How would you fine people rule the virtue:affinity for puns? Basically your spells/speech patterns must be fairly full of puns. Fey magi would have this for sure!
Presumably the puns are in Latin.
Can you give us an example?
It could work.
Expelliarmus - Perdo Corpus Remove targets arm.
Expecto Patronus - Creo Ignem with an intelligo requisite. Room area, brands a stag on the temple of everyone who is a bastard.
Ridiculous - Creo Animal with a Perdo Imaginem requisite. Infects a person and their clothing with louse, however, they are invisible.
Merder - Creo Terrum with a corpus requisite. Creates a very large pile of dung that falls on someone and chokes them to death. (french, but it has links to latin)
Those aren't really latin puns, plus not really sure how that would be an affinity...
the best I can personally come up with is the idea that it would be based on the similarity between book and freedom in Latin (libre/liber) but I couldn't begin to set up the actual structure of the pun- maybe something about Hercules and the book of Prometheus...
Of course not. Harry Potter doesn't correclty use Latin. Nor can I.
While Ars Majica is generally a game that is taken seriously, as the OP mentioned in game use of puns, I thought he was going a certain way, and I was being a bit silly.
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"Non angli sed angeli" ("Not Angles but Angels") is the only one I can think of off the top of my head. Bonus points for it working in translation as well.
Instead of an Affinity, I would do this as Special Circumstances, granting a bonus when you cast a spell while making an original pun—which is to say, a pun your magus has not previously used. I add that condition to keep the joke from getting too old too fast. But otherwise I would be pretty generous with the bonus, ignoring what language the pun was made in, or how good/bad it was.
If you really wanted to play this up, you could make it a Required Condition, but few players would consent to that, since it would prevent them from casting their spell silently or even quietly.
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Unless the pun intended was purely visual in nature of course. There might even be daemons of punnery if you wanted!
Chicken a la Guorna works in English (it's served to make sure a magus is properly feted(fetid)), but probably not in Latin.
Has anybody statted up the Little Myrrh Maid?
In my last session my herbam maga managed to create her amphitheatre with a citrus tree canopy to put on greek plays.
just so she could go from the sub-lime to read Aeschylus
That pun was 5 years IRL in the making.
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Libre de promethus Ex con pedes.
translates to "book of Prometheus from with feet" but compedes is chains and liber is free, so
Liber de Prometheus ex compedes
would mean freedom of Prometheus from chains
which is why puns in foreign languages don't generally work out well...
Would it work better as a flaw?
Maybe you could have to be able to cast silly spells at a bonus to penetration?
Maybe instead of breakthroughs they can make bakethoughs!
Would affinity with puns give you a bonus for enigma texts/magic?
why would it?
would puns be considered a violent use of enigma?
Possibly....