While I agree that the above totals were achieved in pretty ideal conditions for the PC, they aren't totally out of the realm of Imagination. Besides, ArM gives you the choice to start your saga from a summer covenant with more than able resources if that's what you like. Personally, I prefer humble beginnings & the establishment of relationships between a spring (or second spring) covenant & the area's inhabitants along with some Tribunal intrigue, but if you have run this scenario a hundred times in the past, I get it that you might want to avoid it in the future.
What I do find amazing though, is that the Core ArM5 system is robust enough to facilitate both playing styles (low Vs high exp) & anything in between pretty well.
I know you could supercharge an apprentice and make their MT to your level, but why? In the grand scheme of things itâs rarely going to make a significant difference. If I boost my apprenticeâs MT to 6,from 3, to match mine then I get abs +3 to my lab totals. That doesnât give me anymore that I can do that I could do already, that I intend to do. I might save a season on a project, here and there. But then I also have to spend a season teaching magic theory instead of spending the season on Refining the lab to improve it.
Same with spending vis. What do I get I. Exchange for that vis, except for a few more points in lab total. The payoff doesnât make sense.
The original idea was actually to spend the seasons you were already required to teach your apprentice, purely on teaching MT. Then someone asked if you could spend a full year (4 seasons) teaching MT, then not have to teach for the next 3 years (no.)
Then someone came up with the idea of teaching MT in classes (which you can).
Next step of course, was teaching the apprentices Teaching, then have the older apprentices MT.
This of course was nixed by the ideaq of getting/writing a good MT summa and have the apprentices study it repeatedly... you can see the snow ball effect, surely.
Agreed. It was a status thing towards the end, as I recall.
What works really nicely, if you have an apprentice earlier enough, is to have them work on your lab. Then you get to keep the bonuses they put into it. Of course, it's less expensive to just have a mundane trained to do it.
Any season in which you extract value from an apprentice is a season for which the apprentice gets Exposure xp. Not practice, not anything else, except perhaps for an adventure.
Is he improving your lab? Contributing to your lab total? Distilling vis? Exposure.
As for whether to train awesome apprentices, it will depend on the saga, and probably the House. A Tremere master is probably required to meet ISO standards. One Tytalus might decide to teach his apprentice all 60 seasons, so that he can declare Wizard's War right after passing Gauntlet, and have a worthy challenge, which will hopefully end in a stalemate, so there can be more challenges to come. (Or, maybe his idea that he will keep teaching the apprentice until the apprentice graduates by killing him.) Another might 'teach' the apprentice by taking him on 15 perilous adventures, one per year, which probably counts if the parens is right there with him.
Whether apprentices are powerful or not depends not as mush on their total exp but the distribution of them.
Wnen designing a freshly Gauntleted magus I often find myself lacking points for abilities, because I also want some Arts in order to know spells beyond 3rd magnitude.
An apprentice being taught by a skilled teacher one season per year, and spending most ofther season studying Arts from good books is powerful.
One learning a lot of mundane skills like Etiquette, Area Lores, Organisational Lores etc may seem less powerful. Of course it all depends on the kinds of stories being told, whether magic or mundane skills solves the challenges.
Years ago @Tellus and I played a Rhine saga, where we played young magi taking over an established chapter house of Fengheld. We had a small, working covenant with moderate resources, so the saga was not the spring-building theme. We had a modest local library and could call upon more resources from Fengheld, but we had to earn it by performing services. That was things like copying, lab assistance, and solving minor problems - things the older magi needed but dodn't bother doing themselves. It was ok for us to make any apprentices do our chores, hence a way to spend the apprentice's time on things giving only exposure, in addition to the stuff we wanted our apprentices to do for ourselves.
However the saga did not run long enough for us to actually take apprentices, because in Rhine you need to achieve the rank of Master before doing this, if you want to avoid social stigma.
Waaaay back in a long running 4th ed saga, my maga found a set of Gifted twins with each their special gimmick. She took both as apprentices, even though it took half her time teaching them. While teaching one, the other one had a free season to do what they wished, provided it was not stupid. Assuming they weren't complete book-worms they were likely to pursue something not-so-powerful and in either case get exposure or at best practice. This works best when another player is playing or at least administrating the apprentice.
I participated in Praesidium Orae, which was a giant study in how ridiculously powerful apprentices could get. There's a huge difference between a powered-up-apprentice and a new-book-character in a game with a good library and player-character-teachers.
If we assume a master who's wringing out the sponge of apprenticeship, the early few years are going to be force-feeding their apprentice magic theory, and the later years are giving them menial tasks or lab assisting. The apprentice should still get more than 15xp a year on average, of course - 12+6xp a year if their master is Com 0, Teaching 3, + single student. But most magi (definitely at least player characters who don't want to unduly hurt their friend's character) will allow 1-2 seasons of free study a year.
Also, my thought on original topic: 'Training' in magic theory or 'practicing' in magic theory. If you do decide to allow this as a policy, remember that practicing still will take up a lab and either make the covenant spend more money, or maybe even make the lab's user get the 'shared lab' flaw.
Our (My?) main problem wasn't actually that our apprentices were more powerful - I'd expected that. If anything, it simply proved to me why the OoH (with effective means of transmitting information between generations) is so powerful, compared to traditions without books.
My main issue was actually how hard it was to go as low as the corebook character generation assumes.
Again, we were in no way doing a "Praesidium Orae", we told our apprentices to study something useful in the library when they weren't needed.
The Apprentices book dictates what a standard apprenticeship is: Com+Teaching of 4, taught 1 season a year and exposure for the others. It's very reasonable that a PC magus would allow their apprentice to study on their own if not needed, but the assumption in canon is that you don't get that free time.
It's only hard if you can't find excuses to make your apprentice only take exposure
another issue is that if a master has had an apprentice, 15 years at exposure in teaching 1 season per year is a 3 in teaching for the next apprentice. Train 2 apprentices and you have teaching 4 and 10 xp. Com+teaching:4 means 13xp in the season of teaching... and that is pretty low end: and pretty obviously reverse engineered to get the result that had already been assumed.
1 season opening Arts -> 2 exposure = 2
11 seasons of teaching -> 11 x 13 teaching = 143
3 seasons teaching spells -> 3 x 2 exposure = 6
15 years of 3 seasons of doing stuff for exposure -> 15 x 3 x 2 exposure = 90
That's a total of 241 experience and 120 spell levels, as stated. I'd be frustrated if it weren't since I submitted that one for the errata.
13 from teaching would b 9 for solo plus another 4. That's the Com+Teaching of 4 @raccoonmask mentioned above.
Yup!
Sure. But if we assume average Communication and we use the actual number of assumed seasons of Teaching, things don't shift so much. Ignoring the specialty, that means you start at Com 0 + Teaching 4 (0). With the assumed 11 seasons of actual Teaching (Teaching itself is irrelevant in helping your apprentice learn spells in the lab), you're now at Com 0 + Teaching 4 (22), not yet having reached Teaching 5. Now train a second apprentice, and that apprentice will get an extra 9 experience, and you'll end up at Com 0 + Teaching 5 (19). And that's assuming you put 100% of that exposure into Teaching.
Yes, but it wipes out several seasons of Teaching, and don't forget about that season Opening the Arts, which makes Com 0 + Teaching 1 insufficient to reach 240 experience assuming the expected 4 seasons not Teaching.
We have traditionally not considered the season spent Opening the Arts to be one of the 15 seasons of personal teaching that apprentices have the right to. YSMW.
Sure. but notice those 45 seasons of doing stuff for exposure?
That's the bunny. If you start allowing your apprentice to use (some of) those seasons for anything else, that's where the problems arise. Which is what I've been saying the whole time.
You absolutely can replicate the core book assumptions, but you pretty much need to be a lousy teacher and/or use your apprentices as full time slave labor for the rest of the year.
The point is that the rules assume a teacher of minimal ability doing the absolute minimum to train an apprentice. That should be what is represented by the poor parens flaw, not by standard training.
Additionally it doesn't make sense in terms of motivation- when you start an apprentice they have low intelligence and no magic theory- they are of no use in a lab. Whether you do it yourself or hire a tutor to teach them teaching and then hand them books, you have a definite incentive to get their magic theory up quickly. After that the minimal instruction makes sense, but until then...
That's fine. In canon it is considered such, according to what's written in Apprentices.
I agree. This is why for years I've said the basic apprenticeship and even more so the post-apprenticeship advancement are not in line with regular advancement rules. It's really hard to create a Poor Parens and actually have them teach you the required number of seasons. Additionally, things like Apt Student don't kick in unless you're running the apprenticeship. Post-apprenticeship is even worse. If you work 4 seasons in the lab, then you get 8 points of Exposure (and maybe some Correspondence on top of that). But the post-apprenticeship advancement drops you to 0 once you reach 3 season in the lab. Those rules would have worked better with something like 32 - 6N, where N is the number of seasons in the lab, or maybe 36 - 7N or something similar. I would have far preferred someone work the numbers out based on a reasonable typical advancement and then ballpark those for character creation. We'd probably see something more like 360 experience plus 150 spell levels (random numbers thrown out there) instead of 240 and 120.
Clearly people have different opinions of what is expected from an apprenticeship.
The book, as core, assumes Com + Teaching of 4, 1 season a year, and the rest only exposure. It is Hermetically accepted that your apprentice is a lab slave.
In my experience at home games, most magi when they decide to take an apprentice spend a few seasons of study getting their teaching score to 3. Before their first apprentice, they had no reason to have teaching. They often, but not always, are allowed to read an average of 1 book a year.
If we assume 1 book a year at Q8, this gives them an additional 90 xp over default. Every +1 in Com+teaching gives 11 extra xp in the default model. Do you think we should have a new virtue to represent
'Gentle Parens; let you read books sometimes, actually gave you a blanket, sometimes let you eat at the table; gives +90xp during apprenticeship'
Almost impossible, even.
Except if there is a way to avoid spending that many seasons teaching your apprentice.
Given the fact that students absorb knowledge like a sponge at those ages, that is probably more realistic.
We need to put a number on this though, how many seasons would that be for the average npc magi?
Com +0 plus Teaching (Hermetic Arts) 3 would probably be sufficient, even.
The thing is, that they had to put a number somewhere to start from. The Core book says 15xp. for your early life, then assumes 24xp. for your apprenticeship & finally 30xp. for your hermetic years. This is scaling nicely even though they are lowballing it perhaps, but for anyone that wants a somewhat more realistic simulation of a magus apprenticeship, he can substitute that number for something like the above or simply give everyone "good parens" which is almost the same.
Again, we mostly messed about with this (and formed/discussed certain assumptions) before Apprentices came out. Indeed in some cases, while play testing Apprentices.
Which is one of the points I've been trying to make. thank you for spelling it out for me in human interpretable form.
Teach them Hermetic virtues rather than knowledge (pg 40 of Apprentices)? That'll give them only exposure xp whilst still fulfilling the requirement for a season of one-on-one instruction.
You can also spend a season training them and have that count as the required season (pg 44 of Apprentices) which has a decent chance of giving fewer xp than teaching would.
