The Criamon don't mind. In fact, they probably avoid taking measures to mitigate botch dice. After all, increasing their Enigmatic Wisdom scores basically directly shortens their lifespans anyway, so it's not like they're predisposed towards sacrificing current time for longevity. 
Twilight can be a good thing. It is the easiest way of gaining new virtues. Yeah it can have bad effects. But that's the price of being a magus. Eh?
Of course, assuming that the magi do all participate and do all fail their Twilight Avoidance test.
From the point of view of the grogs, for example, a botched Aegis cast via Wizard's Communion with multiple consequent failures of the Twilight Avoidance test means that something weird happens (everyone turns purple, all the beer boils, the horses turn into swarms of bees, the northern tower become unaccountably locked, the moat repels attempts to cross it, or whatever) and some or all of the magi fall into Twilight for minutes or hours or days. Statistically, this might happen once every couple of decades. So, it's something that older grogs tell younger grogs about and might happen a few times in the life-time of a grog.
Which is all very embarrassing for the magi, but it's not like that's actually an existential threat to the covenant in normal circumstances.
Even if that is a tremendous problem (given some other extenuating circumstances), it seems entirely in line with the setting for covenants to sometimes have a crisis triggered by a botched Aegis casting.
Awhile ago, having bent my mind on the math concerning Hermetic Empowerment, and now considering the botch issue discussed here, I concluded the following...
- There is no die roll and no chance to botch.
- In the long run the vis cost for enchantingis equal to or even cheaper than the cost of ritual casting
- You can design the effect to be empowered to have a niceer Penetration bonus than would be availabe for the average casting.
- The only die roll would be the spell to coerce a spirit into a prison, which is not a ritual and can be a Mastered spell with virtually no chance of botching.
- The time cost is much greater, one or two initial seasons and another one every few years, until the empowered item is full up.
- You can design the item with a linked trigger to keep it seamlessly perpetual. No down time or anything.
It's very true that not all Twilight episodes are bad, but it is also true that the more warping you have accumulated, the more likely you are going to have a negative Twilight Episode. And being able to avoid the Twilight is a function of how many botches you have to contend with.
But if we presume that there are 100 covenants in the Order, which is probably too low of a number, 10 of them will have to contend with a possible botch.
I guess I thought that was obvious. I mean, if you can master a ritual and remove all risk of botching forevermore wouldn't you do so?
A botch has two distinct effects. The magic is out of control, what happens is in the hands of the SG, and it's entirely up to him, although the troupe can grumble, he has a wide latitude here. The other effect is that everyone gains warping points equal to the number of zeroes rolled on the botch dice. If there are 9 botch dice and 4 zeroes show up, everyone in the communion gets 4 warping points and must check for Twilight. If we tag our everyman or average mature magus as 30 years post gauntlet, having acquired 60 warping points, or a warping score of 4. He isn't a Vim specialist and has a moderate concentration score of 3, and Stamina 1, the aura is 3 and he doesn't have Enigmatic Wisdom, so let's say his Avoidance total is 1+3+1+Stress Die vs 4+3+stress die. On the average, he's not avoiding Twilight, and this is an average check for him. Even if we reduce the botch dice to the minimum of 2, he's still not likely to avoid twilight, on the averages.
Now let's jump to Comprehending Twilight, which is probably Int 3+die vs. Warping Score 4+die, again, on the averages, he's not going to have a good experience. Finally, the average duration of the Twilight event, will take a day, at this current warping score.
The setting suggest this should happen rather often, if magi are casting rituals like stat boosting rituals and the Aegis, Bountiful Harvests and Mastery 1 doesn't mitigate all botch dice. In short, you have a situation where you have total risk, and you mitigate that with hard work or virtues and a strong Golden Cord, or you have a situation where for a season of effort you will never have to risk casting a ritual in a risky situation, except those contrived by the SG. 
I guess I'm looking at this whole spell mastery and ritual spells thing as if it is a mechanic without a purpose.
I'm trying to understand the purpose of having ritual spells being so risky that one needs to spend a lot of time and effort (and possibly virtues) to avoid the risk, or spend a little time and never have to deal with risk of botching again. The more I harp on this (and I know I am), the more I come to feel as if Ritual Magic doesn't really fit within Ars, it's shoehorned into the system. Ritual magic works, in my mind, so much better as a lab activity if we are going to make it risk free. And if we aren't going to make it risk free, we need to recognize that a lot of magi will have fairly robust Vim scores, to handle casting Wizard's Communion, and/or Aegis of the Hearth, in addition to having spent a lot of time mastering the spells involved, acquiring a familiar, and being a naturally cautious sorcerer, or Mercurian.
Ezzelino's example of who casts the Aegis is exemplary of the problem; these magi are designed to cast the Aegis, and do it safely. Indeed, they can do any ritual safely. They have put a lot of time and effort into doing it, and they cast a pretty powerful Aegis. Canonically, Magviillus.
The other issue is that the mechanics of the Aegis are almost always glossed over, it's presumed to go off, the vis cost is merely subtracted from the vis stocks, and everyone moves on. If that's the case, what purpose does it have being a ritual spell, if it is always done without risk? In mechanical terms, it's a money sink. How narrative...
Hi,
I think that Ritual Magic is a key component of what makes AM AM. Breaking down the mechanic:
- A ritual costs vis. So you can do very few of these.
- A ritual takes time. So you can't pull one out in the middle of combat.
- A ritual is (possibly) risky. So you might botch.
Of these, I think the first 2 are essential and have been from the beginning. Taken together, AM healing is a very different beast from D&D healing. It is too expensive to heal everyone back up to full strength, and you can't heal during the middle of combat or other situations where you don't have at least a half-hour. Taken together, it is hard to boost characteristics or create food and water.
But botches.... I'm always in favor of minimizing these!
Botches also have a purpose, and are very important to some people. It seems reasonable that according to that school of thought, important spells should be even riskier.
As for simulations, Aegis botch frequency is far from the strangest thing that happens when one uses AM mechanics to actually model reality. (True of most game mechanics, that.)
I think that you are radically over-estimating how risk averse magi would be. And under-estimating the cost of spending a season mastering each and every ritual (if your RAW reading allows that to remove the chance of botching).
The Gold Cord subtracts from all spell casting botches, so is a lot more efficient than mastering individual spells if the magus is prepared to still accept a small risk. And a familiar has other benefits too.
Having a high Vim Score, which is probably a good idea if the magus is the primary Aegis caster or is a Communion groupie, increases the chances of the magus succeeding in the Twilight Avoidance roll anyway. Having a high Vim Score also has other benefits too (Penetration on Demon's Eternal Oblivion, able to cast a better Aegis and so forth).
I think that you are also assuming too much game-mechanic knowledge on behalf of the magus. As far as the magus is concerned, he knows that sometimes a spell casting can be stuffed up, which can causes weird, unwanted effects, and sometimes triggers Twilight. Sure, he knows that if he is calm and unhurried, or has "mastered" the spell, or if his familiar is bound in a certain way, he is less likely to stuff up the casting. But he doesn't really know the exact game mechanics.
A ritual takes no time. I mean, sure you can't do it in the middle of combat, nor can you do a healing surge or whatever it is during combat in D&D.
Or not, depends upon whether you consider the stress die for rituals to be as a result of it being stressful or whether the authors put stress die in there just to say stress die.
If you look at what I wrote, I'm not against magical healing being a ritual spell, make that a lesser ritual and keep the mechanics, and maybe ignore the botch dice for it. I'm fine with that, to be honest. It wasn't my intention that a healing spell take a season to cast.
As to boosting stats, once you learn the ritual, if there is no risk, then the only cost you have is vis. If there is a lot of risk, then you will invest a lot of time to reduce that risk, or have virtues that mitigate the risk.
Kinda, sorta. To be fair, you're interested in reducing the extremely bad and good outcomes. I mean if you're interested in eliminating botches, there are a lot of builds that can do this. I think those are good things, so I'm not for eliminating botches altogether, I'm interested in a framework for them to make sense.
Granted, I mean there are issues of producing stuff, and there's the odd things about Finesse requirements with Creo and Rego magics...
I'm basing my risk aversion on people. People generally avoid risky behaviors. Magi spend a lot of time holed up in their towers doing stuff. Sure, some of them might experiment in their lab (many don't), some of them like adventuring (many don't), I mean the game has a mechanic, the story flaw which is a stand in for an agreement between player and troupe/sg that these are the kinds of stories that pull his head out of the books.
Looking at it another way, what is the cost for studying from vis, and how many magi do it? It's simply not done often, because the player realizes what a horrible exchange it is, the cost is far more than any benefit he might receive (rolling 9 1s aside).
And if magi aren't risk averse, a lot of players are. Since Ars is a game, there should be a conceit to the setting that players will tend to play their magi as risk averse, and since magi live a long time, the older they get the more risk averse they will get.
So, I will stipulate that the setting may not have risk averse magi, but that's not how I see it played.
My point is time, all of this stuff takes time (and probably risk for acquiring a familiar, you know, stories! Probably takes a season to find a familiar, befriend a familiar. On top of that you have to get your Rego and Vim score sup.
Yes, more time, if he knows DEO. Not everyone learns DEO, of course someone with a high vim score might know DEO.
He knows that it can be stuffed up, and he knows he can do things that make it less likely to be stuffed up. He knows that when a spell gets stuffed up, sometimes he gets stuffed up. Sometimes getting stuffed up means he comes back with Arcane or Eldritch knowledge, but the older he gets, the more likely he will come back with less knowledge, forgetting a spell he used to know or now has a horrible flaw that is consistent with the botched spell. This is what he sees in his sodales who stuff up their spells. You think that won't make people do whatever it takes to avoid having that happen to them?
Perhaps, but real people are also bad at estimating risk. And real people do engage in risky behaviour that can easily be avoided; c.f. Adventure Sports.
Yeah, but in-character a magus can't see the game mechanics so doesn't definitively know which of the various strategies to avoid that risk are statistically superior.
Also, why do you think that the majority of The Order are highly risk averse individuals rather than, say, individuals with hubris and self-confidence?
It begs the question of why you think they all, or mostly are? Mind you Self-Confident know that they are likely to accomplish some task that they set out to do. In Ars Magica they are given a mechanic that demonstrates this, that they can adjust a die roll by up to 6. That's a pretty big deal, I've used it to penetrate on spells I wouldn't have otherwise penetrate on, or defense rolls that allowed me to escape injury.
Overconfident would have been a better example, and sure, if they take the flaw, then they can't really argue that they are risk averse to casting the annual aegis, nor that they would take numerous steps to mitigate that risk.
And everyone engages in adventure sports? Unprotected sex? Drinking, gambling, drug use? Smoking? In fact, the decline of smoking is something of a point that when people are educated about the true risks of their behavior they can change that behavior.
I'm not saying most of the Order has hubris issues. I'm just saying that the consequences of botching the Aegis don't really seem like such a big deal for anyone except the extremely risk averse.
If a magus is as frightened of botching the Aegis as you suggest, why would he ever risk, say, casting a non-mastered spell in a foreign aura.
Hi,
So, it does take time. You cannot use it as a Cure Serious Wounds, or a Positive Energy Channel in D&D. You cannot use it as a Hero System "Aid", or a GURPS.....
This makes a big difference in how characters and players deal with damage.
Casting time matters.
Hence "(possibly)".
I did read what you wrote, and broke out the 3 facets of ritual for exactly that reason: You are fine with the first two, but are concerned about what happens when the frequency of botches doesn't correspond to the reality you think the game should model. And... I always agree with this. I'm not a fan of botch/fumble systems because I have yet to see one (other than in a Paranoia-style game) that models a world in which everything hasn't already fallen apart. AM is by far not the worst offender. One of my favorite offenders is GURPS Technomancer (if I remember the title right), in which children in the "mana belt" learn to cast a few spells by dint of practice and exposure, but said practice is likely to summon many demons, kill many children, burn down cities due to their low skill and the GURPS spell fumble table.
We've talked about the "there are a lot of builds that can do this" issue. Doing this costs virtue points, meaning that within game this is the character's specialty. GMs often add extra botch dice to such characters. It doesn't help if some other character casts the Aegis. Etc.
For me, the framework that makes sense in most games is about knowing the consequences for success/failure up front. Many games always have the die rolls; I see die rolls as useful only when the GM doesn't already know the answer, such as when a player decides to "push it." It is then useful to say "ok, your jumping skill makes this jump seem iffy, so if you fail, you're going to fall into that chasm. If you still want to try, roll some dice." That's a context that makes sense to me; it also empowers players. For example. Extending this kind of thinking to magic is very possible.
The biggest problem I have with botches involves Supernatural Abilities in unfavorable Auras, especially Second Sight which is totally passive. Walk into a cathedral and lose many SAN...
And never mind botches; a faerie-blooded Shapechanger (score 5, Sta 2, so quite capable) will almost never able to change shape in town.
Anyway,
Ken
In terms of Hermetic Magic though, (as I understand it) botches are partly meant to model the fact that Hermetic magic is not engineering, and contains significant errors which means things sometimes go awry. A magus doesn't botch because he randomly forgets how to do Hermetic magic properly; he botches because Hermetic magic is not an inherently reliable tool.
Yeah, but this is meeting the general expectation of the setting.
The Divine does blow ones mind if one has the tools to try to perceive it. Faeries don't live/operate in towns (except with difficulty, within favourable localised auras).
I think this is a reasonable understanding to have, I don't see it made explicit in the setting, I think it's implicit. And this is where I have something of an issue with the people who contend that a ritual can be cast without risk of botch if the spell has been mastered to a score of 1 based on this sentence from page 86 "Mastered spells are always cast with a stress die, but if the maga is relaxed there are no botch dice, even in a non-magic aura or when using vis." And when considering how rituals are used, that they are done in periods where the magi (or their players) contend they are relaxed, magi will never have to deal with the risks of botching a ritual spell. Certainly, SGs can create a contrived situation to make it risky, but then that smacks of doing what Ovarwa says SGs do to players who have virtues which mitigate risks in other areas.
If botching a ritual is something that can never be fully mitigated, just from an Aegis alone, one covenant each year (estimate of 100 covenants in the Order) will have to contend with a botched Aegis. The Aegis might well go off. It's possible that the characters don't understand that the spell botched, if no one had to check for Twilight. If they did have to deal with Twilight in some manner, they'd have to deal with the fallout from that. In my experience, sagas ignore this.
I may be overestimating the willingness for magi in the setting to ignore the risks. In my experience players are not willing to deal with the risks, and as a SG, I have a hard time imposing risks for something that seems, at best contrived.
Sure, but it wouldn't be used this way, anyway, due to vis, or if it were, it would be used very rarely. If one could cast healing spells by just spending vis, and say they cost no time, would they still be used? I'm leaning towards no, I might be wrong, but vis is almost never used for healing in any saga I've been in, with the exception of a magus who could afford it.
So that rituals take time is almost immaterial, because Healing rituals don't get cast, and other rituals are cast on a different time scale that affect the covenant or the individual for a year or in the case of stat boosting rituals for the character's life. In Ars Magica, rituals take no appreciable time, because they are never used in an episode (this is my experience, if you have a different experience, please share it) and are instead largely a bookkeeping exercise. At best an SG is calling for a roll for any of the rituals the covenant casts on an annual basis at the beginning of a session and has a contingency plan in place in the event of a botch, but usually it's fait accompli. But let's say it's the troupe system, and there's a kind of metagame idea of who is going on this adventure, but we have to do the Aegis roll first, and the botch suddenly causes that character to be unavailable. Now what? How does casting the Aegis, under its current mechanic enhance the game? If you never roll for it, what purpose does it have in the game as something that should be rolled.
Sure, in Ars Magica characters heal damage over the course of a season, after the adventure is over, and it doesn't matter if they have 8 heavy wounds or 1, it still takes the same amount of time to improve to the next level, unless one of those 8 recovery rolls goes sideways. If they get injured early during an adventure that has multiple encounters they are probably going to die without some intervention of Hermetic Magic, period. It's unlikely that that Hermetic Magic is a healing ritual, given the vis cost. Time isn't the consideration here, but the vis cost is, especially to the magus in the field. Bind Wounds is a 10th level spell and easily cast by almost anyone, A variant of Endurance of the Berserkers that works at R:Touch and D:Sun is probably beyond a lot of magi unless they are a Corpus specialist, but these can be made as charged items and prepared in advance.
With those tools prepared in advance, you can heal even faster than in D&D, or as if it were a cleric healing spell, but it's better, because even if you take a new wound, you don't feel the effects of it. Every man gets a bind wounds bandage, and every man gets a potion with an Endurance of the Berserkers.
My experience is that it pretty much doesn't, unless the SG creates a contrived situation for it to matter. I've even demonstrated an effective counter to the casting time argument that involves seasonal time, and multiple charges over a one time expenditure of a few hours (maximum of 8 for Incantation of the Body Made Whole) that would likely only be cast by a specialist, who may or may not be present on the adventure where everyone is. If he's not present, it will happen at the covenant, where the time scale doesn't matter. If he is present, say if he were my corpus specialist, I'd bind his wounds, and then give him the Endurance. And when we get back to the covenant, cast a spell that grants him a bonus to healing. Pretty much the only people who get magical healing are magi, and if they are defended by grogs, they are unlikely to be hurt anyway.
I mean, you can certainly play with rituals being completed in the nick of time or with a shot clock running, but that's even more contrived than going after the McGuffin, or escorting some dignitary, or what have you.
So, if timing doesn't matter, and vis cost is important, and you want rituals to really cost characters something of value, and you want them to be available and not carry insane risks, then treating them as seasonal activities and calling them Hermetic Greater rituals, this is where annual spells or rituals that boost stats go. Lesser Hermetic Rituals are healing rituals, which just don't have any element of risk, unless of course you are casting it in the middle of the dungeon while spiders are coming at you, or something. But even then, there are much better alternatives to that approach, one that would take 2 rounds to implement rather than 8 hours and would result in the same net effect for purposes of the coming encounter.
Hi,
Really? You expect a character with Second Sight to have to start rolling botch dice in town because his eyes are open?
[/quote]
I think that something very different is at work.
I think that what actually happened is that back in the day, the Dominion had a -1/level effect. But magi were able to ignore this with impunity, so various sagas adopted house rules, which eventually became the real rules. The effect this would have on Supernatural Abilities was utterly ignored, because the focus was on magi. (Which is why combat needs to be rewritten every edition, etc.) Even back in the day, of course, Supernatural Abilities didn't always do what their descriptions said they'd do; 21+ to win a a soul from Satan wouldn't work, for all that the rules said it would.
Anyway,
Ken
Timing is important when you are stressed. Especially by a life or death situation. You can always get more vis. You can never recover lost time. Vis is more important than time when you are not so stressed, which IMO gives credit to the case for casting calmly paced Mastered Rituals with a No-Botch Stress Die (ye olde Quality Die).
And my own experieces are much different. Much much different. The option to quick heal would greatly change the dynamics of an action scene, but slow magic healing is still essential to a long intense adventure.
And you know that is my style of gaming.
:mrgreen:
I would say that losing a few hours of time for a ritual that costs vis is probably a decent trade off except for the fact that is almost never happens, and even if it does happen, it's treated as fait accompli.. Creo and Corpus vis are generally horded, and even in Andorra, I don't see a lot of vis being spent to heal grogs, which means that no time and no vis is expended to heal grogs. Magi, of course, are a different thing entirely. So healing rituals are largely more than a bookkeping exercise to subtract the vis from the stores, and not a risky proposition. My memory is fuzzy right now, but didn't you just handwave a bunch of healing in Andorra? I may be mis-attributing this to some other saga I read, so feel fee to correct my understanding!
I'm not sure what you are saying when your experiences are much different. Different to what exactly? Can you explain how it's different from what I'm talking about? And I'm not talking about instant healing despite what follows about your description of dynamics. But even if we conteneed to consider that the timinstant healing, you need to consider that the time to work a healing ritual is almost never under duress or some time constraint and therefore the time cost of rituals is meaningless. It is meaningless at the macro level of the season, and it is meaningless at the micro level of an adventure, and is often treated as such. Again, fuzzy memory and not following Andorra closely, but see my comment about handwaving healing above.
And I'm saying that a Corpus specialist could effectively create a super charged band of Grogs. I mean, even as a player, I'd not hesitate too much about inflicting warping on a group of grogs and subjecting them to R:Touch, D:Moon version of Endurance of the Berserkers (30th level effect). Cast it only on wounded grogs, and keep on trucking, and a D:Moon version of Bind wounds is even within reach of the average non corpus magus. Does Andorra need a Corpus specialist? I think so... And a lot of stories will fill fit in the gap of that D:Moon duration of the spell as a conceit to the seasonal nature of advancement and allowing magi to get back to their labs... And it is even more likely in Andorra (or many other sagas) with the HR: that you can still do lab work and accrue adventure XP.
I edited my post because I realized it wasn't saying what I intended it to say.