Resisting magic?

[Centarion]

I agree with Belial on this one. Any attempt to explain away the clear result of a fight/attack intended to cause death (and only death) is just too far gone to be believable. It breaks the suspension of disbelief.

On the other hand the GM should generally not put the player in the situation where they are being one shot by an attack from 20 miles away with no recourse. For example, when this type of thing happens to/near Harry he is warned by the first signs of a curse and then gets to go try to figure out who is after him before the curse goes off. It is cool to have to hunt down a warlock before their big spells invariably kills you, it is not cool, and likely not fun for anyone, to just up and die seemingly randomly.

In your assassin example, how would this happen? Did the players loose a fight vs. a guy clearly trying to kills them (how, did the GM over tune it). Generally a concession happens before the attack, so conceding to an assassin you are fighting is likely equivalent to running away, possibly taking a GSW in the attempt. One he is in a position to just shoot you in the head (remember, you get to dictate your own consequences), you are already taken out, and maybe dead. 

[Belial666]

@crusher_bob


a) Yep, the GM has to agree to a concession. What happens if he doesn't agree or it makes no sense for him to agree?

b) Players might be aware if you roll against their characters. Except the heart-exploding spell (and any thaumaturgy attack) has a flat number of shifts; you don't roll the attack, you just use the shifts. Sure, a wizard might sense the energy gathering. That's why the professional wizard assassin casts her big spell with a trigger and uses an indirect sympathetic link. For example, take photo of public building for link to that building. Trigger for the prepared spell is you tearing the photo. Observe with telescope when your target will enter that building. Trigger the spell as he does and make the building explode. No wards/thresholds on public buildings, no way to sense the energy in advance, simpler and cleaner than trying to get a link to a specific target. Such a big setup on trigger that waits for the sympathetic link is how the Chichen Itza ritual was done (except it was a LOT bigger). That's why its targets couldn't sense the spell being prepared, couldn't scan magically for its location or prepare defenses against it.
Ditto for the professional mundane assassin. They don't try to shoot you from ambush. They put a bomb in your car. Better yet, they put a much bigger bomb in the car next to yours so that even if you search your car for bombs you still won't find anything and will still get dead.


C) Not a single attack. I shoot you, see if you are dead. If you aren't, I shoot you again and look. If you still aren't dead, I shoot you a third and a fourth time until I am sure you're dead. And when I am sure you are dead, I put you and the crime scene on fire. Can't have police finding good evidence or you rising from the dead if you're a vampire, after all. That's because a professional assassin should ensure their victims' "dearly departed" status rather than do the usual half-@$$ed job supervillains do.

Ditto with a serious assassination attempt with magic. You put multiple spells keyed to activate one after the other, preferably with multiple different forms of lethal attack (an entropy-generated accident, turning the air poisonous, spontaneous combustion, a gravity hammer and a heart-ripper) because redundancy is always a plus. The target might have single-use defenses against a single attack but not all of them. The target might be immune to the specific form of attack but not all of them (such as an accident or poison vs a vampire or combustion and heart-ripper vs a fire elemental). The target might be tough enough to survive one attack but not all of them.
But most important of all, if you managed to kill the target, the sympathetic link you used will stop working and any spell activated after he dies will fizzle. By observing the fizzle, you can confirm success fairly accurately.

[InFerrumVeritas]

@crusher_bob


a) Yep, the GM has to agree to a concession. What happens if he doesn't agree or it makes no sense for him to agree?

b) Players might be aware if you roll against their characters. Except the heart-exploding spell (and any thaumaturgy attack) has a flat number of shifts; you don't roll the attack, you just use the shifts. Sure, a wizard might sense the energy gathering. That's why the professional wizard assassin casts her big spell with a trigger and uses an indirect sympathetic link. For example, take photo of public building for link to that building. Trigger for the prepared spell is you tearing the photo. Observe with telescope when your target will enter that building. Trigger the spell as he does and make the building explode. No wards/thresholds on public buildings, no way to sense the energy in advance, simpler and cleaner than trying to get a link to a specific target. Such a big setup on trigger that waits for the sympathetic link is how the Chichen Itza ritual was done (except it was a LOT bigger). That's why its targets couldn't sense the spell being prepared, couldn't scan magically for its location or prepare defenses against it.
Ditto for the professional mundane assassin. They don't try to shoot you from ambush. They put a bomb in your car. Better yet, they put a much bigger bomb in the car next to yours so that even if you search your car for bombs you still won't find anything and will still get dead.


C) Not a single attack. I shoot you, see if you are dead. If you aren't, I shoot you again and look. If you still aren't dead, I shoot you a third and a fourth time until I am sure you're dead. And when I am sure you are dead, I put you and the crime scene on fire. Can't have police finding good evidence or you rising from the dead if you're a vampire, after all. That's because a professional assassin should ensure their victims' "dearly departed" status rather than do the usual half-@$$ed job supervillains do.

Ditto with a serious assassination attempt with magic. You put multiple spells keyed to activate one after the other, preferably with multiple different forms of lethal attack (an entropy-generated accident, turning the air poisonous, spontaneous combustion, a gravity hammer and a heart-ripper) because redundancy is always a plus. The target might have single-use defenses against a single attack but not all of them. The target might be immune to the specific form of attack but not all of them (such as an accident or poison vs a vampire or combustion and heart-ripper vs a fire elemental). The target might be tough enough to survive one attack but not all of them.
But most important of all, if you managed to kill the target, the sympathetic link you used will stop working and any spell activated after he dies will fizzle. By observing the fizzle, you can confirm success fairly accurately.

I missed you.  Leave it to Belial to demonstrate again how nasty a GM is capable of being, without cheating.

[JDK002]

If all people involved are creative enough, you can always come up with a reasonable concession no matter what.  With the "professional assassin" example, I can think of about half a dozen of them.

Maybe things didn't goas smoothly as the assassin planned and the characters survive long enough for the cops to show up.  Sure they are alive, but now they have to deal with the police.  Maybe a third party jumps into the fray and the assassin has to bail.  The problem is the third party isn't on good terms with the players and now they are captives.

In or out of conflicts a GM should always ask themselves this question: "Is this fun and interesting for the players?  Or am I just being a sadist?"  A GM that has a "me versus them" mentality is doing it wrong.  I've seen a few games that fell apart due to this.  It's not the GM's job to "win" against the players.  They are there to tell a story and keep the game moving at a smooth pace. 

[atavistic]

I'm noticing that a lot of these examples are moving very quickly from the realm of surviving an assassination as a single huge ambush hit from a safe distance to what could only be described as a really unevenly matched combat.
Some guy comes at you with two dozen aspects (at least a dozen to get a 24 shift bonus, maybe another half dozen to push up to 36 shifts, and a few for over kill) already in place against you at the start of a combat, you need to run, and hide, and pull out all the stops to make it out alive.  If they don't burn all of them in the first shot, then you get to take an action, its both the way the game works and how time flows.  Game wise, that first hit HOPEFULLY wasn't all tagging and he's spent at least a few fate points on the attack, good news if you survived is that you get those fate points to use in your next defense or even better to spend as Invoke for effects to put something in place to save your ass when you concede, Like help coming to your rescue before you get finished off, or medical help, or any number of random, Life is Chaos, cant take into account every variable type compels to keep your killer from finishing you off.

Setting wise:  From what we've seen of magic in Dresden's world, you really can't cascade a huge set of large thaumaturgies at someone to create an MRSI type casting would be worlds more complex then one big spell.  Whenever we see thaumaturgy in action and even by the rules, the power gets gathered all the aspects get counted and when the last of the power is there, the circle is broken and the spell goes out. 

To do something like 10 - 10 shift hits would mean making and braking 10 circles, gathering power 10 times, and placing aspects on each spell to delay it just the right amount of time to have it all hit at once.  That's a lot of power, aspects gathered or FP spent. 

If you only have one sympathetic link, after its first use you have to spend the FP each additional spell, or have 10 links.  That hands a fair few FP over to your target. Plus most links have a limited usable value, blood dries, hair only works if the matching piece is still on the targets head, etc.  IF you happen to say, light your target on fire, or light your link on fire in order to light your target on fire, then you can't use it again for the next spell.

 The risks of getting compelled during this massive undertaking go up and up every round your drawing power.  Some random thought or distraction and you end up a vegetable, much like Dresden fears the first time he brings little Chicago on line. A phone ringing, a visitor unannounced and boom backlash.  In game terms if you create say 20 aspects all relating to you and your spell casting and NONE of them end up compelled at some point during things, someone is being a lazy GM.

PS: if your GM hits you with a 36 shift attack, out of the blue with no in game warning, and no way you can generate enough defense to live and it simply takes you out with DEATH, then calmly pack up your things, say "That was a pretty slick move."  and shake his hand. Then smash him over his smug prick face with your sack of books and dice, because all he really did was say, " I don't like your character so he's dead." and you probably won't and shouldn't play with such a power tripping clown anyway.

[Belial666]

I'm not disputing that this kind of attack is totally unfair. I'm just saying that a professional wizard who knows how to use magic to kill and has been given time to prepare will flatten just about anyone. They don't even need a sympathetic link to you to do it - they can target your general area and simply swing around enough power that you become collateral damage if they do it right.

Classic example is Ebenezar's "meteor" strike. This is how he probably did it;

He knew the location of Ortega's fortress and that Ortega had holed up there. So what does he do? He digs up some old observations done over months of amateur astronomy work of a certain satellite's orbit and its specifics; those are some of the aspects he needs, prepared ages ahead of time. Add the satellite itself as an aspect, its own kinetic energy and the dynamic energy of its orbit - those are scholarship declarations BTW - and you got a decent beginning. Having previously named the satellite himself along with Harry and having good photos of it, he has a permanent sympathetic link. So far, the groundwork only needed a couple of hours if you discount the original time spent doing observations. (this BTW is why many old wizards are always doing research, preparation and experiments - so they already have some stuff when they need a quick spell).
Now, we go to the actual casting. Ebenezar starts casting spells on the sat, minor pushes and pulls at his minimum thaumaturgy complexity. That being 6 shifts, he uses those minor spells to create more aspects like "added momentum", "stabilizing spin", "good re-entry angle", "minimum-friction trajectory", "high-speed final approach", "perfect aim" and anything else he can think of to give the satellite to enhance its lethality on an impact via aspects.
Finally, as the sat interrupts its orbit and begins said final approach, he actually casts his spell. The shifts he's gathered are 6 base for his minimum complexity, +4 spell focus/specialization, the "clarity of purpose, absolute conviction" aspects via conviction declarations for +4, the "iron self-control, focused will" aspects via discipline declarations for +4, the "perfectly-aligned circle, esoteric incantation" aspects via Lore declarations for +4, +4 for the satellite's true name and for the name he and harry gave it themselves, +6 for the satellite's high mass, original speed and attitude coming from scholarship assessments, +10 for 5 more assessments from previous astronomic observations, +14 to +20 for the 7-10 aspects he created on the sat itself, +12 for two mild consequences he gives over 3 different scenes with rest intervals to recover between them (the spell took a day to prepare at least so a lot of scenes) for a grand total of seventy-four shifts of power.
74 shifts means that the actual casting for the spell will take him a maximum of 25 exchanges if he goes with entirely safe power control; he has a total control of 7 and thus can control 3 power/exchange with perfect safety. The Wards and other protections in his own house ensure that he gets those exchanges unless something major happens.
Let's go with the actual spell. 74 shifts is barely twice that of the heart-ripping spell a two-bit sorcerer can manage but the results are rather more spectacular. Ebenezar will double-park his russian sat on Ortega's manor with extreme prejudice. 10 entire zones of space will be needed for the double-parking so that's 20 shifts. Also, the 10-ton sat is being parked at a bit over 20 kilometers/second courtesy of all that prodding and directed reentry - so the spell's effect is 54 shifts strong.
54 shifts means the walls and doors and roof of the manor are so much dust, fortified or otherwise (12 shifts takes down vault doors). It also means that anyone in the manor is also vaporized - they can't hope to evade the hit or absorb the stress. And because the spell is a big kinetic strike rather than direct magical energy, thresholds, circles, running water and other protections from magic are irrelevant.
And that was that for Ortega, his manor, his vampire flunkies, his soldiers, his servants, their servants, his food, their food, his dogs, their dogs, the cats and mice and everyone and everything else in the area. For effectively one day's worth of preparation for a powerful wizard who had neither the sympathetic links to them nor directed any magical energy they could detect their way at all - but a wizard who could do a professional killing spell (not a half-@$$ed entropy or heart-ripping curse), and happened to know their location at the time. Tunguska and Krakatoa were probably at least an order of magnitude bigger than that and were still done by the same single powerful wizard and enough research and preparation.





Serious destructive magic cannot be defended against directly. You either need to sit against powerful permanent Wards or you need to deny the wizard his target. That usually is thought to mean a sympathetic link but it could be as simple as his knowing where you'll be at a certain time well enough in advance to lever the power required.

[Sanctaphrax]

Belial, for the most part your account of the importance of initiative is very accurate. If you know you're in a fight, and the guy you're fighting doesn't, he's probably dead.

But you're making some serious mistakes. In order:

a) The concession has to make sense and be acceptable. If an assassin wants to kill you, what concession will you offer? Surrender? He isn't interested in prisoners. His attacks knocking you out but not killing you? He double-taps you to make sure you're dead. Similarly, a wizard hitting you with a heart-ripping spell does not intend to accept any concessions. His spell is intentionally lethal. And it's also an overkill - he doesn't try to stop your heart or give you an accident - he rips your hear out of your chest with enough force to blast your chest cavity apart. What kind of concession would make sense and be acceptable under the circumstances?

It doesn't matter whether the assassin, or the wizard, is willing to accept the concession. They're fictional characters, they get no say.

Bear in mind that "God comes down from heaven, saves me, then demands I repay him" is an entirely valid concession if the group says it is.

b) You can only concede before the roll that takes you out. If a sniper ambushes you and shoots you in the head from a half-mile away, you won't know of the attack until after it happens. Similarly, if a wizard casts a death-spell on you from twenty miles away, you won't know it's happening.

You can concede before rolling whatever skill you use to defend against the thaumaturgy attack/bullet. Even if you're not able to use a skill because ambush, you still roll at +0 and you can still concede before doing so.

c) The smart wizard won't do a 36-shift spell. He'll do ten 10-shift ones, keyed to go off together. Even if each individual spell only deals 1 consequence to you, you die because you don't have enough stress boxes and consequences to absorb all of them. Even if you can concede against one, the following spells will still kill you (sort of how an assassin double-taps an already taken-out opponent or shoots the prisoner)

Ten 10-shift spells keyed to go off together is probably way harder than one 36-shift spell. Delaying effects should definitely cost something.

...(the spell took a day to prepare at least so a lot of scenes)...

No. If you spend the whole day casting one spell, that day is one scene long. A scene has no fixed duration, and lasts "the amount of time it takes to resolve a single conflict or accomplish some other significant purpose."

...For effectively one day's worth of preparation for a powerful wizard who had...

Depending on the GM's personal take on ritual time, it could take much more time than that.

[JDK002]

Sancta's last point in pretty significant.  Keep in mind 1 scene for an off screen npc does not = 1 scene for the players.  The ritual in Changes took literally days to prepare for, very likely with 24/7 activity pertaining to it.  Something like that would give the players plenty of time to come up with a battle plan against it, but if you're not going to clue in your players then what's the point of even doing it other than to be malicious?

[Lamech]

a) The concession has to make sense and be acceptable. If an assassin wants to kill you, what concession will you offer? Surrender?

You aren't surrendering to the assassin. Its a meta-game deal. You need to suffer a lasting damage, but something like a moderate consequence does that.

b) You can only concede before the roll that takes you out. If a sniper ambushes you and shoots you in the head from a half-mile away, you won't know of the attack until after it happens. Similarly, if a wizard casts a death-spell on you from twenty miles away, you won't know it's happening.

Indeed, a one shot spell will do the trick.

c) The smart wizard won't do a 36-shift spell. He'll do ten 10-shift ones, keyed to go off together. Even if each individual spell only deals 1 consequence to you, you die because you don't have enough stress boxes and consequences to absorb all of them. Even if you can concede against one, the following spells will still kill you (sort of how an assassin double-taps an already taken-out opponent or shoots the prisoner)

A bunch of problems with that. First off they defend 4 times. You need to fight through wards 4 times, thresholds four times. Even a normal human could mount a defense of 7ish fairly easily. Or you get really unlucky and a wizard has a 10 shift ward.

Second what's this "keyed to go off"? Their are landmines, but I'm pretty sure those are mines, not long range missiles. I suppose you might be able to add some sort of delay, but that adds cost too it. You could cast four spells in a row, but that gives the target time to set up defenses. (A ten shift ward for example)

[Belial666]

No. If you spend the whole day casting one spell, that day is one scene long. A scene has no fixed duration, and lasts "the amount of time it takes to resolve a single conflict or accomplish some other significant purpose."

Sancta's last point in pretty significant.  Keep in mind 1 scene for an off screen npc does not = 1 scene for the players.

Actually, the above may apply to casting the spell (i.e. the 25 exchanges needed to gather the power) but preparing the spell is another matter entirely. First of all, you don't need to do all the preparation in a single scene or even at the place you're going to cast the spell. For example, Cowl preparing to cast the Darkhallow hexed the entire city to spread fear and chaos (creating taggable aspects), arranged for spirits to go rampaging (more taggable aspects and creatures that would be sacrificed), interrupted Harry's binding of the Erlking and stole Bob so he could have access to the best thaumaturgical aides for his ritual and so on and so forth. Those things weren't one scene. They were probably closer to a dozen. Yes, all of them were preparations for a single spell but there were fights, interruptions and different individual goals tied up into them.

[Lamech]

Then its a much bigger effort. Each scene will be preparing a discrete part of the spell. You'll need to have actual goals other than "complete this spell", and actual fights then. Then its no longer a trivial thing to do, it can get interrupted by a pesky wizard and his talking skull for example.

[Mr. Death]

The ability to concede or not is and should be limited only by the creativity and the ability to negotiate of the players and GM. No matter what the scenario or set up is.

You can look at Death Masks as an example. Harry and Susan are running away from the Denarians, and one of them casts a lethal Entropy curse at him. Harry can't roll well enough to avoid it, so his player negotiates--the concession is that he's trapped in his apartment all night and morning (meaning he can't do things like saving Shiro or contacting his allies) and he has to deal with Susan getting out of control as well.

As has been pointed out, it doesn't matter whether the aggressor would accept the terms. What matters is whether the GM and the players can come up with something that makes sense.

[JDK002]

The ability to concede or not is and should be limited only by the creativity and the ability to negotiate of the players and GM. No matter what the scenario or set up is.

You can look at Death Masks as an example. Harry and Susan are running away from the Denarians, and one of them casts a lethal Entropy curse at him. Harry can't roll well enough to avoid it, so his player negotiates--the concession is that he's trapped in his apartment all night and morning (meaning he can't do things like saving Shiro or contacting his allies) and he has to deal with Susan getting out of control as well.

As has been pointed out, it doesn't matter whether the aggressor would accept the terms. What matters is whether the GM and the players can come up with something that makes sense.

Not only makes sense, but is interesting and dramatic.  The whole point of playing in the first place (to me) is to be engaged in an interesting adventure/story.

Saying "some sorcerer casts a huge spell that kills you instantly" when you've given no hints of clues that someone has been preparing a killing spell for most likely days isn't fun or interesting, It's a cop out.  It will also certainly create drama, but not the kind you want in any RP group.

[zeromig]

Thanks to everyone who replied to my simple question and made it a debate-worthy topic.

The problem, at least in my case, is that I know my players would survive any such attack made on them. We're not playing Dresden, but a setting where they're the scions of gods, and a couple of them have already achieved god status. The aggressor in my game is Hecate, a goddess of magic, and she's specifically targeting random NPCs/citizens in the same town as them (although I did give the town a threshold rating as well), in order to draw them out into a fight. I'm just wondering how/if the NPCs can defend against her one-shot death shot. But I've learned a lot just from these conversations.

[Tedronai]

If it's NPC-on-NPC action, then it can be pure plot that drives the result.
If one NPC is meant to survive, then they do.  If they're not, then they don't.