Well, that's up to the student. The school doesn't have any interest in keeping the notes of any of the teachers or instructors (it's presumed instructors are taking notes as part of developing their lesson plans for their classes. Notes of a student belong to the student. What the student does with them is his business.
I haven't published the Charter, but part of the Charter of the school is that students here have more rights than your standard apprentice (they have to) and the Charter was approved by the Grand Tribunal specially convened, so it carries a lot of legal weight. Add to that the school is in Transylvania, the one Tribunal that has regular annual meetings, and will vigorously defend the rights of the school, because they put a lot of effort into it, too.
Yes, commentaries are a tractatus written about a summa. They work a bit of the opposite way, read the summa and the tractatus quality improves by one.
One point occurs to me- if we are teaching 1 of 6 classes, 1/6 of a season comes to about 2 weeks, which is the largest amount allowed without taking a penalty to normal lab activities. Is this how classes/seasons are being structured?
Don't get ahead of me, here. But no. It's not going to be that simple.
The first year the teaching duties will be light, one or two classes (don't forget the advanced class that some students might want). In the first few years, a lot of time will be spent in preparing the curriculum for the next year. Eventually, assuming a fully enrolled school with students in every year, every teacher will be busy teaching and doing extracurricular activities for two seasons of employment, a season of non-disruptive work and a season of true freedom during the summer.
Labs are a bit complicated, but every teacher is going to have two. Their personal sanctum lab and a teaching lab. I'm leaning towards no more than +4 upkeep in expenditure points, which is 100, that would allow a magus a +4 Upkeep lab or a +2 and +3 upkeep lab. The teaching labs will be largely standard but magi have a freer reign of requesting the school to do improvements (at the school's cost) than improvements in their personal lab.
I suppose, but such a lab provides no benefit really, unless you want to use part of your salary to make up the cost for having a +4 Upkeep lab and a -3 Upkeep lab.
But, I'm seeing way too much min-maxing here, and it's starting to get on my nerves.
It might be six courses a day once we get this rolling but I'm not seeing it now. I as assuming that the Apprentices coming in will all be at the same level ( no open arts). If there are only 10 students that would easily fit into one class.
But we have not seen the new ability yet. Just thinking out loud.
Think of Summa as text books and Tractitus as academic papers.
Summa ( and books in general) are way over powered in ArM5. This is an interesting way of pulling them back a bit. Experienced magi learn from other experienced Magi. Some in the form of tractitus.
Personally, I would like to see experimenting with vis as the only way to reach levels after 30. Less likely to game the system then
And to me (in general, not trying to speak to this game) the image of magi bent over dusty tomes is so thematic that the current book system makes sense to me. Plus it means a truly excellent tome is a great legacy for a mage to leave their covenant.
If we/the game followed the medieval thought, all of the great knowledge is already been discovered and forgotten. Magi would not be writing new books but searching for old knowledge.
IMHO, the education system is broken ( not JL's new system but what is RAW ). It is like saying that the greatest Chemist in the world would get there by reading others works and not by DOING or EXPERIMENTING.
As I understand it, we have 2-3 years of ramp-up time before we actually begin teaching. This is when Elizabeth (I'm assuming) will be teaching us how to teach multiple students in the Arts. We will also be setting up our labs and recruiting students during this time. This will consume 3 seasons/year for the first couple of years, with 1 free season.
So, here's something all our magi would likely have generated one way or another: Reputations. I find it hard to believe that after 40-70 years of living in Hermetic society, that our characters wouldn't have generated some kind of reputation, good or bad. While Ancel would have House Bonisagus Acclaim, it's mostly only good within the House. Hermetic society isn't so large that all of our characters would have flown under the radar after decades of doing whatever it is we've been doing.
Proposal #1: Based on background, every character would have at least one background Reputation. Some may have more. Level is to be determined by Jonathan.Link.
Proposal #2: Due to how much the school breaks Hermetic tradition, each of our characters would receive an Order of Hermes reputation of Hermetic Maverick 1. This represents a level of notoriety for being at the forefront of this academic innovation.
You can more or less pick the reasonable reputations you would've contemplated.
Certainly everyone has an equivalent of the Rhine's Master whether they were from the Rhine, or not. All of the professors are Good Teachers, and have high com scores, and their apprentices are probably reflective of that fact, so Good teachers. Anyone who has written books and can write Q10 books without the second point of resonance and has done so can get noted author of 1.
So, I want to revisit the tweak for summa when they are used in conjunction with studying vis. So far, I'm leaning towards the summa adding a bonus to the roll based on the SQ when studied without benefit of the teacher, so a Q10 summa adds +2 to the Vis SQ.
Where I'm leaning with this is that textbooks are often worthy reference manuals in their own right. One can go back and lookup stuff from the textbook long after having "consumed" it. So, I'm thinking that the bonus from the text book should apply beyond it's level. Maybe twice the level? So a Level 5 book applies up to level 10, level 10 up to 20, and a level 20 summa to an Art level 40. The quality bonus would continue to be as previously outlined, but I'm thinking this additional tweak gives a reason for summa to be useful a bit longer in the cosmology of the game, but it's not super useful. I'm thinking about modifying Poor Student to be exempt from the bonus of summae used in this way, it still affects their totals when learning from tractatus AND when being taught. This gives the possibility of someone who plays an apprentice with that flaw a viable path of playing catchup, if they can get their hands on some vis...