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While a magi may never make that choice, a player might - taking the Poor Student flaw and Free Study would push you towards finding such opportunities, especially if people are being miserly about their books.
Sure, you can deliberately build a character that is bad at normal study. But that doesn’t contradict what I said, really. You are just re-creating the situation of earlier editions, where book studying becomes ineffective. Or trying to. It’s not quite as bad as the “Just no” of 2nd/3rd edition, but you can make it pretty bad.
But even with that double shift, you’d need to have a pretty vis rich saga to make it worth studying from Vis instead of books. Sure, that vis is 1d10+6 (assuming an Aura of 3) vs 11-3 = 8 for a good tractatus.But if your art is in the teens or higher, you are talking 3+ pawns per season, with the accompanying botch chance.
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Where the sweet spot is between worthwhile enough to study, and not broken is tough. The earlier suggestion of multiplying by vis spent may work, if you do not allow people to spend more than the minimum vis required. I could see someone deciding to spend 10 or even 15 vis in one season and hope to strike it rich. An average roll of 5.5 is giving 55 XP. If it goes bad, it goes really bad, but a gambler may risk it.
But yes, implementing a house rule to making study via vis worthwhile is a way to trigger twilight more often, because no sane person is using vis instead of tractatii at the moment.
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Free Study is actually pretty terrible for a Minor Virtue; it gives the same bonus to Quality as Book Learner but studying from vis has a very high opportunity cost where studying from books does not. You could have used that pawn of vis for something else which would have been an ongoing benefit.
I’d suggest increasing the Quality bonus from Free Study to +5 or so.
(Independent Study isn’t too exciting, either, but at least it also benefits Story xp.)
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In the old rules, when you raised Arts by entire levels, vis spent did act as a multiplier. You spend 1-3 pawns of Vis and rolled the dice. If your total was high enough to get another level (or two or three) in your Art, yay!. Otherwise, you got bupkis.
In the modern rules, of course, you do get partial progress if you don’t botch. But it keeps the vis cost high by increasing how much you have to spend to even study.
The only serious way to restore studying from vis to a level of importance is to nerf the availability of Tractatus type books, either by having your Order dominated by Charles van Huse types or otherwise making the mass production of tractatus rare. Or limited to lvl 20 or something.
Books are just that much better even if xp favored vis (which it doesn’t).
And that just does not make sense as the rules are written. Each generation you’d expect at least 1 magi in each art who wants a crazy high score so they can leave a legacy. An epic ritual spell, the best summae ever written, a powerful artifact, etc.
That guy offers new magi deals to make tractatus.If the young magi does not have the score to make a tractatus, the old magi lets them borrow a summae. Magi with scores in the high teens would do a you make me a tractatus, I will make you one, deal. And we’ve had hundreds of years and multiple generation of magi to have this happen. I consider each art should logically have at least 100 unique tractatii of at least quality 8 around the order, and that is being conservative. Redcaps should be moving tractatii all around the place.
House ruling tractatus to only be able to written for every full 10 points, rounding down, not up, instead of 5 points rounding up, would greatly reduce the amount of tractatii available. It stops any but the most focused apprentices writing tractatus, for example.
This nerfing should be done in concert with making study from vis better, or it would just annoy players.
Nerfing book availability isn't the only answer. If Vis gives a quicker improvement rate than books, some people will use it even if it is risky, and players have an interesting choice.
I would be very cautious about a “multiply by pawns” system, it might easily overwhelm. But rule changes such as increasing the quality by +3 flat, or +2 per extra pawn spent, would probably be OK.
My thinking about this comes to a suggestion that ErikT did on the Discord server, which is a bit radical: getting rid of tractatus altogether.
And before you sharpen your daggers and ready up your CrIg spells, I want to say that I’ve thought up an alternative that I prefer to tractatus: Escalated summae.
No magus is supposed to just “write a paper” and that’s it, right? Even if it’s a short-form document, it still would be nice to call it a “1st Volume”. You would write a book (let’s call it a summa for the lack of a better term) that has a Level and a Quality.
You have the same restriction as a Summa when deciding the Level of it. For the sake of example, let’s say you have a veteran maga with a score of 21 in Mentem. In my view, you would be able to write a Level 10 Summa with a varying Quality. Of course, you could lower the level and amp the quality. Simple, right? That’s how you write a summa in standard rules.
However, my thinking would be that you would also be able to write a following volume of Level 20, with diminishing returns on the Quality. The only requisite would be that you would have written the first volume before, and this book would be the second, making it mandatory for you to read the first if you wanna study from the second. Or, at least, needed that you have Mentem 10 before attempting to read the second volume.
Nothing would then impede the example maga with 21 in Mentem to write three tomes, one with L7QX, another with L14Q (X - Y) and finally another with L21Q (X - Y - Z). You would then be able to become an expert in Mentem just from writing those three books alone.
Now, what does this have to do with vis studying? These changes, along with a couple more, would make it so they accomplish three things:
- Narrative constraints. Access to books was difficult, and even with the Covenants rules, the book market could very well be comprised of low-level books, scarce high-level books and very rare high-level books. The latter would be sold only in exceptional circumstances, as heirlooms, or in very prestigious libraries all over ME. It would not be narratively easy to get your hands on a book like that. And even then, it would take you several years to get to the level of the book.
- Incentivising Resonant Materials. Let’s be honest, not many people get ahold of those because min-maxing the stats/v&f of the writer magus is the quickest and easiest way to get good books. Buffing them a bit would make it so it’s actually worth writing with those in mind, because even if you are not the most Communicative magus, you can still get a good book out.
- Writing books for profit. How many people here can say that magi in their saga have written high level books? And how many else can say that the magi have sold those books? It’s pretty rare to be able to sell a book you’ve written. If you actually make it so books are more expensive in vis, that means that players also get incentivized to write a book when they’re high enough in an Art, for them to get Vis which they can use to further their proficiency. It becomes a cycle that would fuel the market with books, and get Vis on the people that need it.
When you can’t afford a book which is a rook, but two pawns get you a sizable way there, then you start valuing studying vis. Then you plateau, and start either questing for or paying for mid-level books, which only get you half-way there. Then you start wanting to write your own books, which if you want to write well enough will need resonant materials (so, more stories) and then selling them, which in turn would allow you to either save up or study more vis.
If we even slightly buff vis studying and nerf books a bit, then you start having reasonable situations when studying vis is relevant and/or necessary, and then we can talk about Twilight and Warping possibilities, which as I said would need a bit of an overhaul for all this to be worth it.
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Of course it doesn’t make sense with the rules as written. The current way the rules are written is why vis study is dead.
Whether it would annoy players depends on your players. The vast abundance of tractatus is the current assumption by some players, certainly. And it is a reasonable one based on the way the rules are written, especially Covenants. But that’s just a choice, just like how much vis is available is a choice. And how many seasons between adventures is a choice. People will have different preferences in that regard.
The setting used to assume that wizards largely did not like sharing knowledge and the fact that Bonisagus magi did was pretty defining. “Knowledge shared is power lost” was a pretty common mindset. It also assumed that noob wizards didn’t have much to say that was worth the time of elder wizards to read.
The vis study rules and the cap on book learning were changed to what they are now because spending a season and vis to get nothing for it were unfun. But that doesn’t mean that the setting has to suddenly change to an all in on book trading and old guys getting better by reading the deep insights of wizards who completed their gauntlet last week.
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I am away from my books at the moment, but previous editions had something very like this -- the student was required to have a certain minimum before they could profit from studying a book. They were essentially summae with a 'starting' and 'finishing' level -- too low & the student did not understand the material; too high and the student found nothing new in studying the book. I don't remember what they were called; maybe 'Disputando' or 'Disputio' or something.
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The Tractatus vs Summa conundrum is more complicated than just making vis study unappealing.
If you find a high-Level, high-Quality Summa then no one is interested in lower Level/Quality Summae on the same topic. Which does not model reality very well since we know that medieval scholars collected lots of books on a topic.
This seems to have inclined the Ars writers to avoid putting high Level/high Quality Summae into canon. But, to make continued study of Pliny or Aristotle make sense instead of writing up their books as Summa, they’re “Encyclopedia” – collections of Tractatuses. Pliny’s Natural History matches what is described as a Summa in the rules, but it’s instead a collection of Quality 6 Tractatuses so it doesn’t get tossed out when somone writes a higher-Level/Quality Summa or become useless to a character with a high Philosophiae score.
That means that a lot of “authority” type books in Mythic Europe are encyclopedic collections of Tractatuses, which reinforces the ubiquity of Tractatuses in general.
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I think the Nicomachean Ethics and Physics are both identical Summa in Philosophaie, so there’s no reason to read both of them.
I do think that Summa are the problem child of the book system, not Tractatus. The mundane books just make it more obvious.
Tractatus are mainly an issue if you accept that they are mass produced and widely traded, which is something you can flavor to taste easily enough.
I don't think anything breaks if you say that some books can be read as a Summa (more than once, to a limit) or as a Tractatus (read once, no limit), depending on the reader. You might have to say that some books have a lower Quality as a Tractatus, such as the Q21 Roots.
I like this change. +3 flat and then +2 for each subsequent extra pawn would buff it tremendously in early-game, and would still hold a bit on the mid and late-game.
What would you propose to make Summae better? Would the “escalating summae” that I propose be good?
Which unfortunately is made patently clear in Covenants. Flavoring is not the problem, as anyone can do it. The discussion is how to change the present rules so they hold together better with what they already state in-canon.
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I could definitely see a good bit of use and fun by allowing one to spend extra vis, especially with a vis limit based on MT. May need to adjust the specific values tho….
With an MT of 5 you can spend 10 pawns a season. A score of < 6 means you need 1 pawn to learn, which in turn means you’d be spending an extra 9 pawns if you wanted to. That would Apprentice’s First Vis Study ™ would be Stress Die + Aura + 18….. though it is expensive to do so, I’ve seen a few sagas who would have that lying around, especially in Vim vis. If you had a score of 16, you’d need 4 pawns to study, so going all out would give you Die + aura + 12, still pretty damned high.
A vis rich saga that suddenly becomes very potent. You may also add a limit on expenditure to match the original amount, which means vis study gets more powerful as one advances.
Would a +1 make it better? It would turn it into Stress Die + Aura + 12 on the first case and Stress Die + Aura + 9 on the second. And you’re right, probably a limitation on how many pawns you can use would be nice. But do keep in mind that MT 5 is very unusual right after Gauntlet if you’re not a Bonisagus or have Puissant MT.
And also do keep in mind that in the case of a botch, you would roll 10 extra botch die… Which is exactly the deterrent we would like to prevent spamming it.
It’s hard to gauge how “good” a bonus for vis study would be because of the potentially huge swingyness of the stress die. I got 128+5 xp studying a significato and suddenly became a Creo specialist as a beginning Verditius. It’s unlikely to happen but the potential of even doubling into the 10-20 range is supposed to be the temptation of vis study.
I’m thinking that applying the bonus to the minimum might be better to eliminate the feeling of “wasting” the vis to get 2+Aura xp.
Remember that the cost of vis is a cost. Spending 10 pawns is probably a couple of seasons of distilling or vis hunting, and could be spent on other things. Or just spent on multiple study sessions to get multiple Stress Die + Aura xp. If you don’t impose a lower limit, a maga with 10 MT might spend 20 pawns but thats 20 pawns of vis – spending that much vis should have an impressive result.
The swingyness of the stress die is a lesser concern because its not changed from core. The difference between 128+5 and 128+15 is miniscule.
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I know “roll many keep best” is not found in ArsM, but that’s how I’d improve vis study. Rolling 4 die has about 1/3 of doubling and/or botching.
It’s not 128 + (5 or 15), it’s (8, 64 or 128) + 5. That’s what swingy means.
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