How powerful compared to the 30 EXP a year are the Magi in your game?

Derail or start a new post. Sounds interesting to me as well.

1 Like

I have a Verditius that has gained 240+ Xp over 7 years, including 55 levels of spells she researched, 3 items enchanted, and 2 seasons spend improving her lab. And of the spells she researched 2 seasons were spent to research one of them.

240+ total over 7 years so 31.5+ per year. For a Verditius who was doing the Verditius thing you were cooking along pretty good. If you spent half your time doing exposure xp activities, that means you were getting 28+ xp in the other two seasons (and any adventure/HR rule/odds & ends).

I had some great teachers, and the covenant has a pretty good library, but of those 7 years, about 7 seasons she spent outside the covenant. In her first adventure she married a minor nobleman, one she was supposed to marry from young age, before her apprenticeship even began. Luckily, while there, she had access to some great teachers for some Abiltiies, and 3 seasons she spent Mastering spells.

1 Like

Now that sounds like a really interesting game. The SG also did a good job of making sure your character could continue advancing.

Euphemism, they might be slowing down in xp for focused study on their specialties, but if they switch over to a more generalist approach as you speculate at the end of your post then their xp per season/year average will most likely remain constant or even jump.

Being willing to study a wide range of arts/abilities lets you use the full resources of your library. Unless that library is narrowly focused or poor you can fairly easily hit 12+ xp per season (before adding adventure/virtue modifiers/etc) for years (or decades if the library keeps expanding).

the reason why there will be a slowdown is because the current xp rate is heavily influenced by the xp boost they gain from applying the multiplier for an affinity compounded by also using high quality texts.

If you start the game with a score in muto of 12, due to an affinity with muto, and you have a summa of lvl 15, quality 12, you will gain 18 xp from reading that until you reach level 15. Then you can read the read the tractatus of quality 14 you gain another 7 xp. once you have read those you have to settle for the poorer ones. Because an affinity gives more extra xp the higher the quality of the text your extra gain from the affinity will be heavily influenced by the availability of high quality texts.

In a good year you might read the lvl 15, q 12 summa thrice, and the quality 14 tractatus once and gain 63 xp in a single year, slightly reduced by the level cap of the summa. However this is only possible because of the affinity. doing this for an art/abiltity without the affinity would have yielded "only" 50 xp in a season.

in other words the numbers I gave were dominated by a monomaniacal focus on the respective specialties of the magi and due to the exhaustion of that monomania the numbers have to go down.

Done.

2 Likes

That character is a bit of an odd duck as he is built around the idea of using the Adamic chapter of Ancient magic, so he is geared around being able to acquire mundane abilities (specifically languages and area lore) quickly. Magically I suppose he's a generalist, but a lot of his recent xp gain is in languages. With Apt Student and Linguist even a just OK teacher can give you 15xp or more in a language. I expect that will start to slow down as he has already learnt most the languages he has easy access to teachers for.

Mundane books are much easier to acquire than hermetic ones, provided you are ok with a bit of a delay. Any book that isn't rare and hard to find can be commissioned for silver with a few years delay. Exactly as you say our covenant does have many more mundane books than hermetic ones. But I've found magi are generally less interested in spending multiple seasons reading about Philosophiae or Artes Liberales than in studying the arts!

The xp gain from that Verditius would actually be lower except for a discovery and a positive twilight experience mixed into that ten year period. I think without those he'd be closer to 20 per year. But that's to be expected for a character who spends so much time in the lab.

The Magi might not be as interested in the non-art/arcane books, but over a long game you can increase the quality of many of your covenfolk.

We recruited a teacher, who spends her two work seasons each year teaching Latin and Artes Liberales. Mostly the children/dependents growing up in the covenant benefit from this, though we try to sneak in a season of each for the other covenfolk if we can. Between the exposure xp to Latin bringing most of our long time covenfolk up to Latin 3 (the cap for our HR), a season in Latin and AL is enough to get most of them to within a few xp in Latin of being able to read.

We made a group decision to let those who are trusted enough to have access to the mundane books to earn 17.5 xp per year, halfway between default and wealthy. Still easy to advance using the rules in Grogs with the addition of +2.5/year from something in our mundane library. Any characters important enough to get per season advancement (Companions) benefit even more.

I participated in a Discord game that was fairly high powered. We ran for 25 years, and we had accomplished a lot, it was time to retire the characters. Characters started at Gauntlet, with these important rule changes:

  1. Secondary Insight was considered a minor virtue
  2. Adventure XP was doubled, to increase interest.
  3. We had access to an easy Mystery that would grant Book Learner. Everyone took it.

Over the 25 years, my character accumulated 47 XP per year, without any Affinities. Our adventures were typically short enough to get a full lab season in. About 2/3rds in, my character got Secondary Insight. We never really had a shortage of vis, and our Lab Aura was a 7, so vis study was pretty good, lots of our study material was Q13 or better, so 16 points with Book Learner.

About 1/4 of available seasons got just Exposure: Teaching, creating magic items, teaching an Apprentice, learning or developing spells.

Virtually every season did get Correspondence.

1 Like

Did you also have a house rule about Adventure XP not requiring the rest of the season?

Yes. Adventures didn't need any extra time to "learn" so you could do lab work without penalty.

That, combined with the doubling, is a huge amount of extra experience house-ruled in. Adventures average about 7.5 points. Doubling that for 15 and then subtracting 2 for not taking exposure, and that's probably 13 bonus experience for every season with an adventure. If there is one per year, those two house rules have taken your average from 34 to 47, quite a bit fractional boost.

Given how Covenants presents book quality, any magus spending his time reading is going to get 40+ xp/year with standard hermetic texts, without XP boosting virtues. So it should hardly be surprising when magi get in the 40-50xp/year range if they act optimally.

My expectation would be that young magi receive a fair bit more than 30xp per year, but that would diminish as they get older - once you get past the level where high quality summa are available your xp gain is going to diminish significantly. This is more of a problem for Art specialists rather than generalists, but even generalists are likely to hit it eventually.

(I did a quick calc for Gregorius in his first 5 years, and it came to a bit over 40xp per year despite a number of adventures and time spent setting up labs).

1 Like

To answer the OP:

In the last big game I ran, it was certainly far more than 30xp/year. Their apprenticeship was in the order of 130+xp/year, and as adult magi, probably around 60, on average.

That is pretty close to the power level of my character, though I am on the higher end of our group in raw EXP. Our Verditius has the least total EXP of the original Magi still alive, but I would not call him weaker. In fact I would say it is a toss up between him and the Flambeau on who is the scariest in a fight.

To answer the question flatly, a little more than 51xp/year over the first seven years for my magus.

This is higher than some other magi in the saga for several reasons,

  • a generalist, he has gone specifically for high-quality books
  • he has spent less time than others working for the covenant (which would have earned him vis)
  • book learner
  • he has not started to think about familiars or talismans or mysteries.
    However, he has learnt 105 levels of spells in that period.

TBH, I had really intended xp gains to be lower than they are. The library is relatively modest, but of course, for young magi even canon sound books outperform the 30xp/year. I had also thought more time would be spent covenant building (incl. travels for networking etc.), but we have ended up glossing over a bit of that and not bother much with the rest. I don't think this is very plausible, but when we do not want to turn a project into a story, we end up with a project with mechanical effect and earn a lot of XP instead.

I am inclined to defend the 30xp a year, on the assumption that a young magus does not immediately enter a covenant, and would probably either do a lot of menial work for rights to read in a library, or roam the country in search for opportunities. I also do not think that magi can expect to find sound books for everything they want to study, and that they will have to make do with Q<10 in some arts. My magus has been very lucky to have been able to spend almost every season after gauntlet in the library or the lab. The advancement model depends very much on the economics of the setting.

However, XP boosting virtues really do disrupt the 30xp average.