That could work. Lots of ways you might take it. The reader might be the one with the option - to what degree do they accept what the author wtites. More xps, but with a drawback - at least potentially.
I was assuming the influence isn't optional, but that both bonuses and penalties wouldn't inevitably occur - linked to die roll - and would often be temporary. Time, or when you improve the relevant score by a point or few. Or maybe there's just a story event. Say, you botch a spell after reading a Bj. written text, you turn into an otter for 5 min, and the covenant Bj. gets really pissed, because it seems you might have somehow pierced the mystery cult.
You might set it up something like the Extraordinary Events table, though probably with much more muted results.
If I were to set up more detailed book rules, I'd probably put a lot of significance on availability. Tieing it to these last couple posts, it might be designed such that a player might need to choose between paying a pawn of vis and getting a copy of the book his parens recommends in a year or two, or making an immediate trade with Gastinious of Tytalus, who has this weird look in his eyes whenever he speaks of the text he offers. But the author was widely acknowledged as the greatest Muto specialist in 300 years ... I wonder what happened to him.
Maybe a simpler way of dealing with this problem is to reduce the Quality of a Tractatus based on the Ability/Art in question.
So, for Arts, maybe -1 quality per 5 full levels in an Art. That means that once you hit 20 in an Art, that level 12 Tractatus is now an effective 8. Sure, you can keep leveling up safely, but it will slow down dramatically as your Art scales up.
For Abilities, maybe -1 per 3 full levels?
I’d need to do some math on this before giving a strong number recommendation, but I feel like something structured like this would be both simple and effective.
I think that both are problems. Studying Vis in a typical covenant’s 3 Aura gives you an average of 8 XP per season.
Also, you will eventually botch. Going from 21 to 26 at that rate takes 15 seasons at a 4.1% chance of botching each (5 dice). Doing that gives you a 47% chance of not botching, so basically it’s a coin toss. It gets worse from there.
Yes, but it cleanly solves the books are always better and safer problem.
It creates a point where, regardless of book supply, vis become better but riskier.
EDIT: Ultimately, my objection to the state of books is that as long as you can get a Tractatus of Quality equal to or higher than Covenant Aura + 5, it is better to spend your vis on buying or renting that Tractatus.
That implies that magi should be willing to spend at least their season study amount of vis on a Quality 8 Tractatus if they live in an Aura of 3.
The problems isn't books are too good, it is everything else is rubbish, especially in context of magic.
Practice is not an option. Vis is risking twilight every 3 years. There is this weird idea adults teaching adults is somehow demeaning to the student, so not done.
Nerfing books is not the answer. Making study from vis cheaper and less likely to send the magi in to twilight is the answer.
I agree, mostly. 'Everything else is rubbish' is also a problem.
Much of that is saga dependent; it has to do with what the troupe wants in terms of 'how rapid is advancement supposed to be'. But even aside from that, there are wide gaps between what all the different learning methods can yield, as well as their costs.
Exposure is 2 xp per season; Practice (No Practice for Arts!) is 4 xp per season; Training (Np Training for Arts!) is 3+Ability per season; Study from Vis is 1-9 +Aura (with botches!) -- Teaching (minimum ~SQ:10 for Arts) and Books are far superior.
So bringing Books and Teaching into line with all the other methods of learning seems appropriate; and the other standout is 'Study from Vis' which really sucks. It not only has a chance to botch, with increasingly severe botch chances as the Aura & Arts score rises, but it also costs Art-specific Vis.
I'm not sure how to address that. My proposal above was a way to increase the Source Quality of Study from Vis, but the prices and risks are just like the default system -- so there is room for improvement.
I do have a few book related ideas based on the normal rules:
One I've implemented in my game - Starting libraries are calculated differently:
Arts Summa - (Level x Quality)/5 (round up) = built point cost
Ability Summa - ((Level x 3) x Quality)/5 (round up) = built point cost
Tractatus - exp value of Quality (if it were treated as an accelerated ability)/5 (round up) = built point cost
(Using the arts exp table or triangular numbers (i.e. 1pt = 1, 2 pts =3, 3pts = 6, 4pts = 10 etc...))
This makes very poor quality books cheap and very high quality books expensive to discourage getting the highest level possible at starting.
This one is just an idea:
When you write a Tractatus you can and indeed must write it with multiple subjects. Divide the normal quality between topics. so for example Aristotle's Categories is normally a Lv 10 Artes Liberales Tracatus. Using this rule it might be a Tractatus with Q10 (6 exp Artes Liberales, 3 exp Philosophae, 1 exp Area Lore: Aegian). Maybe link the amount of quality on each subject you can put into a Tractatus to the level of the skill you have.
All Hermetic texts would have a single point of their quality dedicated to Order of Hermes Lore and a point or two of magic theory.
The primary focus of the book still works to determine how many tractatus you can write on any given subject.
One thing that bugs me about the rules for writing books is how incestuous it can be.
You can have a small group of people each with Magic Theory 3 write a book on MT. They can read each others work and then as they level up their skill in MT, they can write another book each. Whilst this has some limits, it's essentially creating knowledge out of nothing. They are just parroting back what they have already learned and generating new knowledge out of thin air.
So instead imagine if:
When you write a Tractatus you get a -2 penalty by default.
This penalty can be ignored if:
You have studied from the appropriate source of Vis last season.
You got a triple explosion or a triple botch on the relevant ability last season (Mostly for Mundane skills, you can learn almost as much from massive failure as success.)
You practiced that ability in the previous season.
You performed and experiment and got a successful discovery roll last season. (This grants an additional +2 to the quality)
Yes, the modern mindset of everything fundamentally derives from experiment can lead us astray here. The act of writing things down and then reading in a "sewing circle" is just a slowed down version of argument through disputation, which was a valid way of arriving at truth through pure reason. I see no problem with such endeavours, and much to recommend them.
Do keep in mind that studying from Vis is a stress roll. People frequently freak out about the botch chance, but there is also the ability to roll open ended and get a large amount of xp.
That’s because the stress die doesn’t do much to increase the average. It mathematically works out as a roughly 25% increase in expectation value, which takes an Aura 3 vis study from an expectation value of 8 xp to 10 xp for a season.
That’s less xp than the 11 quality sound tractatus that is pretty common according to Covenants.
So, people are right to be concerned about the botch chance more than the bonus. Studying vis needs to be higher reward to balance out its inherent risk.
Either that, or books need to be less effective as your arts increase.
Books are definitely overvalued in the post Covenants rules, which standardized a higher valuation and volume of trade than you see in other books.
Vis studies used to be de rigueur because you couldn't advance past lvl 20 with books (1/2/3 ed) or only with tractatus of generally low xp value (4ed).
Vastly slower - except in xp gain, but apparently without the confrontational aspects of Medieval disputes.
That's fine, though, because Arts knowledge could very well be grown solely via tractatus if Hermetic knowledge is essentially mathematical knowledge. Or it might be better to say symbol-manipulation-knowledge, where the essential thing is internal consistency. In these post-Bonisagius days, no further external input is needed. Magic-working is proof, and experimentation reveals only knowledge that could also have been obtained by pure reason.
An interesting implication is that if there are no "forks" in Hermetic knowledge that must be pruned via spells or enchantment - to see if the idea checks out - then the operating laws of reality must be the rules of Hermetic magic. Hermetic magic theory is the fundamental truth.
(I'd prefer to think of magic as more like chemistry or even biology. Perhaps, theoretically, you could arrive at everything via pure reason. But in practice, knowledge requires frequent experimentation. I wouldn't even mind pure-mysticism, where experimentation - experience - is the only way to gain magical knowledge.)
So... after many tables and much maths:
The average roll of a stress die is: 5.748
Add the aura level usually somewhere between 3-5 and you get an average return of 9-10 exp
This comes with a risk of: warping depending on their starting arts level:
art: 0-5 = 1 pawn and a 1% chance of warping
art 6-10 = 2 pawns and a 1.9% chance of warping
art 11-15 = 3 pawns and a 2.71% chance of warping
art 16-20 = 4 pawns and a 3.44% chance of warping
art 21-25 = 5 pawns and a 4.10% chance of warping
Whilst Tractatus are completely safe. They tend to cost a pawn or two to read one from another covenant's library for a season regardless of level.
The associated virtues: Free Study and Book Learner looks similar on the surface, but Free Study only helps with learning arts, whilst Book Learner gives the same bonus to learning for abilities as well as arts.
In a relatively established Tribunal in which trade exists, study from books is equal to or superior to learning from Vis. It gets better as time goes on and the available pool of books increases, whilst the cost of studying Vis and the associated risk go up as your art levels improve.