I've got a Faerie Blooded maga in my saga, who chose Deficient Technique (Creo) as a flaw, as she wanted to play a person with Muto focus who could not just conjure items to solve problems. Like a faerie who cannot make things from their own inspiration, she had to change things. This sounded really great.
However, though Longevity Rituals are in her future, the rest of the group not blessed with Strong Faerie Blood are starting their aging rolls and longevity rituals and so forth, and it seems to me....
It seems to me that by picking up "Deficient Creo" she inadvertently picked up Difficult Longevity Ritual, as Longevity Rituals use Creo.
The only 'bright side' is that others can make Longevity Rituals for her at full strength.
Am I wrong in this? It just seems to make Deficient Creo much more crippling in a long term game than any other Deficient Technique.
Commission the ritual. In most cases making your own ritual is one of the least efficient use of resources. No biggie here. You spend a few dozens of vis pawns and voila: 1 LP that will last until you enter final twilight. Difficult longevity ritual puts problems even for the specialists in the field.
Very interesting ... one of the magi in our saga is Faerie-raised, and his player chose the Harmless Magic Flaw (HoH:MC p87) with similar reasoning: like a Faerie, he can't actually destroy solid mundane things, but can only create the illusion (for a short time) that the thing has been destroyed.
Nope, while Def: Creo is certainly among the less preferable Flaws, there are worse ones.
Unstructured Caster and Twilight Prone comes to mind without much difficulty.
Weak Spontaneous Magic is another bad one, as is Short-Ranged Magic. Rigid Magic is worse for the "right" character(for some it wont matter at all).
Unstructured Caster and Rigid Magic are pratictically very similar in nature, they are very bad for certain character types. Others (such as my spont specialist) don't or won't mind them at all.
One of the characters in Magi of Hermes has a Deficiency in Creo. He does not know a single spell based on Creo, and the score of the Art remains zero throughout his existence. As for his Longevity Ritual, it was commissioned, and performed by an unnamed service provider. That's what specialists excel in, and are therefore sought after — highly praised, and -paid.
For an "average" i would say that UC is far worse. Of course, for someone that is focused on spontaneous casting, its no big deal, but i think thats almost the only ones who it wont be a big problem for.
Being forced to spend vis and lots of time just to be able to cast anything formulaic and at full casting score, that really sucks badly.
RM OTOH is bad, but most magi dont use ritual magic very often anyway, and since they would still take a lot of vis and time to do, it wont matter if it takes some time to find someone else willing to perform it for you.
