As far as I remember the books, this is wrong. Dresden Files magic is manipulating natural forces, like gravity or heat, or entropy, but very rarely a conceptual "this is now a solid" effect.
The fifth(necromancy) and sixth(time travel) Laws of Magic make it clear that magic only obeys physics of its own will.
In the very first book, the starter villain Victor Sells deploys magical scorpion drones that are the size of normal scorpions when idle, but when activated grow in size and mass and have the strength and toughness to punch through elevator doors.
In Fool Moon, shapeshifters remain sapient even after squeezing their sapience into the neurology of lower animals. A personality hosted on the 1.5kg of neural mass in a human skull cant physically run on the ~120 grams of brain in a 40kg grey wolf.
Even assuming proportionate scaling to an 80kg mass, thats only 240 grams of brain.
In the same book, Dresden throws an energy beam beefy enough to blast a five hundred pound loup garou through the outside wall of a police station, across a street, and through multiple brick walls on the other side of the street without the thermal bloom of that much energy turning the police station, if not the city block into a raging inferno.
In Dead Beat, we see freshly dead, necromantically animated zombies, with human muscles and a vanilla human skeletal system, keeping up with an accelerating car for at least a while without wrecking their musculoskeletal system.
And that was after one tore off the rear engine hood barehanded.
I could keep going.
Dresdenverse magic only pays lip service to driving within the lanes of natural law as long as it suits it to do so.
As soon as it doesnt? It goes off the rails.
Hard.
As far as we have seen additional successes start adding qualitative changes. So a 30+ successes knife will probably utilize kazimir effect to create space warping effect along its edge to maintain monoatomic sharpness or something along those lines.
QM has answered this.
No, that's not how it works. Dresden made a conscious choice to come in contact with the coin - that was free will, and very much in tune with how Dresden Files loosely interprets "free choice". You can't, for example, shoot a coin into someone's back at supersonic speeds to implant a shadow of a fallen into them, or place it onto someone's body when they are in a coma.
No, thats how it works.
Almost everytime we see a free Coin in canon, they seem to actively move to set themselves up to make contact with someone.
We interpret this differently. Dresden "picking up" the coin when trying to protect Michael's son is essentially the same "choice under duress" as Ivy picking up a coin to avoid further torture.
I dont agree.
He didnt pick up the Coin, he placed his hand down on it as a block between Harry Junior and the coin.
It was only after he moved the kid that he identified the Coin, picked it up and went home.
Furthermore, you can freely pick up a Coin as long as you dont actually make skin contact.
Wear gloves. Use a hanky.
Picking it up isnt the issue. Its the skin contact.
If you pick up the Coin and your glove tears, you are in for a Bad Time.
Yes. It all points at them not caring about long term, if they succeed in short and middle one. Taking into account outsider involvement, I think the end game can be guessed - apocalypse and collapse of the Outer Gates.
That is at odds with their characterization in the books.
Its certainly at odds with their attempts in this AU thus far to prevent the Pathfinders fiddling with bound godmonsters.
They want to rule the setting, not destroy it.
And as far as we know, not invite in competitors.
I would maintain that overall it's still a net benefit. Assuming we spend three months training them (let's say AP per charm use, 6 AP total including malcoffee) - that's 190 XP. The charm allows to raise Physical Attributes, Manipulation, and Alertness, Brawl, Intimidation, Larceny, Melee, or Occult Abilities. No Ability can be raised higher than that of their Infernal instructor.
We can discard Larceny, Alertness and Brawl since we are sh*t at those. Assuming average of 2 for every attribute, that's 8+12+16=36 XP to raise an attribute to 5, so 144 XP to get Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, Manipulation 5. This leaves us with 46 XP. Assuming 0 points in an ability, that's 3+2+4+6+8=23 XP. So we can raise Melee and Occult, or Intimidation and Occult to 5. So, at most 4 months to max out every available stat for this charm. After even one month you can have 70 XP, which is probably 2 attributes maxed out, or Occult + 1 attribute (dexterity or stamina for survival).
I think that's well worth it.
All of that doesnt matter if said heavy hitter can leverage that social to intimidate or con or persuade those people.
Do the math; someone with GOOD mortal social(Attribute 3 + Ability 3) going up against DPoE ( -2DC)?
Is suddenly rolling at DC8 instead of DC6 for even the most basic social stuff.
We have done it to the Red Court ourselves; see our encounter with LeBlanc.
Its just making an army for someone else to steal.
And thats not counting the bottleneck of how many people you can train at a time.
Im not saying its not useful; that would definitely not be true. I have books with bakemono builds.
I am saying that given who our enemies are, its a lot more hazardous than you appear to be acknowledging.
I'm familiar. That stuff is expensive to make and has flaws. Note that mixed attacks break the immunity.
Not for an Exalt apparently. Not at 1 dot.
Wizards doing it is one thing, every idiot having items to do it for them is another.
Only if said idiot has Enchantment 3.
Most path sorcerers dont spec into high-tier Enchantment, unlike wizards for whom its part and parcel of how they do magic.
And under Sorcerer Revised's 6-dot rules for Paths, Path 3/4 is a solid Expert, if not master of his craft.
To make something like this?
Your Path mage would require Path Sorcery: Enchantment 3, an appropriately equipped Workshop/Lab with the Resources Background to keep it supplied and stocked, the right recipe, ??? design and crafting time, and another 3-9 days enchantment time.
That is not an easy set of criteria to fulfill on Earth, where most sorcerers are individual artisans with no shared support structure and sorcery is a calling that you pursue in addition to whatever else you do for a living.
Theoretically possible does not mean plausible.
