Boni-snatching an apprentice: nature vs. nuture

Well, to be fair, it's in the title of the thread. :smiley:

Again, thanks for the insights. This whole process is an attempt at me to determine the consequences of actions from a simulationist perspective, and to determine what the story potential is.

  1. In terms of story opportunities, the story I'm thinking of is about trying to pre-emptively cut off a potential Snatching, rather than dealing with it as it occurs.

  2. The actual schooling would be occurring either at the Covenent, or else at the church across the field from the covenant, whose sole purpose is to serve the spiritual needs of the covenant. (It's in the middle of the black forest, a day's ride from the nearest town.) The students would be fellow apprentices or else Grogs of the covenant. The academic schedule would be "3 seasons used, one free" - so not a full schedule. And one of those 'used' seasons represents Language Immersion training. So 2 seasons of "normal" schooling, one representing the fact that everyone's speaking Latin, and the 4th for being a kid.

  3. St. Avery has Subtle Opening (it's what his paren was experimenting with), so the additional supernatural virtues aren't an issue. It hasn't been fully integrated however, and he hasn't actually told anyone that he's got it. In general however, that would be an issue if he were to move forward with the idea.

  4. The entire concept would likely be cast to the Primi of Bonisagus as an educational experiment - does this method of teaching, appropriated from the general society and integrated into the Hermetic system of apprenticeship, further the Order? Because if it does, He'd be happy to set up some form of it on a larger scale, for the benefit of the Order - but having someone come in partway through and tearing it apart is the educational equivalent of destroying a prototype vis source because they got greedy.

  5. The last five years is mostly reading, yes - but if necessary it would be reading with the Paren, as St. Avery knows that he sucks as a teacher (Com -2). Unless "1:1 instruction" LITERALLY refers to the actual game mechanic of Teaching, which I didn't think it does. Also, in reading through the apprenticeship section, it doesn't say that it has to be 1:1 - just that it has to be direct instruction. (I take that to mean the paren has to be I the room with them, teaching them something.) So as far as I can tell, you can teach more than 1 apprentice at a time. OR is that not the case?

EDIT - oh, and in general the GM is fine with it - she was actually the one who mentioned "hey, you said St. Avery was planning on grabbing way more apprentices than he could probably handle. If he grabs four, each of the players can play one!" At that point, one of the other players mentioned the potential boni-snatching as a plot point (and yeah, that's a term in our gaming group), as he beta-GM's sometimes. As such, this whole thread is me thinking out loud about the consequences of setting up an apprentice-style school, and what the character would do to try and prevent things from going wrong (to a greater or lesser degree.)

I find it significantly more effective without the dash, because the "s" of Bonisnatch fits both "snatch" and "Bonisagus".

Oh, sure - that's a good point. Another issue is that he's not sure if he can successfully Open the Ways of an apprentice without damaging their magic - his paren was experimenting with integrating Subtle Opening, and St. Avery is one of the "successes" (which major side effects). So he's not sure if he makes the attempt the same thing will happen to his apprentice.

So he feels almost as though his paren sterilized him, magically speaking. It's also one of the OTHER reasons he was putting off opening the Ways - he needs to either finish off the Subtle Opening breakthrough (his paren never published, as a consequence of being "wanted for questioning"), or else confirm that he can or can't Open the Ways successfully before trying it on someone.

Well. In HoH:TL we read the following non-sequitur (emphasis mine):

There is nothing to say that a Hermetic magus can not have more than one apprentice at a time. Legally, a parens is required to spent a season a year teaching his apprentice. The Arts can only be taught one on one, so a magus could have four apprentices at the most and still abide by the rulings of the Peripheral Code. Of course, such a magus will have no time for his own research.

However, in the section about Fostering, we read that when two magi share the teaching load of their respective apprentices, each parens still teaches to both apprentices an average of one season/year (so each apprentice gets two seasons of teaching/year, one from each magus). This suggests that a magus with multiple apprentices must still sacrifice one season/year for each apprentice, though one with two apprentices could either teach to each apprentice individually one season/year, or to both simultaneously two seasons/year.

Huh. Interesting. I was going by the description of Apprenticeship in the main book, (AM5, pg. 106), "Use the rules in the 'Experience and advancement' section of the Long-Term Events chapter to train your apprentice, remembering that you must spend at least one season a year directly teaching. Keep in mind that you should try to impart a broad range of skills - refer to the guidelines in the character chapter to give you an idea of what level of apprentice competence you should be shooting for."

On page 32, it describes those skills, most of which are Abilities - minimum recommended levels for Latin, Magic Theory, and so on. (although yes, it does describe the Arts as well.)

I was interpreting that to mean that the paren should be teaching a number of things in their yearly sessions (such as Magic Theory and Hermetic Lore); one of the things that could be taught during that time could be Arts. However, as St. Avery sucks as a (game mechanic) Teacher, he'd try to use that requirement to get other Abilities in, and leave the Arts to the reference books. And if the "teaching" consists of "we're all reading from the same tractus, and then discussing it as a group", then more than one apprentice can do that at once.

But if the requirement is "No, you have to teach arts 1:1 during that session" (which seems contradictory), then I do agree that it wouldn't work out well.

Story potential can go either way. I can turn almost anything into a reason for anything story, and make it seem reasonable. :smiley:

I think trying to do something preemptively is likely to create more problems than it is worth. How many magi have done anything similar to this before?

If you're not a Bonisagus why does the Prima Bonisagus care about this? And if you do something like this, you don't think she would rather just take apprentices from you and add that to her House's prestige? What house is this magus?

So an apprentice requires one season of personal instruction per year. Exceptions are a violation of the PC, a low crime, and leaves the potential for snatching the apprentice without any serious repercussions and it is open to any magus, then.

Alright, 4 apprentices, for the most part will all but occupy his year, and as a magus, he will not progress.
The 1:1 restriction on Teaching isn't part of the Code, it's part of Hermetic Magic.

So, if your character is teaching Arts (or spells) it has to be 1 on 1. He could teach Magic Theory to a group. With 4 apprentices the things that can be taught are either things that can be taught to a group,and when they are not would take up all of St. Avery's year.
I think a worthy breakthrough of being able to teach the Arts or Spells to multiple people is a worthy OR goal, certainly Hermetic...but under the RAW, it's not possible.

Heh - just thought of an amusing, if somewhat petty, way to get around this whole issue - Teach the non-apprentices as many Supernatural abilities as possible, thereby making it impossible for anyone who doesn't have Subtle Opening to apprentice them.

EDIT - he personally has Divination, and there are a few grogs around the castle that have Second Sight, Magic Sensitivity, Wilderness Sense, and Divining. That's, what, a minimum 70 to the In Vi lab total?

The trick there, is imparting supernatural virtues to the students, and if the com and teaching score is so low, you're going to be inflicting some nice flaws to go along with it, and still stuck, IMO, with the 1 on 1 teaching problem.

And to illustrate my counter to your idea, a rich magus hires an InVi specialist to Open the Arts. The InVi specialist isn't interested in having an apprentice, but is interested in being owed a favor, or lots of vis, or something worth a season of time. :smiley:

From what I understand, if you have the Subtle Opening of the Arts Virtue, you may learn supernatural abilities as if your Arts had not been opened. But you may not Open the Arts of an apprentice as if he had no supernatural abilities - your Opening total gets the usual penalty.

Game is game,

If you are a bonisagui maga you can be constantly asked to share what you discovered but otherwise you can take any apprentice you may like.

Just puzzled me! If a bonisnatching occurs on 12 or 14 year of aprenticeship... Does the boni begin all 15 years or use only 1... and how a titalus appentice will behave? If it happens at 2nd 3rd year im sure the apprentice will be glad but if it happens at the 14th... Im sure the lad kills(torture not really needed) the boni and runs back home.

And if you have been raised as a flambeau for 6 or 7 years dreaming on dimicatio... And here comes the quilllicker and tells you: its book time and forget the PoF you just learned....

If you are gaunteled bonisagus and you want to return your former house?

Dude the only definitive sollution was given by flambeau.... Want my apperntice? Ok lets play WIZARD WARS!

Are there flaws that may show up if you try to teach Unopened individuals a Supernatural ability? I didn't see anything, anywhere. (I thought Subtle Opening takes care of any penalties that occur as a consequence of Opening the Ways, when it does occur.

EDIT - ah, just read ezzlino's post about Subtle Opening - yep, I was misreading it.

Well, the teaching methodology I was planning on using was either going to be "Teach magic theory (or Hermetic Lore, or whatever) as a group once a year (even though it would be all of 3 xp/season), or else use the Academic/Jewish scholastic rules to all study from the same Text" - that system certainly would get around the lousy COM score. And I would argue that it counts as instruction, although it's certainly a different style. My main concern is that there's some sort of magical imprint requirement in the 1:1 instruction to pass on virtues and whatnot - because if that's the case, this whole setup may very well be moot.

Touché.

Well, I'll just need to get that penalty up to 100! Ha-ha! ...maybe not.

Although for the amount such a wizard would have to spend, they could just as easily set up his own school/instructors, if he's going to go to that much trouble. But maybe he's in a hurry/impatient, or obsessed about one of the proto-apprentices, or something. And the magus would have to know beforehand that they were un-openable, and have the specialist right there, as otherwise St. Avery could simply say "You cannot yet start the opening process. I can do so right now, and am willing to. Let's take this to the Quaesators."

EDIT - ok, due to my misreading of Subtle Opening, this would only work if his Intelligo was higher. (He's a darned tootin' Re Vi specialist, but nothing to brag about in the intelligo department.)

Oh, he's full-bore Ex Misc - apprenticed to a Kaballa-influenced practitioner from London. He's complete with the "Hedge Magic" and "Burnt-out" reputations.

His saving grace is that he had his first breakthrough when he was 9 (I got lucky on the Breakthrough die roll, when doing a season-by-season writeup of his backstory), and recently had three confirmed stabilized Breakthrough while researching at Duremar (In different things - again, I had been saving them up via his backstory). In-game, he's in the running for getting one of them published in the next Colentes Folio.

If he had been Bonisagus, his house reputation would currently be "upcoming protégé". As it is, at Duremar at least, he's got the rep of "that clever fellow from Stonehenge. A bit odd, but they're all a bit different up there."

Outside, though - he's known as a complete tool. But at least in theory he's got some credit with the Boni's. Otherwise I wouldn't even be considering the attempt.

You indicated this could be a situation where there are multiple apprentices. "Very well, begin opening his Arts, right now, and while you're doing that, this one is coming with me." You have no reason to go to the Quaesitors, he's not an apprentice until he's been claimed and that method of claiming is opening the Arts, and from that moment on, you have to meet the teaching requirement, but you're delaying it for 5 years.

The opening the Arts process isn't defined, but if he can't open the Arts, I'm sure he figures it out soon enough. He might not know that the potential Apprentice will be a problem. But, looking at the numbers, considering you can't impart too many Supernatural Virtues and or Abilities, without doing the teaching you're avoiding, I think it's safe to say that he has to have an InVi lab total of at least 30, which is not high. And maybe he doesn't care about preserving the virtue, which you do. He doesn't have to know, he just has to force you to pick one, and he picks another, and there's not much you can do, by the time you press charges (which you will be hard pressed to do) and bring the matter to Tribunal, he will almost certainly have had the Apprentice's arts opened, whether by his own hand, or another's.

I also remembered that putting 4 Gifted students in a room, without Parma isn't a good idea. The -3 is cumulative, so the SQ takes a -12 hit... That's a pretty major issue to be overcome. Or teach them Parma Magica before they gauntlet. I dare ya! :smiling_imp:

I believe the apprentice completes whatever is left of their term. The Boni might be able to squeak out a little extra by claiming the pupal wasn't instructed properly or needs extra training to gauntlet for House Bonisagus.

If anything a Bonisagus who appropriates an apprentice has to be extra careful not to neglect or exploit his new apprentice in prosecutable ways. Like stalling their gauntlet or skimping on teaching. Bonisnatching (Can't say I omitted the dash on purpose but I do like it that way) is tolerated but can't be very popular and guilty votes at Tribunal wouldn't be hard to come by.

Eh, in that case he'd just hand them off to his soldales - there are four of them. But I do agree that's the back-up plan. Also, it goes to motivation - why would such a rich magi be obsessing over someone else's obviously-about-to-be-trained apprentices? At some point it probably becomes about ego, (which is ironic, considering St. Avery is also acting out of pride as well - as otherwise this is a fairly silly thing to do.)

In glancing at the numbers, it's 53. (In+Vi is mid 26, but there's a Familiar and high intelligence and really high Magic theory in there). So, higher, but I agree - not that high. By the time this all occurs (it'll take a few years to set it up), the level will probably be 60: he's currently researching Divination, and a lot of the breakthroughs there are (obviously) in Intelligo. But again - yeah, not all that high.

Well, you can extend the parma around other folks, which does cancel out the penalty from The Gift. But that does raise a good point - St. Avery will have to get his parma high enough to protect up to 4 students at a time, if he takes on 4 apprentices.

Or, more likely - get a breakthrough on studying the Jerbiton's Gentle Gift Virtue to put together a Ward that does the same thing - this was actually one of his long-term research goals (Integrate Gentle Gift). Knowing the character, i'ts probably faster to do this than to learn Parma up to that level...

As the person who introduced the term to the board (I got it from my friend and co-player, Joe), I put the hyphen in there simply for clarity, as I've never actually seen it written. In casual pronunciation, there's no pause or explicit demarcation, so I'd say running it together like that is fine. :slight_smile:

How high is his Warping score? With so many breakthroughs and on going research projects, it would be high. Which is ironic, because he might have gained far fewer by undergoing a similar ritual to the one you first mentioned.
And does everyone have their Art scores to 5? Opening Arts and inflicting a deficiency because the Arts aren't high enough is a low crime.

I wasn't what your characters InVi total was, I was saying that the other magus taking an apprentice from your character would probably only need a 30, if he didn't care about preserving the virtue.

To extend Parma, he would have to stay in the same area, recipients of Parma should stay within eyesight, but I've ruled it can be hearing or close proximity to allow for going around corners or another room for a moment.

The idea that he could get through researching integrating Gentle Gift seems a bit on the fast side...

Not Original research (from HoH:TL) - rather, Breakthrough rolls for existing magic systems (via Hedge Magic or The Mysteries). You don't get warp from those.

EDIT - and to be clear: he doesn't have more than 10 breakthrough points in anything; he's developed a couple of interesting spells, and has integrated one (very minor) hermetic virtue into Magic Theory (One of the Divination techniques.) Other than that, he's still setting up his main lab and whatnot.

Not yet - as I mentioned earlier (I think on this thread), he needs to spend a year finishing that up. Everyone else In the covenent? Most of them are pretty close (I believe, due to redesign of our characters due to the sudden existence of the Roots and Branches in everyone's backstories) Again - one of the reasons why he was planning on taking that five year "why bother" time.

Also, of the four apprentices, 2 are off-limits. One is the child of a sodales - (yeah, you can pick her if you want to get a beat-down at the next Tribunal), while the other is the son of a Templar who got ensorcelled by a local water nymph (and subsequently begot with child), whom we promised we would raise. Touch that one, and you start straying close to Church issues. So that leaves two - one of which St. Avery would claim, which leaves one - and I'm guessing one of the remaining sodales could take over for that.

Well, it's "during training" - so I would assume it happens just like with any other training group - you enter the area, you get protected by your paren's parma, you train, and then you leave. You don't have to have it up 24/7. As long as the entire group was training together (which is the explicit purpose), I'd say it would work fine.

I'm referring to the ability of the Parma to reduce the effect of the Gift, which is what I believe the main reason for "extending the parma during training" is. (You don't need to train in Arts - so therefore you don't need the magic resistance: therefore, it's likely for the social skills.) Gentle Gift is an existing Hermetic virtue. If he could find an Initiation script or a Hedge tradition that had something similar, he could achieve a breakthrough in a Season, with an (Intelligence + Magic Theory + Creative Genius + stress die vs. 18). Currently, that's 5+10+3 = 18 + a die roll vs. an 18: don't botch.

With that, you get a troupe-agreed upon Breakthrough - something to do with the researched virtue. In this case, I would recommend inspiration for a Re Vi ward of some sort that reduced the penalty of the Gift: -1/10 levels, or something. Create the ward using the Experimentation rules, and you gain the desired spell, plus whatever you roll on the Experiment chart, plus some Breakthrough points. The spell itself it a totally "normal" spell, even if it pushes or breaks a hermetic Limit.

EDIT - and one of his previous stabilized breakthroughs (From the rabbinical Ex Misc magus that actually gauntleted him, and from whom he got his own Focus: Wards) was a spell that translated regular Circle/Ring wards to Individual/Sun wards. So if he can get an effect into a Ring ward, he can also muto it to turn it into a personal ward. Which is how he'd deal with the quality penalty, if he didn't have time to increase his Parma.

There is nothing in the Code that would prevent a Magus from kidnapping a Gifted child of another magus and opening the Arts of the child, thus claiming the child as an apprentice. There should not a be beat down, as under the Code, the magus who kidnapped the child did not violate the Code.
And a Holy magus could come in claim the child and push the issue that your covenant is interfering with the Church? Granted, you didn't provide much for details, so I can only speculate. I will just point out that nothing is ironclad or certain. I can even envision a Tytalus coming in to kidnap that Gifted child of a magus. :smiling_imp: or he comes to visit, notices the boy takes him to his quarters and begins the process. The process for opening Arts might be, once begun, impossible to undo without destroying the Gift and must be completed over the course of a season. So now, he is a Tytalus apprentice. Short of a Wizard War or a Bonisagus, he belongs to the Tytalus.