There's always the highly abusable tactic of using Recovery powers to negate consequences from fallout/backlash.

Only use this trick if you're in a party with some really high powered characters, though.

I don't see how that really helps though.  Don't you still take the mental stress from casting the spell even if you botch the control roll and take fallout/backlash?

The DFRPG rules do a pretty great job of modeling the universe we see in the books.  There are a few exceptions though.  One of the biggest things I've noticed lacking in the rules is a way for characters to cast more spells over time. 

In the books, as Harry progresses and becomes a more powerful wizard, his spells grow more powerful, and he's also able to cast more of them before he starts getting worn out.  The rules do a good job of modeling the former, they don't do a good job at all with the latter.  In fact, there really are no ways to increase the number of spells you can cast.  You cap out at 4 points of mental stress with 3 points of conviction (which any spellcaster should be starting with), and there are no toughness powers for mental stress like there are for physical.  And as far as I've found, there are no ways to avoid the mental stress from casting a spell.

Has anyone else thought this was an issue in need of fixing and tried to come up with ways around it?  Basically, it seems like you'd need to either be able to cast some spells (likely pretty weak ones) without taking any stress at all, or somehow increase your boxes of mental stress.

For me, that's the point of playing a low refresh character.  You don't try to play a character that's going to be exactly what you want.  You play a character that's going to BECOME exactly what you want. 

I'm okay with starting with a lower refresh and a character who will grow into what I want him to be, as long as the growth happens at a decent pace.  If you're using the pace of receiving refresh points that the rules suggest, it's pretty slow, especially in a group like ours that only plays for about 3 hours every two weeks.  If we ever want to get a chance to be more powerful, we have to either start higher, or advance faster.

So I'm finally playing in my first Dresden Files game (which is awesome by the way).  My character is a Scion of a djinn and a mortal, and one of the things that seemed very fitting for the character was supernatural toughness, with the catch being true magic (based on the mythology that the djinn cannot be hurt by normal weapons and must be fought or trapped with magic).  Until recently it worked out fine.  Where we ran into an issue was when I fought my first magic user.

The DM and I were both having trouble wrapping our heads around how the catch interacts with the extra 4 boxes of physical stress capacity that supernatural toughness grants.

So my character normally has 3 boxes of physical stress capacity from his endurance, plus 4 more from supernatural toughness for a total of 7.  But if I get hit by magic I only have 3.  That's where we were getting confused.  So what happens if, for example, I get shot and take 3 boxes of physical stress, then get hit with a bolt of lightning for 3 more?  Am I taken out or not?  The 3 stress from the lightning would fill my 4th stress box (which isn't there when my catch is satisfied), but the physical damage I took first could fill the 4th box with no problems.

And does it matter which order I take the damage in?  If it was switched and I took the lightning bolt first and then got shot would it result in a different outcome?

Okay, just a few off the top of my head:

Fool Moon - beaten badly by the Lycanthropes, overused his magic to the point of not being able to use it for awhile, watched Carmichael and a bunch of other SI cops die horribly
Grave Peril - Besides Susan getting turned whatever the vampires did to him in the dark that he still has nightmares about, poisoned himself with toadstool, bad head injury, got a bunch of his magic taken away by the nightmare, died for long enough to leave a ghost to help him beat up the nightmare.
Summer Knight - Saw the queens with his sight, stabbed himself in the hand with a letter opener, found out Elaine was alive
Death Masks - tortured by nicodemus, Saw susan again and she told him it was over for good, Saw shiro die horribly
Blood Rites - Can't think of any besides what you mentioned
Dead Beat - Tortured and almost killed by Cassius, Leg injured and almost killed by corpsetaker
Proven Guilty - Watched the kid at the beginning get killed
White Night - Got fairly beaten up in the duel with Vito Malvora and the Raith guy
Small Favor - Failed to save Ivy from the Denarians, almost drowned in the fight at the Shedd, had his eyes frozen by Mab, Got his nose broken by the Gruffs, watched Michael get shot and almost killed
Turn Coat - Saw the Naagloshi with his sight, saw the Naagloshi kill Kirby and badly wound Andi, Found out that Luccio had been forced into a relationship with him and didn't want to date him anymore
Changes - Car got destroyed, house got burned down, broke his spine, Found out he had a daughter that Susan had hidden for him for years, Agreed to be the winter knight, fought in a magical war at Chichen Itza, killed Susan, got shot and nearly killed at the end.
Ghost Story - Found out he was dead (or thought so at the time), nearly got eaten by wraiths a couple times, Lost almost all of himself by using too much magic, hurt by seeing what had happened to all of his friends since he had "died".

I've been working (in my very limited spare time) on coming up with homebrew rules for Codex Alera using D&D 3.5 as the core rules.  It's going pretty slowly though, since there's a lot of things about the system that need changed to make it match the books.

I just logged onto the boards and was searching for a thread I started a couple of days ago.  I didn't see it anywhere, and thought it might have gotten deleted or something.  Then I noticed that the most recent response on any of the threads was May 20th (5 days ago).  Did something happen and wipe out everything more recent than that?