Timothy, actually. 8)
I quote from your second post. (Just in case there is any difference to the first, that I did not find.)
The future author you assume with Apprentices cannot usually do what you claim. Why? Because e. g. p. 41 of Apprentices, as is, makes no sense, and requires the adjuducation by the Troupe to be useful at all. Matt in his first post on this thread has given a very good reason, why this is the case.
That a rule can only work with the adjudication of the troupe is not new.
As an example, it's a "problem" all of the line's authors for all of the Tribunal books have faced, and they face it deliberately because I built it that way. In Covenants, the number of Hooks a covenant can take is set by the amount of play a real life group of people does. It's "six months' play", so if you play often, you get more, and if you play monthly, you get less. And NPC covenants need to scale against that. How do we scale NPC covenants? We just shoot basically for what we think most of he playtester groups will say is reasonable. So, what will happen here is that authors will just shoot for a conservat5ive middle, or pitch ideas that people let slide because of their innate coolness.
It's worked so far, for the last however many years.
If the page makes utterly no sense, and is important, an errata will be issued eventually, because Matt's aesthetics aside, there's a business case to be made that the line can't be unwritable. If it just says "Do what you like. I'm not your mother." then actually the future author can write in canon really easily. He just does what he likes and sees if the playtesters think it is cool. If it says "Hey, this is more difficult than you thought." well, for the characters in the setting, it has always been difficult, and they've had years to work on ways to fix their problems, or live with them, and we can examine their responses to the difficulty.
For a simple example, read Apprentices p. 41: "Each Minor Hermetic Virtue the character already possesses adds +3 to the Target Level, and each Major Hermetic Virtue adds +9."
This plainly and simply states, that it is harder to teach a Hermetic Virtue to an apprentice from the Rhine Tribunal, after he has had his Eichengilde Training in Durenmar, hence has now the Minor Hermetic Virtue Eichengilde Training (GotF p. 20). Or after he has been given - somehow - an item producing Vis, hence has now the Minor Hermetic Virtue Personal Vis Source. Or after he – again somehow – got famous, hence has the Minor Hermetic Virtue Hermetic Prestige.
I don’t believe that you would want to bind authors to this.Usually with ArM5 this is cause for errata – but with Apprentices there won’t be such, for the reason Matt has given.
Cheers
That seems a trival sort of problem, though, for a future writer. I mean, on the level of "You can't really define any covenants in Covenants, because it is not the Tribunal book."* or "You can't actually use Hermetic Architecture to build a flying castle for that flying castle thing.", "Where does Bob get the extra +3 bonus from?" is kind of small biscuits. I mean, I may not be understanding the problem, but it seems kind of minor compared to "You villain is a demon. You realise demons aren't able to engage in long term planning, because the requires the virtue of patience, right?".
- None of these are actual quotes, but they are real writing challenges I've faced when writing some of the books. I'm not sure the problem presented has the same sort of "Damn, start again. No. Can't start again. Start -thinking- about starting again." quality to it.
Assuming there's a situation where there's a dramatic necessity to know how all of this fit together for an NPC in a book (which seems a tall ask since we usually don't stat magi, let alone apprentices), If it causes too many problems, it'll get errated. If it doesn't, it doesn't. We could just retcon the Eichengilde Training so that it has some mystic mumbojumbo that makes it easier, or something. I admit I'd need to look up Eichengilde Training, because I can't recall what it is. I've not played a game set in the Rhine in real-life years. Other authors work on that stuff, and I tend to rework real life historical documents, so this may not be a workable solution. Working on the basic assumption David's not an idiot, if this causes problems, he won't carry it around like a dead albatross: something will be done.
It basically looks like a comic book continuity problem: either you are the sort of fan who says "The authors suck, none of this stuff links together and therefore it is all crap." or you say "How do we link all this stuff together with fancfic?" The writers, by the nature of the thing we are doing, have to be guys in the second set. So, if there's a problem, and we can't just let it go, eventually someone will fix it. The idea that the book breaks canon because it has troupe input seems a bit, well, unlikely, given some of the stuff I pulled in Covenants. All of that unreliable narrator / ask your troupe stuff actually makes it easier for an author to come in later and say "There's no rule against X, and X is cool, so watch me do X."
So, although I've not seen the specific example, I have to say I'm realtively sanguine about canon surviving. What you do at your own table is something outside that. I, for example, prefer to play diceless.