First, there seems to be a consensus that Mastered, relaxed Rituals should not have botch dice. I will shift the errata wording to make that clear.
There is then further debate over whether that fixes the perceived problems, makes Mercurian Magic too weak, is consistent with canon, and so on.
It is possible to errata Mastery scores onto published magi who "ought" to have them, and errata books into libraries. This wrinkle was not a conscious decision based on how the authors and line editor thought magi should look.
Mercurian Magic could get the addition that you roll no botch dice for Rituals when relaxed, even if you haven't Mastered them. That would mean that a Mercurian leader could avoid botching for an entire covenant.
Ezzelino's suggestion is not out of the question, but it is a major change to the rules. I'm not inclined to do that in the absence of a strong consensus in its favour — and I am not seeing that in the tone of the discussion.
I'm somewhat curious why that would be so big a change from the baseline is "Mastery 1 + relaxed = no botch dice" (I'll call that baseline Minimal Mastery or MM for brevity). I think it produces a significantly cleaner outcome, and that's why I advocate it, but the game-balance/setting impact seems fairly minor.
If you take MM as a baseline, allowing Rituals to just use simple die in relaxed situations is clearly less of a bonus than giving out a free Mastery 1 in every Ritual a magus knows. In fact, under MM a single Mastery 1 (adaptive casting) is all that's needed to "unbotch" all Similar spells, e.g. every Aegis.
So, for the vast majority of magi I see, either published or in my games, simple-die Rituals is a bonus worth less than ... three Mastery 1 at most? That in turn is 15xp scrounged from stories/exposure, or at most 3 study seasons in abysmal study environments (without any books, away from the lab, in a hostile Aura etc.). It seems much less of a bonus than ... correspondence from Covenants, say.
The only magi who'd benefit more significantly would be those who specialize in Rituals, and who are not already covered by some other Virtue like Flawless Magic or the proposed "updated" Mercurian Magic. I think those poor Ritualists need all the help they can get, because it's clear that players tend to shun them as playable characters and instead "outsource" what they do to npc specialists. But even for them the resulting bonus would be on par with a Minor Virtue. Why do you see it as major change?
No, the baseline is "non-mastered rituals always have a (usually significant) chance of botching"
With your change, rituals cast in relaxed situations would have no chance of botching.
That is a pretty big change.
Compared to allowing mastery to remove botch-chance for relaxed rituals can also be considered a significant change, since mastering every ritual a magus knows (which is needed to be equivalent) could take many valuable seasons that could have been spent on other things.
I was clearly too concise. Let me get this straight.
The current consensus appears to be: a) In a relaxed situation, Mastery 1 removes all botch dice from Ritual casting.
I claim that compared to a), it's only a minor change to have; b) In a relaxed situation, even without Mastery, roll a simple die for Ritual casting.
Obviously. b) gives an advantage compared to a). But how big?
Strictly smaller than giving one "free" Mastery 1 for every set of similar Rituals a magus knows.
That's because if you have a Mastery 1 (adaptive casting) in a Similar Ritual, in a relaxed situation you can just roll a botchless stress die +1, and that's strictly better than rolling a simple die. In fact, if you think you are not going to learn a similar Ritual, you can instead get some other neat Mastery ability instead of adaptive casting. And if you already have a free Mastery 1 (from Flawless magic, or the proposed revised Mercurian Magic) or some other way to reduce botch dice to 0, then b) yields no advantage at all over a).
So the question is: how many (sets of Similar) Rituals does your typical magus know?
I claimed that, for 90% of the published magi (and magi in my games too) that's no more than three.
So allowing b) gives you an advantage that, for 90% of magi, lies between no advantage at all and 15xp in spell mastery. Which in turn, is certainly worth no more than 3 seasons, possibly (probably?) less. That does not appear "significant" to me.
For that small fraction of magi who know many (sets of Similar) Rituals, and have no other ways to bring botch dice to 0, it's going to be somewhat more significant. But I claim that 1) it's good to help those character concepts, because players seem to consider them sub par and 2) it's probably worth no more than a Minor Virtue to them anyways (this is, admittedly, somewhat eyeballed).
I hope that was clearer!
The thing is, a) is not a consensus, it is a proposed major alteration of the rules which has some support. What you propose is a far more radical alteration of the rules. I believe even introducing a as a change would require a massive reconsideration of Ballance and what other rules it might impact, and yet you are treating it as the baseline from which to go even further. As currently written ritual spells are always stress dice due to complexity of the ritual, not due to the situation of casting. Mastery is at least a balancing point, but it is not the only conceivable one to make habitual massive rituals safer- there is the house rule I suggested above, it is also possible that botch dice can be reduced by additional participants in the ritual (though I would suggest this should also require more time if employed, otherwise it is very counterintuitive), such that the fluff of the aegis being a day long ritual involving the entire covenant would gain some crunch without significant alterations to the setting. Neither of these options would begin to support your moving the goalpost from really big change to truly massive change in the rules.
I don't assume that the fact that the vast majority of the posts in the thread are on topic to be an indicator of a widespread consensus. I hope the publishers will consider multiple mechanisms to correct the mathematical oversite, though I fear I will be disappointed in that they will likely choose the fastest band aid over trying to determine the best.
My reasoning is that, if you are going to assume Mastery 1 + relaxed = botchless (and yes, that is a big thing), you might as well instead just have relaxed Rituals (not all Rituals) cast with a simple die like relaxed Formulaic spells, because:
a) the end result is much cleaner. First, because it reconciles mechanics and settings without errating tons of npcs in the books. Second, because it requires fewer changes to the text in the corebook, and leaves the text in clearer shape (see the post where I first proposed the change).
b) moving from one to the other has only minor game impact: I claim it may be worth 2 "bonus" seasons for 90% of magi (published, and in my games)l more only to already suboptimal character designs that would benefit from a boost. A number of people seem confident that it's instead something "massive", but I still fail to see why.
Very roughly, the proposal is not about changing game balance (I think it doesn't, at least appreciably), but about making the rules cleaner. Clarifying that a mastered, relaxed ritual yields no botch dice - that significantly alters the game balance compared to the alternative, no questions.
I agree it is a big thing. I personally like the idea to make a big complex spell like a ritual safe, one has to spend a season doing nothing but studying that ritual.
In the errata, one can write any NPC in supplemental material who regularly casts a ritual is considered to have mastery 1 in the ritual.
I agree the proposed changes are big, however, the difference between both changes is minor. Anyone casting rituals often is going to master them if it prevents botch dice. Spending a season mastering a ritual just to prevent one exploding is boring. There is a question Why force players to master the ritual?
I think thematically mastering the ritual feels better, however, I wouldn't have written the counterpoint question if I didn't think it had some merit.
In my view, that's indeed why you spend one or more seasons (re)inventing a spell (Ritual or Formulaic) that you plan to cast repeatedly rather than just casting it from a casting tablet.
One thing I truly, truly like of ArM5: npcs are created exacttly by the book in terms of xp. This would violate that principle, and would feel a bit like an ugly patch.
I don't think I am being hard on Mr. Chart (this time). It would be a question of value versus expense- is it worth committing his or others time to finding the best solution to what is likely seen as a relatively trivial glitch in the system. I would like to see the work done, but aside from any request to volunteer my time I am not the one who would be paying that cost or making that decision, merely one more voice offering my opinion.
No, it is not. It is a possible reading of the current rules, which has support from the way they are written. It is also possible to read them as saying the rituals can botch even when mastered and the caster is relaxed. This is an ambiguity which needs to be cleared up. It would seem sensible to clear it up in the direction of one of the possible available readings, and the people in this thread are 13 to 3 in favour of clearing it up wth (a). That's a consensus, as far as we ever get them on this forum.
Clearing up an ambiguity could be described as changing the rules, but certainly not as a "major alteration".
With that fixed, we can then look at what, if anything, we want to do about the fact that botches in regular rituals should be rather more common than canon normally assumes. We may not want to do anything. As pointed out, botching the Aegis need not blow the covenant up, and might not take magi into Twilight. That is a separate discussion, however.
Yes, that is arguably true. However, (a) is the resolution of an ambiguity, the other side of which was "rituals always risk botching, even if you have them mastered and are relaxed". Your proposal is an enormous change from that reading, and affects every magus. The fixed ambiguity only affects those who have mastered rituals which, as noted, is canonically hardly anybody.
You have seriously inaccurate beliefs about how your posts come across.
BY my reading it is clearly stated that spell mastery in relaxed circumstances does not eliminate botch dice, only reduce them. As such it did not appear to be a rule clarification, but an alteration. I did assume that the decision as to whether or not to consider other alternatives was one belonging to Atlas games and not you alone, which is why I did not even bring your name up in the post where I was being accused of being to hard on you. I apologize for not blaming you for considering 10 players to be a consensus of people who play ars magica, since I was not aware that the number of people playing the game was under 20, even if it is a consensus within the context of he thread.
For clarity, Now I believe I am being hard on you. Not too hard, but hard.
Silveroak, I agreed with you above that changing those two lines as Ezzelino suggested would be a massive change to the rules. Despite this I think Ezzelino's solution is clean. But as it would be a massive change, it should be considered whether or not this is too much for errata.
But if you're going to be hard on someone like this post, you really should try to read better as what you have said is "clearly stated" is clearly incorrect. There are two relevant statements:
So here are the possibilities that obey both of these:
Not Mastered:
Relaxed - Stress die, could botch
Normal - Stress die, could botch
More problems - Stress die, could botch
Mastered:
Relaxed - Stress die, cannot botch
Normal - Stress die, could botch
More problems - Stress die, could botch
The place the question comes up is whether or not a Ritual can ever be cast relaxed. What does "incorporate many elements" mean? From descriptions there are two things: ceremonial methods and using vis. Ceremonial methods alone have not been stated to need stress dice, and vis is explicitly removed from being such a factor for the mastered spell. So it is highly likely it is possible to cast a mastered Ritual relaxed. But that's not clearly spelled out.
To be honest I am so disgusted by the idea that the definition of "consensus" hinges on a mere 10 people commenting in a thread that at this moment the technicalities have little meaning to me, which is something that very rarely happens.
Are you suggesting that Atlas should hire a survey firm to conduct a methodologically sound random sampling survey with carefully weighted answers and an accurate demographic and geographic representation of its fanbase instead?
No, I'm suggesting that they should simply not rely on the idea that they have an established a consensus based on such a small sample size and instead focus on what works best for improving the game, and hopefully consider ideas beyond the one which happens to be the theme for the thread.
But again, I do suspect that in the cost benefit analysis even this is an unlikely outcome- assuming that this is a question of cost benefit analysis and not one person just being a tool, which when I asserted before that this was likely an outcome of cost benefit analysis said person seemed to get upset at the suggestion.