That is because that is how you want to treat experience not anything about using a spreadsheet though. You want experience totaled first then having a 1.5 multiplier, it is not that it is easier to do it this way in a spreadsheet. That is not how we do it and not how my impression that it is supposed to work in the book, but if you do it that way fine, just admit that it is because you want to do it that way, not that it is easier to do in a spreadsheet.
So what? You can learn an a arbitrarily high number of spells in a season provided that your teacher has a high enough lab total. You could easily learn 20+ spells and master them all with a teacher with a good lab total. That is 100 xp in one season right there, is that broken? It is how everyone agrees it should work after all.
But you tend to view all experience multiplying effects that way.
It IS easier to do it that way in a spreadsheet. You just make one cell be X*1.5 and it always gives the full total, no problems, you just type in the base XP in cell X.
Hmmm.
First, put me down as one of those who takes "When you learn a spell" to mean exactly that. If you learn a spell when you have Flawless Magic, you get 5 XP in the Mastery Ability, if you don't, you don't have any XP in the Mastery ability until you spend a season practicing it or read a book on it. Removing the virtue doesn't change the ability score, it only changes the rate at which it is learned.
If you gain Flawless Magic, you don't have to reinvent a spell to master it. You can spend a season practicing it like everyone else. Spending a season practicing it will even give you 10XP. Sure, for low level spells, you could invent more than that single spell and thus have a better spead of XP, but them is the breaks.
As for spreadsheets or not spreadsheets, once you have entered Extremely Complex Character Generation, XP is gained season by season. As each season is rounded, that means you can no longer use the distributive law. You don’t have to use spreadsheets to calculate XP, but you do have to be careful about when you apply each factor and when it would be rounded.
Why can't you do what ever it is that you can do when being taught a spell and do it all more efficiently? And why should it matter about the level of the spell? learning mastery for a spell, the spell level never matters.
But he does not break down the rounding by season and would take away the extra points if you lose the virtue. So he is playing it in a very different manner than other people.
I agree with that.
The only point I was trying to make about reinventing the spell is that you need to either reinvent a spell you already know or spend a season practicing it (at 10XP) to gain a mastery when you suddenly acquire Flawless Magic.
You don't have to reinvent the spell to get the mastery, but you do have to either reinvent it or practice it (or spend Adventure XP on it, or read a book, or whatever). Which is fine, that's a choice that the player/character can make. If you happen to have a bunch of low level spells such that you can (re)invent several of them in a single season, then it is more efficeint to reinvent several in a season than practice one.
When he is taught spells the student is inventing the spells. He is just inventing them with the guidance of the teacher.
So nothing I said it wasn't unreasonable. I would like to point out that while you can learn an arbitrarily high number of spells the practical limit is nowhere near what the average experienced Mage should know. Though I suppose at any given time a Magus could learn a few score tiny spells for no good reason. But that kinda falls outside practical limit in my book.
So? I never said otherwise. Though I have admitted that my troupe's view on rounding play into my views as well. Heck, many of my friends are still of the mind that in any RPG you always round down. (We are all old school gamers from back in the day when rounding was the devil. The way you cheated and almost every game specifically told you to always round down lest blood rain down from the sky.)
BTW I never meant that we do it because it's easier for spreadsheets. Just that it is easy to do with spreadsheets. Although I only know that from what my friends tell me. I stick to paper. The infernal aura spreadsheets produce tends to crash my computer.
If flawless spells are so different why do they get to double their mastery xp in the spells they did not invent flawlessly?
The problem I have with this is what are they doing when they are inventing the spell that they can't do via reflection once they already know it? And as mastery had nothing to do with spell level why limit it based on reinventing spells?
I guess it is impossible to think about spells and have insights about them when not inventing them in your minds, but I don't see why that should be.
A flawless caster is really efficient at gaining the insight necessary for mastery. Other magi can't gain mastery specific insight just by inventing or reinventing a spell - they have to use it in practice or study the insights of past masters (both of which flawless magi also do better) - but flawless magi pick up enough insight for the first level of mastery only as well. Inventing or reinventing a spell happens to be a pretty fast process if the spell is is much lower level than your TeFo so if you gain flawless magic later in life one option to quickly master your easiest spells is rebuild them from the ground up. It's more useful for a TeFo specialist.
So basicly no one ever masters ritual spells other than flawless mages because who is going to spend a season casting a ritual repeatedly.
Well there's also people who get sudden insight from casting a ritual under stressful circumstances - story xp and people who read tractatus written by Flawless casters etc. Indeed given that rituals have so many botch dice I can see a Flawless Magic magus deciding to get tractatus on mastering a particular common ritual from as many sources as possible so as to be able to write a summa of level (magnitude +1). Plenty of acclaim to be had methinks.
Have you tried using OpenOffice for them? Its much less troublesome.
Actually serfs parma but I believe a season spent practicing a spell for mastery is not necessarily just repeatedly casting the spell. I seem to remember it being described as study of the spell. So it could be a far more scholarly activity.
Practice ArM5 p 164, it is casting repeatedly.
Interesting question.
What happens if you cast a ritual without vis?
For momentary Creo Rituals, there's a simple possible answer: it lasts for momentary duration. It could thus be possible to practice these.
But for other durations?
I think the simplest answer is simply to decide that a ritual cast without vis either fails, or else lasts but an instant, thus allowing practice for mastery purposes.
Oh, and for the record, I'm of the school of "Flawless Magic is like book learner, its effects aren't retroactive"
+2 to Fixer IMHO.
What the hell, +3 for using "its" instead of "it's".
The virtue does say, "When you learn a spell..." not "Every spell you know has..."
Given each level of Spell Mastery can give a number of different special ability, what rationale would there be for having this sudden insight provide one ability rather than another? If someone gained Flawless Magic and suddenly understood Magic better, what would cause that insight to be Magic Resistance rather than Increased Penetration rather than Quiet Casting rather than Subtle Casting rather than... Whereas if it is only when you learned the spell that you gained this additional insight, choose to focus on one aspect rather than another while inventing it would explain having one expertise rather than another.
Well, suppose that Tisatis has a L60 lab total with PeVi effects and knows the spells Unraveling the Fabric of Animal, Unraveling the Fabric of Corpus, Unraveling the Fabric of Mentem and Unraveling the Fabric of Vim at L15. If he subsequently learned Flawless Magic and if he also has lab texts in all of these spells, spending a season reinventing them would give him four spells with spell mastery 1 in each. Whereas if he was just practicing to master the spell, he could only practice on one spell at a time. So, if he only wanted level one mastery in these spells, reinventing them rather than studying them would be a faster means of doing so.
Yes, that's what I play too.
It seems perfectly reasonable to allow a season of "failed" casting like this to be sufficient "practice" to count as a Practice Study Source. You are still practicing all the incense burning, drawing symbols, hand waving, and chanting (or whatever) that needs to be done during the ritual.
Learning Spells from a Teacher:
- "You may learn spells from another magus..."
Inventing Spells:
- "Inventing a spell is more difficult than learning one."
- "It is also possible to invent a spell based on another magus's Laboratory Text."
RAW, it only applies when you have a teacher. I don't think anyone wants that. 