An apprentice blacksmith can help a master blacksmith in the workshop. To do this, the apprentice uses their own skill in blacksmithing to assist the master. The master may train the apprentice by sacrificing a 'season of activity with the apprentices assistance' (the apprentice can produce nothing useful); instead the master uses the ability being trained (for a seasonal activity) without any assistance from the apprentice. Since the apprentice would be supplying help specifically with the 'blacksmithing' ability, that is the ability being trained.
An apprentice mage can only assist a magi's seasonal activity with one ability; 'Magic Theory'. The mage must forgo a season of assistance -- same as the master blacksmith. It seems to follow that the ability necessarily being used & trained is MT.
Allowing to train apprentice during a regular lab activity will lead to a great leap in MT level in the Order: as long as the magi does not benefit from the apprentice contribution to complete his work during an allotted time, he should consider training him.
Conservative scenario:
1 season a year of extra training: master with (only) 5 MT +3 = training of quality 8, x15 = 90 XP extra, bringing a typical level 3 at end of apprenticeship go 6 and spare XP.
2 season a year of extra training, with a slightly more skilled master (8 in MT), same math: 11 x 2 x 15 = 330 extra XP. Nobody sees a problem here ?
You can tweak the previous numbers as you want and disagree with my assumption, it will still lead to highly MT skilled apprentices.
And you can bet than PC mages will use that to quickly churn an über apprentice that they will gladly take over their mage after 15 years of carefully groomed min-maxing.
So beside the definition of training, and comparing blacksmith vs magi, such change will drastically impact the power level of starting magi, and will made most material and magi NPC at best under-powered, at worst non-relevant. So everything will have to be rewritten considering that all new mages, from the dawn of the Order have been master in MT. Which means that most (all ?) mages would have 10+ in MT (it requires "only" 275 xp to reach level 10), which means that any magis doing Original research will always have the option to use the +/- 3 while experimenting, drastically changing the face of Order since Notatus level of Breakthrough should be a lot more prevalent.
The Apprentice can't contribute to your Lab Total in those seasons, which means, the longer you do this, the more seasons you're not actually getting use out of the apprentice. One of the main reasons Magi train apprentices is to have someone who's beholden to help them in the lab.
My proposal was that these seasons DO NOT count as the Teaching you're supposed to give an apprentice, meaning your Magi wouldn't want to spend too many of them anyway, since it's not part of the required curriculum.
You can't raise his MT above yours, so if you have MT 5, that's as high as he can get with training or teaching.
You're required to also teach him Arts and spells.
I addressed this in the other thread. This is looking at the wrong thing. Training doesn't require it to be the single most used Ability for the whole season, just that it is an Ability used for the whole season for the work. So it doesn't really matter if the Form and Technique are used on average for 9 hours a day together and Magic Theory is used on average for 1 hour a day. That would still allow Magic Theory to be used. That's one of the misleading things in the "more central" argument above.
I'm not so sure about that. Every time I've seen an apprentice played through without Training, the first thing taught is a few seasons of Magic Theory. Why not get that MT high quickly so the apprentice can actually be of value in the lab? Sacrificing a few of these better Teaching seasons to get in a few more Training seasons wouldn't tend to increase the MT scores I've seen.
Mostly what I see in your numbers is that you're having the parents give them more than one season a year. That, of course, leads to higher Abilities. But that's due to the time rather than the method.
Would you care to explain why you're on that side, specifically in context of Training being something magi (noted in Apprentices) do and the rules on Training (from core)?
Would you allow a blacksmith to Train an apprentice in Bargain? Assume a guild master type setting or a local blacksmith working independently in a small town so we don't have to worry about someone being told what to make while working directly for a lord. I would content that it is used "for the whole season" in that sense in that at least some amount of every day is bargaining with suppliers or customers or planning how to be able to sell more (I would count knowing the local buying and selling as Bargain not Local Knowledge). I wouldn't unless it was a season in which the blacksmith was primarily acting as a merchant of his wares not a maker of said wares.
I zoned out a little on the earlier comments because it looked like the argument had ended up on strictly mechanics (is it in a roll and how many other things are in the roll). But I feel that MT and lab work is exactly the same as Bargain and a season of (practicing a craft so as to make a living) craft work.
Neither way will break the game clearly so I don't think it matters much. It does have the interesting, to me at least, side effect of allowing a mage who is poor at communication and teaching to compensate for poor Teaching if they are willing to spend more seasons Training also.
So you are supposing more than one season per year of instruction from the magus? Why? One of the main reasons that a mage has an apprentice is so that the apprentice can be useful to them. Either the mage is using the apprentices assistance, or the apprentice is fixing Arcane Connections, or extracting Vis -- and missing out on those extra seasons where the apprentice is working becomes a steadily larger burden as the apprentices MT rises.
Also, Arts may not be trained; so raising an apprentices Lab Total with the sacrifice of a single season might be considerably more efficient with that season Teaching an appropriate Art.
If the argument is that 'the PC mages will quickly churn out Uber Apprentices', then it seems that Teaching is being overlooked -- and Teaching is far more effective than Training. It would seem that one constructive approach is for the ST to note that the players are committing to stories about 'Uber Apprentices' -- Boni-snatching might become more common. Or maybe the whole point of the saga is 'Player Characters do things differently from NPCs, and this changes the world'.
Really? A blacksmith's Bargain v. a mage's MT? Consider magi who get more than a billion times the increase in Lab Total from MT than from the Arts. MT is not really being used? Meanwhile, how much does Bargain contribute to the Workshop Total? Or if we look another way, would you let Puissant Bargain for only 10 minutes while your Bargaining apply to those bargains? Would you let Puissant MT for only 10 minutes of the day apply to the entire day's laboratory work? Similarly, if your Bargain is 15 due to a Vessels Virtue for a few minutes while you're bargaining, should that apply to those bargains? If your MT is 15 due to a Vessels Virtue (combined with Lesser Craft Magic to bypass MR) for a few minutes, would that apply to the entire day's laboratory work?
Magic Theory having a large impact on the Lab Total does not mean it is used much of the time.
You might use your Magic Theory just for a few days in the start of the season, when you plan your lab work. The rest of the season you proceed according to that plan, but without actually having to use your MT the rest of the time.
This way your Magic Theory can have a very large impact on the end result, without being used for much time.
One can compare it to building a house. Making the initial plans and drawings of a house doesn't have to take much time at all compared to the actual building of it, but will have a very large influence on the end result.
I should have used my word more specifically: "allowing to let an apprentice benefit from the training rule while being present in the lab, without providing his bonus to the mage's activity (because it won't lead to saving time on the project)".
My example was an abstraction that did not refer to any particular ruleset. And I said myself it was an hyperbole meant to better illustrate my point, in response to your explicit question: why I "chose" sufficient over necessary in terms of a particular skill being central to an activity.
My answer was simply that if multiple skills are each necessary, and together sufficient for activity A, while a single skill is both necessary and sufficient for activity B, that single skill is more central to activity B than any individual skill is to activity A.
So you'd be totally fine with a player avoiding Warping for the season by having huge boosts to MT (Puissant, Vessels, etc.) which end after a very short period of time, still applying those MT boosts for the entire season?
Having built a house, no, this is not really comparable. The carpenters, electricians, plumbers, etc. don't need to know all sorts of the stuff needed to create the plans and don't really touch on most of it. Meanwhile, as for the time comparison, that ratio is pretty rarely true.
Sure, but again you are implementing house rules to make your point. So? And where does training say anything about being "more central" rather than just being used through the process? That's made up, too.
Huh? The issue is that you're giving multiple seasons of instruction instead of just one each year, and then you're noting that this gets out of whack. I'm not the only one who has pointed out this inconsistency. You need to be consistent for such a comparison. Replace seasons of Teaching for seasons of Training one to one.
Did I say that? Did I say it is always the case that MT is only used at the start?
No, I did not.
In general I would apply the same rules as for Cyclic Magic - bonuses need to apply for the whole season to count for the Lab Total, penalties count if they apply for any part of the season.
And then I would not bother trying to figure out which skill was used when during the season or how often.
And to chime in on the actual question of the thread, I would normally not allow a magus to Train an apprentice during the same season they do labwork. This for the simple reason that doing labwork isn't using that ability to earn a living, which is needed to train someone One can of course argue that working in the lab is the equivalent for a magus, but equivalent or not, it is not the same thing.
While in theory all Abilities can be trained, for many of them it can be very hard to fulfill all the requirements needed for Training. And I think this is just fine.
I haven't read all the posts in this topic (though I did in the previous one that generated this one), but I thought I'd share my reasons for voting "No".
Working in the lab requires a dedicated and quiet space for the magus. As we can see in Covenants, if there are foreign entities active in your lab and not implicated in your work, that brings danger and uncertainty in your current project (reflected in various Lab flaws that reduce the Safety characteristic of the lab.)
To me, having an apprentice who is working on something different in the lab (that's essentially what Training is) would be similar to having two magi using the same lab at the same time for different purposes (not collaborating on the same project). This is simply not a safe practice.
ArM5 p.164 states that "Training is one-on-one training where the master shows the trainee what to do." When the magus is working on a project in the lab, he simply does not have the time to do this, since his attention is focused on his project. Any time spent on "showing the thainee what to do" would be detrimental to his lab total -- a distraction from his work -- possibly a source of potential disasters much like those from Experimentation.
As I'd said, the rules model reality poorly. A beginning intern in my field probably has had unit operations (think "intro to chemical engineering") but not more advanced engineering classes; they'll have had chemistry -- probably organic, but not inorganic/physical. In ArM terms they've got scores in Academic Abilities... but probably at 1 (+ spare xp). It's not really enough to be helpful; if they were "helping" with lab work I'd probably model them as the "Servant" lab virtue rather than the "Apprentice" lab virtue. After another year of schooling (and experience, and maturity) they're much more helpful.
Which, again, gets to where ArM modeling the real world falls apart: these are college students who are 18+ years old and we're still leery of trusting them on their own working with dangerous things that could go BOOM. Hermetic apprentices per the rules may start in the lab at 6-7? And yet a magus does not suffer a horrific lab Safety penalty from having an impulsive child "help" them in the lab; parents might ponder what their own children that age might do if let loose with, say, cooking. Arguing from reality isn't going to be too useful here. It's better to consider this from a game balance perspective.
While technically you could have an apprentice start aiding you in the lab at age 6, there is a reason why most magi won't even accept apprentices younger than 8-9 years old, and not allow them into the lab until they are 10-11 years old. Still not what we might like in a dangerous lab, but kids back then were treated as adults much earlier than we do now.