Familiar Bond Enchantment Exceptions

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

In the text for familiar bond enchantment, it says that there are five differences from the rules for enchanting items, one of which is:

Third, the maga may invest any number of powers in a season, if they are all of the same Technique and Form and their levels add to less than or equal to half her Lab Total.

It has been brought to my attention @callen that this is not, apparently, an exception to the rules as written for enchanting items.

There is still time to change this in ArMD (just about), but I am nervous about it, because nobody has noticed it in twenty years. That means that it might well be correct, in which case changing it would be bad.

So, is this a mistake that nobody has noticed? (It could be — people are unlikely to cross-reference the familiar rules when creating enchanted devices, and it tells someone empowering a familiar bond not to look for enchanted item rules for this point.)

2

If it's not an exception for enchanting items, then it shouldn't be listed as an exception for Familiar bond enchantment.

3

But is it? I want to confirm whether you can do that for enchanted items. It is scarily easy to overlook things in texts that you are familiar with, so I do not trust my assessment here.

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4

Under Multiple Lab Activities in the COre book:

All the activities you perform in a season must be
of the same type (learning spells, instilling powers
in an invested device, creating potions) and
must use the same Technique and Form. To

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5

I would leave it, just remove that it’s an exception.

It’s not too bad, generally people only read to grab the “what can I do, and how do I do it”. It being “an exception” would be ignored mentally as “noise”.

There are a lot of “holes” and missing cross references of minor elements of the rules over the 40 books that are inconsistent and sometimes completely missing or just edited out.

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6

I think the text would be clearer by removing that section.
That is not an exception per se and could be used for false deduction.

It would be more logical not refering that as an exception.

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7

given that it is an exception, I would suggest both removing it and also updating the text that Itzhak Evan quoted to include investing powers in a bond as one the examples.

8

(Oops, misread. Sorry.)

Yes, updating the use of lab texts could be done. But I was already worried about the size of the change with deleting this one sentence. Seeing as there would just be agreement with the use of lab texts, I'm not sure adding another sentence there is needed. David would know more about adding text and what might happen to spacing.

9

Oh, it was noticed, and even pointed out on the forum here!

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10

As a general point and this torques me off all the time on clickbait ads) even if something hasn't been reported, don't assume that nobody has noticed something before you.
[tangential rant]
I mean seriously, 10 things nobody ever noticed before in Endgame? Just how special do you think you are?
[/rant]

11

Looking at the rules for enchanting items, and the rules for multiple laboratory activities, that is indeed not an exception to the regular rules.

If your Lab Total is double the level of the power, you can invest the power in one season. (ArM5 p99)
You can do multiple lab activities in one season, if they are all of the same type, all use the same Technique and Form, and each can be done within a season. Then you just apply your Lab Total to the combined required levels (ArM5 p102)

Those two rules in combination should give exactly the result described in the third "exception" in the familiar bonding enchantment rules.

(If one wants to be really picky, the rules for enchanting items don't say anything at all about investing multiple powers in one season, so one would have to look both at the rules for enchanting items and at the rules for multiple lab activities to figure out this can be done - but it still doesn't look like an exception to what can normally be done when enchanting an item.)

Most of the things later in the section on Empowering the Bond are not exactly exceptions to the rules for enchanting items, but rather things that are not touched upon at all in the rules for enchanting items (since those never mention anything about familiars or familiar bonds).

For example, that when a power is invested in the bond, mage and familiar each take on some minor characteristic of the other. Not part of the regular rules for enchanting items, but not changing anything said there either.

As it is, one could easily get the (false) impression that those are all part of the regular rules for enchanting items, since they are not part of the list of exceptions.

My suggestion is to change "with five exceptions" to "with some changes", followed by an unnumbered list of the five four actual changes from the enchanting rules.
So instead of "First, there is no limit to the number of powers which may be invested in a familiar." you would have "- There is no limit to the number of powers which may be invested in a familiar." And so on.

While in some ways less precise, I think that would actually be less prone to misunderstandings.

4 Likes
12

In general, yes. When you have been the contact person for errata for twenty years and no-one has reported something that is a pretty obvious error once it is pointed out, you have good reasons to believe that, if you haven't been told, it hasn't been noticed.

Good reasons do not always lead you to the truth, however.

In any case, it does look like this is a mistake. I am checking to see whether it can be fixed at this stage of the layout — Chapter 8 has been done, and this change would shift things substantially on the page.

4 Likes
13

Yes, that shifting was my worry. As I'd said, changing "five" to "four" and "fourth" to "third" shouldn't be bad. But when it comes to deleting a full sentence that has its own paragraph breaks I was worried it would be too much at this point. Still, I'd rather point it out and be told it can't be changed than not point it out when perhaps it could have been changed.

14

I have checked, and it is possible. This will be fixed.

5 Likes
15

Does the following edited text look right to everyone?

A maga may, at any time, invest powers in the familiar bond. This is a laboratory activity, and the rules are based on those for investing a power in an invested device, with the following modifications.

There is no limit to the number of powers which may be invested in a familiar.

The maga gets no bonus to the Lab Total from other effects already invested in the familiar. Instead, she gets +5 if the effect matches either the Technique or Form used to bind the familiar, and +10 if it matches both.

Powers are limited to effects which target the maga, the familiar, or both.

The benefits of Verditius Mysteries do not add to the Lab Total. The Mystery has nothing to do with familiars.

If the enchantment affects only the maga, it is activated by and under the control of the familiar. If it affects only the familiar, it is activated by and under the control of the maga. For the use of effects enchanted into the familiar bond, the maga and familiar are always considered to be touching one another.

…and so on, continuing as the current text.

12 Likes
16

Looks good to me.

17

Overall I like it. But you have to be really careful when you start saying a whole bunch of things that were not previously exceptions are now "modifications." That may impact things across a whole bunch of other books.

The most obvious example is the very last statement. If using 1 pawn per 10 levels (rounded up) of the appropriate Form/Technique. As it says the cost is the same, it must be that the appropriate Form/Technique is a modification. But that isn't. So now we have a contradiction, the rules on Familiars telling us we misunderstood the earlier rules even though we didn't. So are the earlier rules in error or are the Familiar rules in error? We don't know.

That's just the one that jumps to mind immediately. I'd need to read through them all carefully and try to remember things from other books before saying there won't be other, similar problems.

18

Meanwhile, since about four lines of a column are being removed, it could be worth throwing in about 1-2 lines with the control notes to explain how this forces the Concentration Duration over Sun/Moon. It's all currently consistent, but the logic is a little buried, and there is now space. (Sorry, should have caught that and mentioned it a year ago.)

19

Change that last sentence to
"As usual, this vis must match the Technique or Form of the effect."
and it ought to be clear that statement is just a retiteration of the rules for enchanting items.

Technically that whole last paragraph about vis costs is redundant and could be removed, but it would probably be good to retain the information there for clarity.

If the minor change I suggest above is considered insufficient to avoid any seeming contradictions, how about the following?:

As I suggested earlier, change "with five exceptions" to "with some changes", or to "with four exceptions"
Then an unnumbered list of the five four actual exceptions to the enchanting item rules.
Then add the sentence "The following also applies when investing powers into the familiar bond:" followed by the rest of the text.

That way one should avoid the implict claim that the rest is part of the regular rules for enchanting items (which it mostly isn't) while also avoiding the implication that all of it is different from the rules for enchanting items (which that last paragraph isn't).

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20

Even then, it's just as bad to say a normal version of a rule is a modification as to say a normal copy of a rule is an exception. The proposal is essentially to replace a mistake with the same mistake elsewhere.

However, it will explain the shared traits thing better, so the change is positive.

Yes, something like this is better. I agree with you that repeating some information isn't bad. We just need to make sure the repeated stuff isn't stated as being an exception (current problem) or a modification (proposed problem).