That's about how I feel about music.
I am sure I can write a book on music theory. After all, it is largely just an application of signal processing.
But I still can't carry the tune.
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"Mundane scholar who studies magic theory" is a great niche for failed apprentices. Think about it - you're an intelligent young person who started to learn magic but then your Gift starts to fail and eventually you realise true hermetic magic is beyond your reach. At least some of them would become theoreticians as a consolation prize.
I could see there being a small society of them spread across the order. According to Grogs people who lose their Gift often retain some supernatural virtues so these people maybe form an undercurrent of hermetic scholarship focused on both theory and minor magics - they could make use of enriched items of virtue, and dedicate more time than magi to training supernatural abilities like Second Sight and arcane abilities like Realm Lores. There are a lot of interesting areas of arcane research that aren't quite significant enough to warrant magi dedicating their lives to it.
And even without the gift they aren't totally closed off from all magic - these same people might study hedge magic and have a sort of grey market of un-gifted initiations for supernatural abilities.
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Well, the failed apprentice is not mundane in this sense. They are explicit exceptions in canon, and not only can they learn magic theory, but they can serve as lab assistants is if they were Gifted. Probably they have experience of practising magic as well.
Canon has it that anyone can learn magic theory, and the analogy with music theory makes this plausible enough.
However, there are many interesting game effects of allowing anyone to learn magic theory:
- You can boost the general level in magic theory with cheap mundane labour writing tractatus on Magic Theory.
- Setting up a standard lab, no longer cost magus time; a grog with MT can do it instead. Improvements to if it is unrefined.
- Copying of magical books can be done by cheap mundane scribes.
The latter seems to be uncontroversial, but it is massively important for the book economy. The other two, in my experience, are likely to catch the SG by surprise. I am not convince the effects are intended,. though they might be.
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True there's nothing to stop people other than failed apprentices learning magic theory - I just meant that failed apprentices strike me as a group of people who might actually want to!
Taking the music theory metaphor - it would be a very rare person who has no musical ability who would want to or have the opportunity to study the theory of music to a high level. But people with some talent, but not quite enough to be a professional on that basis alone? That seems more likely.
But that's mundanes studying magic theory to the level of being experts and skilled teachers, which is very different to the small amount needed to copy books or set up a laboratory.
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On the other hand becoming known as a great academic in music theory has never provided access to miraculous resources that can extend your life...
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That's a fair point. However, many covenants can easily, and surely do, offer many mundane incentives to those who bother to learn magic theory and do their donkey work. Be that libraries with rare lores, lavish food, or other luxuries.
Then there are the deluded who study magic theory in a vain hope.
And then there are the anthropologists who really want to study the magi, and doing the chores provides a way in.
And last, but not least, studying magic theory with no chance of application does not sound that different from studying the most abstract branches of pure mathematics which I kind of fancy myself.
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Another good point. Just a pity that if it comes into force, it breaks the common argument that copying books on arts be essentially free. It is just mundane labour.
I think that those 3 points sum up why I dislike the "any mundane can learn MT". I personally much prefer it being limited to the (ex-)gifted plus a very rare selection of mundane.
The thing is that it becomes not a payment but a mutual incentive. If a munane has magic theory ability above an 8 and can teach, or especially of 16, you want to keep them around, since they are a better resource than the books. Which means it is in your interest to make a longevity ritual for them, which means they get to live longer as a benefit of their studies, which means more mundanes have an incentive to study magic theory in hopes of becoming such a valuable resource.
Of course as mundanes expand the availability of knowledge on magic theory the relevant score values are likely to rise...
Right. And then we are not talking tractatus. We are talking summa.
I expect tractatus to dominate if there are mundane teachers available who can only boost their scores with tractatus, preferably high quality tractatus.
I disagree with point 2.
Unless the lab is specifically set up to be usable by anyone, a magus cannot use a lab built by a grog - a mage must set up the lab themselves, with their unique quirks and work habits, in the same way that they can't simply walk into the lab of another magus and use it. And even if a lab is built to be completely generic and standard, I'd probably require an actual gifted magus to add refinements or virtues that give bonuses to magical activities, though I might allow free virtues. An unGifted theorist simply cannot sense magic properly to attune the space, no more than a blind man can correct a problem with lighting.
(Honestly, I'd probably ban non-free upgrades and modifications entirely, unless you want an explosion of cheap classrooms and scriptoria. A generic classroom with bonuses to instruction from "lab virtues" and a "lectern of quality" is already fairly abusive without allowing grogs to build them by themselves.)
What are we discussing here? What canon says, or what canon should have said?
I find RAW rather clear and unambiguous.
On your first point, it says, «If such a lab has a Refinement score of zero or less, or if the lab has a positive Refinement but was designed for transient use (as the spare labs at Durenmar are, for example), then the new owner may simply move in and begin work straight away.» [Cov:118] In other words, your quirks and work habits are only relevant when you increase the refiniment. As long as you keep it at zero, anyone can use the lab.
The only requirement to create a lab ever mentioned is the score in Magic Theory. «It takes someone with a Magic Theory of three or more two seasons of work to set up the lab.» [Cov:106] For installing virtues, «The person doing this work needs to have a Magic Theory score at least three points higher than the lab’s Refinement.» [Cov:113] No requirement on the Gift, having arts opened, or anything else is ever mentioned.
I am not saying that your argument does not make sense, just that it isn't canon.
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My current character has a Lab servant (she is listed, though not stated in my lab thread), who is really more of a "Lab Manager". Yes she does do a little cleaning and grunt work in the lab, though mostly her duties are supply and logistics. She handles the supply stocks, orders replacement tools and equipment from the craftsmen, handles mothballing the lab when required (its a HR), and other such things so my Magus can actually focus on lab work.
From a personal rather than Covenant wide point of view, she is the most important Grog to my Magus. While she is no master of Magic Theory (she has a 4), without that skill she would not be able to do what she does. The +2 Safety she provides (Int +3) is more assumed to be from the fact that everything is well stocked and damaged things are caught and replaced quickly.
This is actually the first game in which I have a Lab Servant. I got the idea from my wife's time working in a research lab. While they do have people who help with lab work (which would be a Lab Assistant in AM), they also had people who handled all the other stuff without actually doing or helping in any lab work.
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having worked in multiple labs (with different quality of lab mangers) I would say that in a real life lab, the main safety benefit that a lab manager provides is that researchers tend to be rather absent-minded and thus are often a source of variability in their own experiments while the sort of people who make good lab managers are the opposite of that. The safety comes from having someone who remembers to put everything in its proper place after use and who does see when things have been left a mess (as opposed to running away in excitement over the new results they just gathered).
Having a everything replaced in time is a nice benefit of a good lab manager though.
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True, though for my wife's lab the people who cleaned up were not lab managers. Her lab manager was a very nice, though extremely anal-retentive, girl.
Thinking about this further, if people want complications to throw into an attempt to set this sort of thing up, Corruption and Corrupted Abilities are things. You start out with one scribe who's Envious of the magi's powers, and a "helpful" demon. A little later you have a scribe with Corruption, and probably some other "magical" abilities as a bonus. A bit after that, you have some tractatus which grant the Envious personality trait to those who read them, or give them Corrupted Magic Theory. A bit after that, you have a bunch of envious / corrupted scribes, and possibly some magi. At what point do the magi catch on? Is it them who does, or someone outside the covenant they've sold a book to? How much of their library can now be trusted?
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Considering all the hoops demons have to go through to give someone a personality trait I don't think a corrupted tractatus would accomplish that (also it would need to be an academic, not just a scribe, but that is nit picking). A secretly circulated infernal initiation to grant mundanes the False Gift or other such "magical" ability is certainly a possibility though...
Agreed I mean "author" rather than just "copyist". It's explicitly one of the effects of the Corruption Ability (pg 91 of RoP:tI), though, that you can exert Personal Influence via the written word, so that anyone who spends a season studying what you've written gets an appropriate Personality Trait as though you'd spent a season corrupting them (although I think the Pre + Leadership roll gets replaced by a Com + Corruption roll - it's not completely clear).
There are ways for people reading the book to try to get the knowledge without being corrupted, if they spot what's going on in the first place, but they require their Per + Infernal Lore roll to beat the Com + Corruption roll, or you waste a season - so usually not a good use of a magus' time unless they're already very good at Infernal Lore for some reason.
We have a Grog with Good Teacher that knows MT at 5 (heading toward 6). She is setting up a Lab for herself with a Greater Feature to give +3 Teaching. This will give her the ability to teach 26 points of MT in a Season (+3 Com, +5 Good Teacher, +5 Teach ability, +1 Teach Specialty in MT, +6 single student, +3 Lab Specialty, +3).
On the side, she is reading all the Tractatus we have on MT to raise her MT. If she teaches the magi MT, can they then read the same Tractatus to raise their MT higher?
On the weirder side: Can she hold classes to teach familiars, so they can provide extra lab total bonuses to their magi? Even a familiar with a -3 Int can be taught up to a 4 or 5 MT relatively quickly to provide small bonuses.