Hogsmeade Tavern

102 pawns isn't overly silly: 11 magi listed on the wiki, an Aegis per year, most covenants have a vis sinking fund. Plus there was discussion of some planned items and developments in the setup threads a while back. I can see it being a good supply.
Those undead servants aren't free. :slight_smile:

Agreed. It's not like all of the 102 vis will be distributed to the magi. There will definitely be overhead.

With that much I wonder if having a Hermetic fair might not be a bad idea. It would have to wait until we got settled but it might be an interesting story.

This does bring up an interesting point about how the Virtue was written. It seems the Virtue was written with an assumption that there were a certain number of magi at a typical covenant. If you change the number of magi significantly without changing the vis available per magus, it can drastically change the value of this Virtue. For example, you might be in a low-vis setting (covenant brings in 5 pawns/year/magus) with 40 magi in a covenant. Then this Virtue would provide 20 pawns per year. Meanwhile, the same Virtue in a high-vis setting (covenant brings in 20 pawns/year/magus) with 2 magi in a covenant would only provide 4 pawns per year. Essentially that means the Virtue does not function properly mathematically because its mathematical behavior is designed to not properly match the setting (provides high vis in a low-vis setting and low vis in a high-vis setting). Ultimately this is because the core book describes the setting in a per-magus fashion (which is sensible) while the Virtue leaves out the per-magus part. It's probably one for the errata, not that the problem would show up often.

not really, because what a covenant brings in is more about how much vis is produced in the area they effectively claim, so it is about distribution over area rather than distribution per magus, which is a better indicator of vis scarcity. If you move an extra 20 magi into an area with x amount of vis per year, should your personal vis source decrease?

I think you misread the Virtue. The Virtue is independent of magi moving in or out and independent of gaining or losing vis sources.

no, I am making a meta-point about how it measures what it is measuring, since you seem to think it should be handled differently. The build points for a covenant are based n its age, not its membership (in covenants), and it's vis resources are based on the build points allocated, so why should the virtue be dependant in any way on the number of magi around?

Conceptually I thought the virtue should reflect the overall vis scarcity in the saga, not the specifics of the build points of the covenant. However I suspect the reason the rough formula is there is so that the troupe has an idea on how to calculate the vis per year. I don't think it's meant to be a rule.
Specifically for us - if Vis is going to be plentiful for the characters (combining setting with build points) then PVS is potentially a wasted virtue point that could be spent on something else.

Oh, from the meta-point-of-view there are two points. The first is that I was taking numbers straight out of the core book, not making them up. Second, the assumption that the effective region a covenant controls is not based on the number of magi there does not match the description of Mythic Europe. Mythic Europe has a certain size. There are also a certain number of magi. That works out to a certain area per magus on average. So if you condense magi into fewer covenants, each covenant effectively controls more territory, exactly scaled (on average) by the number of magi per covenant. Now some covenants will have more and some will have less, but the number still work out that the existence of larger covenants means control over more territory per covenant, and so your previous comment about the area determining this vis would mean more vis per covenant.

The thing is that you decided the virtue was 'broken' by introducing a variable of 'per magus' which isn't really supported as a meaningfull metric, since vis per covenant is not inherently distributed to the magi.

No, I didn't. The core ArM5 book introduced that metric specifically to gauge power levels. I just followed ArM5's own power-level metric on Vis to show the Virtue as written in ArM5 doesn't match its own metric. This internal disagreement is where things are broken. Otherwise the Virtue isn't broken at all, it just varies in value from saga to saga.

I suggest PG determine its specific Vis value and then allow people to exchange to get or get rid of it since there were so many different interpretations and most may not end up matching the value PG sets.

That seems a fair option to me.

My understanding (or assumption, rather) of why that virtue is worded the way it is, is to not define a vis value for PVS that will be the same for all sagas. Some sagas have vis growing on trees, while others may have you scrabbling for every pawn you can get. Thus the one vis per ten vis of the covenant's income thing.

As I said above, using the formula in the book results in a value of 10 pawns for the virtue. However, that doesn't pass the "gut test": does that feel right?

So. I'm going to go with an "income" value of not more than 6 pawns per year for Personal Vis Source.

Yes, the whole vis growing on trees versus drastically rare is what I was referencing. That's where ArM5 goes into vis per magus, which is why PVS is odd. The way it is written specifically puts it at odds with many possible saga scales (in terms of vis) when rated as ArM5 rates them. Why write a Virtue not in agreement with your own methodology?

Is this "not more than 6" as most players will choose 6, but you may well force it to be lower if something like Creo vis is chosen? Or is this "not more than 6" because you are still deciding on something at 6 or potentially lower.

I'm not sure why you keep saying that Personal Vis Source is based on vis per magus. The virtue specifically says that "the yield should be about one tenth as much as the player covenant expects to gather per year", not as much as each magus would receive.

No, you get up to six pawns in the art(s) of your choice. A player may choose less than six if he wants, and I'm not going to penalize anyone for choosing Terram rather than Vim, for example.

I'm not saying that, quite the opposite. I'm saying that it doesn't say that puts it in disagreement with how the ArM5 core book itself gauges how plentiful vis is. Essentially the ArM5 core book has said how plentiful vis is in a saga should have no bearing on how much this Virtue provides. Why should how plentiful vis is in a saga have almost no correlation whatsoever with part of how plentiful vis is in a saga? From a logical standpoint that sounds pretty ridiculous. Again, I'm not saying the Virtue is broken, just that its calculation doesn't correlate to what the book essentially states it should correlate to.

No penalty for a Technique over a Form?

Small side question on Vis for familiars and items - were the characters who bound familiars or created items required to pay the vis cost from where?
i.e. An amount of vis from the covenant where they lived, or a personal vis source?

From the advancement rules on p. 32 of the core ArM5 rulebook:

I haven't been on the boards for a little bit. I've been overloaded with work and quite sick recently. Both areas are improving now. I'll catch up shortly.

Just as an FYI, I'll be on vacation from March 18th through March 29th. I may have some access to the Internet, but I'll be on my phone, so I don't expect to be posting much, if at all.