(Original title "Familiars, Experienced Characters, and Why Didn't I Start on the Open Call Sooner?" cut for brevity's sake.)
If you bond a familiar who did not previously have human intelligence, it gains Int -3. While it can assist you in the lab at this point, it's doing more harm than good until it gets Magic Theory 3 with an appropriate specialization.
So does your familiar gain experience at the same rate as your magi? Would you devote time to "teaching" Magic Theory? Has this come up in someone else's game, or should I just write "pretty bird" down under my equipment and move on to more important things?
(And if anyone wants to handle the equally thorny question of Apprentices using the Experienced-but-not-Extremely-Complex generation system, that'd be much appreciated as well.)
Familiars gain xp in the same way any other character does.
Get your local teacher (the one with MT) to teach your little bird what it needs to know...
Or just let it hang out in the lab wothout helping until it gets the requisite experience from exposure. Or hire a Latin/artes liberales tutor for it and then set it down with a good magic theory summa.
All wonderful ideas. All require the Extremely Detailed option.
If I'm just making a stock character (30 XP/year, 2 Warping/year, 5*MT Vis available for lab) it's my understanding that non-laboratory seasonal activities, like Teaching, Studying from Vis, or Reading, are off the table. Because while they're powerful, they step outside the abstraction of the chargen system.
So, I can say that my familiar gains 30 XP/year, that's true. That means it'll be 2 years before he's any good in the lab (less if I Gift of Reason him up). But there's not much I'd be spending my familiars XP on except Magic Theory. I guess I could use the guideline that his MT won't exceed my own, that'll keep things more reasonable, but it'll still grow very... rapidly.
Apprentices are another matter entirely. They specifically require the devotion of seasons. I'm tempted to say taking an apprentice during character creation loses me a season, which leaves me only 20 XP/year or 3 seasons for lab work (or some hybrid thereof), which probably isn't worth the bonus to lab totals.
