Thaumaturgist Character Help

[Tbora]

So I am about to start playing in a new game and we recently got done with city creation.

None of the rest of the group wanted to play a spell caster so I volunteered, I decided to take one of the faces and use it.

I took a first lawbreaking prison guard warlock that is sacrificing inmates to fuel his rituals.

Were playing in a Submerged level game, and I talked to the GM, because the character is supposed to be fairly specialised in what were doing he says he is not limiting the amount of refinement I can take.

Thus far I have this and not much else.

[-3] Thaumaturgy
[-2] Lawbreaker (First)

I need help figuring out the rest of the mechanics, thanks in advance for the help guys, you have yet to ever let me down

[Belial666]

OK, I've been considering a thaumaturgist just yesterday. Here's my build suggestion;

Evil Enchanter/ress

[-3] Thaumaturgy - transmutation/disruption complexity free specialization, +2 t/d complexity focus
[-1] Lawbreaker First
[-5] Refinement x5 - increase t/d complexity focus to +4, +4 crafting power focus, +2 crafting frequency specialization, 4 enchanted item slots.
      foci - the enchanter's hands (2 bracelets)
Skills: +5 lore/discipline, +4 crafting/athletics, +3 conviction/endurance



How it works:

Rituals: With whatever you have at hand, you can do a 10-shift transformation/disruption ritual at the minimum time. With only a couple of mins per ritual, you could spend an hour every morning to do thirty spells. These can do any of the following;
a) Rearrange your house and stuff to your heart's desire. You want a new fence? Trasform those bushes into one by "taking them out" with repeated transformation attacks. Want your once-wooden door to be steel? Want your new clothes to be fancier? Want your lawn to look perfect? Want your hair to be green? The crafting skill gives you a pretty good idea of what you need to do to make something and instead of spending hours of physical labor, do it with minutes of magic.
b) Curses are fun. Bad luck, old age, rotten teeth, bad sight. You could even turn someone into a frog or a statue. A 10-shift curse won't take-out a PC-level enemy. Half a dozen of them in quick succession would only take a quarter of an hour to do and will take him out due to the law of averages; he's bound to roll badly eventually.
c) Why curse when you can buff? You could change the properties of an ally's clothing to be hard as iron or enchant their skin to repel projectiles. Or enhance their strength and speed or skill and perception. Basically, any DnD transmutation buff you can find, make it into an aspect-giving spell. A 9-shift spell for Monstrous Strength could apply 3 fragile aspects so your buddy gets a +6 to kick down that wall. All you need is to cast for a minute or so. A more subtle spell that applies a single, sticky aspect for 4 shifts and has 6 more shifts in increased duration could well last for a couple of days... and you could pile a dozen aspects in your own weapon so that thrown knife is "seeking", "poisoned", "magical", "sharpened", "exploding", "thundering" and any other enchantment you can think. Throw the knife or other weapon and tag all those aspects in a single attack for a gigantic bonus.

Items: You can craft items at 9 strength with 3 uses each. This means that a magical blasting ring aimed with discipline could be a weapon 9 attack at +5 skill, at +6 skill if it is lethal and gets Lawbreaker bonuses. Similarly, a defensive item could raise a 9-shift transformation block (stoneskin is good) to deflect attacks. You can use those items 3/day without expending stress and if you don't want to expend their charges, you can spend mental stress to use them in short fights.
And then, there are potions. Potions can be enhanced by aspects. Remember those rituals to "buff"? A potion has several ingredients. Enhance each of those ingredients with an "infused with power" aspect that you tag when you make the potion and you could easily (as in, if your DM allows) a strength 20 potion that is good for 3 doses. You could make mind-control potions, transformation potions, potions that go boom or rip the hearts out of people and so on. Even potions of invulnerability to get a long-duration, nigh-impenetrable block on you.

[Tbora]

Don't want an item crafter, I want a true thaumaturgist - a guy who can pull off epic rituals given enough time to prepare and no particular morals to speak of that would hinder this.

How would I do that?

[Belial666]

This build CAN do epic rituals just fine. If you want an "Epic" ritual, just spend 8 hours applying aspects on yourself with minor rituals. That gives you 240 aspects. Tag them all into a single big ritual, add your effective lore and you have a ritual complexity of 485 for any type of ritual, 490 for disruption.
That's enough of a ritual to make 200 meteors rain from the sky, each blasting a separate zone (such as the foundations of a building) with a weapon 85 attack. You could easily level all big buildings in a couple of square miles of Chicago.

IF your GM allows it, of course.


The magical items are only there in case someone attacks you before you have time to cast said ritual. Short-range, instantaneous defense and storing a couple of effects into potions for later use.

[Tbora]

I might have the complexity but how do I build the power to feed it for such a ritual?

Unless I have power to match it isn't going to do much good.

And I like your example, the GM would never allow that I can guarantee.

But still cool.

[Haru]

The power buildup is the easy part of the ritual. Just do an evocation like roll every exchange and add up the power of each roll. You have to declare the number of shifts you want to add every exchange and match that number with your discipline role. So if you have enough time, you can just put in 1 shift of power every exchange an be on the save side. Or you could even say you have all the time in the world to finish the ritual and just "don't bother" rolling.

[Belial666]

It's thaumaturgy so you don't need to summon all the power at once. If you can spend 8 hours upping the complexity, you can certainly spend the 164 exchanges (say, another hour) to summon all that power to actually cast it.

You got an effective control of 6 for lethal thaumaturgies and a conviction of 3. You fail to control 3 shifts of power (and thus need to take 1 backlash to keep casting) every 81 exchanges. You could, potentially, cast a spell of 2187 shifts taking a total of 9 backlash (full physical track, full mental track, 1 mild consequence) using the minimum amount of time for it. If you have time to spare, increase the casting time by 50% and you can cast spells of ANY complexity since you can't fail a control roll for 2 shifts of power.
Of course, since the maximum duration of a single-aspect buff is only one day for your 10 shifts of maximum thaumaturgy, you could at most amass up to 1000 complexity in that way and still have time to cast if you work for 20 hours straight.




Finally, keep in mind that you don't have to use the build to its maximum theoretical potential. Ask your GM how big rituals and how many "stored" aspects he's willing to allow and limit yourself to that. Even if he goes for only a few aspects, after you use them up in a scene you could just spend a few minutes to recharge... and you are still useful in offense via items, in utility via other types of thaumaturgies. Transformation/Disruption is extremely flexible.

[babel2uk]

This build CAN do epic rituals just fine. If you want an "Epic" ritual, just spend 8 hours applying aspects on yourself with minor rituals. That gives you 240 aspects. Tag them all into a single big ritual, add your effective lore and you have a ritual complexity of 485 for any type of ritual, 490 for disruption.

A very similar point was raised on a different thread. I didn't agree with it there either - but chose not to say anything. In my view, if you're performing a little ritual to give yourself a bonus to the effect in a larger ritual, all you're doing is performing a small ritual as part of the Preparation stage of casting, it's not a separate ritual at all. As a GM I'd view it as a grotesque abuse of the spirit of both the system and setting to allow a character to do what you're describing. It's the equivalent of saying "Well, I've been jogging on this treadmill for the last eight hours, but only in 2 minute bursts - one after another, why should I feel tired?". I'd concede to using small rituals to give you Aspects that could be tagged or invoked to give you a bonus on the control rolls during the casting of the big ritual, but they wouldn't add anything to the effect of the ritual at all.

You got an effective control of 6 for lethal thaumaturgies and a conviction of 3. You fail to control 3 shifts of power (and thus need to take 1 backlash to keep casting) every 81 exchanges. You could, potentially, cast a spell of 2187 shifts taking a total of 9 backlash

As far as I read it when you take backlash on Thaumaturgy, you take ALL of the shifts of power accumulated up to the point where you fail the control roll as Backlash, so in that example if you fail your control roll at the 2000 shift point, you'd be taking a 2000 stress hit in backlash to continue the spell.

[Richard_Chilton]

If you're spending 8 hours working then you should be working on the main spell, not adding aspects to tap later.  Aspects that you grant rarely last long - most only last a scene (say 15 minutes).  Having 5 - 10 minutes alone should be enough to cast most spells.

Besides, what spell would need that many shifts? The "I burst your heart" spell only needs 32 shifts and things like world altering spells are plot devices, not things that PC should be casting.

Sometimes I wonder if we are losing tract of something - every spell should be a story, not merely a mathematical excise of adding shifts until you can transform a house to a skyscraper.

Richard

[Belial666]

  Aspects that you grant rarely last long - most only last a scene (say 15 minutes).

4 shifts for the aspect to last a scene. 6 more shifts to increase duration to one day. Total 10 shifts thaumaturgy ritual.

As a GM I'd view it as a grotesque abuse of the spirit of both the system and setting

Maybe to the former, and no to the latter. Consider the following;

Make declarations: You can declare
a mini-scene relevant to preparation,
where you use a skill and create a temporary
aspect to tag. When successful, this
is worth two shifts toward the deficit. If
the effort fails, the spell isn’t automatically
a bust, but no forward progress is
made, either.

With a Discipline and Lore of 5, the thaumaturgist can simply do skill declarations. Since the difficulty for a temporary aspect is typically only 3, he succeeds 16 times out of 17. And since failure does not stop the spell, he can simply do Lore and Discipline declarations as long as he wants until he gets the spell Complexity high enough to pull meteors out of the sky, cause volcanoes to erupt, hex entire cities or make ascencion rituals that make him into a god. Using minor rituals make it potentially faster to amass the aspects but you really aren't doing something skills can't do anyway. And it isn't against the setting as it HAS been done. Several times. Admittedly, the wizards doing that were a lot stronger than -9 refresh (as much as -30 or so) but even a fraction of the energy needed to become a god or make a volcano erupt is enough to do a 200-300 shift spell.

you take ALL of the shifts of power accumulated up to the point

In this you're right - my mistake. I guess he'd need to take a slower approach for the really big spells but still that's 80 exchanges where he statistically won't fail (210 shifts of power) and a Fate point could absorb a single failure.

[babel2uk]

Using minor rituals make it potentially faster to amass the aspects but you really aren't doing something skills can't do anyway.

D'oh, I'd forgotten about the Declarations option. My mistake on that. However, I'd still limit that to a number of rituals equal to your Lore at most. After all your Arcane Sanctum and Library limit your ability to declare using your Resources skill (I believe this was covered in another thread), so using Discipline and Lore over and over and over again under the excuse that "it's a different ritual each time, so the previous use doesn't count" is still a major abuse of the system. The inference I get from the rules is that each skill is useable only once to contribute a declaration to a spell.

And it isn't against the setting as it HAS been done. Several times.

I'd ask for examples, but I have a feeling that you and I would view the same events in radically different rules interpretations.

Back to the subject at hand...

Richard's point is probably the most important one that's been raised so far. Each spell is a story. Come up with a nice description of the ritual and preparation, then fit the mechanics around that. Doing the oposite (crunching the numbers, then trying to use them to justify a spell effect) kinda takes the magic out of magic, which is a greater sin by far than any abuse of the game rules.

For the prison based sacrificial magic I'd point Tbora towards "HellBlazer: Hard Times" and there's a graphic novel by Warren Ellis that has a similar set up (I can't remember the name, but it's either 'Strange Kisses', 'Stranger Kisses', 'Strange Killings' or 'The Body Orchard' - the main character is an SAS Combat mage called William Gravel - there's a comic series featuring him called 'Gravel' too, but I've not read them yet)

[Belial666]

I agree with the latter point. Stories are not as hard as you think though. For example, for his ascencion ritual Cowl went around and used magic to hex the city during the night, causing panic into hundreds, maybe thousands of people. Tapping all those "frightened" aspects - essentially using emotions to fuel magic - was a significant portion of his spell's energy.
Similarly, dozens of spirits with torture/madness spells were used to weaken the Veil and might have eventually been used in an effort to tear it (again, a ritual tapping many aspects applied via magic).


And while we don't have specific details, we know The Blackstaff has made volcanoes explode and meteors fall from the sky. As he's the only wizard with the freedom to voilate the laws and, in my opinion, would not resort to human sacrifice, he had to find the hundreds of shifts something like this required via declarations - taking extra scenes is simply not fast enough to do a major ritual in only a day or so and sacrifice or additional casters were not available.

[Richard_Chilton]

When I first starting looking at this game I came across Rick Neal's blog.  He seems to have been one of the playtesters and beyond that he has a good head on his shoulders - his posts are great at taking game concepts and breaking them down into things that are easily understandable.  Of course he uses more words than the game designers could afford to devote to any one topic which may be why his commentaries make so much sense.

In one post, at http://www.rickneal.ca/?p=639, he sits down with the skill list and gives five examples of tags you could use for thaumaturgic preparation.  And I mean every skill.  Contacts? Finding out personal information about your target – I Know You.
Athletics? Scaling a cliff to get a feather from a falcon’s nest – Merlin’s Feather.
Deceit? Acting contrite when the cops question you so that they don’t search your car and find the stolen spell materials – Hot Merchandise.
Survival? Befriending cats to use as a pattern for your shapeshifting – Live Models.
Guns? Using a paintball gun to hit your target with a special mixture to help you focus the spell – Painted Target.

I found that list was great to pass around to get people thinking outside the box when it came to spell prep.  Everyone thinks about using Lore, but who thinks about using Rapport? And the more you think outside the box the more the spell becomes something more than just the math.

Another thing to consider:
Harry Dresden is a gamer - he plays RPGs.  He knows the gamer mentality.  He doesn't look at every problem as "what kind of thaumaturgy rite can I use to to do this", because doing things that way would be boring for the reader.  And the thaumaturgist working out the math for his spell casting is boring for the GM and the other players - so the more story behind it the better the play can be.

Richard

[Becq]

Assuming I run DFRPG at some point, this thread has inspired another house rule. 

In general, "An individual can only contribute toward one ritual during any given one-hour period."  I'd apply this as a soft rule and allow exceptions.  But while I see no problem with a wizard performing a quick several-minute ritual for a minor Thaumaturgy, I *do* see a very big problem with a wizard performing 30 rituals per hour for eight hours straight.

Hm.  Maybe as an alternative: "Thaumaturgical castings normally do not inflict the baseline 1 stress that Evocation does.  However, the accumulation of Thaumaturgical echoes on the caster (or participant or subject) disrupts further attempts at casting for a short time.  If any such individual has been involved in another Thaumaturgical casting within the previous hour or so, then the ritual inflicts one stress per such ritual performed by any participants during the last hour or so."

Yet another possibility: apply the aspect of "Thaumaturgical Echoes" to the ritual space and/or the caster/participants, which generates a free tag to oppose a further casting, thus increasing the chance of a failed control roll.

Or (a variation of the apect idea) I might make use of some form of "Thaumaturgical Debt" -- if you perform a Thaumaturgical casting before the echoes of the first have died away, you gain a point of "Thaumaturgical Debt" which allows for a free compel against the character (similarly to sponsored magic's debt rules).

Any of these would be soft rules, which wouldn't necessarily apply "when it improves the story".  But only very, very, very rarely would I consider a 490 complexity ritual to be capable of improving the story...

[Todjaeger]

There are a few things I feel need to be considered with respect to the (very high) suggested number of shifts possible in a thaumaturgy ritual.

From the novel Storm Front, and as mentioned in YS301, The "Heart exploding spell" had a complexity of 36+, and in order for Victor Sells to successfully cast it, he had to do substantial prep work, as well as animal sacrifice and harness energy (inflict Consequences on) his wife and the two Becketts.  He also had to take a number of Consequences himself in order to harness the power required, and was also dependent on being able to tap into a thunderstorm.

Harry told Murphy that he himself could summon the power required to cast the spell, but it would kill him to do so, without others helping.

As mentioned in Changes:

(click to show/hide)

The 'larger' version of the heart-exploding spell was the Bloodline Curse that the Duchess Arianna was preparing at Chichen Itza required several days of preparation, with a number of individuals participating (if not hundreds) as well as a number of human sacrifices.  Enough for blood to pool in some areas of the pyramid.  With the power levels of the principal casters involved (high ranking Red Court nobles/borderline Old Gods), the sheer number of participants available to absorb consequences (hundreds or more), the ready use of human sacrifices (each one providing ~20 shifts) and the use of a Place of Power, this ritual still wasn't ready in a day.

While this isn't the same a Jim or Fred stepping in and saying "a single human wizard can't arrange a spell of ~500 shifts in a single day," it does strongly suggest that one person couldn't do so.

Now, for any spell greater in complexity than the caster's Lore, which means anything using 6+ shifts of power requires the use of Preparation involving Aspects, Scene skipping, Consequences or mini-Scenes where relevant skills are successfully used in a manner which could work towards reaching the complexity of the spell.  Lastly, the power of the spell needs to collected and controlled successfully using Conviction and Discipline.  The 'slow but safe' method of doing so, would be for the wizard to collect/control a number of shifts equal to or less than the lower of his Conviction or Discipline -2, assuming that would provide at least 1 shift of power is collected per exchange.  This would allow a wizard to avoid taking Mental stress from summoning the power, as well as not triggering Backlash or Fallout.  If we were to assuming that the wizard is only able to manage 1 shift of power per exchange safely (by either only having Conviction of Average:1 or Discipline of Good:3) then the Heart exploding spell in Storm Front would take 36 exchanges to collect the power needed, unless there were power boosts available from other casters, focus items, etc.  Now, while an exchange is a Combat measure of time, a Scene (YS314) could be considered the non-combat equivalent and doesn't have a specifically assigned length of 'story time' it can range from a minutes to a half hour or more.  Assuming that each Scene spent summoning power takes ~15 minutes, then a Wizard operating on their own would need 9 hours without interuption, to cast the 'Heart exploding spell'.  A significantly more complex spell, that uses 100+ shifts of power, would take the same wizard an entire day (24 hours) or more to summon and cast the power.  Again, this would also have to occur without interuption, which means that the wizard would start running into the limits of human endurance.  Attempting to push past that would trigger (with me as GM) pretty much automatic Stress on the character, and/or Consequences, and/or free Compels.  In the case of a single wizard attempting a 500+ shift spell, that would pretty much be an automatic death sentence for the character in this case, since the character would have been casting (again, no interruptions for minor, unimportant things like food or sleep) for 125 hours/5+ days and automatically the character would have started getting Consequences like Weary, Hungry, Headache, etc which would get Tagged to cause an automatic failure with summonging/controlling the power at some point, with the character then being hit with either Backlash or Fallout, and no character would be able to take 100+ shifts of Backlash or Fallout.