Thaumaturgy: Styles and Flavors - Page 3 - OG Myth-Weavers

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Thaumaturgy: Styles and Flavors

   
You can't utilize it when something is on top of you like you can with Evocation but there is plenty of combat applications of Thaumaturgy (as is shown in the canon).

Also, the book says that most of the thaumaturgy effects take a standard action (so there's a contradiction).

It's really the prep time - most wizards aren't throwing around Thaumaturgy that is much more effective than their evocations unless they have a few extra moments. A wizard like the Merlin, for example, is capable of a bit more. These things are all relative though depending on various factors.

Actually, if you look at all the times he has used Thaumaturgy, he isn't using it /in/ combat. He uses it before combat gets started. For example, the illusions he puts together in the FBI building during Changes takes place before the vampires are attacking. The big earth stompah spell in South America happens before combat is engaged. Etc.

If you have a few minutes, you can pull all sorts of things together. Powerful veils, summoned allies, landmines, and so on. But you need prep time. If you got to pull off stuff with a vampire right in your face, that's Evocation. Otherwise, why have two separate powers?

And Sponsored Magic is also a separate power. And what that lets you do is cast certain specified Thau-like effects using Evocation speed. You have to use Power and Control, just like Evocation and do it all in one turn. No safe casting like with Thaumaturgy.

Go to that page. The tablet on your left. The last paragraph answers your question. Sponsored magic has nothing to do with this.

....Do you have a pg number for what /you/ are looking at?

pg 288, it addresses the point of distinction of evocation with thaumaturgy when you have evothaum:
This may seem like a bit of a shell game,
since the sets of mechanical effects available
to thaumaturgy and evocation are pretty
similar, with only a few areas of non-overlap.
You’d be mostly right, but for this point:
getting a broad range of effects out of evocation
is an exercise in creative rationalization.
What the power source is offering in this
specific case, then, is a broadening of what
you don’t have to rationalize. It’s just quickly,
easily available to your spellcaster. Combine
this with a few mechanical benefits available
with each source and it’s a definite upgrade
to a character’s arcane options.
And you can use that reasoning even when you don't have a sponsor.

@Chee
I would say as they Council army was actively engaged in battle that counts as "in-combat" - this is of course open to interpretation.

@Blkc4ce
I think the key phrase in that sidebar is "power source" - Evo-thaum by RAW is the purview of Sponsored Magic because the power source is doing all the extra work or rationalization as the sidebar puts it. The average practitioner just isn't going to be capable of that (especially as YS only goes up to 10 Refresh characters).

EDIT: This conversation actually makes me want to put out a Customer Power that I've created for Spell-Craft, however I think I shall make that a separate thread as I would like to keep this one for discussing different types of Thaumaturgy!




 

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