Soulfire Question for PP

[dragoonbuster]

I think you're overrating Mental Toughness a bit. It's certainly worth its cost, but the sort of shift-counting that you did there is going to give you a misleading impression.

Ignoring backlash like that isn't a good idea, and the measure of a wizard's power isn't the number of shifts they can put out in a scene. If it was, a guy who could cast power 1 control 1 spells for free would be better than the whole Senior Council.

I fail to see how you'd practically compare the powers in another way. I pretty clearly hedged my statements with the fact that I know there are flaws in the analysis, and what those flaws are, but there are always going to be flaws in any analysis. I'm looking at situations when you're going all out with your magic in a prepared fight where you've got the FPs or Maneuvers to weather most of the Backlash. If I'd more optimized the Focus Item assumption I made, the contrast between the powers would have become even more stark; a +4 to control offensive spells would have introduced another 4 shifts extra from MT vs SF, and if we compared defense it would've been 13 shifts extra from MT vs SG, and quite a bit less Backlash to boot. Mental Toughness obviously is less OP if you're not using it to its full extent...like any power would be. If you don't stretch both Soulfire and Mental Toughness to their limits, you can't get a practical comparison at all, short of running the exact same conflict twice with the only differences being the magic user's sheet, which still would see no practical possible differentiation until each PC was stretched.

I think you're overrating your assessment of my assessment a bit; I'm pretty sure I've got a great impression of Mental Toughness's power, whether or not you agree with it. A measure of a wizard's power is LITERALLY the number of shifts they can put out in a practical scenario with reasonable assumptions. It is practical to assume there might be 6 exchanges in a conflict. Your counterexample is farcical and insincere; you can't assume most fights will go for hundreds of exchanges, which is what your scenario would require to balance--and that's assuming the non-single-shift caster's opponents are somehow tied up and can't act. Even if the Senior Council were totally out of magical gas, they can do things like punch and throw things and move around, and presumably these aren't all at Mediocre or Average for all the Council; Weapon: 1, 1 to strike spells forever is obviously weaker than even a normal spellcaster, let alone vs SF or MT, and using my comparison method would prove it HANDILY if you deigned to consider it properly.

This is the only way to compare two different sets of powers: how many shifts are you getting out of one versus the other, in the same situation? If it is not, how could you possibly make an objective argument regarding the strength of one power versus another? You'd simply ram opinions around, otherwise, and while there's plenty of room for opinion in an RPG, there are also definitely situational advantages one power will provide over another, demonstrably making it a better power for that set of assumptions.

If it were not, why is magic considered so powerful in DFRPG? Sure, there's room for doing impossible things you couldn't otherwise accomplish, but practically speaking that rarely really gives you an advantage you couldn't have created another way. The strength of magic in the system is obviously the fact that you can achieve incredibly high weapon damages and rather high Blocks and Maneuvers compared to most PCs. The most significant limit to this power is the clearly limited number of times you get to perform a spell in a conflict. When you take that limiting number and increase it by fifty percent, you've suddenly dramatically changed the effectiveness of that limitation.

Even if we applied Backlash shifts as negative shifts towards the total instead of ignoring them, you get:
Mental Toughness, Apex: 95 shifts
Soulfire, Apex: 64 shifts
48% more shifts

Mental Toughness, Non-Apex: 62 shifts
Soulfire, Non-Apex: 49 shifts
26.5% more shifts

Even if we were to allow for Soulfire users performing two actions when the MT-user has those two extra spells, to be completely even in the assessment, and assuming they have a useful skill to use at Superb, that's only 10 shifts more--you're still 3 shifts lower w/ SF vs MT in the non-apex situation. If you use those two actions to maneuver with Discipline for a +2 to control two spells, you've just now beaten MT in a non-apex situation by something like 9 shifts...but only until you use more optimized Focus Items or use a lot of defense, and then once again MT comes out on top. So in all situations you might run into where your magic is strained, except non-optimized non-apex casting (pretty uncommon...), MT comes out on top--and most of the time, significantly on top.

I realize I'm in the minority regarding my opinion on Mental Toughness and PCs, but that's why we all have our own sandboxes.

[Tipop]

Inhuman Mental Toughness:
+2 boxes of stress and Armor: 1 against mental stress; I believe the general consensus is that the Armor doesn't apply to spellcasting so I'll assume that.

Actually, the book pretty clearly says it's only armor vs mental ATTACKS. So that automatically discounts spellcasting stress.

[Sanctaphrax]

I fail to see how you'd practically compare the powers in another way.

...

If it is not, how could you possibly make an objective argument regarding the strength of one power versus another?

Read them, play with them, go through some example scenes with them. When using one, think to yourself; would I rather have the other?

It's not very mathematical, and the final report will always be partially a judgement call. Which is a shame. But I think that's unavoidable.

A measure of a wizard's power is LITERALLY the number of shifts they can put out in a practical scenario with reasonable assumptions.

It really isn't. One weapon 10 accuracy 10 attack is much better than two weapon 5 accuracy 5 attacks. Shifts don't add linearly.

It's also important to look at what those shifts can be spent on. Soulfire has the edge here, with its evothaum and its holyness and so on.

And for what it's worth, I don't really think having enough FP and maneuvers on hand to make backlash a non-issue is a reasonable assumption unless you built your character with a strong focus on control over power. You can do that though, so if you want to use such a character for this comparison that seems reasonable to me.

Your counterexample is farcical and insincere; you can't assume most fights will go for hundreds of exchanges, which is what your scenario would require to balance--and that's assuming the non-single-shift caster's opponents are somehow tied up and can't act.

Farcical, yes. But quite sincere.

The things that make the Senior Council better than Mr. One-Shift are the same things that make shift-counting in general so misleading. I was trying to use an extreme example to make those things obvious.

What is your analysis, Sanctaphrax?  How would you compare the two?

I haven't actually used either, so I'm not super confident in my judgement, but I think they both look like solid worthwhile Powers.

Looking at canon Soulfire and not the version dragoonbuster uses:

Both offer 2 extra stress boxes that you can cast spells from. IMT's boxes are better because they're on the mental stress track. But Soulfire also gives a bonus mild consequence. In terms of increasing your spellcasting stamina, I think they're pretty close to even.

IMT also protects you from mental attacks, Soulfire also pierces Toughness. These are situational bonuses; if you fight White Court Vamps all the time you'll probably like IMT. If you fight demons, you'll probably like Soulfire. So part of the balance is game-dependent.

Soulfire gives a field of evothaum and +1 power to a lot of spells, IMT has a Catch. This makes Soulfire look better, but it costs more.

I don't see much justification for calling either superior. And neither seems clearly better or worse than Refinement, either.

With dragoonbuster ruling that you can't cast spells entirely from soul stress, that changes the deal. Under that ruling I'd be inclined away from Soulfire unless I expected to use the defense-piercing effects a lot.