Thaumaturgy declarations and time

[UmbraLux]

But maneuvers don't add to the complexity, declarations do. 

More correctly, Aspects are what add shifts to complexity.  Aspects may be set up with either Declarations or Maneuvers.  They may also be existing personal, scene, or area attributes.

How do you adjudicate prep time?

"As the plot demands" combined with "what makes sense".    Seriously.  Using Lore, they may spend an hour drawing the "Perfect Ritual Symbols", five minutes remembering "Ritual Gestures Propitiating the North Wind", or weeks searching through libraries for a "True Name".  All depends on resources, skill, and time available.  The end result is a single aspect set up by Lore providing +2 complexity.

Let's say the PC's have 2 days to find "the missing girl".  They decide that wipping up a big Thaum spell is the way to go.  Assuming they make all their declarations, Can they just go do it?  Or would you say, "it's gonna take a full day to prep" and then they decide if it's worth the time and risk that the spell will actually work?

Remember: "story first, mechanics second".  If they're short on time, they need to choose declarations which don't take much time.  Discipline for a "Focused Mind", quick lore check to find the "Greek Word for Simularity", a few minutes in the right location and an Alertness check to find the "Missing Girl's Hair", and short drive to the store for a Resources check to pick up some "Purified Salt".  Probably less then an hour total for a single person and he's got a +8.  Could be done quicker if the wizard concentrates on focusing while an assistant draws the circle and friends fetch hair and salt.  Don't forget the party when designing rituals either, a group's ritual can be far more complex than an individual's in a similar amount of time.

I thought that you could only make maneuvers during conflicts.

I just treat out-of-combat maneuvers as declarations.

Am I wrong, here?

You can use maneuvers anytime.  (Turning on or off lights is a maneuver.)  They're just part of the story until they become important mechanically.  Then they're a maneuver. 

[crusher_bob]

"As the plot demands" combined with "what makes sense".    Seriously.  Using Lore, they may spend an hour drawing the "Perfect Ritual Symbols", five minutes remembering "Ritual Gestures Propitiating the North Wind", or weeks searching through libraries for a "True Name".  All depends on resources, skill, and time available.  The end result is a single aspect set up by Lore providing +2 complexity.

And I specifically don't like this approach because all maneuvers/declarations have equal game effect.  Is 'a perfect ritual circle' any better than 'a ritual circle of ketchup, squeezed out of a fast food ketchup packet'?  No.  Unless I make more declarations about the perfect circle, my ketchup circle is mechanically just an beneficial when to comes to getting the job done.  And the GM effectively penalizing the 'perfect circle' declaration by making it take more time than the ketchup circle is not very nice.  That just makes everyone want to make the ketchup circle instead.

Most games get around this problem by having a perfect circle give you more game effect.  So, for example, a perfect circle made out of blessed silver might be +6, a regular chalk circle might be +4, and the ketchup circle might be +0.  But in this game, you are effectively trading declarations/time for bonuses.  And the amount of time you have to trade for another +2 should be the same, because the effect I get from the bonuses is the same.

That makes the main point of the 'text' of the declarations be something that is interesting to the players of the game.  So it boils down to, if you can entertain us 3 times with your antics with fast food condiment packets, you can get a +6; but it's perfectly OK for you to entertain us 3 times with your antics with a big compass, a bathtub full of ice, and your grandmother's set of fine china instead, you'd get a +6 for that too.  And you'd 'pay' the same time/cost/whatever for either one.

But then, how do we make characters do different entertaining stuff when they want to do thaumaturgy?  I chose the 'use every skill you have' route so that players:
1. couldn't just keep making lore (or whatever their best skill is) declarations over and over again
and
2. since different characters would hopefully have different skills, the things they declared would hopefully tell us something interesting about the character as well.

[sinker]

And I specifically don't like this approach because all maneuvers/declarations have equal game effect.  Is 'a perfect ritual circle' any better than 'a ritual circle of ketchup, squeezed out of a fast food ketchup packet'?  No.  Unless I make more declarations about the perfect circle, my ketchup circle is mechanically just an beneficial when to comes to getting the job done.  And the GM effectively penalizing the 'perfect circle' declaration by making it take more time than the ketchup circle is not very nice.  That just makes everyone want to make the ketchup circle instead.

Actually I can give you two mechanical differences between those two aspects.

1) The table (or the GM) may decide that a circle of ketchup isn't really appropriate and therefore would not give a benefit. Just like you can't invoke an aspect that wouldn't give you a benefit in a specific situation. So one could argue that invoking a circle of ketchup for a ritual is like invoking a "friends in high places" aspect to give you a bonus to gunplay. This of course would depend on your table.

2) The GM would also be perfectly justified in compelling your "circle of ketchup" to make the spell go all pear shaped, whereas your "perfect ritual circle" would not give him the same opportunity. This would likely not depend on your table, I can see most GMs going "Trying to summon a demon within a ketchup circle sounds less than bright."

More correctly, Aspects are what add shifts to complexity.  Aspects may be set up with either Declarations or Maneuvers.  They may also be existing personal, scene, or area attributes.
....
You can use maneuvers anytime.  (Turning on or off lights is a maneuver.)  They're just part of the story until they become important mechanically.  Then they're a maneuver. 

To be purely technical I think Sanctaphrax and Taran are right. Specifically in the prep rules one can invoke existing aspects ala a fate points or make declarations. Those are the only listed options for using aspects in prep (unless you count consequences, but that's irrelevant to the discussion anyway). In addition I'm pretty sure a maneuver is specific to the rules of conflict (as one of the three actions one can carry out in conflict). For all other situations there are declarations and assessments.

Of course I'd usually err on the same side as you and say regardless of RAW you can maneuver or make declarations in that specific situation. With the difference between the two being as I previously stated.

[crusher_bob]

2) The GM would also be perfectly justified in compelling your "circle of ketchup" to make the spell go all pear shaped, whereas your "perfect ritual circle" would not give him the same opportunity. This would likely not depend on your table, I can see most GMs going "Trying to summon a demon within a ketchup circle sounds less than bright."

So, how much risk am I trading for the much faster circle of ketchup?  What about a less half-assed circle of chalk instead?  If the balance of risks is only evaluated in the GMs head, and not a shared head space between me and the GM, I have no way of making real judgements about how much risk I'm willing to trade off vs time.  And leaving the rules as 'whatever' means that any shared head space about risk vs time has to be created by discussion with the GM right then and there.

If I start with my circle of ketchup (5 minutes) and the GM says "that's not a good idea", "well duh" I respond, but it only takes 5 minutes to do.
So I ask him, how much risk am I trading off between:
circle of ketchup (5 minutes)
circle of chalk (15 minutes)
prefect ritual circle (30 minutes)
And even the amount of time it takes me to do those different things it jsut a number I made up.  And if we have a discussion and come to agreement about exactly how those risk/time options compare, it doesn't really help at all when:

Green Play-doh
vs
A paste made of finely ground black acorns to which a small quantity of my blood had been added

Comes up for evaluation. 
Or maybe I have the black acorn powder, but don't want to bleed into it, what are the risk trade offs for that?

----------------

Things that are fantasic need even more background/rules work because there is no shared consensus between to players when they first come to the game.

----------------

And here's an example of something that the players probably already have some shared consensus about, by comparison:

Bob wants to drive from New York to LA, how long does it take him to do it?

How much faster if he avoids sleep, and uses little yellow pills to stay awake?
How much faster if he goes a little over the speed limit?
...a lot over the speed limit?
What if he doesn't eat anything, and pees into empty Mountain Dew bottles, so he only really ever stops to get gas?

Players who all live in the US can probably have a reasonable idea of how such a trip would happen.

--------------

But what about whether black acorn paste or green play-doh would be a better component for this spell?  The 'true' answer might very well be, "green play-doh, because it's green".  But it might not.  And we have no way of answering that.

[sinker]

Seems to me that now you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. As you pointed out all of that would be defined individually at each table and within each circumstance, so there's no real point in bringing it up. I'm just saying that aspects can be compelled as well as invoked, and using an aspect that you know is shabby (it was your example of a shabby circle) is more likely to be compelled in any given situation, whereas using an aspect that you put time and effort into will be less likely to be compelled.

If you're asking me personally I'd always give the benefit of the doubt to the ground acorn/perfect circle over the play-doh/ketchup because it represents effort made on the part of the character to improve the situation rather than use whatever's laying around and I'm a GM that tries to put more value on the intent than the actual product.

[crusher_bob]

Seems to me that now you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. As you pointed out all of that would be defined individually at each table and within each circumstance, so there's no real point in bringing it up.

No, I'm saying that rules that require you to stop the game and have discussion, not what exactly you are going to do, but how exactly the rules are going to interface with what you want to do are pretty terrible rules.  That's why I wrote my rules patch for thaumaturgy.  And why I usually take the field against people saying 'Just make up something" when it comes to how to figure out what to to with thaumaturgy.

Imagine, in the books, if the GM had to stop and have a negotiation with Harry's player about how to make his thaumaturgy declarations every time Harry did some bit of thaumaturgy.  And notice how common thaumaturgy is.  That discussion is probably not that interesting to the other players.

[edit]

So what I think should happen is something like this:

GM: (in the beginning) we are using Crusher Bob's rules for thaumaturgy declarations
---------

Later:
PC1: I want to try to do (this), with thaumaturgy, what's the difficulty?

GM: (some number)

PC1: "OK, I'll be over here figuring out how long that would take me."

(GM and other players do stuff for around 5 minutes)

PC1: OK, I can do this.  It would take me (time).

GM/Other players: OK

PC1: And here's the interesting things I did to make it happen:
(declaration 1)
(in game description of how declaration 2 failed)
(declaration 3)
etc.
And it's done!

GM/Other Players: Yay!

----------------

As opposed to this:

PC1: I want to try to do (this), with thaumaturgy, what's the difficulty?

GM: (some number)

PC1: Hmm, can I do that?

GM and PC1 have 30 minute discussion about declarations, difficulty, time spent, etc

PC1: It's done!

GM, to other players: "stop playing xbox, the rest of you, there's a game going on."

[sinker]

Or, as I would (and stated above), one could simply decide that the player is either a) clearly sacrificing effectiveness by putting less effort into something, or b) putting more effort into something to make it better and then go off of that. The issue is when you try to make a definitive list of things and how they work for something that can so simply be defined by a clear value. Obviously however you and I value different things in this system/setting.

[Watson]

I like crusher_bob's rules for Thaumaturgy prep alot, and will use them more or less as they are. I like them for exactly the same reason as he made them (as I understand it) - it clearly states what a player can expect his character to be able to do and how long time it probably would take. Sure, one could run the Thaumaturgy as written, but I also expect to have long discussions as a result, plus players trying to weasel out as many declarations from their high-level skills as possible ("how many declarations can I get away with for my Lore 5?"). 

[Taran]

As far as the ketchup vs perfect circle goes, I'd just say the perfect circle is 3 or 4 declarations

1. for having it made of silver (resourses)
2. for having crafted it yourself(craft)
3. for laying it out/orienting it to best use the flow of magic in the area (lore)

= Perfect circle +6 Bonus

Ketchup = +2 bonus

But that's me, and I digress.

[devonapple]

For my money, the ketchup circle would simply require a higher roll to accomplish successfully. For purposes of "the rule of cool," I can easily  imagine Harry resorting to one in a particularly dire moment of an early-series DF story.

[UmbraLux]

And I specifically don't like this approach because all maneuvers/declarations have equal game effect.  Is 'a perfect ritual circle' any better than 'a ritual circle of ketchup, squeezed out of a fast food ketchup packet'?  No.  Unless I make more declarations about the perfect circle, my ketchup circle is mechanically just an beneficial when to comes to getting the job done.  And the GM effectively penalizing the 'perfect circle' declaration by making it take more time than the ketchup circle is not very nice.  That just makes everyone want to make the ketchup circle instead.

Things have to make sense to the story.  In my view, you will get an aspect from your ketchup circle - a negative aspect reducing the spell's effectiveness.  If you're letting someone run roughshod over you with ketchup circles, I don't think mechanics are the true issue.

Most games get around this problem by having a perfect circle give you more game effect.  So, for example, a perfect circle made out of blessed silver might be +6, a regular chalk circle might be +4, and the ketchup circle might be +0.  But in this game, you are effectively trading declarations/time for bonuses.  And the amount of time you have to trade for another +2 should be the same, because the effect I get from the bonuses is the same.

I can't comment on "most games" having only played / run a few.  In my view, those "Permanently Etched" "Blessed Silver" "Runic Circles" give you the +6 from three zone / location aspects.  If you have time, you can still set up additional aspects with each skill.  End result is the potential for a more powerful spell than someone without access to the circle in your basement. 

Esentially, the wizard who planned ahead an built useable features (aspects) into his permanent circle starts with a higher complexity potential than the guy working in the ruins of a fast food restaurant.  Either way, they can still set up more aspects...if they make sense. 

Actually I can give you two mechanical differences between those two aspects.

1) The table (or the GM) may decide that a circle of ketchup isn't really appropriate and therefore would not give a benefit. Just like you can't invoke an aspect that wouldn't give you a benefit in a specific situation. So one could argue that invoking a circle of ketchup for a ritual is like invoking a "friends in high places" aspect to give you a bonus to gunplay. This of course would depend on your table.

Yep!  Unless you have ketchup elementals to summon most players I've met will agree you're not getting a bonus from a ketchup circle.

2) The GM would also be perfectly justified in compelling your "circle of ketchup" to make the spell go all pear shaped, whereas your "perfect ritual circle" would not give him the same opportunity. This would likely not depend on your table, I can see most GMs going "Trying to summon a demon within a ketchup circle sounds less than bright."

Either compelled for complete failure or invoked for a -2...probably depends on the group and just how far the GM thinks you're pushing things. 

To be purely technical I think Sanctaphrax and Taran are right. Specifically in the prep rules one can invoke existing aspects ala a fate points or make declarations. Those are the only listed options for using aspects in prep (unless you count consequences, but that's irrelevant to the discussion anyway). In addition I'm pretty sure a maneuver is specific to the rules of conflict (as one of the three actions one can carry out in conflict). For all other situations there are declarations and assessments.

Check YS:269 - the last paragraph of "Invoke Aspects".  It specifically states you can invoke "temporary aspects that are in place".  Since temporary aspects may result from a maneuver (YS:114), I'd argue using maneuvers in thaumaturgy rituals is "RAW".  That said, I'm not a big fan of arguing legal definitions of phrases in a game book.  Whatever works for the group is good.