the Law
« on: February 08, 2011, 01:18:12 AM »
This is an excellent post but I am warning you that it may go over some readers' heads.

I mean this without malice, but after having spent about 6 months lurking on these boards and a month posting, I can say with full assurance that some players see the first law as "killing is bad, mmmkay?" and don't pursue it any further than that.

I think we've already seen some people possibly missing the point of that post. But Drachasor, I think you've got a really brilliant idea there. Essentially, as I see it, people are confounding two sets of laws. The legal laws that the White Council enforces; and the natural laws resulting from the pseudo physics governing magic. In the novels Dresden has repeatedly stressed that Magic is governed by physical rules such as the rule of equal and opposite reactions. So, while I can take a gun and kill someone, accept that it was necessary, and move on, that is not possible with magic. If I use magic to kill myself the very nature of magic will force a change in my mind equal to the change that my mind created in the world. The White Council, in an attempt to prevent wizards from descending into dark magic (i.e. those forms of magic which can pervert a mage's very nature and destroy their free will), was formed so as to constrain wizards' power. This is clear from
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. Basically, the legal laws of magic aren't moral at all, they are simply designed to prevent wizards from being corrupted by their corresponding natural laws of magic (although the rule about the outer gates might be an exception to this).

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DFRPG / Re: Magics Limitations due to Mental Stress
« on: February 08, 2011, 12:45:18 AM »
So do people think a stunt that allowed you to cast rote spells with no mental stress provided that the discipline "roll" is at least double the conviction would be a balanced stunt?

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DFRPG / Re: Looking for advice on how to Self-Compel aspects
« on: February 04, 2011, 11:24:21 PM »
Somebody Has To Do It - You could Self-Compel by getting involved in supernatural conflicts which aren't part of the main adventure, because you are the best one for the job. Especially when doing so will end up providing support that *will* loop back into the main plot.

Knowledge Is Power - Self-Compel to be lured astray by the promise of power or knowledge. Maybe it w*will* help in the long run, or maybe it was a false lead. And if someone offers you information to spare them, well, guess what? They came to the right Warden.

In particular, it sounds like, with some buy in from the GM and other players, that these two would let you introduce some hooks for the less CSI style stories you seem to be jonesing to play.

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DFRPG / Re: True Shape Shifting Skills
« on: February 04, 2011, 11:14:43 PM »
You'll still need to be able to pick up a gun though.

Ya, my question is basically, can a shapeshifter shape in to a human(oid) that's really good at some humanish skills such as guns/weapons/drive?

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DFRPG / Magics Limitations due to Mental Stress
« on: February 04, 2011, 10:26:08 PM »
I do like how normal casting is portrayed in this system. It seems like this accurately characterizes how Harry is generally completely spent after even short battles in the books,
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However, it does seem rather limiting that even an expert caster could probably only get off at most, lets say eight spells (mental stress track + consequences and maybe some physical consequences for good measure). We have instances in the books where
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It seems to me that there are a couple of reasonable solutions/interpretations to this issue:
1) Possibly RAW is sufficient and it's just standard operating procedure for wizards to fight in shifts (I would guess three) so as to trigger the rest between scenes rules to clear the stress track. Thus, whenever we see a group of wardens engaged in pitched battle in the book,
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they were ultimately screwed since they would quickly burn through their magic (i.e. mental stress),
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2) Another possibility is that we should add a couple of stunts that full battle mages would take. I'm seeing one stunt (battle mage or whatever) that allows you to cast magic with no stress if your discipline roll is double the shifts of power you decide to use. You could probably add another optional stunt chained off of the first stunt (call it battle master [originality for the win!]) where simply achieving spin on your discipline roll to control your shifts of power (i.e. power+3) obviates the need to take stress.
3) We could allow for a new mechanic where a pertinent loose (non sticky at least, I can't remember the terminology off the top of my head) aspect on a character can be tagged by that character to cast a spell and the use of that tag would be to cast the spell for 0 base stress. An example of this would be that a character could do a navel gazing conviction maneuver to place the aspect gathered power on him/herself. Then, next turn, could use the free tag of that spell to cast without taking mental stress.
4) Finally, it could be argued that Sponsored magic is much more common than I would have thought and that most mages expecting to enter battle would find one or more sponsors that they could incur debt with in exchange for powering their magic.

A somewhat related question I had was how you would portray the battle in Small Favor where
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tl;dr Long post is long, what do y'all think about taking mental stress for casting pretty much every spell?

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DFRPG / True Shape Shifting Skills
« on: February 04, 2011, 09:49:25 PM »
The rules specify that the character can freely rearrange skills (while maintaining the same number of skill points and conforming to the restrictions laid out in character creation) as long as no social or knowledge based skill ends up higher than it started. Does this mean that skills such as guns could be shifted (obviously with the caveat that I wouldn't let them use knowledge base trappings for the skill)? These are physical skills and since the book allows for skills to represent either training or innate talent it would seem reasonable but... I'm not really sure.

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