new virtue prodigy

Another example would be Flambeau apprentices given "battlefield promotions": HoH:S, p.14 also reports that "a Flambeau apprentice named Cindrallon was made a full maga of House Flambeau after only seven years of apprenticeship because she single-handedly killed a renounced magus in a Wizard’s March. Though she had used a spear rather than a spell to slay the renegade, her master and the Primus agreed she had shown outstanding courage and fighting ability. Other, similar, battlefield promotions occurred during the Schism War."

Personally, I think the two are quite different because (magus) PCs are typically supposed to start at roughly the same power level, and in particular the same number of years out of gauntlet. Skilled Parens and Gild Trained give you more magical power than the other PCs; "prodigy" effectively gives you a bonus to aging rolls and saves you some vis if and when you'll get a longevity ritual.

So I think that finishing your gauntlet three years early (for the same experience) is worth definitely less than the amount of xp you get as a magus in three years. A better comparison would be to consider a magus who starts his apprenticeship X years later, and "recovers" those years with an apprenticeship that is X years shorter, giving him effectively X years of pre-apprenticeship XP. At 15xp/year, 90 xp are then equivalent to an apprenticeship cut short 6 years, not just 3. And even this comparison is somewhat biased against the prodigy: pre-apprenticeship xp can be applied to stuff that's often less useful to a starting magus.

Given this I'd rather not handle this as a Virtue, because even at 1 Virtue point its granularity is too coarse. What if I want to play a character who's spent just one year less than the customary 15 -- or one year more because e.g. he failed his gauntlet the first time? What I'd rather do is say that for every year more or less than the standard 15 years of training, a magus

  1. gains or loses 10xp and 10 points of spells, AND ALSO
  2. gains (regardless of whether he's younger or older) 5xp in an appropriate reputation, which is probably half good and half bad if the character is too young, but most likely bad if he is too old.

They are? Really?
I mean, seriously?

Well, it's not a hard-and-fast rule, but (barring some notable exceptions) it's generally a good idea in most rpgs. The corebook itself, on page 29, suggests that: "in most troupes all magi should be approximately the same number of years out of apprenticeship. Actual ages are relatively unimportant, as magical abilities tend to overshadow mundane. If you decide not to do this, it should be because the whole troupe wants to play in that sort of saga, not because one player has a cool concept for an older magus."

Damn, i was about to ask exactly that... :mrgreen:

I created a Ex Misc tradition with a major flaw that amounted to a drastically Shortened Apprenticeship. (5 years) There where some other conditions like all members of the tradition had to be a Magister in Artibus before they started their apprenticeships. It was also expected that members would never keep their own apprentice's for more then five years.

maybe this virtue could be combine with the major intelegence increase virtue?(maybe?)