I guess we just have vastly different views on the differences between PCs and NPCs. I tend to think that most Bonisagi and Criamon types are /more/ likely to accept high prices than the PCs, who still want to be able to function in a wide range of stories.
A lot of my wizards are perfectly happy to make the kinds of trades that Merlin and Odin and others in literature made for power and knowledge. Give up an eye and hang on tree for days? Sure. Go mad for a while? Okay.
I don't know how you can say they don't know the rules for combat or research, but they do know the rules for warping and whatnot.
Who's to say they haven't? There's no reason that the rules we have now represent the abilities of the Order throughout its history. A number of effects described in the books have been the result of a breakthrough. I think it would be interesting to build a timeline of when certain breakthroughs happened and when they propgated through the Order.
Again, the issue isn't the past application of the rules. That can be however we want. Its the future application during the saga... How many breakthroughs and new projects is the storyguide introducing during the saga and how does that compare to the way these rules work if applied to NPCs equally with the PCs?
Yes and no. The basic change is that instead of inventing spells and hoping to get a discovery, you research a source of insight (ie. An old magic item, ghost or whathaveyou) and gain Insight, which you then stabilise by recreating the effect, gaining breakthrough points which are compatible with those gained from traditional OR.
It also resets the rules for learning virtues yet again, and frankly makes hermetic research almost impossible to share for anything save ranges, targets and durations, but that's a seperate issue.
If you want to read these rules, you can go to the page of Ancient Magic on Atlas' website; they link to a "sneak view" pdf of the book, which is just these rules. So you not finding your book's copy is no excuse
One problem that I have with the Ancient Magic rules is that, cool as they are, they mostly nescessitate that someone first invented such a magic.
=> Even if using only these, I think that, background-wise, OR rules are needed, even with insane difficulties.
Problem is, however, that these must account for the possibility of something like bonisagus+founders to create hermetic magic (or something equally powerfull) in a somewhat short time. Unless, of course, bonisagus was divinely inspired, or else...
errm - isn't "Ancient Magic" all about the magic of the Ancients - the mythic predecessors of the Order of Hermes - even in some cases, from "before the Flood"?
Unless you want to shift play back to those times, you don't in fact need to explain it... and Yes Bonisagus and the other founders did use and have access to pre-Hermetic magic. They made breakthrough changes to pull those together to form what we now call Hermetic Magic (or at least - some of it... some has been added by later breakthrough research).
And it is said that Bonisagus was a genius...
There already are rules for inventing new, non-Hermetic magic through Mystery initiation. Creating your own Mystery from scratch is difficult and the "first generation" scripts will be horribly costly on the initiates, but they do indeed provide a path to powers on par with what's in Ancient Magic.
The hard work game-wise is to actually write those new powers up, which is what the Ex-Miscellanea rules in Societates are there for, I guess.
I kind of like the idea of the grandeur of the past. Hermetic magic is the work of bringing together the strands of magic that was once whole, but was scattered. Perhaps through the Tower of Babel, perhaps Hermes Trimagistus' or Prometheus' gifts have been forgotten.
Back to the OP's point of analyzing how long it would take... I've setup an excel spreadsheet and using Multinomial probability distribution, figured that it will take almost exactly 100 years to make a breakthrough discover, and that is using the +3 risk modifier. It seems to be pretty mandatory to making discoveries faster. It's not obvious, but the kicker is in the increased probabiltity of rerolls that a +3 allows for.
How does your spreadsheet handle rerolls? Do you choose a fixed risk modifier before the second roll? Or does it just narrow down your choices? Come to think of it, how is this handled in canon?
For example, Suppose I have an 11 Magic Theory, and roll 14 on my stress die. I am going to roll twice, but do I have to declare that my risk mod will be +2 (or whatever) before those rolls? Or am I allowed some flexibility, in that I can take any adjustment on the chart, as long as it is -2 or above (anything that would have granted me a reroll on my original 14)?
Rerolls start a mathemtical infinite series so you can determine quite easily fixed values for the probability of getting a certain number. To be honest, I need to take a reread of the rules for doing original research again to doublecheck my spreadsheet. (I made the spreadsheet at work several months ago, which is where I usually post from.)
