Is living as swan (Heartbeast) for one year in natural surrounding Living Condition 0 or -2
No living condition modifier. The Swan will live in a suitable environment, but it's certainly a natural environment not shaped by the hand of man to add additional protections...
Jon,
What's wrong with good ability summae? They typically aren't nearly as game breaking as high quality & level art summae.
Question 2:
If a character is interested in having an Agency using the rules from HoH:S or LoM, and does not have the virtues to take one at character creation, how can one be developed through the seasons before play?
Heh, I was going to ask this myself. Given my character's background and skill set, it makes sense.
I think I made my case in the main forum thread discussing magical lighting. You can't get your money for nothing and your chicks for free.
If you're going to do spells to try and earn the bonuses for light and heat, expect some warping...
Let's use HoH; Societates. I'm not familiar with the differences that might exist in Lords of Men.
How I answer is a function as to how one expects to use the agents.
So...maybe I'm missing something obvious, but how does one improve the bond strength? Is it a pyramidal scale based on the Abilities table?
It might be, without having a virtue that all players can get so many XP for developing agents, and then giving up a season of advancement will grant XP for improving bonds, recruiting more agents.
From what I recall the LoM version is about 99% the same. The system is fairly generous - PCs get an amount of "xp" to spend in addition to and equal adventure xp exclusively to expand their agency.
Well, I did scan the LoM section, thinking bond strength might be explained there, or how to build bond strength. Am I right in assuming it's based on the Ability table? I can't find anything explicit.
I think bond strength is based on the ability advancement table - I don't have my books in front of me ATM.
Second point:
Ability Summa, what's the deal with restricting them? They're far less game breaking than art summa so far as I've seen.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Summae, in general, are the debbil. Much like high level Art summae, a Magic Theory Summa with a L6 represents 105 experience points. Give it a quality of 10 and it costs 28 build points, whereas a 3 Q10 Tractatus cost 30xp. And yes, generally Ability summae are less abused than high level Art summae, they still can be abused.
Besides, what I'm doing with regards to teaching generally involves summae, changing how they are used completely to deliver experience points. Putting it another way, you can buy one with build points, but they won't work the way you expect them to work.
I'm not trying to be mysterious here, with regards to summae. I'm just changing how they work drastically as part of the teaching process. High quality summae do not exist in this saga, whether for abilities or Arts.
I don't get it - a teacher will still want to learn new things to teach their students.
Also, on a practical note, this is a PbP game. Advancement will be so slow over real time that I fail to see how a Lvl 6 quality 12 summa is going to break the game.
This one is non-negotiable. I'm going to manage hard here. If you (or anyone else) doesn't like it they are welcome to leave.
I progress the game fairly quickly compared to most PbPs. Cooperative players can get through stories in 4-6 weeks. Stories will generally be once every 4-6 seasons. I write stories for the individual player, and try and minimize the impact of a player turning into a phantom so as to minimize the length of time it takes to complete story. When i use the term cooperative, I mean to say players who are clear about their writing commitment to this saga. If they can do daily, I write differently than someone who can only post once or twice a week. During character development, everyone posts about 5x of what they usually do when the game begins, so I'm taking everything with a grain of salt.
It's the lack of a clear "why" that I'm trying to get at - game balance? Lack of PC resources? You want PCs to acquire them in play? Lack of NPCs wanting to help out the PCs - politics?
In the "in game universe", summa exist and would be highly popular, unless there's more house rules making them much more difficult to produce/write.
If the PCs are going to be joining a new covenant, unless it already has a library... I have difficulty seeing why the PC teachers wouldn't bring books with them - magi gain the majority of their xp from reading books.
See above your previous post where I quoted from the original post in this thread that summae are off the table. In short, it's part of the premise or conceit of the saga (and elsewhere I said this was going to be a heavily house ruled saga). Repeatedly asking for high level summa isn't making it easy on me, either.
Why high level summae are unavailable is irrelevant, since everyone (in the universe) is in the same boat. But the why is because I'm changing how summae work. They just simply don't exist beyond L7 for Arts or L2 for Abilities, and they are primarily used by magi to train apprentices, or perhaps to round out the knowledge of a magus to get to a score of 5, but they do that very poorly without assistance. It's not as if I'm denying you or your character that I'm not denying to anyone else. Summae, in modern Ars Magica are crack. Crack is whack. Believe me, as a player I love 'em, but they need some serious adjustment.
Ok, I didn't understand that since you posted in that statement in the character developement, as "they are off the table" vs "they are impossible to make beyond l7 for arts and l2 for abilities" - ENTIRELY different. If you could please add this to the House Rule list, then it's fine and makes tons more sense to me.
The reason it is here and not in House Rules, because the House Rule isn't fully formed. That's why I put it in character development guidelines.