Ten! Ten, I say!
John Hawkins says:
Interesting — Item of Power and Sword of the Cross are listed separately, above. Am I correct in guessing that the Swords are called out more as an homage to their DF-relevance than because they are really a different power? Or are they somehow outside the scope of a standard Item of Power (like maybe the second section could have been called “Weapon of Powerâ€, and can do somewhat different things from an IoP)?
Fred got this one on the comment thread. Thanks, Fred!
Lanodantheon says:
So, what’s used to build attacks for those items of power (like a magic sword)?
I could see Breath Weapon used to make Link’s Master Sword. I don’t know how a PC would justify having it let alone why it would exist in the Dresdenverse, but you could do it.
He also got this one. Thanks again!
Atlatl Jones says:
Does the Lawbreaker stunt have a mechanical benefit or effect, beyond moving the character closer to being an NPC?
Lanodantheon got this one. Thanks, Lanodantheon! However, I do have a couple of clarifications. First, you get a new Lawbreaker power for every new law you break. Each one only gives you the bonus for using magic to break that specific law again, and each one costs you -1 Refresh. If you have three or more of the Lawbreaker powers, the bonus increases for all Lawbreaker powers. And habitual offenses do kick in if you break the same law three or more times: the bonus increases, as does the Refresh cost. So, gaining Lawbreaker powers starts you sliding down towards NPC-hood.
Iorwerth says:
I may have missed it somewhere, but what are the mechanical differences between sponsored magic and non-sponsored magic?
Ihadris answered this one. Thanks, Ihadris! You got it right, but I’m going to supply a little more detail.
Your sponsor and his/her/its agenda can greatly affect your magic. For example, Seelie Magic is more potent for healing and more effective against Winter Court opponents than mortal magic. And it can supercharge a power you already possess on your own – this is where things like Hellfire and Soulfire come into the picture. You can also, from time to time, call on your sponsor for aid, essentially invoking an Aspect without spending a Fate Point, but that puts you in debt to the sponsor. And the debt will be collected. And, of course, as Ihadris said, if you try using the magic against the agenda of your sponsor, it’s not going to work nearly as well, if at all.
Ihadris says:
Again, as always, thanks for writing these Rick. I was just catching up on the Q+A’s and I wanted to ask another question further to one I asked previously concerning skills. In relation to vehicles you said that “Specifically, there are no rules for vehicles in the books.â€. Does this mean that skills like ‘Drive’ and ‘Pilot’ have been removed?
Well, Pilot has been rolled into Driving, but Driving still exists. What I mean is that there are no tables listing different stats for cars, or planes, or tanks, or motorcycles, or boats. This is not a (mundane) gadget-heavy game – most equipment is handled through handwaving, as pieces of narrative colour and story props, not as items with their own mechanics attached. The exceptions are weapons and armour, which are each broken into four broad categories, and magical toys like focus items, enchanted items, and potions, for which there are more extensive rules.
And you’re welcome!
I understand completly where and why you have drawn the line and had assumed as much previously which is why Im not asking for you to give out a full list.
I appreciate the understanding, but lists are easy. It’s when we get to people asking for a complete description of everything you can do with the Deceit skill, for example, that I have to say no. What did you want a list of?
John Hawkins says:
I was trying to think how to model various types of cool characters, and it occurred to me that I’m not sure how the system as discussed thus far would model Inhuman+ *Precision*. I’m thinking of Kincaid, here, but in general I know how to simulate creatures with really badass endocrine, or musculoskeltal systems (speed, recovery, toughness, strength), but what if I want to model a really improved nervous system that allows for incredible precision with a firearm or something like that. Is there an obvious way to model such a thing? (I assume so, since there’s a write-up of Kincaid.) I guess you could get partway there with mortal stunts, but the same argument could be made for feats of strength or recovery, and there are outright supernatural powers for those, so I feel like there ought to be something with a bit more oomph.
Rechan’s chimed in with an answer in the comment thread. Thanks, Rechan! I have some further comments I want to add, though.
Kincaid is modeled by giving him Superb combat skills, along with Inhuman Speed and Strength, a nice array of combat Mortal Stunts and Aspects, and a possible Supernatural Sense. While it would be possible to build an Inhuman Precision power, I would be very wary, because it could easily become too good. If you plan on going that way, I would strongly recommend paying very close attention to the way Speed, Strength, and Toughness are built – different bonuses for narrow applications of things, rather than one big blanket bonus covering everything. Otherwise, I think the power would become so good that no character would pass it up, which means that their foes will probably have it, which means it’s kind of like nobody having it.
Anyway, that’s just my two cents on it.
Iorwerth says:
Thanks Ihadris. If your magic comes from a sponsor do you use evocation and Thaumaturgy mechanics, or has it got a system of its own?
You use the same mechanics, but there are a few tweaks, depending on what type of sponsor you’ve got. Basically, you get to be a little better at a couple of things.
Rechan says:
So can the game be played Solo (1 player, 1 GM)?
Definitely, though I recommend in that case that the GM create a character or two as NPCs in order to give the PC some folks to share novels with. And some contacts in the game, of course.
while a focused practitioner wouldn’t be able to make an Evocation potion specifically, Thaumaturgical rituals can be built that do the same things, only slower – or in potion form.
Now, what do you mean? How would you mimic evocation with thaumaturgy? I know that T takes longer. But are you saying that you could create the same effect for a potion/ward, even if you didn’t have it? Since I thought that T was limited merely to making declarations.
Thaumaturgy is far broader than that. You can use Thaumaturgy for pretty much any effect you can imagine. They even stat up Victor Sells’s tear-your-heart-out ritual in the rulebook. In the Thaumaturgy section of the Spellcasting chapter, there’s even an entry on the subject of Enhanced Evocation and Duration. Basically, by taking the time and building the ritual, you can use Thaumaturgy to strike an enemy with power, either in the form of a curse or as a direct attack.
I want to answer Iorwerth’s question, but I’m actually confused. I can’t figure out why Sponsored magic costs MORE than when it clearly comes with bigger limitations.
If you just go with Sponsored Magic, you actually get away with it being cheaper. Taking Seelie Magic or Unseelie Magic gives you the ability to use a narrow set of both Thaumaturgy and Evocation for -4, instead of the -6 it would normally cost you. If you buy it as an upgrade to either Thaumaturgy or Evocation, you get it at -3, and at -2 if you already have both. The bonuses depend on the type of Sponsor: Seelie Magic ignores one step of Toughness possessed by Winter Court faeries and a talent for biomancy, while Kemmlerian Necromancy gives you bonus specializations to power and complexity with necromancy. Stuff like that.
John Hawkins says:
@Rechan @Iorwerth my understanding from earlier discussions of the topic was that Sponsored magic allows you to call upon greater levels of power from your sponsor than you would be able to safely summon up by yourself, and that the constraints placed upon you by that sponsor are not sufficient to zero out that advantage. As to how that works mechanically, I’ll have to defer to those of you holding the book.
That’s the bottom line. I’ve laid out some examples above. Thanks, John!
John Hawkins says:
@Rechan — that does partly answer my question, but I’d love to see an actual synthesis of such a power as an example of how those very guidelines for new power creation are laid out. And to be clear: I’m actually more interested in Inhuman Precision or something that would allow you to very precisely aim a weapon at a long distance or that kind of thing. Heightened perception would factor into that, but it’s only part of what I was envisioning.
There aren’t actually any power creation guidelines in the books, but it’s fairly easy to eyeball things and set Refresh costs for them. The key is to keep the scope of the power in mind.
For example, Inhuman Precision strikes me as being a particularly slippery thing to nail down. Obviously, you want it to work with ranged weapons. How about lockpicking? That can benefit from the same type of combination of heightened perception and body control. And acrobatics? Driving? Martial arts? The scope begins to creep very quickly.
One option is to be very restrictive when creating it, maybe even renaming it to Inhuman Marksman and only making it apply to ranged weapons. Another possibility is to make it cost more Refresh because of its broad application; Inhuman Strength is -2, so maybe make Inhuman Precision -4, say.
Personally, I like the way they did it with Kincaid: Inhuman Speed, Superb Guns, several Stunts, and a few relevant Aspects. However, if that doesn’t do what you want it to in the game, then building a new Power may be your best bet.
Rel Fexive says:
Here’s another question for you – who’d a’thunk it?
That’s what I said! 😀
When Harry does that thing with his “wizard senses†to sense wards, spells, magical creatures (like fetches) and such, how does he do it in the RPG? Is it a spell effect, a narration of the use of his Investigation skill, an extension of his Sight power or something else?
Bosh gets part of this in the comment thread. Thanks, Bosh! The information is pretty much spot-on with The Sight stuff, though there are more rules attached to it than there were in the playtests, which produces a little more guidance as to what sorts of Assessments characters can make with The Sight.
The bit missing is something that I don’t think has been mentioned on my blog yet. Wizards can use Lore as a substitute for Alertness when inspecting magic with their normal senses. This is primarily how Harry detects magical effects and creatures, though he needs to use The Sight if he wants specifics. Although, as Bosh noted, that can be dangerous.
Thanks!
You’re welcome!
Bosh says:
I’ve love to play a burned out old wizard (so old he’s forgotten his childhood) who doesn’t have any power left (or memories of how he lost it) except Wizard Constitution and The Sight. His shtick would be that due to long experience and a horrible memory he’s mostly immune to the mental damage you get from The Sight and keeps his Third Eye open far more than just about anyone else can do without going crazy.
I like this idea a lot! Reminds me of the old Fallen Jedi template from West End’s Star Wars game, or the burnt out street mage archetype from the original Shadowrun. Cool!
Rechan says:
I seem to be at a loss how the math works here, Rick. I read the examples, scratch my head, and don’t see how they play out.
Look at the Earth Stomp spell (293). It says that it starts with 8 Shifts. Then the Discipline roll is 8 (so, 16 total). Now, it says the target rolls 2. Which results in 10 shifts? That doesn’t add up! 16-2 = 14!
So where do the numbers come in as far as spell slinging and resolving it all go?
I think the math is off, but not in the way it first appears. Here’s how I work it out. Fred or Lenny, am I doing this right?
First off, the Discipline roll of 8 is just enough to control the 8 shifts of power. You don’t add them together. Now, to target the four enemies that the spell describes, you’re making a spray attack (p 236), so you split your 8 shifts of Control (which is also the targeting roll) into four attacks of Fair (+2) with the power split between the four targets for four attacks of Weapon:2, as per the Evocation Attack section on p 251. So each target should take a stress 2 hit, plus every whatever they missed the Fair Might check by.
Is this right, guys? Do we split both the targeting and the power when using an Evocation as a spray attack?
Rechan says:
I wish there was an “edit†comment button. i have thoughts way after I posted.
Sorry, man.
Is there anything about spellcasters supercharging spells? For instance, Harry using the Lightning storm to blow up the toad demon. Or was that just a special effect for E?
That was Harry dumping Fate Points to tag a whole bunch of Aspects, including the Lightning Storm Aspect that was on the scene. And he still wound up taking a whole bunch of backlash!
That’s it for tonight. You know the drill, folks. I’ll be back tomorrow evening if you leave me more questions.
The math of the Earth Stomp Spell example in the book is correct, but muddled.
Note that the spray attack rules on page 326 do not talk about splitting up your Weapon:X value, just the shifts used to hit.
8 shifts of power means a Weapon:8 spell. The control roll masters the spell, by hitting Legendary.
However, the targeting roll (the same roll) gets split up for purposes of targeting: it’s a +8 result, but Morgan chooses 4 targets, so it’s like he rolled a Fair (+2) attack against each of them individually with his Weapon:8 weapon (the spell). If they roll better than Fair on their Might defense, the attack should miss them, no stress, period. If they roll Fair or worse, then the margin indicates the base stress, and the Weapon:8 spell adds 8 stress on top of that.
Morgan is not someone to mess with.
Now, text in the book says “Each target that rolls a Might check of Fair (+2) or worse takes a 10 shift hit minus his Might roll.” This is a fancy way of saying that if you defend with Fair against a Fair attack, the margin is zero, and Weapon:8 adds 8 to that. Note that your Fair (+2) defense subtracted from 10 = 8.
But what the language should say, instead, IMO, is: “Each target that fails his defense against the Fair (+2) attack takes an 8-stress hit, increased by the margin of success of the attack if their defense is worse than Fair.”
The mathematic result is identical, and I think it’s a lot clearer.
Thanks for the clarification. I should point out that the write-up on Evocation Attacks on p 250 says to split the Power of the attack, while the section on spray attacks says to split the targeting roll. This is where the confusion came in, at least for me.
Oh, bloody hell. You’re right. I’ll need to point the developer heads at this and get some explanation.
Question’s fired off to Lenny. We’ll get this sorted out, and I’ll post an update here once we get it unknotted. Preserving the Weapon: value of the original attack is the intent of the spray rules as written, but the spell rules might work differently as you point out on page 250. One of them is right. I wrote my first answer, above, using the spray attack model rather than the page 250 model.
Thanks again, Fred. I appreciate you taking the time to look into this and let us know.
Hey, it’s a *bug*. We need to squash it.
This is profoundly informative. Will issues like this caught at this stage of events make it into the final version?
I can`t believe you`re still at it. Nicely done.
In an earlier post you mentioned the different tiers of play (submerged, feet in the water, etc). I`d like to get a feel for what those power levels feel like. Harry (in Storm Front) is supposed to be the poster-boy for Submerged, so that one is pretty straight forward, but I`m not very clear on the others. Can you list a couple of characters for each tier? I’m obviously just looking for names here, not asking for a stat block or anything.
Thanks again.
Squashing Bugs…..as a former Game Tester on Mushroom Men for the Wii this brings back tons of memories. 🙂
@Unshaven I think that’s precisely the message, yes. =) They’re quite a while from press yet, so small fixes are still pretty easy. (i.e. Last time Fred talked about what was ahead of them, they didn’t have the short story from Jim for book 2 yet — presumably if there’s room to add a short story, there’s room to update the rules text.)
Correct. I’ll be fixing the Earth Stomp spell writeup.
@Mike Ryan I think your question may be hard to answer, as worded.
Note that the following is really just a lot of rambling from my head, so take it for what you will.
The way they’re setting up power levels, they aren’t really defining capability, but rather how much capability you can have and retain free will. Now, free will (in FATE) is it’s own kind of direct mechanical power, but if I describe two characters to you, one with the ability to lift small trucks and summon fire from thin air, the other with no extraordinary capabilities whatsoever, they could both be refresh 8, but the first would have (roughly) 2 refresh remaining of her free will, while the second would have the full complement of 8 + 2. A character with -9 worth of powers has slipped too far into that power to be a player character (at chest-deep).
I was thinking about these issues more today, and it brought several things into greater clarity. The idea of lawbreaking and the significance of Greater Powers in the game, in particular.
Lawbreaking is a negative refresh power, and confers bonuses. Bonuses for doing POWERFUL things! Like killing foes outright, or walking backwards through time. But exercising that power quickly sets you on a path that you cannot control unless you possess tremendous amounts of innate willpower (base refresh). And notably the “power” of lawbreaking kind of sucks, insofar as its application promises to take you on an accelerating path to servitude, even if it’s not clear _to what purpose_ you would serve.
Now, we might presume that the Queen of Summer possesses tremendous amounts of innate willpower. But she also must join battle with the forces of Winter, even when the costs are, well, everything. So when it comes right down to it, she actually has very little practical free will. The idea of being an NPC and the idea of being beyond your own control are intriguing ideas to bind together.
Obviously this all gets fuzzy and frayed at the edges, but compared to the usual deal where there is absolutely no justification at all for the line between PC and NPC (or hero and prop), and players are power limited by fiat alone, it’s a pretty neat concept.
It also makes it a bit clearer why Rick (and of course the authors) advocates so heavily for the +2 pure mortal bonus. That first touch of power has *tremendous* cost. And it should.
I guess my takeaway is that part of what makes power supernatural is that it pulls you away from this stable, rational world in which we control our actions*.
So you can be powerful, or you can have a firm tether to reality, and each is its own kind of strength. Indeed, the choice a Changeling must make is perhaps the most profound choice the game offers relative to its own metaphysics. A Minor Talent or a newly minted Changeling is in fact somewhat weak, because they have not yet committed to conventional reality or turned their back on it. But they are also very powerful because they have the best of both worlds — they have not yet lost their core being to their power, and yet they have power through which to channel the lions share that remains.
Now, with all of that said, you’re probably just asking for samples of characters with various _refresh costs_. And that’s a simple enough question, I’m sure. But since I thought the question as stated was pretty interesting, I figured I’d take a wild swing at it independently. 😉
*As a side note, I don’t actually believe in free will — I’m a materialist. But since I have the firm perception of free will, there’s no way for me to alter my behavior on this basis, so I go along with the idea anyway.
thanks for answering my questions
is there a money system or rules for how favours work
keegan: I assume it works like the SotC resource rules, at least in the broad outlines: http://crackmonkey.org/~nick/loyhargil/fate3/fate3.html#resources
John Hawkins, I also think the big hit for taking your first bite of the supernatural makes a lot of sense because:
-It provides a nice dynamic tempting players to dig in deeper (well I’ve already blown my mortal bonus, might as well get something out of it when I advance my character…)
-I’m assuming that generally the marginal utility of more supernatural powers starts dropping after a while. What I mean by that is that going from no magic to fire Evocation is a BIG increase in your power but each additional element you add on on top of that gets less and less helpful (because you can only do one thing every round). This keeps people from being able to do one kind of supernatural thing really really well and then doing it over and over and over again with only a minor refresh cost. If you want some powerful supernatural shtick, you’ve got to pay for it. FATE really shines at kicking min-maxers in the nuts (I can’t think of any games with SotC’s level of complexity or greater that are anywhere near as muchkin-proof) and this seems to be something in that tradition.
“What did you want a list of?”
A list of the skills as they stand would be fantastic but I didnt want to ask for them as I thought it might be overstepping the bounds a little. It came out of looking at the skills in SotC and thinking if skills like art, or pilot would still be as I couldnt think of much of an application for them in terms of Dresden games.
Ihadris – take a look at the first page of the searching for quotes pinned topic on the main JB website.
Ok, here’s my Q – relating to the discussion of control rolls above and the process of spellcasting.
How are these people making these rolls?
Fair enough with Thaumaturgy where you can essentially do maneuvers to give yourself a bunch of free tags by roping in eighteen chapters of freemasons, but with evocations you need to be spending fate like it’s going out of fashion to control a complexity 8 spell… and wizards are the people with virtually no fate points to begin with.
I assume that because these are rotes that the wizards concerned don’t have to worry about making the control roll – it’s just there for targetting purposes. So, e.g. Morgan tries to hit the 4 targets with his Earthshock. His discipline is 4 and he rolls a -1 making for 3 shifts of targetting. He now has to split that between the 4 and take whatever mental stress is required because the spell has a higher power than his conviction? Is that right?
as an aside: I love the way the Fate system plays out the fact that the more powerful you are the more you act in terms in of your nature. It’s both very realistic and very pretty. The less people fear the consequences the less they deviate from their nature, the more used to not deviating they become. It’s there in SotC, but the refreshes are much lower in Dresden bringing it to the surface with far more force.
Hey, it’s a *bug*. We need to squash it.
And this is the kind of thing that makes me love Evil Hat.
Are there rules for Rituals? In the books even pure mortals can do supernatural effects this way (the adult movie entropy curse cult in Blood Rites) but I’m not sure how this would work balancewise in game, since the major limit on them in the novels is that well-known ones don’t work since the power of the entity the ritual calls on is divided up to the point of uselessness.
Or is it like Sponsored Magic? But rituals aren’t really an ability of the *character*…
How does advancement work? I’ve seen some indication that it is done primarily through a gradual increase in refresh rate, but what about the skill pyramid (if it even is still a “pyramid” shape)? Anything you can reveal would be greatly appreciated.
Behold! A decision on Earth Stomp (and evo sprays in general).
New approach:
When you’re casting a evocation spell, you’re rolling once, with your Discipline, both to control the amount of power you’re summoning up — 8 shifts in the Earth Stomp case, setting the control difficulty at Legendary (+8) — and to target the attack. When you split up the attack spray-style, you split those controlled shifts of power and you split the targeting result. Let’s say you really rock the house and make a Discipline roll of L+1 (+9). You’re controlling all 8 shifts of power (you determined & announced those ahead of time, which set your control difficulty), and you’ve got 9 shifts of targeting too. You split those 8 shifts of power up into 4 Weapon:2 effects, and you split your targeting into one Good (+3) attack on the guy who’s up in your face and three Fair (+2) attacks on his back-up dudes.
This is in CONTRAST to how the spray rules work for someone attacking with a regular weapon like an automatic gun. The Weapon:X value on a mundane weapon does not get split up, since its value is not *produced* by the attack. So if you had a Fantastic (+6) attack with a Weapon:2 gun, you could split that into two Good (+3) attacks all at Weapon:2, three Fair (+2) attacks all at Weapon:2, etc.
I really like how Lawbreaker works. It sounds likely a deliciously seductive slipperly slope. I could very easily see that mechanic being borrowed by Star Wars version of Fate.
I’m also curious about rituals, mainly because I’m in the middle of reading Blood Rites. (I want to read most of the first 10 books before I get the game, because I avoid spoilers like the plague; I was disappointed that the reveal about how White Court vampires work was spoiled for me by reading the archetype writeup).
Yikes. That’s a super-minor spoiler too.
Thanks for the attempt, John, but that wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I apologize for being unclear.
In various examples, they have said that Harry, Murph and Michael are all effectively “submerged” characters, built with the same skill cap (suberb), total skills points (35) and base refresh 10. They’re just built with different stunts, powers and adjusted refresh rates.
I was assuming that someone like Molly might be a good example of a “chest deep” starting character, but that might be wrong. Perhaps the group from White Night (can’t remember what they were called) would perhaps be examples of “foot in the water” starting characters. That kind of thing.
I suppose it is possible that there aren’t any true foot in the water characters in the novels, because we see the world from Harry’s perspective. Since he is submerged, anyone on his radar is also submerged.
In a nutshell, if I was going to run a foot in the water campaign, what would the PC’s “feel like”? But that seems like it is a more complicated question than “are there any foot in the water characters in the novels?”
Hey, Mike. The Feet in the Water example set reads: “Typical characters might include a Focused Practitioner (page 76), a Lycanthrope (page 79), a Minor Talent (page 80), a Red Court Infected (page 80), a True Believer (page 82), a weak Were-Form (page 82), or a White Court Virgin (page 85). Some base templates are technically affordable, but you’ll seem pretty weak until you can afford some upgrades. These include a Champion of God (page 73), a Changeling (page 74), an Emissary of Power (page 75), or a Faerie Court Knight (page 78).”
So you might have, say, Mortimer Lindquist (though it’s not clear how powerful he is), or the Alphas at the very beginning where they didn’t have enough experience to really make the most of their shapeshifted forms yet. Or you could do a game centered at Special Investigations, playing nothing but “vanillas” (or minor talents trying to pass as vanilla mortals) trying to face down the weird. Could have a very X-Filesy feeling to it.
Feet in the Water still has a lot of playable options. Murphy COULD be that sort of character, but she’s running around as (essentially) one of Harry’s most valuable peers, which is why we built her on the Submerged basis.
@Mike Ryan actually it sounds like you framed your question correctly in the first place. My confusion, not yours. Though I still enjoyed exploring the implications of “power” in the system, so no regrets. 😉
If I’m doing signature characters for each level, I’d say:
Feet In The Water – Father Forthill
Up To Your Waist – Alphas (maybe)
Chest-Deep – Molly (maybe)
Submerged – Harry
But these are wibbledy-wobbledy. Many series characters COULD fit into more than one power level (which John essentially explored in much detail above). So it’s more informative to talk about type of character is viable at each level.
Also note these levels are merely starting points and are not super-significantly separated from each other. Your Feet in the Water characters could after some modest advancement end up Up To Your Waist in short order.
@Rick The following is a series of comments and not questions, feel free to omit to cut down your word count for the inevitable Spinal Tap joke.
It is not difficult to make a Wizard or should I say Wizard-like character at lower power levels. I’d use an aspect called, “Plucky Apprentice” . You just have to a remember that an apprentice has no political ground to stand on until they become an actual Wizard.
The +2 bonus to Pure Mortals to me is absolutely necessary in a game like this. For me it and The Laws of Magic solve the “Jedi Problem” as I call it. The Star Wars RPG is notorious for its Force User/Non-Force User system and fun balance issues.
In Star Wars, it is not fun to play second banana against someone who can pull a Star Destroyer out of orbit no matter how many blasters you have(because that Jedi is pretty immune to it).
In DFRPG, it is comforting to know that can Magic Users run out of gas rather quickly if they aren’t careful while Pure Mortals have it in spades, that guns are the great equalizer and that Magic can have the same level of cool as firing 2 guns whilst jumping through the air.
When asking my question in the previous edition I’d completely forgotten you’d already said “who’d a’thunk it”, Rick. How weird is that?
Anyway, more great questions and answers here. Thanks to Bosh and Rick for answering my query; it was the ‘Lore for Alertness’ thing I was looking for, but the info on how The Sight works is appreciated nonetheless. Thanks guys!
I have another question, and one more vague than before: just how magical are Baltimore and Chicago as presented? One of the things I’ve noticed from reading playtest comments is how often the Dresden-ised cities seem to be seething pools of hidden magicness, with spirits, ghosts, faeries and city-wide magical effects around every corner – something that, to me, isn’t apparent from the books. A lot of the time they end up like how World Of Darkness cities seem to be, where every important thing that has, will or can happen has a supernatural origin. Are Baltimore and Chicago written up in the same way? Is this presented as the expected way to do things, or are they more toned down/less obvious than that, or is that just one of the ways a group can “magic up” their city of choice?
Cheers!
@Fred Thanks. That was exactly what I was looking for. And I’m glad there’s wiggle room there. I was just looking for a frame of reference.
@John Those implications of power have me drooling for this game. Normally I’m not particularly interested in time travel, but I’d be tempted to break the sixth law just this once.