It's not a bad idea at all, but I think it might be too much detail to deal with one spell, and too much precision for the general case, making things harder for the troupe rather than easier.
Er, in the place where my friend is using it. Hypothetically.
Faerie Sympathy forced it to be a stress roll, even if there were no botch dice.
I don't like Finesse/3 because it still makes a mess of things. While it solves the exploding roll, it requires many magi to be unreasonably stupid. The reason I say that revolves around House Verditius. 1) You would be better off buying items constructed this way rather than by the Verditius methods. 2) House Verditius wouldn't think craft magic beneath them because it would generally be better. 3) Since it is generally better it really screws up some of the benefits of Verditius Magic.
Troy, most magi should be able to exceed Superior. It only takes a score of Finesse 1 to reach Excellent +1, if the roll gets high enough.
Yes. That's why I said they're not contradictions. But item effects are spell effects put in items, so I thought it worth mentioning.
Why? All it's doing is changing three words to two words.
I was specifically saying why my group used Finesse rather than Craft. Many (dare I say most, though YSMV) Magi will lack a Craft ability appropriate. If you limit the maximum quality to Craft/3 then I suppose you could create an Excellent +0 item though in general that is worse than a Superior item. 0 rounded up is still 0.
While it would encourage Magi interested in Craft Magic to put a few points into varies Craft abilities, that just makes the biggest flaw of Craft Magic larger. The run-away difficulty on Finesse rolls which requires an extremely optimized build and dumping a significant portion of XP into it. Adding additional required XP sinks into a build which is already XP constrained makes it even less likely to be used.
That extremely high difficulty, combined with the heavy optimization and focus that restricts most other activities is why Craft Magic is one of the least used styles, at least as the primary focus for a given Magus. It takes a very dedicated player to play a Magus who specializes in it. A system that lowers the runaway difficulty to a more reasonable level, while still keeping it high enough to require effort to be good at, would make it a more viable play style.
I am actually interested in learning how many people have had a player play a Magus specializing in Craft Magic using only RAW. Were they actually effective at it? How limited was the rest of their abilities?
Because my friend doesn't have City and Guild, so it would also require including that whole section.
It should be noted that this was a design goal. The established background was that covenants employed craftsmen (who could be played as grogs), so the rules needed to make it extremely difficult for a magus to take over those roles.
Either you've changed a rule and haven't states so or you've misread it. The normal limit of Craft/3 rounds up. So unless you've changed the rounding, too, Finesse 1 would get you to Excellent +1.
I have several times. Each time they were very effective, even with Craft/3 limits rather than Finesse/3 or no limits at all. One of them was world-breakingly effective even with the limits. Another was mentioned above and was why I suggested such limits, as otherwise I had a weapon with something like +27 for Attack and Defense and +27 to lab totals to enchant it. Meanwhile, they're Rego experts with good Finesse, giving them a lot of general utility, so other things haven't suffered.
We are cross talking, since I am talking about using Craft/3 as the limit and you are talking about using Finesse/3 as the limit. I even specifically said "Craft/3" in the part of my post you commented, in which having Finesse 1 or Finesse 100 makes no difference in the maximum quality of items produced since it is not the limiting factor. Well, other than giving you a really high roll but that would still bump up against the limit of quality based on their Craft/3. No related Craft, then limited to Excellent +0 or Superior items.
Ah, sorry. My bad. I lost track of the switch. I see it now. Getting a full night of sleep really helped.
I've done exactly that. My maga was quite effective at crafting things ruled by Terram, and was branching out into wood and linen products when the saga ended. She made a number of very fine mystic towers (via Creo) and a fair few exceptional weapons and hauberks (via Rego). She also repaired and expanded the covenant's walls, with great improvements to the covenant's aesthetics in the process. And, the covenant's laboratories had some of the best glassware in the tribunal.
She was not as effective in combat as either our Flambeau (Aquam specialist) or our Bjornaer (Ignem and Vim specialist), but she held her own with spells to fling, affix, and telekinetically control metal weapons and armor. Out of combat, she was one of the more social magi of the covenant, as she focused on craft and social skills in those periods when she wasn't monomaniacally pursuing Finesse. Her social skills allowed her to use her abilities to get a fair few good deals for her and her sodales from other covenants.
So, I found her very fun to play. She was definitely not a generalist, but was very effective in her field and flexible enough to not feel overly restricted in play. I don't think she'd appeal to those who demand to squeeze out every bit of effectiveness possible from their magi, but I didn't consider her to be disadvantaged at all.
Note that our troupe had no problem with someone using a collection of spells to craft things in stages. So, she had spells for finding ore, smelting iron, smelting steel, turning smelted metals into ingots, , shaping metal as a blacksmith would, quarrying stone, cutting stone as a mason would, mixing mortar, placing mortar and stones where they needed to go, etc. Even without a requirement to learn the associated Craft skills, though, I found the bonuses from them attractive enough to have her spend the time and cash to learn them. Time well spent for a Jerbiton who wanted more than anything to beautify the world, IMO.