Dresden Files RPG Play-by-Post Planning

[BRickAstley]

I made a subforum under The Gaming Table to have unified posts for stuff like city info and player sheets and links that are relevant. I've made all the players moderators in that subforum, so you can go and edit posts to add things you think might be helpful or relevant.

[BRickAstley]

Dave, to answer your post in the other thread, the level that we'll get to know each other will actually come up during the process of character creation. Part of the backstory creation has the players detailing one of their past adventures, and other players coming in and relating how they were involved in that too, and therefore how they met that other person. But we'll get more into that when we get to creating the characters.

Also, the posts in the subforum I had envisioned mainly for storing data about the game, while having discussion take place in a main thread here. Just an FYI.

[DaveV]

What post? Fear my rashly-given mod powers!

For the record:

It seems to me that the first thing we need to decide is where we fall on the spectrum from "five guys walk into a bar" (no history together) to "you and your four childhood friends go on an adventure" (long history together). I lean more toward the former, but it would speed things up if we've at least met before the start of play.

[Mardoc]

Lewwyn, Commodore, and I had a brief chat over the weekend. A couple things came out of it.

We got some first thoughts on the characters we'd like to play. Commodore's thinking of a mostly-mortal guy. The twist is that he's blind, with a permanently open Third Eye. That means he sees the world entirely in supernatural terms - sometimes what's really there, sometimes a metaphor for it. He'll see a vampire under disguise as a real predator - but he'll also see that man with the candy and the van as a predator. It also means his sanity is constantly under attack. For combat, he's thinking of being a pistolero; mostly mortal abilities combined with supernatural perception.

I'm thinking of playing a starting wizard. Which probably translates to Sorceror in game terms, as I won't have the full abilities of a wizard yet. Not until we 'level up' - however that translates to FATE. I'm generally planning to go more toward the subtle end than Harry Dresden; hoping to know more about lore and research than combat wizardry. And during combat, I'll be more about deflection and dodging than overpowering the foe. So far I haven't got a core personality to the guy, though. I kinda like the idea of being Boston Old Money, WASPy, with enough money and land to indulge my magical interests. Maybe my grandfather made his money in whaling and trade, and while he was out there, he saw a lot of non-scientific things. I've spent my life (starting in, oh, 1900ish) studying the things he brought back, in between a million other hobbies. Only recently have I started getting serious about it, though, which would explain why I'm low power and still might grow.

Lewwyn's looking to be a werewolf, with ties to a local pack. The game provides a lot of room for variation in power level, and Lewwyn hasn't really settled on a level yet. His main dilemma is how much to spend on werewolf-specific traits, and how much to spend on less specific things, like a knowledge of magic, or useful skills. I didn't get a lot of feel for what he has in mind beyond that.

It does seem like we're coming up with ideas disparate enough that the closely related end of your spectrum won't work, DaveV. So it's a good thing that's where you were leaning anyway .

What are you (and Ranamar) leaning toward as a character concept? As I understand FATE, there aren't really 'roles' that have to be filled like a D&D party, so you're pretty unconstrained at the moment.

The closest I have to a suggestion is that we're a bit weak on mortal interface characters - no one who can use the internet or who'd know how to take advantage of GPS, cell phones, spy gadgets. But even there, Lewwyn could take on some of that without a problem if neither of you is interested. And we can probably find magical alternatives to a lot of things if we need to.

[Ranamar]

Point of order... As an "archive", is the expectation that we hash things out on this thread and then stick it into the archive threads, or should we be moving discussion in there?

DaveV:
Characters (and locations and even whole campaigns) have "aspects" which are most of what make them unique. PCs get about half their aspects from previous adventures, essentially, wherein the cast generally at least partially is comprised of the other PCs. Probably the best way to look at it is that every PC is the star of his own narrative, but, since they share a universe, there are crossovers galore.
(To pick a superhero example from recent movies, your group would play as The Avengers, but, if you're, say, Iron Man, you'll have shared a story with Natasha (Black Widow), and if you're Thor you'll have Hawkeye having at least shown up and threatened you with a bow as an "Agent of Shield" in your first adventure. Meanwhile, Black Widow and Hawkeye have a long-running history, so they might even have aspects from each others' adventures that name the other one specifically, which is a significantly closer bond. ... or actually, the example from the Dresden Files series that you can find in the book is pretty good.)

ETA: crossposted Mardoc; I need to think more about a character, but I'm kind of compulsively an engineer, so, if I don't go the magic route for in-game levers to pull, I might maybe go for someone who makes levers to pull. I'll think some more about how such a character would react to magic being just about as cool as he thought and rather antithetical to his profession and see if I'm feeling inspired.

Edit2: Since it's not really explained in Storm Front, which is as far as I've read... how does one become a magical practitioner anyway? Clearly there's training (the apprenticeship) but how does getting one play out, and how much does it hinge on innnate ability?

[DaveV]

Yeah, I did some reading in the character creation chapter and think I understand the overlapping stories bit now.

My thoughts on a character: pure mortal, martial arts devotee. Bullied as a kid, steered into karate class by his fairly well-off parents. Majored in computer science at MIT, stayed in the Boston area after graduation.

[Ranamar]

Yeah, I did some reading in the character creation chapter and think I understand the overlapping stories bit now.

My thoughts on a character: pure mortal, martial arts devotee. Bullied as a kid, steered into karate class by his fairly well-off parents. Majored in computer science at MIT, stayed in the Boston area after graduation.

Great minds or people with similar experiences think alike. (I hadn't gotten as far as martial arts, but it's an obvious direction.) Anyway, go for it, and I'll come up with something interesting.

[DaveV]

In classic D&D terms, it seems like we're missing a cleric/healer role at this point. Is there something similar in the Dresdenverse?

[BRickAstley]

In the Dresdenverse, magical healing is a rarity at best. TVTropes actually had a decent summary of the theme it has:

In The Dresden Files healing magic seems to be nonexistent, at least for humans (Listens-To-Winds does have some capability in this matter, but he's a Senior Council Member and regularly goes back to medical school to add to his ~18 Doctorates). Magic can be used to staunch a wound or keep someone alert, but not in any more direct fashion. Very powerful beings like the Faerie Queens can do more, but not without cost or sometimes help.

According to the RPG, Summer Magic can be used to heal people (at least, better than most people) as the magic grants some kind of instinctive knowledge of physiology. Miss Gard's Runic Magic and certain forms of Necromancy can also stave off death.
A Justified Trope in that the reason healing is so hard is that the body is really complicated and if you try to fix someone without knowing exactly what you are doing, you'll probably kill him or at least make him even worse.

For the most part, healing is to be done naturally or at a hospital, with magic at best just staving off things worsening. In the books, Harry had a hand blackened by fire that took years to heal up completely.


Intent of the archive threads is to store and categorize information, whether that's details we decide about the city in setup, or our character details when we get to character creation, or a thread for you players to try and organize what you know about things going on. Main discussion would stay in a main thread here ideally.

[Mardoc]

Edit2: Since it's not really explained in Storm Front, which is as far as I've read... how does one become a magical practitioner anyway? Clearly there's training (the apprenticeship) but how does getting one play out, and how much does it hinge on innnate ability?

There are a whole bunch of different approaches shown in the book, and it leaves it open for more. Although it partly depends on what you mean by 'magical practicioner'.

To be a general purpose wizardly type, you need to be born with the ability to sense magic energy flow. If you've got that, you can eventually get full power everything, but you'll learn a lot faster with help. Help is usually becoming an apprentice, but there's apparently some books (as well as a lot of decoys). I get the impression that all the really powerful guys have had training, but lots of people can do a little just by practicing on their own, once they were convinced it wasn't just coincidence that odd things happened when they willed them. Mostly, getting training means bumping into a wizard who really wants you to succeed: wants a loyal subordinate, is family, or is a close friend. And you have to *not* break any of the Laws before you're found, even with good intentions. Mind control your teacher to forget you skipped class? Or your friend to wake up when his alarm goes off? That's a death sentence

Specific purpose - born with the ability to sense, but aren't a systemizer. Basically anyone with a more limited talent: speak with ghosts, read minds, see the future. Can only do one thing, usually.

You can be almost general purpose if you're sponsored by a heavyweight. Queen Titania of the Summer Court of Faerie is an example: people who get their power from her are limited to powers associated with summer: light, warmth, life, and things like that. In practice, you can do just about anything that's even sorta related to the sponsor - the main limitation is that you have to act in accordance with your sponsor's goals and occaisionally direct orders, or risk having them withdraw the power. On the other hand, you can still have technology, and you often get physical boosts as well.

You can get effects without sensing magic if you are either really well informed and precise, or lucky. Think along the lines of making a potion under Bob's supervision, or doing something simple like a magic circle. This seems to be entirely dependent on learning magical theory; hard to learn by doing if you can't see what you're doing and 99% of the time you try, you fail.

There are also sponsored rituals, where a Nevernever entity supplies power for a one-off effect, if you provide what they want in return. This is typically a sacrifice.

I'd think Harry's interactions with Toot-toot are arguably another sort. The summoning requires mostly just the Name, everything else requires negotiating clout and access to something toot-toot wants. It's not your *own* magic, but you're causing it to happen. Negotiating with higher power entities can be risky, they're good at getting more than you intended to give.

Most of these things can be added together. You can be a wizard who experiments on his own, was trained, does some things by rote on pure theory, gets help from a sponsor, negotiates with the Little Folk, and has some specific abilities he doesn't understand. At least you can if your name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden . Maybe not at the level we're starting out.

In classic D&D terms, it seems like we're missing a cleric/healer role at this point. Is there something similar in the Dresdenverse?

If I'm understanding FATE correctly, combat is less common and less fatal than D&D. Most combat damage is 'really' using up your store of luck and endurance. You don't get anything more than a grazing wound until things are really bad. Then you acquire a lasting 'Consequence' like a burned nonfunctional hand and your 'hp' meter is reset to full. Healing is short-term regaining your endurance, or long term (like, several adventures) removing those Consequences. And there's also a status called 'taken out' where you fall unconscious until the end of the scene, rather than dying. Death is possible but mainly reserved for NPC's . I think if you get too many Consequences eventually you die, but that's not supposed to happen in normal play.

Mainly, losing combat means the bad guys get what they want.