Ahh, ok, stuff you can do easily.
Infuse yourself with rage/violence, placing multiple maneuvers on yourself that you can tag. 1 mental stress and you can have two aspects to tag.
Or I could do it with a roll and not have to spend any mental stress. Granted, I'd have 1 less tag, but 2 stress vs a potential 12+ stress is not a very good tradeoff for one mental stress.
Also, you could give yourself the power of The Dance (great with the ladies and in some other social settings). Imho, it is 3 power for each aspect you can tag (once tagged, that particular aspect goes away).
Or once again, I could roll athletics for "fancy dance moves" or something similar.
You can create wards easily enough, whether traps/mines or merely ones that strike back (standard ward..but that seems to fall under violence to me, personally). Traps and mines are definitely a go though, and they last until sunrise by default.
I covered that in my OP:
1. Creating a quick and dirty circle or ward
Not impressed.
One thing you can do is add aspects to a scene, so you can have lightning or fire going around making things dangerous (which can be tagged or invoked). That's not as easy to do with an athletics roll (which tends not to cover a whole zone). Oddly enough, the rules seem to indicate doing it to a zone and doing it to a person is just as difficult.
I can already do that with standard evocation (which I have).
You could do a block on a whole group of bad guys, if you invoke some aspects, it could be pretty darn high. Flavor it as making them have to do everything to a dance which makes it far harder to hit anything...I think thaumaturgy should make this have a longer duration assuming no breach. Theoretically, you could make it into an armor effect, reducing the damage of everyone.
Once again - evocation already has this covered.
Divinations to look for power lines (lightning), volcanoes (ok, unlikely to be useful), information on dances, and violence can be done at a moment's notice, not requiring minutes to do. Most of the DCs for this are easy.
Now this one may actually be useful. My GM gave me the aspect "Near your goddess" or something like that in my last fight since a Temple of Pele was like a mile away. This gave me a passive +1 to all of my attack rolls in combat, which was awesome, not OP, and totally thematically appropriate.
(Big hand to my GM if he reads this. That was awesome.)
If your performance isn't great, you can clearly substitute a magic spell for dancing.
I covered this in my OP too:
2. Replacing a really bad skill with a 4 to 6 shift skill for one roll
It's potentially useful. My character tends to let others do the talking in social situations. He just gets ripped on or forced to take drugs.
You should be able to force a ghost out as an evocation, so that it is vulnerable to violence.
Ok, this is the second interesting possibility you brought up. I will have to give that one more thought.
However, couldn't I attack one with spirit evocations anyway? I'm not sure.
You can enrage things, filling their minds with violence. You could turn a strike or protest into a riot. Verbal infighting with bad guys into blows potentially. Make a maneuver on one of them "you are filled with violence" and compel it with a fate point.
I could probably do that with the magic skill roll too. Like for say... intimidation or something.
You could conjure lava to make a zone barrier.
My evocation is stronger.
You have quite a bit of options.
Yeah, but the "thaumatergy at the speed of evocation" thing still seems kind of lame. I primarily took sponsored magic for the character development and potential plot arcs that may come of it.
If I had just spent those 3 refresh in refinement, my (combat oriented) character would probably be much, much more powerful. I've yet to see any /significant/ evidence to the contrary.
It gives me a few more options in game, which I like. For combat though, the uses seem limited.
