Every time you invent a work-around like a casting tablet it gives a magus extra seasons to munchkin out at the stuff he's really interested in. If you got rid of things like casting tablets, super high level books, and uber labs then I think a lot less of us would be experimenting with arts as abilities and similar power fixes.
Maybe the specialist is disinclined to journey to your distant covenant and is willing to send a casting tablet via Redcap. I'm not saying make them freely available to whomever wants them at covenant creation. IMO, I think that's a bad idea. But used judiciously there's nothing wrong with them.
See above... I can see a specialist making a casting tablet and sending it off, charging an exorbitant fee consistent with him actually doing the work, and then protecting the tablet under cow and calf or renting it out for a season and expecting it to be returned, and so on, and so forth. The idea is limiting their access to the PCs. Making every casting tablet under the sun available to the PCs at the start of the saga will ruin an SG's day to be sure.
See, to me specialists for hire are also part of the power escalation in recent Ars Magica, or at least in AM as discussed on these boards and in supplements like Covenants as compared to my old view of the game world. You want a Mystic Tower? Choose one of the local magi to spend some time learning the spell. If you're lucky you can find a lab text, if not reinvent the spell. Being able to hire a specialist to build the tower or to brew a longevity potion just gives the PC magi more time to get powerful. If you like powerful magi and an OOH that overpowers everything short of Divine Intervention, this is no problem. If you favor a lower powered world it just causes trouble.
I think it's implicit that specialists exist within the Order. There is a huge area open for discussion as to how much they should really cost. Obviously, in a lower powered saga, they should cost a lot, I mean a whole lot, and not just in vis. The more a specialist costs the more likely their benefit should be for the entire covenant. If you block off a CrCo longevity ritual specialist from easy access, though, someone at the local covenant (if we're talking munchkinism) is likely going to assume that role...
I concur. The whole concept of specialists-for-hire is not and never will be part of any Ars Magica saga I run. Frankly, it undermines the whole feel of magi for me. Magi are not wandering craftsmen. Magi are wizards... wise, powerful, subtle and secretive. Magic is a Mystery not a trade. To have these specialists-for-hire wandering around swapping powerful spells and enchantments just ruins the whole setting for me.
Truthfully, I think if you really want to have a less powerful saga, all you really need to change is the attitudes of the players and the assumptions of some of the source books.
This is probably the single most important piece of advice...
Hiring a specialist is obviously a good deal at whatever price you set, or nobody would hire them. I may complain in real life about what my plumber charges me but I'm obviously better off paying him then spending the time it would take to learn how to do the work well myself. Getting rid of the specialists for hire must make life harder for the PC magi or there would be no market.
Everyone grouses about CrCo magi living longer than others if you disallow specialists but I've never seen the problem. If you're a wizard who spends his life obsessing over the elixer of life instead of doing other interesting things, you ought to be able to live longer. I think the issue just comes from players who want to play their own concepts and still live forever.
If someone at the covenant is a CrCo specialist (or one of the two), then that person is likely going to be providng LRs for his covenant-mates, or at least be asked. He's also going to also be charging for this, right? He becomes the defacto specialist selling his services to the magi of his covenant. So if he's doing it for his own covenant-mates, why isn't someone else out there doing it for others?
Going back to the plumber comparison, I can do plumbing, it might take me 4 times as long, but I can get it done, eventually. So I weigh whether it's worth it for me to do it or hire someone to do it... Human behavior is economic behavior, someone out there is selling the service, and a question can right be asked is the price worth it? If specialists are too accessible to the PCs, then they need to adjust the prices accordingly.
If you're grousing about the availability of specialists, then I think ultimately you need to reconsider the pricing model you're working with and increase it accordingly.
I didn't explain the CrCo bit very well. To me a specialist is a specialist, whether a PC or an NPC. One house rule I've long favored is to half the effect of longevity potions for everyone but the creator, regardless of magic affinity. A magus either spends time learning CrCo instead of earthquake spells or demon summonings, or else dies younger. It makes for a less powerful Order.
The argument you and others make with specialists or new virtues or any other option is that if they're priced right they don't raise the power level. In practice they always do raise that level though. Nobody would pay for the specialist or waste points on the virtue or go through initiation unless they saw a net benefit. So you can either price it out of the market and make it pointless or accept that it will increase power levels. I defy anyone to argue that magi made with the core book alone are as powerful or as flexible as magi made by someone using the entire line as published to date.
No, the argument I'm making is that if you have a saga where things are sold and you don't like how it affects the saga, then the pricing structure is too cheap. Eventually that specialist, or at least the one most capable of making an LR, is going to be asked by someone in the covenant to make his LR, because his scores are better. So what's that going to cost? That question is difficult to calculate without having a basis of how much it would cost out in the mythic world. So, your HR effectively nerfs the LR for others bit and now the CrCo specialist is no longer necessary. How do you nerf the Terram specialist who goes out and builds things for others? It's a pretty sweet gig, go some place build someone a covenant full of buildings and get income for the next 5, 10 or 20 years... Do it maybe once or twice a year, and that specialist is set for life, right? Do Verditius sell their enchanted items? Why? They're specialists, too...
You're changing the scope of the discussion. I didn't say anything about using anything outside the core book. The MRB, Puissant Creo, Affinity Creo, Puissant Corpus, Affinity Corpus, mMF:Aging, Puissant and/or Affinity Magic Theory is going to make a pretty darned good LR specialist with just the MRB.
All things considered, the alternative is spending a number of seasons (1 is a number) in studies of Creo and or Terram. Both of whic are highly useful Arts. And ofcourse buying a labtext, then spending a season nventing the spell from the lab text.
That, or building a mundane building, obviously.
I think players tend to underestimate the value of time for the specialist, which leads to low price. If you're a longevity specialist obsessed with living forever, what else could you have done in that season? Remember, you are never going to get that time back, ever, so it better be worth your while. You could have spent the season researching a way to live longer, but now you've "lost" it crafting a longevity ritual for someone who has no interest in your s-o-important research -- he just wants to live longer without spending the time.
In many sagas, people seem to think that the value of a season is based on how much Vim vis you could have extracted in that season. I think it should be based on you highest Te+Fo lab total instead of your CrVi total. Multiply this by 2 or more (based on the personality of the magus) and now we can start talking. This means that a longevity specialist (with a CrCo lab total of 90, for example) would charge at least 36 pawns of raw vis to craft your longevity ritual. Of course, if you allow him to experiment on this new technique he's working on, he might be willing to lower his price... to say 18 pawns.
So the best specialists should be essentially too costly for junior magi, which is simply common sense. Even today, the best services are only available to a minority.
But that's getting far from the original subject...
It's not far from the subject at all. If the Order is less powerful than the implications of trade do need to be discussed. Books, Vis, Magic Items and Services are all parts of the economics of the Order. It's more nuanced than saying specialists don't exist or don't offer services. The 130 year old magus with a horde of vis whose longevity ritual has begun failing regularly and it failed him again this past winter is desparate to get a new one... He might be highly motivated to seek out a specialist. And of course, the specialist would be highly motivated to extract an extreme price... Is the PC an expert? That could be an interesting story, and it does not have to be power breaking. Say they bargain for the price, and agree to a half now and half on delivery deal, but the 130 y.o magus doesn't have the second half of the payment, or doesn't want to pay and only tells the player once the LR has been taken. Oh, and I'm dis-inviting you from the Aegis. What's the PC going to do?
In a less powerful Order, costs for things should be higher, and covenants will generally look to within to solve most problems that they can. They may be imperfect solutions, but that's life.
Mispricing can certainly be a problem, as you and others point out. However, if we assume a fair price then classical economics informs us that commerce / division of labor will be beneficial to both sides in a transaction. Therefore, the more specialists and commerce we have, the stronger the Order and its individual members. This certainly corresponds to the intuitive feel one gets in AM when useful things are more widely available for sale.
Pretty much. This has two positive effects for me - a younger order with less ancient and powerful magi, and an atmosphere where magi who specialize in eternal life live significantly longer than those who specialize in other things. I believe this was the way it worked in an early edition of the game, although my memory could be faulty and I don't have the books nearby.
It's not a question of wanting to nerf Terram or other specialists, but certainly one effect is that they live shorter lives without purchased longevity potions. That's a pretty significant nerfing.
Granted, I'm moving too far afield here. My larger point is that increasing options, even an a fair price, always leads to an increase in overall flexibility and power, unless the options are so weak or pointless as to be forgotten about completely. But you're right, we're way off topic now.
You aren't understanding me. If no specialists sell their services to other magi, than what are they doing? What economic activity occurs in your saga?
increasing options is an opportunity to tell interesting stories. Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done or even is being done, but as an SG, telling interesting stories is what I'm after. If players are just going after specialists because it helps them move their numbers on the page around, that's a bit of a problem. If the troupe decides they want their magi to solve a particular problem by hiring a specialist to do the work, well, there is a lot of room to tell interesting stories there, and an awesome opportunity to develop a compelling NPC that players can engage in dialog or correspondence. If you say Magi don't sell their magic, then what are they doing?
Studying magic. That's what wizards do.
Why do wizards have to engaged in magically based economic activity? Why would magi have to sell their services? Just because you're a wizard doesn't mean you're a whore. Magic isn't a trade.
In Ars Magica, it could certainly be argued that magic is an Art, yes.
I want to add that, in my saga, a basic tension within the magical community exists between those who view the study of magic as an end unto itself - the goal of magic being the spiritual advancement of the magus - and those who view magic as also carrying with it an obligation to be used for the good of others. The orthodox view of the Order holds the former position, and dismisses those who use magic to help their neighbors as mere hedge wizards at best, interfering with mundanes at worst. However, both view those who sell their magic for their own personal gain as nothing more than whores, trading their hard won wisdom and the core of their soul for mere coin.
Also, under my model, specialists don't sell their services because if you haven't developed the knowledge to achieve a given spell or enchantment yourself, you haven't developed the wisdom to handle it properly. You want to live longer, first understand powers and properties of life.
You're somewhat going full circle here.
- The existence of specialists, among other things, means that magi can devote more seasons to study their arts, which I see as a problem
- I will thus supress the trade in the order.
- But it magi aren't devoting their seasons to doing things for other magi, what are they doing?
- Devoting their seasons to study, of course!
This is certainly the better way to handle the "no trade" thing (that is, social pressure), but this implies that, because your sodales prefers to devote 10 years to study terram, he does not deserve to live as long as you, who devoted 10 years to study corpus.
So, if you're wise, you study Corpus and not Imaginem, or Ignem? While true in your saga (If you study Ignem or Imaginem, you die), I can't see, say, the Flambeau, or the Jerbiton, going with this, seeing their Art delegated to the rank of secondary pastime, having to devote time to prolong their life instead of learning how to burn these Hedge Magi, or how to create more perfect and beautiful illusions. I can't see the Tremere going for this, since it is such a waste of talent.
This also means that your Order should have an abondance of Corpus texts and specialists, compared to other magi.
I'd say that your problem here is, maybe, both a pricing problem, and a longevity problem. If you increase the price of Longevity rituals (someone suggested going with the lab total used, and this is great) and diminish their power for everyone (so that magi live less), you should get a similar result.