And I agree. I guess the bigger point would be that the flow of books to the troupe can and should be influenced by the players, as otherwise it stales pretty fast.
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This can play out in any number of ways.
The most boring is the bustling book market prescribed by canon [Cov]. If you have vis, there is the redcap mail order service, and if you have not, you make magi with good teacher and write to trade in kind. Sure, the fledgling covenant may have a sparse library to start with, but if the market is open and mundane scribes are trivial to recruit and keep, it is easy to build a library.
And the problem is that once the book is bought, there is no further vis cost. You can spend every season reading, and reserve your vis for enchantments.
If you make the Order a little more WW, books may be treasured more. Getting a book worth keeping may be a political adventure. The magi may be left to vis studies for ages, until they stumble upon an opportunity. Reader hospitality may be more popular than purchase, which may incur a vis charge per season.
One of the problems which annoys me is that the vis game balances poorly. An enchantment-driven magus is constantly out of pocket, while everybody else can spend their time reading and hoard vis for decades. If everybody depends on vis studies. this would even out a little.
You can also trim down the library by making mundane help hard to recruit and keep, possibly playing the loyalty mechanics harshly, or make the population sparse. That would cap book copying and thus trade.
The problem is that every measure you take to limit books will slow down the pace of the saga. Books remain valuable, and pro-active players would simply make an effort and initiate stories to win new treasures. Sure, you can reduce it to a down-time die roll, but that's hardly less boring.
Making a slow-paced saga with lots of stories about winning favours and trading books could be a good story to tell, though.
This assumes that their character concept is "specialist in TeFo" which has always felt like the most basic and boring of character concepts to me. I think there is a wide spread between laser like focus on your TeFo and trainer in all, master of none and that spread contains the vast majority of the interesting character concepts with goals and personalities more interesting than simply "be the best at X."
You can think that and the rules make that possible. I don't think that is actually what Magi think of as legacies.I think they consider apprentices and students to be legacies. I don't think that the entire Order acts like they are Bonisagus magi.I don't think that they are obsessed with theoretical knowledge (highest possible Art) and I don't think they are keen on sharing their knowledge. And I don't think that these high quality books are being traded. People are letting you study in their library for compensation.
Between Ex Misc traditions, Mystery Houses, and Mystery Cults, half the Order is in some kind of secretive organization with oddball magic. Yes, game mechanics let a Merinita Archmage write a book on vanilla Imaginem with no faerie mysteries involved, but why would they? The Faerie mysteries are what they are about. And mystery cults don't circulate their knowledge. That's what makes them Mystery Cults.
Do you think Tytalus or Flambeau Magi are generally gonna go "woah, that dude's clearly the best, look at this book he wrote!". Not to mention there isn't a game mechanic objective standard in character. Is Lord of the Rings actually the best fantasy novel if there were game mechanics? It's clearly good, influential, and highly regarded. But someone coming a long and publishing a "better" book doesn't make them likely to displace Tolkien.
And, fundamentally, I don't think the players' obsession with maximum Art scores is actually how wizards would work. There's so many practical things to do with Magic that are more impressive than grinding out season after season of incremental progress. And in character, without mechanics, who is going to know you are now 42 instead of 40 if fame is actually what you are after? New spells, magic items, weird personal achievements, smiting dragons, and all kinds of applied magic is how most wizards will evaluate someone's power and success. Unless you are in a Bonisagus mindset, you get the high art to do the practical things. Not for the sake of having the high art. Even the Bonisagus Folio favors lab texts over tractatus.
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I mentioned that my groups sagas have tended to de-emphasize books.
Partially, it was to encourage adventures and lab work.
Partially, though, it was to greatly simplify the Hermetic economy, and make it easy to have it conform to the way we thought it should work, as opposed to the way it seems it would work, if all the rules scattered over all the 5th edition books were summed up and applied. Esp. if some of our players are fighting lifelong addictions to munchkinism.
I don't think the specifics of our HRs matter so much as the overall result, which I'd characterize this way: Books become more like vis. They require a magical source (A mage. No copies made by mundane scribes), are of rather limited availability, and tend to be traded as-magic for-magic.
The experience of my first two sagas was instructive. In the first we were a spring covenant with a poor library, and one mage tended to hoover up all the vis.
That taught us the importance of vis.
The second saga was an Autumn covenant with - more to the point of this discussion - a wonderful library. The contrast demonstrated the importance of books, which may have only grown over the editions. That's not a bad thing, but it's hard to understate the influence of books on a saga. Player groups are very well served by putting some real thought into what they want, then making any necessary adjustments. Which might more often involve forgoing certain options rather than needing to add house rules.
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All you say is true in principle, yet it very rarely works out in practice.
First problem is of course the canon assertion that the Order in 1220 has a bustling book trade, combined with the fairly low requirements to get mundane scribes to copy the books.
Second problem is that if you want to hide the clever magi behind some secretive organisation, you have to put some effort into designing the demeanour, if not their actual motivation.
The third problem is that it is hard to avoid being side-tracked by the pure mechanics. Books is the low-cost, superior way to knowledge. Even if you are not heading for the 40s and want to make spells and devices instead, you need to spend some time advancing arts. When book trades are so obviously beneficial to PCs, how do you design the NPC motivation so that they don't?
I am not saying it could not work, but it takes consorted effort in the troupe, and that's a rare thing. Every troupe tends to have one or two spreadsheet enthusiasts ...
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Sure, there's problems. That's because the game rightfully emphasizes fun play experience over "the fiction of the setting". In 2e/3e, there were a lot of unfun elements around libraries. If you didn't have a terrible Spring library with lots of low scores, most players couldn't interact with the book writing rules. It was a complete waste of time. And once you exhausted your library, you were supposed to study from vis. But advancement was all or nothing, so you could burn lots of vis and not actually get better. Very unfun.
So, wisely, they changed the rules on how libraries worked. Now any player can get in on the book writing game and no one has wasted seasons (except possibly in Original Research). They increased the vis cost of studying from vis to keep it in line with the wasted vis of the old system.
But once you turn around and apply that to all the NPCs, you get problems. Players know if it is better to read Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones because they can see the mechanics. If your 'lively book trade' is based on all the NPCs being able to see the mechanics, libraries would be one summa and a bunch of tractatus.
The easiest way to play Ars Magica is straight RAW with all NPCs knowing the mechanics. Which puts you in the situation that the best way to be the world's foremost physicist is to read the most doctoral theses you can. Which does not make for great gameplay particularly. At least, in my opinion.
So, yeah, every table is going to have to decide what they want the Order to look like. And what they think will be fun gameplay. Because, sure, Covenants says there is a lively book trade, but most of the Tribunal books act like there isn't and somehow 6 Arts don't have a Branch.
I simply don't think it is useful to keep pushing the rules in the direction of supporting this view that all NPC see the mechanics and evaluate them like PCs do. I don't think it is healthy for the game. But, again, that is my opinion. It shouldn't affect how people play at their table unless they happen to agree with it.
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sure, but the challenge is not to realise that real people and NPCs do not think like players. The challenge is to decide what makes NPCs tick and design them to be more like real people than the players are.
Yeah, but I feel like my previous post addressed my view on that. 
I don't think that there will be consensus on that, which is fine. Everyone should be free to configure their saga as they wish.
I don't have extensive experience with ArM5, but I have also a feeling that there is an issue with books. But my feeling is that the issue is not something that was mentioned above, it is that the Good Teacher virtue has too much impact on the quality of libraries, and results in the assumption that because the Order of Hermes exists since many centuries, books with high Quality have been written and can be found in many libraries.
Rather than adding three to the qualities of books written, I think that it should make it faster to write books, twice faster for example.
Maybe? That would make the theoretical limit on books a bit lower. 38 instead of 41. It's a virtue. You don't have to say anything about how common a virtue it is. That's kind of the issue in a lot of the discussion. It is possible to have a Magus who has +5 Communication, Affinity with Art, Book Learner, Good Teacher, etc, etc. So, obviously, such a magus should exist! Imho, no?
No matter what the rules are, you are going to need to tweak them to suit your troupe's preferences. The game talks a little about this in discussion of saga parameters with high vis/low vis, fast/slow, very magical/less magical. It could have stood some more attention to the different parameters around how libraries and books work in the setting. And what the effects of those decisions are, so newer groups can get closer to their preferred style out of the box.
I will have to disagree here. Why on Earth is this an SG problem and not a player problem? Why do I have to bend to the whims and wishes of the players? This, and sorry if I sound abrasive, would be a player skill issue .
Why in the world is it a problem? I see it as an opportunity, or if you’d rather, a Story Hook.
Any time a player says “my character wants X, it is a perfect opportunity to create a story and everyone wins.
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I would imagine that some troupes might get tired of "ugh, another 'find a book' story". It is certainly possible to have a wide range of stories about this sort of thing and not have this trouble, but not everyone is so inclined. They'd rather spend their stories on other things.
And if you go with my preference, which is hospitality studies (aka you go to someone's library to study, but not copy), that can result in needing to have the libraries of all the nearby covenants available if your players aren't tolerant of "Okay, I need an aquam book, what's the options?" but want to be able to compare available options between different Arts, fees, etc well in advance.
Sounds like an Order of Hermes Lore roll to know what they've got (or just whether they have a really famous Aquam specialist or had one in the past if they're old). And from an SG end, for the big old covenants with famous libraries you can use something like the rules for the great Library of Durenmar in GOTF.
Well.
Under the DE draft, a sound tractatus (quality 11, and thus returning 11 XP) costs 2 or 3 pawns of vis, and the tractatus still exists after you read it, meaning it can benefit your covenant-mates or be sold on to another covenant. (Cow & Calf is about copies, after all, not selling on an original.)
If you have an Art score of 6+, and your covenant has a magic aura of 5, you will average 10.75 XP from studying from 2+ pawns of vis (2 at 6-10, 3 at 11-15, 4 at 16-20 . . .), and the vis is then gone. (Also, of course, there's the botch risk.)
Assuming that most covenants have an aura of 5 or less (and the example "strong Autumn covenant" in Chapter 6 is Aura 5), and most magi do not have a Virtue that gives special benefits to studying from vis or a Flaw that penalizes studying from books (since that's the default), most magi in the Order should happily trade vis for known-sound tractatus rather than study from that or more vis.
Of course, NPC magi may have a hard time actually quantifying the relative benefits of vis study and reading sound tractatus, given the statistical nature of the results of vis study and the difficulty of quantifying a gain in knowledge.
But the bigger wedge in there is "known-sound". If magi don't know that an unread tractatus is sound, they might well prefer spending more vis in a season to save time over discovering they've spent a season reading a Q4 tractatus. And there are no rules I can recall to know what a book's Quality is before spending a season studying it, even if it is reasonable to assume that after spending a season in study a maga will know roughly how good it was.
In the current rules, tractatus are substantially better than studying from vis. This is a side effect of not wanting players to have wasted seasons. In earlier rules, you used less vis per try but you could, and regularly did, get nothing for it. The new rules make you use more vis up front, but you always get something.
But if you make tractatus widely and cheaply available, it's never worth the risk of vis study.
Are big old covenants the only ones with books of value? Seems unlikely. Youngish magi ought to be able to find other covenants with less august libraries that are of benefit to their particular study. Mistridge's library might only be a bookshelf (as it was described in Covenants 2e :P) but if one of those books is useful, that's probably better than standing in line at Durenmar or Coeris.
I like designing libraries, but not everyone does.
Vis study is too risking. Logically the root books exist, because if they don't someone writes them. Mid range books to get to level 15 must also exist, for the same reason (A Quality 15, level 10, while called "vain", is better than most tractatus, and not complex to make). Why risk botching and wasting resources, for the same average XP return?
Tractatus should grow like weeds. Most magi will want a score at 5. Training apprentices, better sponts, spells with requisites. A quality 6 tractatus is still better than nothing, so at some point most magi without com penalties will churn out some tractatus. The redcaps will be shipping tractatus all over the place.
That elder mage who wants to make that capstone spell, enchantment, whatever. They need tractatus, and have the resources to pay. Again, logically in the history of the order, some magi wanted 40 tractatii to drive the score to achieve that end goal. An old mage spending 6+ vis to study, risking that twilight, I don't think so.
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It seems to me that the first issue is that everyone is trying to solve different "problems".
It might be useful to step back and instead of arguing how things "should" be discussing which solutions address which issues most effectively, while acknowledging that one saga may have the opposite issue from another saga depending on what game style or background is preferred.
For example- if I decide I want to use a "library score" to support Independant study what range of bonus xp should I be looking at before it becomes excessive. One obvious part of this is whether I want independent study to potentially be more beneficial than adventuring...
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Yes, as I said, the current rules make is so that the best way to be the ultimate physicist is to read the maximum number of doctoral theses. Actually doing any labwork is stupid.
This is in contrast to earlier editions, where it was literally impossible to become a top expert without doing your own research. Whether that was experimenting with vis for direct Arts improvement or experimenting with spell design and getting lucky on insights. Or getting insight from Twilight.
If you like the 'avoid labwork like the plague' paradigm, make lots of tractatus available. That's fully supported by the rules.
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