- Location
- washington
Unless we work under the assumption people in our hell are just plain lesser than people from earth. Where someone with 5 dots in a path or skill or whatever is usually like 1 in a 100,000 or lower. Maybe 1 in a million.
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
No i think in understand just that from what I see the war weavers are active detriment on that point being massive vulnerabilities without granting equivalent cover. A Warlock with A Matter 2 spell (base Difficulty 5 if they any level prep 3) with five successes could make all of them non functional.
Or in this case Metal into slightly more (Rigid,Soft,Hard, Ductile, Heat resistant, Heat absorbent...)Metal There is a reason any android or Victor meant to deal with mages had Primium Countermeasures. Sorcerers don't have any magics that could effect materials like this.Mage the Ascension 20th Pg.518 said:
McCoy is a primary Caster who carries no weapon other than his staff. Could he have tried to stop and try and fight all of those people almost certainly with some level of ability to probably kill most if not all of them almost assuredly should he do that when running and staying ahead of them allows him to possibly get into a better position by which to disintegrate all of them at once without needing to possibly be injured by Outsiders and red vampires no in the world is that a smarter decision than just beating feet.
There is also the fact that he excels in killing with magic rather than with sword or gun or anything like that.
Then we should probably select some actually heartier units rather than something that can be taken out on Mass with a beginner spell. This also applies to most Force spells that could tie into matter patterns which could make every joint on a robot insanely hot or just cause the expansions and contractions of the machines to tear through at the metal in weird ways there's just a fuck ton of ways to destroy not magically armored robots.
But that brings it back to yet again people with guns are way harder to circumvent simply because they're fucking shooting at you and don't need to Traverse any distance to do that. Never mind the fact that are you going to prioritize the guy with the gun or the guy with the magic dispelling sword or the woman with a flaming sword flying at you. If we bring the robots they're definitely going to be the first things they focus on and they'll disintegrate them pretty much immediately.
There is also the fact that Morgan is not going to hide behind us or anyone with we bring is simply because he is a man who chases down red vampires with a sword.
Last edited:
I'm not nerfing anything, I just don't think it's reasonable to have tailor made max skill sorcerers for any arbitrary situation we can think of with no notice.
We've got a large population to draw from so I can buy that all kinds of people exist, but getting that many master sorcerers like that with an hour of warning at most and no system in place to streamline this sort of thing? That seems like a bit of a stretch. If we had at least a day or had previously set something up to help do this then that would be a different story.
If there are any around then the three slots I assigned to combat casters should go to them, but invoking the law of large numbers has practical requirements.
This has come up multiple times and it's annoying that it's discarded so frequently.
Of the Exarchs only one member is as old as the wars of unity, which happened a while ago but not thousands of years. There's clearly some sort of generation mechanism to the wheel in combination with the people who choose a final death.
Moreover we've seen people changing jobs and skills lying fallow as a result. Like that guy who was so heavily borged up that his brain had been moved to his torso from the first FCF chapters. We also have an Exarch who's some kind of business magnate who's planning to give up everything to drive a trade cart after his next death. People don't stick to one thing all the time.
So yeah people who've been continuously practicing sorcery for thousands of years are to all appearances kinda rare. I'm not saying they don't exist, just that they're not the sort of people you should be able to just duck in and pick a perfect candidate from off the cuff.
When we were physically in the Courts researching anti tampering measures for our guns the fortune sorcerer we tapped to help was literally the AI who ran the city's defense grid. I'm sure there's a peer group for that guy who could do things for us, but they're out in the world doing stuff.
The terminators are combat drones, the sort you make in a factory. Different categories might have different costs, but they're the sort of thing an industrial magitech power might have. You don't question the ability of the US government to get ahold of APCs or anti armor weapons do you?
Subtle because the terminators actually have a decent stealth score and I included Hand agents who actually know how to speak the local language in the group to manage them.
You have hand agents, but they're also trying to work with a fistful of powerful mages they've never met before. If something goes down they'd be significantly more obvious because they'd be throwing around magic while not personally having much experience with this context.
They're using Simulacrum rules for motion, weight, and things like that. These sort of issues aren't really concerns. They're also Sutra platforms, so they're not inanimate matter to twist to a wizard's will either. They're as hard to do that stuff to as the Hand agents are.
They suppress magic by killing casters or running interference for the wizards against opposing forces.
As to head count, you've got 5 sorcerers and magical martial artist of the obvious variety. Not just any sorcerers, but masters of specific disciplines. For this purpose I think my point still holds.
The door is left open in my plan if some guys like that are available, but I don't try to order mail order exact masters.
We already have IC stuff happening around the Qiao and our access to them. Assuming access like this is an example of the whole tailor made perfect search issue I was talking about earlier.
- Location
- washington
In fairness someone can get 5 dots in a skill as early in life as their 20s or 30s it's not common but it's not anything like unheard of. Centuries could actually allow specialists to break past their limits. So there should be millions of people millions upon millions of people with 3dots or more in most paths and skills. Since 3 is professional or something and 4 is like an expert.
Master should be relatively rare but we are still talking about something very feasible in a human lifetime.
Last edited:
BoredMan
Maintaining the Agenda is our top priority
Did you.. really just ignore the bit I brought up about us being noted to have people on standby just for this sort of thing and a planet's worth of assets to draw from on that front?
The martial arts of our kingdom do revolve around the same bodily energy. Long Ling is very specifically about repelling spirits and Supernaturals the fact that we have humans in our kingdom means that if no other path developed please fuck off spirit is almost certainly one of them the entire flavor could be different the mechanics on how it works could be different but you expect a kingdom populated full of more powerful Supernaturals does not have a dedicated martial arts to telling them to fuck off seriously.
You don't need even a century to become a master every sorcerer we see in sorcerer revised and Mage did not need even a century to become a master you might need multiple centuries to become a legend I won't doubt that but you can become a master of a discipline within a decade or three never mind multiple centuries. Unless people in our kingdom just do not practice with any level of veracity of people that are actually interested in pursuing a craft we should have a lot of Masters Maybe only like a couple hundred Legends total across the billions of people but Masters are like people who are like doctorates or higher education members in a field not legendary figures.
No they are not. Not even getting into the relative Rarity of Life sphere Magic in Dresden Files. The minimum sphere requirement to negatively affect another life form is three rather than two for most applications that will work on a robot. If the Sutra platforms are the robots as in they are the spirits of the robots then they are still in a way worse position simply because you still don't need the spirit sphere to affect material objects that have Spirits in them which means the low difficulty spells that would affect the robots remain at a low difficulty even if they are piloted/manned by spirits. If they want to affect the Sutras maybe it would be equally difficult to use on them as on the hand agents but if they have no need to work with the spirits they can just attempt to melt a joint or transmute a chunk of their Mass or any other numbers of things that unguarded robots are bad against.
I can't really speak to that so maybe that's actually completely true but that doesn't really address my point of being walking masquerade breaches. There's also the fact that even with Simulacrum rules they would still just be insanely heavy and really loud and that would Translate to increase difficulty on stealth rolls and general circumstantial difficulty changes like our own armor (VLE) that increases the difficulty of stealth rolls.
Last edited:
Sorry, I'm travelling today from a conference, so can't be more engaged, like i want. So:
[X] Heavy riot suppression SWAT equivalent team
[X] Trace, use it to try to find more senior, or at least more skilled warlocks
My reason goes like this - wizards and us will primarily be contesting wizard magic. Support should be guys who can keep our guys alive, help breaching, and act I ways that wizard conspirators aren't prepared for. Hence the idea of a SWAT riot suppression squad. Not sure about the details. Again, sorry, am writing in between flights.
[X] Heavy riot suppression SWAT equivalent team
[X] Trace, use it to try to find more senior, or at least more skilled warlocks
My reason goes like this - wizards and us will primarily be contesting wizard magic. Support should be guys who can keep our guys alive, help breaching, and act I ways that wizard conspirators aren't prepared for. Hence the idea of a SWAT riot suppression squad. Not sure about the details. Again, sorry, am writing in between flights.
COMMENTARY
Molly should have 14/15 HP, not 13/14; 2x Ox-Bodies is 8HP.
Molly should be able to tell if this wizard is a conspirator, or someone who got wololo'd; she has her list of names and faces in her head. The age of this girl suggests they got whammied, but who knows OOC.
Just drug her and put her in custody of a couple base teams.
Sophia has the Gifts Sense The Unnatural and Secret of Gaia.
She doesnt need the wizards to find the enemy.
Or Molly could use the scene as a Crown focus.
Meantime, Invoking The Spirits of the Storm should dump enough water to jam any attempts at scrying for us by just summoning a torrential downpour out of the blue.
The final HP box is Inc, I prefer to think of that as 0/14 not 1/15, seems more accurate to what it does.
We have ready teams, but I don't think that's the same as an arbitrary mix of high end experts.
5 dots is world class, you don't get world class skill hiding in your basement.
If the president set up a ready team for medical emergencies in the White House how many of the best heart surgeons in the world would idle there waiting for the call without doing anything else?
I can buy some good ones being around, but the best people from an arbitrary number of domains sitting around waiting?
I'm just saying that we've had specific IC mention that this is an area of difference between our world and earth. Which is something that should have a little more thought put into it than off the cuff grabbing Qiao off the shelf like that. To date the only equivalents we've seen or heard of have been unique ones.
Most people never get that good in the first place. World class mastery isn't the inevitable end result of choosing to practice a skill.
Maybe they branch out, change lives before hitting the peak, or things are just more technological.
You were the one who specifically brought that time scale into things with the immortal sorcerers bit.
They're CoDs, much like vampires can't actually be turned into lawn chairs because they're not alive the possessed robots shouldn't be subject to that kind of manipulation off the cuff. It's been established that while in a platform it's treated like the tech spirit's body.
Also, would it kill you to format your posts? These walls of text are making my eyes bleed.
You can't speak to that, so you immediately speak to it?
The stuff you're describing is mechanically represented by flaws. These flaws are not present on the sheet and the rules involved allow for human form robots of varying levels of stealth without actually changing the statline.
They don't weigh significantly more than a person or make appreciably more noise than one. You're trying to have a reality ensues moment for bullshit magic robots. They don't have those issues for the same reason they exist in the first place; magic is an engineering cheat code.
@DragonParadox could we get a ruling on if Sutra combat robots are subject to lawn chair effects?
BoredMan
Maintaining the Agenda is our top priority
The president doesn't have uninhibited access to a planet's resources from every nation, the comparison does not hold. A handful or so of specialized mages seems entirely reasonable when they were described by DP to not be uncommon.
You are fine with it comes to stealth rolls and such, like you said you did not take those flaws so you can assume they are made of lightweight composites and have magical sound dampening. That said if someone does see them they are going to react like someone who just saw a combat robot walking around.
Dragon Paradox specifically asked for an example martial art and there aren't many Ki Arts across world of Darkness unless you wanted me to put hard or soft style from Mage the Ascension.
The first five dots of each path are learned abilities that lead up to a magnum opus they are a field of study you make your life being those things we will have to agree to disagree mostly because you can get to five dots within 20 years you can get to five dots within a mortal lifetime it doesn't matter if it would take them literally 600 years to get to five dots which it shouldn't we would still have thousands of people with five dots in almost every path simple because people pursue their talents like they want to and because they're directly tied to actual abilities rather than ephemeral nonsense if they have any level of skill they would have no reason not to continue to hone their craft.
Even the vampire the lawn chair bit which isn't right by the way because the spirits definitely aren't the metal bodies. Unlike the vampires even the vampires require life and matter both of which are too high for what made the Ascension says they are you only need life four matter four for the effects that it's trying to simulate but that's world of Darkness vampire pandering for you. Not to mention the fact that vampires just have a whole fuck ton of weird static Magic bullshit surrounding them rather than if they were just a corpse it would only take matter three to turn them into whatever you wanted but they have both a magical source of their own magical powers of their own and on some level count as alive as far as magic is concerned.
Unless they attempt to kill the Sutra which would require Spirit 3 affecting the metal shell around the computer is Matter 2. Which yet again if the spirits were very specifically the metal robots it would still only be Matter 2, Spirit 3 because they're not chanting to change the nature of the spirit or otherwise fuck with it they're just trying to fuck up its material shell which is made out of unliving metal. Ie Melt metal leg (••• Spirit/ •• Matter).
P. S Also are you like reading this on a phone or something those are just paragraphs not even particularly long ones either.
Last edited:
BoredMan
Maintaining the Agenda is our top priority
@DragonParadox Those from yesterday
Not quite.
Combat effects are supposed to be excluded for Night-Folk, not for Mages/wizards, because counterspelling for Night-Folk is usually a reflexive roll, while for wizards it takes their action for the combat turn.
Lemme see if I can find the exact quote:
M20 p544-546
I dont have my copy of Sorcerer Revised at hand, which clarifies rules for hedge sorcerers.
But basically, Night Folk have reflexive countermagick against attacks that will directly alter them(curses, possession etc) BUT they dont have any against Fireball or Magic Missile or Acid Arrow or Chains of Light or a Fist wizard using magic MMA.
Mages/wizards on the other hand, have counterspelling they can use against anything they understand.
But it has to be a full action, and if they are doing it they cant take any other full action that turn, like attacking or buffing someone else or things of that sort. Not unless they have a multi-action effect running.
Vampires CAN be turned into lawn chairs.
However.
The Lawn Chair rote requires Life 5 AND Matter 5, beating the character's innate countermagic and racking up 4+ successes after that, with the target number of successes being determind by the targets HP pool, and the duration of the effect requiring additional successes on top of that.
The Notorious Vampiric Lawn Chair
(••••• Life/ ••••• Matter)
A feat more spoken of than actually performed (if only
because so few mages have Mastered Life and Matter well
enough to enact such radical transformations of both), this
legendary spell transforms a dreaded undead entity into
domestic furniture. Variations include soap bubbles, trees,
household pets, and – in one infamous urban legend – a bag
of flaming poo. Despite such rumors, though, the realities
involved in this sort of metamorphosis make the idea more
theoretical than practical.
According to rumors, both Caeron Mustai and his
arch-rival Porthos Fitz-Empress had several pieces of Kindred
kindling in their studies, although this seems unlikely, given
the risk of said furniture turning back into vampires at
nopportune times. Certain vampires have claimed – rightly
or wrongly – that mages turned them into chairs and other
inanimate objects… typically using that claim to justify the
nightmarish fates they inflicted upon those mages afterward.
It was speculated that the Massasa Wars were sparked by such
disgraceful transformations… and in at least one verified
case, that speculation is true. The vengeance worked upon
the Hermetic Master in question – who dared to turn a flesh-
crafting Tzimisce into a commode – remains an object lesson
for mages with more skill than sense.
System:
Seriously, this is a truly stupid spell. No mage with
the Sphere aptitude and Arete to perform it is likely to ignore
the many complications involved in such a prank – to wit:
• It's vulgar. Really vulgar. As in, there is no way to possibly
justify this by paradigm-level vulgar. Paradox is inevitable.
• It's got to overcome the innate resistance a vampire has
to such spells. (See Night-Folk Counterspelling, p. 546.)
• It must inflict enough successes, after countermagick, to
bring that vampire from full strength to Incapacitated.
For a young vampire, that would demand at least four
successes (eight health levels); the same feat might
demand five, six, or even more successes if the mage is
trying to convert an elder Kindred.
• If you're using the divided successes option, then the
player must devote at least that many successes to the
transformation damage. That means that a four-success
roll will change the vampire into a lawn chair for one
turn. After that, the lawn chair becomes a vampire
again – and the mage had better have a good escape
spell handy at that point, or his name becomes "blood
bag."
• In order to effect a lasting transformation, the player must
either spend or roll additional successes, as shown on
the Base Damage or Duration chart. Turning a young
vampire into a chair for one day, for instance, would
require at least seven successes.
• Tuning an undead vampire into some other form of
inert material demands Matter 5. "Vampire" is not listed
on the Periodic Table of Elements, so transforming that
substance into different forms of matter requires full
Mastery of that Sphere.
• Vampires with the Protean and Vicissitude Disciplines
can transform back to their original form with very little
trouble. The vampire must spend one Blood Point for
each success the mage rolled. Every point negates one
success on the Arete roll, and the vampire changes back
when those successes are all negated.
• The transformed vampire is still a vampire, and that
vampire remains conscious. Said vampire may use any
Discipline that doesn't require moving her limbs. If the
bloodsucker has minions within summoning distance,
things might go rather poorly for the mage.
• A Kindred on the receiving end of this spell – whether
or not the spell succeeds – must make a Frenzy roll at
difficulty 8 (outright humiliation, plus dire peril). For
players unfamiliar with Vampire: The Masquerade,
this means that the vampire will flip her shit unless she
makes a successful roll, and anyone within reach will
become wallpaper in very short order.
• A vampire who gets turned into wooden furniture may
be set on fire, for the usual amount of damage. If the
spell lasts long enough, that vampire might be left out
in the sun, again taking the usual amount of damage
each turn. That burning Kindred automatically goes into
frenzy and may immediately change back into her normal
form by expending her entire blood pool, assuming that
she has enough blood left to do so. If not, she burns.
• Vampires hold immortal grudges. Any mage who
transforms a Kindred into furniture will be blood-hunted
by that vampire, her allies, and probably other vampires
as well. (A blood-hunt, for non-Vampire players, is
essentially a zero-mercy undead APB.) After all, examples
must be made, lest other mages get the wrong idea.
• When, not if, those hunters find the mage, their revenge
will be as gorily theatrical as possible… and when it comes
to gory theatrics, it's hard to beat an angry vampire!
Any mage dumb enough to brag about doing this sort
of thing (whether he can actually do it or not) deserves his
impending sadistic demise.
(••••• Life/ ••••• Matter)
A feat more spoken of than actually performed (if only
because so few mages have Mastered Life and Matter well
enough to enact such radical transformations of both), this
legendary spell transforms a dreaded undead entity into
domestic furniture. Variations include soap bubbles, trees,
household pets, and – in one infamous urban legend – a bag
of flaming poo. Despite such rumors, though, the realities
involved in this sort of metamorphosis make the idea more
theoretical than practical.
According to rumors, both Caeron Mustai and his
arch-rival Porthos Fitz-Empress had several pieces of Kindred
kindling in their studies, although this seems unlikely, given
the risk of said furniture turning back into vampires at
nopportune times. Certain vampires have claimed – rightly
or wrongly – that mages turned them into chairs and other
inanimate objects… typically using that claim to justify the
nightmarish fates they inflicted upon those mages afterward.
It was speculated that the Massasa Wars were sparked by such
disgraceful transformations… and in at least one verified
case, that speculation is true. The vengeance worked upon
the Hermetic Master in question – who dared to turn a flesh-
crafting Tzimisce into a commode – remains an object lesson
for mages with more skill than sense.
System:
Seriously, this is a truly stupid spell. No mage with
the Sphere aptitude and Arete to perform it is likely to ignore
the many complications involved in such a prank – to wit:
• It's vulgar. Really vulgar. As in, there is no way to possibly
justify this by paradigm-level vulgar. Paradox is inevitable.
• It's got to overcome the innate resistance a vampire has
to such spells. (See Night-Folk Counterspelling, p. 546.)
• It must inflict enough successes, after countermagick, to
bring that vampire from full strength to Incapacitated.
For a young vampire, that would demand at least four
successes (eight health levels); the same feat might
demand five, six, or even more successes if the mage is
trying to convert an elder Kindred.
• If you're using the divided successes option, then the
player must devote at least that many successes to the
transformation damage. That means that a four-success
roll will change the vampire into a lawn chair for one
turn. After that, the lawn chair becomes a vampire
again – and the mage had better have a good escape
spell handy at that point, or his name becomes "blood
bag."
• In order to effect a lasting transformation, the player must
either spend or roll additional successes, as shown on
the Base Damage or Duration chart. Turning a young
vampire into a chair for one day, for instance, would
require at least seven successes.
• Tuning an undead vampire into some other form of
inert material demands Matter 5. "Vampire" is not listed
on the Periodic Table of Elements, so transforming that
substance into different forms of matter requires full
Mastery of that Sphere.
• Vampires with the Protean and Vicissitude Disciplines
can transform back to their original form with very little
trouble. The vampire must spend one Blood Point for
each success the mage rolled. Every point negates one
success on the Arete roll, and the vampire changes back
when those successes are all negated.
• The transformed vampire is still a vampire, and that
vampire remains conscious. Said vampire may use any
Discipline that doesn't require moving her limbs. If the
bloodsucker has minions within summoning distance,
things might go rather poorly for the mage.
• A Kindred on the receiving end of this spell – whether
or not the spell succeeds – must make a Frenzy roll at
difficulty 8 (outright humiliation, plus dire peril). For
players unfamiliar with Vampire: The Masquerade,
this means that the vampire will flip her shit unless she
makes a successful roll, and anyone within reach will
become wallpaper in very short order.
• A vampire who gets turned into wooden furniture may
be set on fire, for the usual amount of damage. If the
spell lasts long enough, that vampire might be left out
in the sun, again taking the usual amount of damage
each turn. That burning Kindred automatically goes into
frenzy and may immediately change back into her normal
form by expending her entire blood pool, assuming that
she has enough blood left to do so. If not, she burns.
• Vampires hold immortal grudges. Any mage who
transforms a Kindred into furniture will be blood-hunted
by that vampire, her allies, and probably other vampires
as well. (A blood-hunt, for non-Vampire players, is
essentially a zero-mercy undead APB.) After all, examples
must be made, lest other mages get the wrong idea.
• When, not if, those hunters find the mage, their revenge
will be as gorily theatrical as possible… and when it comes
to gory theatrics, it's hard to beat an angry vampire!
Any mage dumb enough to brag about doing this sort
of thing (whether he can actually do it or not) deserves his
impending sadistic demise.
Only of use as a flex by an incredibly arrogant, incredibly stupid wizard.
Fixed, thanks for the reminder.
BoredMan
Maintaining the Agenda is our top priority
Last few.
Forgot to point this one out.
Im reading it on a laptop and its long.
On my screen, most people tend to average 3 lines per paragraph, and then space before the next paragraph; when they exceed the average in a paragraph, the next one is usually short.
Yours are often 6 lines or longer, and you dont space as regularly. So it comes off as a monolithic block of text.
Take for example this post I snipped.
Your post is four paragraphs; the first is 2x lines, the second is 6x lines, the third is 6x lines, the fourth is 4 lines.
There is no spacing between the paragraphs other than the quotes you are replying to.
It makes it look dense and impenetrable, and I suspect that more people just bounce off it than actually bother to complain.
Maybe I'm going too far in the opposite direction, but the point I'm trying to argue is not that they're impossible for us to get so much as that logistics is complicated.
The more specific and rare a subject you request is the more involved fulfilling it is. Having more resources around means you're more likely to have it, but also that finding it and moving it is harder. This applies to people as much as material goods.
Request a good doctor? Doable. Request a world class one? Workable but expensive. Requesting 5-6 world class surgeons with experience performing particular operations? That's going to take a minute.
Asking for really good sorcerers with those paths is different than asking for the best around. Especially with the side chatter about them being focused on counter spelling specifically. I can buy that poking our head into Sanctuary and calling for good sorcerers to show up would get results, but the tailor made applicants don't grow on trees and probably have important stuff on their plates. Those things can be handled, but not without lead time.
I guess the root of this is that I'm thinking about what the guy we ask to do this has to work out.
Imagine you work in the Empress's palace, maybe running Molly's fast action security forces. She pokes her head in and asks you to find the best people alive at X task with Y specialization that you didn't previously know to keep around and are in currently out living their lives in one of the cities. In the next hour.
They exist, and they're probably not going to turn down their goddess, but could you even get them on site in time?
I think this problem could be eased by say assigning a subsoul to help organize an office for it, but our security forces aren't exactly set up for that role.
The cosplayers get more dedicated every year.
Yeah phone posting. My bad on that, I never use this site any other way and honestly didn't consider that.
@DragonParadox replied in a way that implies to me that they don't need to worry about being turned into toasters by an uncontested shaping effect.
Wizards usually can't just snap their fingers and banish things or transmute bodies. With some prep yeah, but at combat times they're going to be evoking at them.
At most I'd guess they'd do night people counterspelling, which is wits+occult.
@DragonParadox we saw a sutra use computer to cast fortune magic once, is that a general rule for them? Full disclosure on the point of the question; because of the features I picked for flavor reasons being able to counterspell attacks like this with computer would be favorable to the War Weavers.
They'd get the -2 difficulty on the roll if it was wits+computer, but since they aren't casters otherwise it mostly lets them be good on the defense without investing lots of dots outside of their focus.
Your average Fortune user in sanctuary, by which I mean someone from the cities will use the Path of Fortune with technological means yes and thus roll computers. You could find someone who throws bones or reads squid ink in water or studies the flights of leather-wings, but they are far rarer since the people of the Jungles, the twilight planes and especially the Wastes are much less numerous.
Funny thing, the president had an entire hospital wing fully staffed reserved for their use at all times at every location they visit. Its the same for every world leaders. So probably dozens of them.
That reads like a gag spell added back in after they'd released errata to stop you from doing that.
In any case, casting bot to brick should be pretty hard on a base level for the same reasons even the gag spell doesn't make it a simple thing to do. Based on DP's reply to my question on this, the War Weavers would resist such effects using wits+computer with their Aracana Feature based computer difficulty reducer.
Which would be 4 dice at DC 4. Which isn't astounding but statistically they're getting the same sort of success you'd see out of someone rolling 6 dice against the standard difficulty. that's pretty good all told.
Well yes, but that's a setup thing and while they're very good in general that doesn't necessarily mean they're a full pool of all the best at everything.
Really that illustrates my point. The closest thing to reserved forces we have are whatever our people thought to include at the palace and already have at hand when we show up. So asking for skilled people in general roles - an experienced trauma surgeon - makes sense. Asking for a the best heart surgeon with a specialization in transplants won't necessarily have as many hits immediately at hand.
Especially because those sort of people tend to have commitments. The super heart surgeon might travel between hospitals a lot to work on people who need their particular attention. They'll come running, but if they didn't know to be nearby you might need to rush them in from Alaska. That's not even factoring in the time necessary to figure out where they are. Which isn't necessarily hard but is a complication.
On the other hand if you set up agreements for retaining people, scheduling who's on call when, and generally do the prep in advance it becomes easier to do.
We don't need to get way off into the weeds, but I think this calls for a little bit more effort than picking up a take and bake pizza.
I think the thing you are missing about in this logistical conundrum you are imagining is the fact that we have conveynce mages and AI overseers.
We say we want somone, that person gets a call in a minute that they are to drop everything and report to a point, where the conveynce master is there to transport them.
Its logistically very viable.