What combats psychomancy?

[C.J Peters]

I've only read up until Changes but I'm running a Dresden RPG and one of my players decided to be a psychomancer and it is a nasty magic! If a warlock doesn't care about breaking the laws of magic, they can get real powerful, real quick, and it's real hard to stop them. Once this players character hit a significant milestone and became a full wizard, I've had a hard time creating opponents to knock him off his feet. What keeps these warlocks from dominating everything do you think? What are their limitations/drawbacks if morality isn't an issue?

[MarvelDresden10]

Well, in the books the only known defense are psychic shields, like when Harry tried to defend his mind by putting a “wall”, and that was revealed to be the default WC answer to defending minds.
Other than that, unless your character is mostly instinctual, and doesn’t think, just acts quicker than than MindMage can react, I don’t believe there is a way to stop them... also I’d love to learn more about the Dresden Files RPG, I just recently learned about it, so if you could help me out, that’d be pretty cool! And good luck with the issue, I hope I helped!

[g33k]

In the books, Harry does the "build a wall" thing, which proves only a minor impediment to his opponent.
 Then he floods the attacker with mental Hellfire, which causes them agony; they break off the attack to recover (if he had just pulled a gun and shot her then, I suspect he could have gotten the shot off before she could muster her defenses).

This implies, to me, that many other modalities can be expressed via the channel of psychomancy.  Once the psychomancer has established a link to attack through, a biomancer might strike back at their bodily processes, a force-evoker might slam them into a wall, etc.

Later, we see Harry and his psychomantically-talented apprentice practicing various attack-and-defense techniques to strengthen themselves.

We see more mind-magic in the next novel after Changes, titled Ghost Story.
 

[Braincandy]

In the books, Harry does the "build a wall" thing, which proves only a minor impediment to his opponent.
 Then he floods the attacker with mental Hellfire, which causes them agony; they break off the attack to recover (if he had just pulled a gun and shot her then, I suspect he could have gotten the shot off before she could muster her defenses).

This implies, to me, that many other modalities can be expressed via the channel of psychomancy.  Once the psychomancer has established a link to attack through, a biomancer might strike back at their bodily processes, a force-evoker might slam them into a wall, etc.

Later, we see Harry and his psychomantically-talented apprentice practicing various attack-and-defense techniques to strengthen themselves.

We see more mind-magic in the next novel after Changes, titled Ghost Story.

A bigger reason why Harry struggled to stop that mind magic is that Capiocorpus was just flat out better than him. All of the Kemmlerites were. He couldn't beat them at straight evocation either, which IS his strong suit.

[g33k]

Edit -- gaaah.  Sorry, all.  Just realized what a thread-necro this was, that I was replying to months-old content here... :-P

... also I’d love to learn more about the Dresden Files RPG, I just recently learned about it, so if you could help me out, that’d be pretty cool! ...

What do you want to know?  What do you already know (about RPGs in general)?

The original "DFRPG" was a "Fate Core" game, more or less.  It came out in 2 volumes, "Your Story" (kind-of the player book) and "Our World" (kind of the setting-book), followed by a 3rd volume, "Paranet Papers" (more setting; also updating the RPG to include later content from Jim Butcher's stories).

Later, a leaner "Fate Accelerated" version came out, "Dresden Files Accelerated."

There are also a few free intro adventures available; there aren't piles and piles of published adventures/modules (in the D&D model), however!

The Fate RPG has free PDF's and "SRD" website, if you want to look at the bare naked mechanics (a very-narrative layer atop the generic-simulationist Fudge game-engine):
https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/basics
https://fate-srd.com/fate-accelerated/get-started
https://fate-srd.com/
https://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-core-downloads/
Note however that the DFRPG is a highly-tuned rendition of the generic Fate engine:  rich and flavorful and steeped in Dresden lore; bare-naked Fate... isn't that.  The DFRPG books are wonderful!  Haven't yet seen DFA at my FLGS, so I cannot say (but presume they are also excellent).

But likely, you want to take this topic over to the DFRPG-specific forum:
https://www.paranetonline.com/index.php/board,5.0.html
Those folks can answer all your questions!!!

[Braincandy]

My fault. I didn't realize how old the thread was. I didn't know that there was a Dresden File Accelerated though, so some good came of it.