I have been (off and on) kludging around with a more high-fantasy reflection of Ars Magica, avoiding Mythic Europe and the ascendancy of the Divine.
One of the rules I had been throwing around was that your Warping Score just added to your casting score. Just… flat. Sure, you were heading towards a Final Twilight, but you get more powerful with every mistake you survive.
Rego has always been able to change the state of a Target without going through intermediary stages or processes:
ReAq 3: Change a liquid into the corresponding solid or gas (for example, change water into ice or steam).
ReHe 15: Weave thread into a tunic.
Rego Craft Magic is just doing the same thing where you jump from the current state to the end state without passing Go and collecting $200. The implication here is that the state of the Target (baked cake or unbaked ingredients) isn’t part of it’s Essential Nature and can thus be moved between the states using Rego whereas a change in Essential Nature would need Muto and be temporary.
At the same time while rego could convert wood to charcoal, there has never been an indication it could convert it to coal or diamond. Of course diamond in mythic Europe is a bit different than diamond in the real world, but you see the principal. Neither, for example, does rego convert grass to milk, though if you creo or muto something into being a cow it will handle the process just fine (at a slower rate). The idea is that a philosophical formula is closer to grass→ milk than dough→ cake. Even the dough→ cake example doesn’t explicitly include eggs, wheat, and milk→cake in a single step.
In Mythic Europe coal, diamond, & milk don’t have the same origin as they do in the real world. Per Pliny, diamonds apparently breed underground like other gems (or if they’re the clear gems he talks about they may just be very hard ice). Milk is something that cows produce naturally, like trees bear fruit. You can bring a tree to fruit with Rego Herbam; you can probably make a cow produce milk using Rego Animal.
Note also that Rego Animal can spontaneously generate animals that are produced that way in Mythic Europe: vermin, insects, eels, geese, … snakes & crocodiles if you want to take Shakespear as a source.
edit: hm. Looks like Pliny mentions “live coal made of the hardest wood” when talking about gold in section 19 here. So, maybe you can get coal from wood using Rego in Mythic Europe. Although I know that the Romans also mined coal in Britain so I don’t know where Pliny would have gotten a coal - wood connection from. Could be some translation confusion going on here with “coal” used for “glowing ember of solid fuel” or “carbon rock”.
Because one makes charcoal from burning wood.
One makes charcoal from burning wood. But one digs coal out of the ground.
However, I hadn’t thought to check the Latin: carbo is either coal or charcoal. Which still makes me think there’s probably an interesting Natural Philosophy backstory for Mythic Europe on how something they think comes from burning wood to char can also be naturally dug out of the ground.
The key point is that Rego has limitations, especially when it comes to what we consider natural chemical transformations, and that complexity and number of steps is likely why formulas cannot be replicated without understanding while simpler tasks like smithing can be.
After all milk may be “something cows naturally produce” but it doesn’t take a genius to see that grass is what they start with and that there must be some unknown process by which grass becomes milk within a cow. Replicating it with a spell is an entirely different matter, one we know cannot be done, which thereby establishes a limit of rego magic, if not a well defined one.
I can even see teh arguments in character
“Well a cow can turn grass to milk,”
“Sure, but a cow isn’t a craftsman, is it?”
“Women produce milk, and they don’t eat grass”
okay, now this is starting to feel like a Monty Python bit…
Guys, are you posting the right thread? I’m not sure what rego craft magic has to do with twilgiht and warping.
Whups. Looks like that was me accidentally crossposting from the Rock of Viscid Clay and other etc... thread.
I agree that the Roll-Many-Keep-Best mechanic for studying from Vis would be a good approach to making study from Vis worthwhile compared to books. It also rewards magi who spend xp on Magic Theory, by allowing more Vis to be used to study from -- and that leads to bigger gains and fewer botches. That also seems appropriate. The 'Warping score adds directly to all Casting Totals' and 'Warping Score adds to chance to comprehend Twilight' are also very interesting; they might be ways to lessen the 'sting' of warping for players, while being a little self-limiting.
The trick is that we want to add back warping & twilight without disincentivizing Vis study again. I think that we need to unhook 'botching' from 'gaining warping points' -- any time a magi studies from Vis, they gain warping. Treat the number of Vis as the number of points spent on an Art in the pyramid scale -- the mage gains that much Warping in a season, which basically guarantees Twilight. But with bonuses to comprehend (and so shorten) Twilight, and the off-screen nature of seasonal study, Twilight might not be a game-killer.
I don’t believe vis is limited by magic theory for studying, as it doesn’t require a lab. This is good imo because MT is already heavily rewarded.
As a test of roll many and keeping the best I rolled 175 d10s, as 25, and then 3 x 50 as seasonal activity studying from vis with Free Study. I got crits every time (as expected), for 10, 14, 12, 18 xp getting me a total of 66xp with +12 (4x3) from Free Study. Enough to take an art from 0 to 11, an average of 16.5 xp a season.
A mage reading a 15/15 book with Book Learner earns 18xp a season and didn’t spend 175 vis to do it.
Very small sample size and all that, but even at 100 vis for a double explosion statistically, you might roll a 2 and get 8xp, or 10 and get 40xp. Which is still not incredible numbers.
I believe that was in response to a proposed change in how using vis for study would be handled, not RAW.
What Ethan Steele is describing is not RAW - you don’t get to roll additional dice for more vis under the current rules. He seems to be providing a perspective on the proposed rules change, not restating the current state of affairs.