concerning evading final twillight

maybe it's because im new to the game but i just can't see why a warping score of 10 is a death sentence.
all you need is this.:

cautious sorcerer,flawlessmagic(for mastery),flexible formulaic magic(to make up for the fact youll rarely cast spontaneously)

and stay the hell away of auras.

i mean to even have to roll to avoid twillight you need a very unluucky stress die, and to gain more than one warping point at once.

with those virtues here.. what are the chances? plus unless you really have an ENORMOUS warping score(it can go over 10 right?) you always have a reasonable chance of avoiding it.

alternatively if your a merinita transform your flesh(Only) to fae. though this may not be allowed.

bythe way when it says i spend 2 minutes t obring my magic under control... does that mean no spellcasting till then? if so for most people it may be a more literal death sentence than any non final twillight

I agree that warping is not really a killer.

If you look here:

https://forum.atlas-games.com/t/the-ultimate-wizard-aging-and-twilight-simulation/9531/1

people have done long term simulations of the Order, and it is decrepitude that kills magi, not warping.

Bob

Basically, a magus can "choose" the way he wants to go.
Would he like to be remember as Excellimus, the Clumsy-yet-Flamboyant magus, or Prudentus, the Venerable-Decrepit-Babbling Geronto-mage.

Okay, it is possibly too caricatural. But as you pointed out, a magus who does not want to go because of Twilight as mean to achieve that goal. It means making some choice, staying away of certain situations, but overall, very doable.
A magus doing a lot of original research (since it is another of your topics of interest), however, is more likely to be remember as Inventus, the-almost-more-famous-than-Bonisagus, who disappeared in a gorgeous flash of crimson light, with his lab, his notes and two-third of his covenant :smiley: .

i don't see why you can't prevent decrepitude.

1st to the list i mentioned add strong faerie blood and unaging( affectes everything except decrepitude,helps a lot )

second since we are assuming we have a mage who is hell bent on livng forever he needs to make this major breakthrough.

"adds his corpus/10 scorus to aging modifiers"

next he just makes an extremely good potion. after a long time he will need even mroe vis but.. when you are 400 years old(age=power) it should be easier to acquire or just "relieve" people from their possession of it.

it's worth noting that (as i interpret it) magic theory only limits the vis you spend on seasonal activites lab work.

BUT you don't spend the vis during the season you create the ritual.. you spend it when casting it. s theres nothing preventing me from making a potion allowing me to exist for a 1000 years

Yes, you do. It's clarified in TMRE. It's seasonal when you make it, so limited by Magic Theory. If you later redo it it's a much shorter thing and is limited by Art scores.

Faeries don't have any flesh. They just pretend to, to give them a way of interacting with mortals.

fair enough,but there is no explicit limit on magic theory. or other abilities right?

No, there is only the Law of Diminishing Returns.

By the time one is old enough that one's LR fails annually, the magus will quickly go through whatever vis stocks he has in Corpus. He will also have earned sufficient decrepitude by that point that he will be virtually bedridden. I would certainly allow a LR to enable him to move about his lab, but going on an adventure, or a vis hunt would be out of the question. A magus of such advanced age is either waiting for Final Twilight or Death's embrace...
There are paths to immortality, the LR isn't one of them.

yes but you don't need to wait until it actually starts failing.

in game terms the moment there is even a small possibility off gaining an aging point that year this is when you cast a much stronger ritual.

That's two major virtues, so you'll need to be a member of a mystery cult or get lucky in twilight. If you're a member of a mystery cult you'll have duties to take care of, meaning you can't just sit around being safe all the time.

That depends. Do you have any enemies? If you do, they can cast a spell to give you two warping points and you are a goner.

If you only care about botches putting you in twilight, it still depends: are you doing anything with your life or are you just sitting around being an old man in a tower?
Are you a PC or an NPC?

No spellcasting and no actions whatsoever without extra concentration checks. This includes dodging. Trying to avoid twilight in combat is deadly.

No. Doesn't work the way you think it does, or at least it isn't that easy. In order to create a longevity ritual that is much stronger you need to have Age/10 Magic Theory score, to handle enough vis in a season of lab work, or higher a specialist to do it for you. At 100, that's a Magic Theory score of 10, which isn't impossible by any stretch. At 200 you're looking at 20, and I'd say that there are only a few magi in the Order with the art scores that high. If you did it yourself at 100 and 200, you'd need to put 775 experience points into Magic Theory over those 100 years (from age 100 to age 200), or average about 8 xp per year, or study one Magic Theory tractatus, on average, every year. And that's only for Magic Theory, in order for the LR to be stronger, you have to increase your Creo and Corpus Arts, so now you spend most of your time chasing your tail increasing Creo, Corpus and Magic Theory. It may not be every season, sure. But it will be a lot of them. Might as well pursue your preferred path at immortality.

Trying to predict the failure of your longevity ritual is a crapshoot, I mean you could roll two or three 1s and explode into some seriously high numbers, well beyond the capability of your ritual to protect, and then your ritual fails. Now, the system protects against this outcome again, by allowing the magus to rebrew the longevity ritual at the same strength, only adding extra vis due to age. The ritual isn't any stronger though.

If you aren't defended by a grog, being a magus in combat can be just as deadly. One assumes that the magus in Twilight is still being defended by his shield grog.

So he's doing experimental magic and risking entering twilight? Or going on quests for insight and risking entering twilight?

So you're throwing your weight around and making enemies, which will encourage people to throw you into twilight?

But anyway, let's assume you do have Strong Faerie Blood, Magic Blood (positive), Magic Blood (Negative) a Creo Corpus lab total of 130 (you're not getting it higher than that. You're probably going to have to risk twilight to get it that high) and a Corpus of 50 (again, you're probably risking twilight to get that high). Oh, and some good living conditions

That gives you a -42 modifier to aging rolls. At 341-350 that's a net modifier of -7. You have a ~1.5% chance of getting a crisis each year, and you're gaining decrepitude points bit by bit all the time, so you may pass a decrepitude marker without even a crisis. At 361-370 you have -5 for a ~1.5% chance again. 381-390 is a ~1.6% chance. The odd decades are about 1% less. In the 300s you can expect at least 1 crisis, and possibly a second level of decrepitude just from build up of points. If you were to reach 461, you'd have a +4 modifier, giving you a ~13% chance per year of crisis. By 490 you are dead, no questions asked. And that's with a -42 modifier to aging.

Do you actually generate more than one botch die when casting spontaneously? I know you get 2 botch dice if you fast-cast, and one die if you lose concentration; but I don't know of many other sources if you avoid hostile auras.

hmm ok i see your point. still it may not be complete immortality but it's a step in the right direction :laughing:

plus you may simply use it as a stepping stone. for sth like hermetic alchemy. at this point being hard to change hardly matters as you already overpower mostly everything .

age=power right? that seems true in most tabletops ive been .dnd,cwod and i think ars magica as well.

plus there's always the possibility of researching vis less enchantments( a hermetic breakthrough but still). that should vastly improve your lifespan as you will only have to spend vis to increase the effective lab total.. you don't even have to do the research yourself.

just take some willing helpers(slaves) tell them to do it and give them a reasonable timetable."do it now!" with standard civilised modern corporate employment procedures"or else face my eternal wrath " using very sophisticated psychology based encouragement methods " beatings will continue till morale improves!", "i have your wife"
and alwass reward success" it sucks im sorry, but you know too much and i can't risk it.."

at this point your parma magica is supremely powerful i assume,while your strongest spells are overwhelmingly potent.
so in case of retribution.. i think this would happen
youtube.com/watch?v=Hk0sOGVSAP4 (ah.. memories)

One doesn't really have the time to expand one's arts to create powerful longevity rituals AND research breakthroughs AND pursue paths for immortality, let alone find the time for increasing one's Parma to ridiculously high levels for magic resistance.

Pick one path and stick to it, it's advisable for most of Ars Magica advancement. Advancing off that path will be frustrating.

With regards to botch dice and spontaneous magic, it's entirely up to the SG. If it's stressful, or a stress die is used, you start at 1 botch die and go up from there, based on the situations involved.

Generally, I base it off of formulaic casting. If a situation would warrant X botch dice for a formulaic, spontaneous magic gets X+1, so 2 in the base case. Note, fast casting is technically +2 (as in 2 additional botch dice) not 2 botch dice, which means 4 botch dice for a spontaneous fast cast and 3 botch dice for a formulaic fast cast. And losing concentration is adding an extra botch die.

He was right to an extent, though, about the idea of joining or founding a covenant for immortality-seekers, allowing him to share resources, breakthroughs and the services of the CrCo master.

Adrian, one thing you do not want to do is try to constrain magi by virtue of being older and more powerful. That happens a fair bit in Autumn covenants and especially in the Rhine Tribunal, but it's just asking for the slaves to either revolt or run away. Instead, use your age and power to fight for vis and provide benefits in your specialty (if you're a dedicated immortality-seeker, you can probably be the CrCo specialist, which is a job that gets you lots of friends).

And such a covenant is going to have huge logistical challenges, and potentially disagreements on how to even achieve immortality.

That CrCo specialist does have to spend some time making longevity rituals, it's probably a big revenue generator for the covenant, if not for the magus in particular. How many LRs does the specialist make over the course of 5 years, 10 years? How does one balance advancement, along with all the other stuff that must be done in a covenant.
Is it possible? Yes. But it's almost never as easy as it is suggested in this forum.

this is another thingi find strange in ars magica. basically doing research for a long time will get you weaker than someone who never heard of the phrase"arcane experimentation"
ill admit i find this confusing because it's kind of the opposite of what happens in mage ascension from where i come from

Having played both M:TA and ArM3, White Wolf really did try to make the two systems the difference between the science of magic, and the art of magic. It would have been a much more elegant dichotomy if they hadn't hidden a demon under every rock, and put in a mechanic where armor was more likely to get you killed than going into battle nekkid.

I prefer the art of magic, with all it's flaws and inconsistencies. They build character.