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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 7764613" data-attributes="member: 5142">Their spells do fail. Their magic is generally more reliable, especially given that it is an entire culture and society built around magical wizardry, but their spells can and do fail. Sometimes this is the result of verbal failures, technical failures (e.g., wands), mental failures, or as a result of other magic. We do often see this, however, from the perspective of trainees, which may represent the sort of expected failures for young wizards-in-training. Ron was injured for a large swath of Book 7 because his botched Apportation spell caused him physical injury. (If we were playing in Fate, we may say that Ron's PC failed their Overcome check when attempting Apportation. As getting out of the Ministry of Magic was critical for the story, the PC chose "Success on a Failure" and accepted - in a consultation with the GM - an appropriate Consequence that required multiple sessions for it to slowly clear.) Yet one of the best series of spell failures from an adult wizard that comes to mind is Gilderoy Lockhart in Book 2, who fails a spell for mending broken bones, a spell disposing of a conjured snake, and fails a memory wipe spell (though this last one has more to do with him using Ron's malfunctioning wand). There may be a few other spells he fails, but I can't recall. So spell failure (or spell incompetence) is most definitely a thing even for adults in Harry Potter. (Here as well, we may also give Lockhart a Fate Aspect reflecting this failure - e.g., "Magical Celebrity Fraud" or "All talk but no game" - that accounts for this failure.) All that said, Harry Potter's franchise imagines a different sort of wizarding class fantasy for its young adult world. The characters in such a world would presumably be all wizards. So distinctions between characters would likely be represented in other ways. These are the sort of scenarios that are appropriate for Fate Accelerated games, which adopts Approaches (e.g., Force, Careful, Smarts, Flashy, etc.) that prioritizes how a character does things over specified ability scores reflecting physical/mental characteristics.</blockquote>

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