Exposure Experience during Character Creation?

If a character gets into a year of lab work during character creation, does he gain exposure experience for it?

RAW, no.

It is assumed to be included into his total XP allowance.

Xavi

None of the example characters have exposure xp but I think that such xp. would make a more believable set of numbers for a character that would better represent how such a character would look if advanced in play.
So I'll agree with the other posters that the rules say no. But I'd advise doing it anyway unless you're interested in having your character match some arbitrary specific power level defined by the rules as presented (such as being fair to other players doing the same thing).

Quick summary: the rapid advancement rules don't match the seasonal advancement rules at all. I wrote this up more thoroughly in another thread. If you want to make the rapid advancement rules come closer, work with something like 36/year-7/(season in the lab). This will vary somewhat with the prevalence of books, use of correspondence rules, etc.

Chris

For clarifications sake what you mean is:
36XP per year and reduce that by 7XP for each season spent in the lab during that year, right?

I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that the rapid advancement rules don't match the seasonal advancement rules atall*. 36xp is only 20% higher than 30xp, and if a magus concentrates lab activities into full-year blocks (as suggested), he'll lose only 30xp/year in the lab vs. 28.

That said, I do agree that rapid advancement rules tend to be a bit "conservative" - though I could see low-powered sagas for which they would be perfectly appropriate.

I think it's more that losing 10 xp per season in the lab along with the 2 xp Exposure would result in 12 xp per season not in the lab, or 48 xp per year. That does not match the 30 xp per year of rapid advancement.

If you consider {13 + 2 + 13 + 2 = 30 xp}, then losing 10 xp per season in the lab is close enough to the seasonal advancement rules but you couldn't take more than 2 seasons per year in the lab. And what were you doing for those 2 Exposure-only seasons? Who were you working for?

(Hey all - back after long haitus. And good to be so!)

Both true, but it's also true that many such newly-created but "highly experienced" magi characters then end up with inexplicably low Magic Theory scores. Two obvious solutions are 1) mandate that characters put an appropriate number of xp into Magic Theory (or some other appropriate "exposure" skill, such as Spell Mastery) each year, or, 2) indeed, to allow some exposure xp. Hardly a game breaker, either way, and I've seen both done with good results.

This may be a somewhat spurious argument, depending on your Troupe and Saga. While, true, 7.5 xp/season (30/4)appears low at first glance, it may not be when taken over the life of an average mage. It all depends how many "below average" seasons are endured - dull duty, lengthy travel, disappointments, delays, dead ends, (non-magical) recovery from injury, the occasional imprisonment or research, anything that prevents more fruitful pursuits - unless there is an adventure or opportunity for dedicated study every time a mage steps out of their lab, in-game play would regularly deal out the occasional season of exposure only - 2 xp for that season, and that's it.

In play, it all comes down to the Storyguide and Troupe, what is "average" for your Saga in the long run.

(Otoh, don't forget that experienced magi can invent spells and create items much faster than 30 pts/year; 4x that rate is not difficult to achieve for dedicated elder magi.)

Welcome back Hound of Cuchulain :wink:

Thx EK!

<bows modestly, waves to all>

I forgot to add that it's important to remember that such InVi spells are Realm-specific, so if a child were unconventionally "gifted" with Fae magic or Daemonic power*, the standard InVi spell would not work on them, altho' an identical spell targeted at that Realm would. Fun ideas for SG's if they have Characters with that spell...

(* Such a child would not, typically, be appropriate as an apprentice. These are different from the Virtues/Flaws listed in the core book, but a creature whose power flows 100% from that other Realm, and not the Realm of "Magic".)

Well the numbess of the gift spell is done in magic because, the gift is magical.

However, it may react to infernal false gift (because infernal may trick hermetic magic).
Since there is only one "faerie gift" (from the homonculous), it's better than this is not detected seen those are monstruosities!

Sorry for the late reply. I haven't been online much in a while.

Well, first you haven't done the math properly in your comparison of a loss of 30/year to that of 28/year from my version because you're not taking into account the starting point. The point of the 7/year loss is to bring the experience to 2 for Exposure as a quick estimate. To do that starting with 30 you should remove 5.5/year. So you should be looking at how well a loss of 30/year compares to a loss of 22/year.

But let's see how well the rules do really match up...

Adventure: 5-10 experience, averaging about 7.5
Practice: 3-8, averaging about 4.5 since 3 is exceedingly rare and there are several common sources of 5 and higher
Training: 9 with a typical master (Ability 6)
Teaching: if you're the only student, and most magi should be able to afford that in general situations, it's hard to average below 10
Books: the standard tractatus is around 10-11, and summas are best at low levels and typically are noticeably higher in quality, so 12 should be a good average

I would expect most magi due to their nature and since they're wealthy, to get a lot of out of books. But for simplicity, let's just average those together. That gives us 8.6 experience per season. So I would expect to see 34 as a minimal yearly suggestion. Sure, it's not too far off, but let's keep going.

If you include Correspondence, that can easily jump up by 4 points, probably 3 at a minimum but it could be fewer. So I would then expect 36 or 37 per year at a minimum. Thus my suggested number. (Also 36 works well for losses to lab work because you don't deal with fractions.) Really I suspect it comes out closer to 40, which is noticeably off from 30, but going with a more minimal value is safer. But, again, let's keep going.

Let's look at a few cases of lab work. First, if the method really resembled the regular advancement, you shouldn't have to clump your seasons since that's irrelevant later, but let's ignore that for now.

Case 1: No lab work. Then even 34/year differs from 30/year by more than 11%.
Case 2: Minimal regular lab work: 1/4 of seasons in the lab. Putting all those lab seasons together gives 90 experience over 16 seasons. Those same seasons using 8.6 from above and 2 for exposure (leaving out Correspondence here) gives 111 experience in the same 16 seasons. Now it's off by more than 12%.
Case 3: Lab rat: 1/2 of seasons in the lab. Putting all those lab seasons together gives 30 experience over 8 seasons. Those same seasons using 8.6 from above and 2 for exposure (leaving out Correspondence here) gives 42 experience in the same 8 seasons. Now it's off by 14%.
Case 3: Verditius type lab rat: 3/4 of seasons in the lab. Putting all those lab seasons together gives 30 experience over 16 seasons. Those same seasons using 8.6 from above and 2 for exposure (leaving out Correspondence here) gives 58 experience in the same 16 seasons. Now it's off by more than 19%.
Case 5: The ultimate lab rat: every season in the lab. The quick rules grant 0 experience, while the actual amount should be 8, and there's no need to round anything to figure that one out. The quick rules are just plain wrong in this case.

So even by clumping the seasons in a way that does not match regular advancement at all, the difference between the rapid and regular advancement rules diverges as more seasons are spent in the lab. If they were to match reasonably well we should not see this divergence. But let's keep going.

The rapid advancement rules completely ignore things Virtues and Flaws such as Book Learner. But let's keep going.

Using experience for lab work would be the equivalent to 7.5 levels of spells gained in a season of lab work, or a lab total of about 15, though knowing precisely is difficult. It is reasonable to assume magi will study more if they're not able to invent something in reasonable time. The lab total would tend to rise for the 2-season or 3-season projects. However, it would also fall much more quickly for lab texts. So 15 is a reasonable interpretation. Magi generally have Int+3 or so. It is assumed the Aura is +3. Also magi have a minimum Magic Theory of 3, so we can probably assume 4 is a good low average for the early years. That's 10 already. Having only an extra 5 from Arts, Puissant, etc. is definitely a pretty low assumption, especially since magi (and persons in general) have a tendency to do what they're good at or work to be good at what they do.

So, let's put that all together. We can forgive the rapid advancement rules their lack of Correspondence since that came later. Let's look a the rest. The rapid advancement rules don't start with a reasonable estimate of the yearly average, become even worse when taking lab work into account, don't properly take into account the distribution of seasons, don't take into account Virtues and Flaws properly, and have an unreasonable assumption for lab totals. So in what way do they match the seasonal advancement rules? I'll stick with my statement of not at all.

Chris