IMS, the simple fact that you need virtues to reach + 4 and +5 means that it's outside the bonds of ordinary humanity (+3/-3): The strength of hercules, the intelligence of archimedes, the Presence of alexander, the Communication of Cicero... These particular exceptionnal exemples may have other virtues (such as Mythic Strength, inventive genius, inspirationnal or great teacher), but such a stat marks you as clearly exceptionnal, like olympic material or heroes. After all, that's why there's all this talk about Heroes in HoH: TL
IMO, people usually make 2 errors for these:
Assume particular PC builds are the norm in the OoH, which isn't nescessarily true (and as I said above, while they seem to be the norm in some campains, they seldom are on these boards, for exemple, nor are they in published characters). In fact, this breaks my suspension of disbelief: Besides your players, how many Cicero are there in the Order? How many Einstein?
Assume stat-increasing rituals are widely known and used, which is very saga-dependant (IIRC, in RAW, they are secrets of house mercere, only used on worthy people).
The fact that something is possible by the RAW doesn't mean it's common.
The fact that something is common, or rare in a given saga doesn't mean it's common or rare in every saga.
So assuming xx to be "standard quality" is probably moot save when refering to published RAW books or a given saga.
Well I'm with LuciusT on book rules. Covenants significantly inflates things in both the Libraries and Laboratories sections over what is implied in the core book. At least the Laboratories chapter is cool enough to make the inflation acceptable to me; the Libraries chapter just isn't. I also think Good Teachers, and especially ones with abnormally high Com, should be exceptional and exceptionally rare. Otherwise there's nothing unique about playing one.
Aside from that, I think adventure experience gets short shrift in AM these days. It may make sense in terms of how we envison wizards learning, but it's not particularly condusive to gaming to have the best way of improving be to sit at home inactive for years upon years. From my perspective, season-long adventures should average more experience than typical seasons home with the books, while short adventures should add 2-3 points on top of a season's book learning.
I have to point out that the wizard kids in Harry Potter didn't end up failing all their magic classes at school because they were too busy chasing basilisks. In AM terms, they were learning from both adventure and teaching.
On the topic of Q12 summae, I would note that the quality of a summa can be improved by diminishing the level. A Com +2, no virtues author of a book on the art in which he has a 20 (assuming he's that sort of specialist) starts at a Q5, L10 summa. Assuming he's got good scribes et al at the covenant, that goes to Q8; even without resonances, that means our specialist who talks better than most, but not crazy-good, can make a Q13, L5 primer. Especially in a spring covenant, these sorts of primers are often preferable to tractatii early on.
This does not modify the original point as applied to tractatii... resonances on those do make them a bit overpowered, but tractatii are far more common for older magi trying to pump arts that are already above the summa level, where the extra point in a tractatus here and there isn't making a large difference in the final result. (I'm not really happy with 5th ed tractatii, as I think it starts to feel off when an archmage is picking up writings of fresh-from-apprenticeship magi just to feed his hunger for writings on a topic... the complete separation of the quality of a tractatus from the knowledge of the character feels weird to me.)
But keep in mind several things when discussion book inflation.
Resonances can only be applied to books on Hermetic arts... you can't resonante on Philosophae according to RAW.
Magi rarely specialize in the academic arts of the masters, because they're busy studying the arts.
The kids in Harry Potter have free seasons, just like everyone. They adventured for about one season a year, and were probably taught for 2-3. Remember, seasons are abstractions for most characters.
Bringing Harry Potter into the mix was probably a bad idea to start with.
But, as far as I remember the books, Harry and his friends learned something from every single class they took at wizard school. It would be quite an abstraction to call some of the school terms free seasons. I don't see how a game like AM that obsessively totals up teacher and book source quality could be said to be abstracting things in that direction.
Well, the book itself says it, really, though I don't have a page reference on hand.
In my experience, what it tends to mean is that magi are actually treating seasons like seasons, whereas most other characters don't actually work two seasons a year and then take the other two off... they work throughout the year, sometimes more, sometimes less, and spend their free time doing other things.
This obviously breaks down a bit when magi interact with non-magi... if a magus is teaching someone for a seasons, from the magus' perspective, it's that season, but from the other's perspective, it's spread throughout the year? Does not compute!
The other way you could look at the HP situation is much like magi who go on adventures... they're taking the teaching source over the adventure source, because it has a higher quality.
I would also add that Mythic Europe is not the present-day world, where any book published can (pretty much) be bought online or ordered at a local bookstore. Good books are jealously guarded, because allowing copies to be made would diminish the value of the original. So while I'm sure the Flambeau House has an exceptional Ignem summa somewhere, maybe something L20Q15. Good luck gaining access if you're a Tytalus ! and as for getting a copy, you had better save the Flambeau Primus' life first. Twice.
In the saga I run, first, I did away with the extended rules from Covenants entirely. And only book with a quality <=10 can be bought: anything higher requires an adventure. Roots of the Arts are an exception, since they got their quality from lowering the level and were meant to be widely available. Part of my rationale is that that way, actually getting one-on-one instruction by a competent teacher is clearly better, as I believe it should be.
Of course, it all comes back to how much adventure you want to give your characters per season, which also depends on how fast you make the game advance: character development is an important part of a campaign, so you need to tailor your xp to how much your players actually play in my opinion. If you make them go through 5 separate adventures in a season, representing untold hours of gaming, then you probably need to give them experience for each and every adventure, never mind the rules. And if that free season of studying is bracketed by two very intensive adventure seasons, by all means let them have good books. But if you have one short adventure a year, you don't want to go overboard with easy xp.
Even in the modern world scholarly works are far from interchangable. If you're doing research on a particular advanced topic, you're very unlikely to be able to look over a stack of books that all contain the information you want and select the one written most eloquently. If you want the Order's libraries to look anything like actual medieval libraries, forget about it.
The root of the problem is the rules that make Tractatuses generic. The second problem is Covenants assuming an infinite supply of works, such that the eloquent drive the confusing off the market. A more reasonable assumption from the corebook is that authors average Com is 0 and average Tractatus quality therefore 6, with 7 or 8 fairly easy to obtain if you stick with the generic Tractatus rules.
Yes, people can go on with their mathematical models of how many books an average magi writes and how many must therefore be in the Order's libraries, but the astronomical numbers people come up with don't come close to resembling a medieval world.
Problem here is simple:
Ths seems to be "true" in the HoH: TL, but since the guidelines are freely available (straight from the core rule book), any magus can invent them from first prnciples. Since the game "must" (should) be playable from the core rulebook rather than assuming everyone has (and uses) every book added on, there are not valid restrictions on these spells.
Better yet, Hourse Mercere cannot even claim that these spells are stolen or copied, wthout violating the secrecy of their own internal cults.
It makes no sense that these spells are somehow limited, only that the Cult of Heroes posses lab texts for them while others most likely have to invent them from first principles.
In character, the magi (and scholars outside the Order) don't know the Quality of books as precisely as the players do. So, from the character perspective which books are best is debatable. Also, some available books are likely lower Quality than the original version.This is because some books have been around for hundreds of years and are only known of as copies of copies of copies with maybe several shifts of language (Greek to Arabic to Latin, say) occurring. So, some books could have suffered from this process, but are still read because "educated people read those books".
Also, in character, the magi (and others) are not reading books solely because of the book's Quality Score and the consequent rise in Ability Score. The books actually have content that the characters are interested in. Say, you have two books that are both Civil and Canon Law Tractatus one of Quality 8 the other of Quality 10. The Quality 8 one might actually be more popular and widely available because the content is more interesting and relevant to the characters, or the author is more "prestigious", even though from a pure game mechanics perspective the other book is "better".
Anything from 2-10 per player/year is usually ok. Vis does not need to come from hunting magical creatures.
Also, Vis sources, singleuse or repetitive can be found by grogs or companions, if given proper assistance, like a magic item that lets them see/hear/smell Vis.
A combination of sources are usually best, at least one steady source that gives a few Vis once each year. A few magic auras or regios nearby that occasionally tend to produce singleuse sources, often giving more Vis than the constant source. And magic creatures that can be hunted for specific Vis, that sometimes wanders into the area.
When making a covenant, dont forget that you can both add constant sources as part of the covenant as well Vis in the covenant storage(the latter is cheap and can often keep a covenant running for a long time).
Then there´s the question, do you really WANT to run around killing all those poor unicorns that are so pretty and wonderful and everything?
As already stated, by game rules you cant have XP from more than one source per season, which is then neatly and quickly broken by the rules themselves with Correspondence.
Basically this rule is one the worst you can find in the basic rules.
My suggestion:
If players gets interrupted with whatever they´re doing, then you take a relatively sized penalty to that XP (decide yourself how strict you want to be and if you want to include the nominally free ~10 days), so if they have to run away from the library for 10 days in the middle of studying i would probably penalise somewhere between 1/5 and 1/10 of the XP they would have got from the studying in peace as it´s both an interruption and it removes time.
Then, you vary the amount of XP for adventures more according to the importance, time and impact of what is done. Something unimportant that takes only a few days or less, might only be worth 1XP. A litte more involved adventure story and you get 2-3 XP and so on upwards.
The above 10 day interruption might be enough to warrant 1-5XP. So the end result for the season might be more XP or less but from more than 1 source.
Oh and if possible, even if adventures may take more than one playing session, try to give out XP(and if applicable, Confidence points) after each one. If it´s just a small adventure taking annoyingly long to play out, it´s better to give out one or a few XP each session than to give 15 or 20 at the end.
If players roleplay exceptionally well or is very inventive or something else good, give them 1 extra XP at the end of the session.
Just remember that Virtues that gives bonuses to XP should only trigger once per season, otherwise you will soon find yourself with characters going very high on XP(and potentially only partially).
Oh, and IF you happen to be wanting a more of a "powergamer" playstyle, you can change Seasons into Months without any changes to the rules otherwise. Some new players likes how extremely fast characters can develop like this, and how much easier/faster it is to produce magic items or other labwork. Not recommended overall, but some like it as it allows characters to have much more "productive" lives.
More, characters don't know what's available. There is no "Comprehensive list of all the books available in Europe", (except, possibly, in rare cases and large libraries/collectors/specialists/etc.).
The names of the great Greek Authors are far more impressive at face value than the name of some more recent so-called "saint". This is true for NPC's as well - if those are all that's available from libraries and booksellers, and those librarians and booksellers are excited to have them, it's all the PC's can get, and all they ever hear about.
Hard to know all the books available in Philosophiae when your Phil score is only 1 or 2.
I have to agree, this abstraction is quite good (it adds flavour to the game for one thing) but sometimes hard to use when dealing with magi AND companions.
I find that the "no adventure from more than 1 source" is no big deal:
If you've got a long adventure that precludes lab work, it usually gives you about enough XP than reading a book, and is more flexible
If you've got a short adventure, just combine it with a lab activity that yields only exposure, such as item creation, and take that XP instead of exposure. 5 flexible XP is better than 02 fixed.
Yes, that is good if the character is prepared, and anticipates the adventure somehow --- by actively being the cause of it.
A timing issue might arise if the adventure is unexpected, and he has already started some other activity.
Say, one month into the season an Fire-Breathing Adventure comes blasting through the Aegis. The adventure is resolved in an hour of in-game time --- everyone gets the opportunity for 5 Adventure XP --- do I abandon reading a tractatus for 10 XP; if I do have I "read" the tractatus? What if I really need that 10 XP for what I was planning on doing next season? Or if I was studying from vis, how much vis is spent, a third of it, all of it, none of it?
Not to say that there is a real problem here. The player/character just needs to make a decision.
Well, I think obviously the player would choose the better source quality and the storyguide needs to take the players desires and their character's activities into account when "interrupting" seasonal work. After all, the adventure isn't a surprise to the storyguide who planned it.
I think part of the whole issue here is that experience points in Ars Magica aren't a "reward for playing."
At one point the creators of D&D 3e said outright that experience points are a reward to the players for showing up and playing the game. After all, it makes very little sense that after a few days or even hours fighting goblins in a cave your character should suddenly become a better rider, a better blacksmith or even a better wizard. Advancement in many, I dare so most, RPGs isn't tied to what the character are doing. It's a reward for the players playing the game.
In Ars Magica, advancement (as represented by experience points) is directly tied to your character's long term activities. Wizards don't become arch-magi by fighting monsters. They become arch-magi by spending years sitting in crumbling towers reading musty tomes and conducting strange experiments. Even adventure experience, when earned, is tied to what the character did during the adventure.
So again, experience points aren't a reward to players for showing up and playing well. The "reward for playing" mechanic in Ars Magica comes in the form of Confidence Points and material rewards like vis and treasure.
A bit of Creo Mentem and some Vis will suffice to let you get your communication up to +5. If someone is a good teacher it is a good investment to get their com up high through rituals as it will pay off in the value of their work. That is something you need to remember, and it might well be valuable to loan someone the vis to do this. I could see consortium's in bonisagus that find good teachers and in exchange for rights to a certain number of tractati boost their communication.
