Ebookbinder dresden files
We hit Wikipedia and Google about the city, its history, its urban legends, any cool-looking locations that we might want to include in our campaign.Īnd since no one of us ever went to the place, we could repurpose or slightly change anything without feeling like we were "betraying" a familiar location : The Boston Athenaeum library became the homebase of our Prometheus-scion PC, the bostonian Society was "upgraded" from an historical society maintaining the Old State House museum to a full-fledged occult city council, the peculiar achitecture of several key buildings became part of a Ward against an ancient horror, the Patriarca crime syndicate and the mayor are pawns to rival vampire clans, several urban redevelopment project never happened because we felt the older neighborhoods were cooler campaign location, etc. We are all kind of from rural areas, so we thought we'd use a premade setting from the paranet papers as none of us really have cities we strongly associate with.We live in rural France, and our group chose to play our campaign in Boston because one of us thought it might be a cool occult-adventure location (and boy, it is!). If I ran it again, I'd ban Wizard PCs altogether and replace them with specialist magic users.
#Ebookbinder dresden files Pc
They effectively replace a party, to the point where our Wizard PC had to go well out of their way and mumble about magic being complicated to allow other PCs to do things. They can solve any combat related problem (they start to burn out of resources at around Round 4 of the combat, but by that stage most everything's dead anyway), and any out of combat problem can be solved as long as you have time to use your Thaumathurgy.
#Ebookbinder dresden files movie
I'm sure you've all seen enough movies set in New York or LA to have an idea of the high points of the city, and if you make the city "Metropolia" instead of Movie New York, you don't have to worry about the specifics.Īs to pitfalls, Wizard PCs are amazingly, scarily competent. If your group doesn't feel they know enough about a particular city, why not set it in a fictional one that matches up vaguely with a real world one? It sets the themes of the game, gets the players buying in, and makes sure that you have characters that match the setting. I'm also of the belief that City Creation is important. Evokers in the DFRPG stall out after a few rounds of combat, but before then they're more dangerous than anyone else. *Who, let's be honest, will be your party wizard. Your most effective tactic will almost always be to have most of your party spend their actions Maneuvering to give your heavy hitter* a bunch of fresh aspects to tag. If someone has 12 stress boxes, hitting them three times for 7, 5, and 9 stress accomplishes essentially nothing. But especially with the latter, mid-range hits are.kinda useless.
Sometimes because of armor, and sometimes because they just have a ton of extra stress boxes. In the DFRPG, you'll usually be fighting things with health bars way bigger than yours. If you don't do that, things wind up pretty cookie cutter. If you slap an "ARMS BOUND" aspect on someone, they don't get to use their arms, even if no-one spends a fate point.
If you use a maneuver to place a "THE BUILDING IS ON FIRE" aspect on the scene, the place is actually on fire, and people should react and take damage accordingly.
They're not just tags to hang on the scene that only matter if you spend fate points. The most important piece of Fate advice, which seemed blindingly obvious when I first was told it but never seemed to be emphasized in the books, is that aspects are real. The main difference is that the more fate points are moving around, the more the game feels character-driven, rather than mechanic-driven. The rules for supernatural powers and magic are quite crunchy (occasionally to the game's detriment my last DFRPG game got bogged down a lot trying to translate "I do X" into mechanical terms), and things are still fun even if fate points devolve into rarely-used hero points. I am also NOT the GM.In contrast with some of the others, my experience has been that the game actually functions decently well without much in the way of Fate point flow at all.