Which is why I, personally, prefer to track the fractions. So 1.5 xp is just recorded as exactly as that.
I really like this idea.
So much hate for the extra half an experience point per season. My tastes in this particular issue are diametrically opposed. Let the players have an extra half of an xp. Let them do it twice if they split their exposure between two arts/abilities where they have affinities in both. The players will enjoy it, and compared to the impact of more or fewer free seasons of study quality 8 versus quality 12 tractatus and the availability of vis it makes precious little difference.
Tell me why you dislike it so much.
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I'll admit it's not entirely rational. Tracking the base experience points and multiplying it to compare against the advancement table, and tracking fractional experience points solve the issue, though.
Over the grand lifetime of a magus, the extra experience point adds a lot, especially if they are putting into to Arts/Abilities with affinities. Adventure XP gets allocated to the art/ability with the affinity and it's always odd, so as to get the extra experience point. It's a bit of a temptation that even good players who don't go full munchkin are going to find hard to avoid.
Same as Mr Link here 
I am interested that Jonathan.Link thinks Flawless magic is the most powerful virtue in the game. I really like it but I've been strongly conflicted on whether it is actually worth a major virtue.
Having just created a character with It I can confirmed that for many of his spells, mastery is entirely irrelevant. They don't need the casting boost, don't need penetration and usually end up with abilities like still or quiet casting just to make the PC look flash when casting. He certainly won't be increasing his mastery score on them.
I can clearly see the use when mastering attack spells or those that need penetration, its useful with rituals too. But most characters I have played have few of these and a PC might be better served taking the mastered spells virtue (bonus, only a minor virtue rather than flawless' major) for the 50 xp in spell masteries.
My games have never had too much in the way of books on mastery lying around which might well colour my interpretations. I do recognise the use of doubling practice experience as it means you get mastery 2 in a spell with only one season of study.
Has anyone else played a flawless magi and can they relate their own views?
I know you asked about others' experiences, but I thought I'd add my two bits.
All of your spells get a +1 CS bonus automatically, and all get one less botch die than normal, again automatically. For the equivalent of 5 xp you double the benefits I mentioned.
Agreed, certain spells it's a bit harder to make the case. I'd be interested to see a sample of these spells though. With rituals, the mastery skill isn't always useful, but removing one or two botch die is, especially as it comes after things like the Golden Cord and Cautious Sorcerer.
50 xp of mastery goes quick. Why not make it 100 with Flawless Magic! 
But yes, combat gets a lot of attention from mastery abilities. Still, there are other good ways to use mastery abilities other than combat.
I have a character who has Flawless and Subtle Magic, a lot of his spells have quiet casting taken at least once, a couple I think are taken twice, like Prying Eyes. This gives him a lot of advantages of casting spells when others don't know that he's casting spells. I know that one could get the same benefit of still and quiet castingx2 with Deft Form, but of course that only works with one specific form. I had some general feeling when I built him that I was going to turn this character into a generalist, because I normally don't play a generalist. Now, he is an apprentice in a saga where the PCs started as apprentices in Doctorcomic's Alpine Apprentice saga, and given the house rules in that saga he has a lot of spells, 230 some levels of spells (we are near the end of the apprenticeship). I kind of see him as a MacGyver type but with spells for any and every occasion.
Fast casting (defensive) spells also becomes a bit easier, because the fatigue loss isn't a forgone conclusion when a spell is mastered for fast casting as it would be for a spontaneous spell.
In the thread I started about the average quality of a tractatus, and we got into discussing how many there were in existance, I posited that there would be a lot of Spell Mastery texts out there, especially combat related spell, and any useful ritual spell will have them, too. Depending on how many texts you think exist, I think it's reasonable a lot of even low quality level of texts for mastery exist, just because it's so useful and vital for minimizing botch dice.
Edit:
Wanted to add that my experience is that it seems to mesh well, if not magnify, a lot of other Hermetic Virtues when placed on a character. Which clearly it does in the case of your original post.
My views...
Double the xp gain from the book, so 6xp +3 equals 9, doubled equals 18.
I have never used Metacreator. Pen and paper and calculator. Or a text document, I am modernized I suppose :mrgreen:
But I run into players that use it all the time and from what I have seen, it is a confusing mess.
And Flawless Magic is not so super-powered at all. It is useful for a couple of spells, but not every spell. And it sorta sends you down the path of collecting a wide variety of generic spells just so you can get your money's worth out of the thing. It makes your specialization "spells" rather than any one Art or Focus.
Which is not such a bad thing now that I think of it.
What if Flawless Magic was a Minor Virtue, but also inhibited your ability to make magic items? Halve Lab Totals for Charged, Lesser, and Invested Items?
It gets a bit messy when a character initiates the affinity virtue or looses it in an initiation.
I'd imagine you'd want to determine the score prior to the virtue change and translate it into an equivalent value to be used afterwards. The alternative - I had 100 xp in penetration now I have 150 yipee! - or -I had a magic theory score of 7 now its down to five darn- don't match with my vision of what the virtue means.
I see the virtue as meaning that you pick up the skill more quickly than others. The character's mind is more attuned to assimilating information about that subject. (Puisant on the other hand means that you perform beyond your knowledge.) The extra xp gained per study period maps satisfyingly on my model of what the virtue means in the story.
This is true I guess I just don't see the extra experience point as somehow unearned or cheap. Affinity is a virtue that they paid for, they should get the rewards (I'll admit that it's a fairly strong virtue). If I did I might share your feelings for the different xp scales option (or Arthur's amazingly simple "don't round the xp total" idea).
As someone who is bothered by (ok this is a guess you may not really be bothered) the munchkinness of the round up rule, do you see any benefits for the metacreator "solution" that aren't achieved by Arthur's method?
My understanding is that metacreator originally sprung from a Hero system tool that was applied to other game systems. Hero system's philosophy is to attempt to make a build point worth the same amount of utility no matter how it is spent, so a 600 build point character is balanced with any other 600 build point character. This set up is ingrained enough in the assumptions of the software that it was hard to make it do affinities the way that fifth edition described them. It wasn't an attempt to "solve" anything perceived to be a flaw in Ars Magica (This could be completely wrong I've no sources for it.)
On the other hand, your Twilight Experience, Mystery Cult initiation, whatever, where you gained the virtue was so powerful that you had to reorder your understanding of the Art and Ability and suddenly understand so much more about the subject than you did before, a paradigm shift, if you will. Conversely, you get a big bonk on the head and are suddenly confronted with the knowledge that you knew so much more, were capable of so much more before the accident (I've seen people with TBI struggle with this). I'm unsure whether RAW says that affinities are retroactive or not, but I can see both sides of the argument. It couldn't hurt to ask for it to be changed to allow the existing score to stay, and recompute or change how they work generally in MetaCreator.
Well, if you aren't using MetaCreator, or specifically if I wasn't using it, I would prefer Arthur's method. MetaCreator does a really close approximation of this, since it tracks total XP, anyway.
That may be. When a programmer has a piece of code that he thinks will do the job, he'll reuse it rather than invent from scratch. I wouldn't ascribe as much to the software being a certain way as I would to the programmer who may not be as motivated to understand the underlying system as an avid player might. My experience suggests he's open to making changes, based on my reporting of the Flawless Magic errata to him. He made the change, put it in a beta version, told me about it and I said it worked great (I think) and it was put into the next release of the production version. He didn't know about the Flawless Magic errata, while it had been published for some time.
This would be more easily represented as a major virtue and a major flaw, (My gut feeling is that it would be better represented this way as well but I could possibly be argued out of that point).
I do find spell mastery useful. One particular use that I haven't seen many people here discussion is defense mastery. As I've been advancing Ranulf and Adelbert in to elder characters I've frequently looked at learning spells simply so that the character could master them for defense, touch of the Enigma, and enslave the mortal mind are two that that I did this for. Certainly given a enough time to study magi would also want to learn a level of mastery in defense for wind of mundane silence (to prevent the removal of your parma) and opening the intangible tunnel as well, (although these were in the case of my magi spells that they'd want to know anyway).
But, useful as it is, I don't see flawless magic to be as powerful as life linked spontaneous magic -
"Hey Jim can you cast [ insert any imaginable sixth magnitude spell here]? "
"Sure just drag my unconscious body back to bed after I'm done and you're gonna owe me a beer"
A character with life linked spontaneous makes entire covenants over the top powerful. Not just an individual magus.
I can see this happening in a play group that didn't have their magi generally mistrustful of each other, think of the covenant as a place where they just live and not an agreement of business partners, more or less. If Jim is talking to a Tytalus, for example, why does he trust the Tytalus to do only what he asks? Why isn't someone plucking ACs from his unconscious form? It's easy to be too powerful when you have an assumption that you're all PCs and in this together. I know it can be hard to play, but magi should be generally cautious with respect to other magi. As has been discussed in other threads, spells that lower your defenses are easy, and doing things that let magi do this even more easily is something that would probably be at the top of everyone's mind.
Hi,
Both LLSM and FM are great virtues. Book Learner too. And Affinities, also.
As usual, I'm pro-"Munchkin." /924723984729 +3 from BL gets doubled ftw. Affinities round up ftw.
After all, if I really wanted to solve the Munchkin problem, I'd get rid of things like Creo, Muto and Ignem, which are completely insane....
Anyway,
Ken
Muto? 
Yes, and Intellego too! Totally bonkers what you can do with that.
It's 18 xp. First one generates a study total - to which Book Learner contributes. Then one doubles the exp to be put into Spell Mastery.
It depends of your campaign whether that is as good as it looks: you first need to get lots of books on Spell Mastery, and second lots of situations where high Spell Masteries matter.
Cheers
I had forgotten about the magic resistance mastery ability and now I read it, its actually rather badass.
I think part of my internal monologue on this comes from the generally rare nature of books on mastery abilities. My sagas current library only has about 6 books on mastery. However, most of these are for attack spells so the magic resistance ability would be very handy.
I might also start thinking a bit more seriously about inventing spells specifically to take advantage of mastery abilities. such as fast cast defensive spells, generic attack spells to magic resistance, spells that allow one to talk while gagged to take advantage of quiet casting. This could add much utility to the virtue.
Thanks for your insights one and all.
Although the consequences of a botch are nasty. Mythic Stamina + Cautious Magic can knock off 4 botch dice, even down to 0.
I see LLSM as more powerful toward the beginning of a magus' life and FM more powerful later, especially for an experienced player. Then again, there's Marko's excellent example of a starting character with FM.
LLSM + Bear Heartbeast + Inner Heartbeast + Tireless Quality 
But FM + (minor virtue that gives +2xp for practice and 3xp for adventure) is also interesting; not as good as having a book though, but you at least don't need the book.
I consider FM to be one of the few Major Hermetic Virtues that are really worth it. It is both versatile and powerful, allowing many kinds of effective characters and allowing a given character to quickly acquire and develop new competences. Your favorite offensive spell? Penetration, Fast-cast and Multicast (and Magic Resistance if it's everyone else's favorite spell too). Your favorite secret Mentem spell? No words or gestures. That ritual you don't want to blow up in your face? Get rid of a few botch dice. Etc.
FM + Cautious Magic + Familiar = What botch dice?
There are lots of ways to increase penetration; vis, arcane and sympathetic connections, wizard's communion, ceremonial spell mastery, synthemata, etc there are darn few ways to increase magic resistance but at least the way we do have doubles the resistance against an entire class of spells.
For characters who have significant resistance already, the magic resistance can get close to unbeatable.
There's merit to this in that it keeps the power curve a bit more manageable and danger from inside of the group can add some interest to a story. There is no more formidable an opponent than another PC and intra party conflict tends to not have the quantity of bloodshed. Players exhibit more care with other player's characters than they do with "mere" NPC's. On the other hand there the time span that the game takes place over, after a decade of in game time has passed is it realistic to not have a sizable portion of the covenant's magi treat one another as something like family?
There is also the fun factor of playing a game where the characters are working together for the good of all. Cooperation has in my experience provided more great game sessions than intra party conflict. Not that I haven't had exquisite intra-party conflict games, but it can grow tiring. I more frequently want to tell stories of friends working as a team than scheming opponents trying to take advantage of one another. It's somewhat more relaxing to be around the table if I feel that the other characters have my character's back than when there is distrust and animosity between the characters. One has to, at least a bit, imagine things from the perspective of your character and it makes things a bit more tense. There's less information sharing and fewer goofy strokes of genius that come out of group planning to be laughed about.
OK I'm getting pretty far from the original xp point question now. Sorry.