You're a programmer?
Right, think of it as each module works, and has been tested to death. You know what each module sends to each of the other modules.
If the thing was designed properly from the get go (a far too rare occurence!), everythng should work fine when put together.
We all know that they don't - this is why you roll a stress die.
You don't get botch dice for being in a magic aura - local host, set up by your friendly, competent SysAdmin - but you still get botch dice for Vis (ie users).
Now you're ready to take this thing on the road - run it on the client's host. Too bad their SysAdmin sucks, or perhaps just prefer a different server set-up.
local host runs tomcat - working great!. Client like Jboss, so you need to modify "a few" bits on the run - this is your Divine aura...
For legal reasons, I won't even suggest what the Infernal Aura is running
I know that Hermetic magi are "native" enough to magic auras that they don't suffer Warping from them. But I just reread the Realm Interaction rules regarding auras, and it was very unclear to me whether magi are spared from extra botch dice in magic auras. In the example given there, the magus has a Faerie-aligned power, and that power does get extra botch dice in a Faerie aura (even though it also gets a bonus to its casting score). By implication I would think that a magus would still have extra botch dice in a magic aura. But it's not a slam dunk case IMO. Edit: I totally misread ArM5. Not my day.
I agree that it is less than crystal clear, but native does not smply mean friendly.
The faerie aura is "friendly" - it adds to your total. But unless you have faerie magic, it's not native (unless you're a faerie imposter? In which case you really should have faerie magc...), so it still hands you exra botch dice.
Actually, you both misread that. The Faerie power in a faerie aura of four adds...
I don't think this is at all ambiguous. I'm pretty sure it's been stated elsewhere as well.
Re: Rituals for Programmers
Makes sense, but I see it more as you have a test bed, where you are testing each individual module, but until you deploy it live on your collection of devices, you can't be sure how it will behave, let alone expose it to online use and heavy traffic of Vis interaction in the real world. I could buy your well architected, tested to death set of modules theory, but it would seem that that effort should require more then the effort to master Pilum of Fire by actually getting to cast it a hundred times in a season. I could buy a ritual being mastered after developing, say, ten times its level in lab research (via lab total - spell level). That would seem to represent "tested to death" to me. Alternatively, a season of practice and a dozen give or take actual castings. Maybe even less, five or six, wouldn't exactly seem like a fata compli, but I'd sign off on it 8).
Read the whole example please. The faerie aura penalizes his hermetic magic, but not his faerie based power.
He does use a power from the faerie Realm, but is not mentioned as having the Faerie Magic Outer Mystery of Merinita - meaning that his hermetic magic is purely hermetic and as such gain +2 to total, but +4 botch dice from the faerie aura. His faerie based powers are affected as above, ofcourse.
When and where did you last get to spend 3 entire months testing a system before sign off? Are they hiring?
And that only subtracts 1 botch die, so when you're running it from the test server (post test bed server) you set up yourself, with only a limited number of instructed users, it's probably not going to crash.
That Jboss (divine aura) or silly users from the net (actual stressed situation) is still out there, but as long as it's only for in-house use and you get to give people a crash course before they use it (not a stressed stuation), things are fine! ... er ... just don't ingest an entire library into the fedora in a day, yay?
I'm confused, I quoted the section saying that a faerie power in a fae aura does not gain botch dice, in response to
I added the emphasis for, well, emphasis . I'm not sure what was incorrect in my quotation that you are refuting?
As for the general question of botch dice, I think the earlier paragraph's implications are strong enough to be conclusive...
This is the basis of additional botch dice, and it states they are only applied in foreign auras. Thus when it later says "His Hermetic spells are based on Magic", a statement reaffirmed elsewhere in core and other books I'm sure, and in the example immediately following it by implication (because the Hermetic magic spells are using the Magic Power column in the Realm Interaction chart), that pretty much spells out that hermetic magic does not receive extra botch dice in a magic aura.
Well, I'm just not sure I understand, logically, as opposed to game mechanically, how a ritual would ever really get mastered. But a good point was raised that it is only a reduction in botch dice, anyway. So maybe I'm just hung up on the spell mastery analog and not looking at it as an incremental process. Afterall, the ritual gains magnitude in botch dice for vis use, which will require several additional mastery levels to attain the same degree of "mastery" conceptually as a mastered formulaic spell (i.e. to reduce your base case number of botch dice to 0).
More, the rules support the exact opposite, that in order to master a spell you study it, and say nothing about "casting"!
Spell Mastery (p 86)"Hermetic magi can study Formulaic and Ritual spells that they know in more detail. This leads to spell mastery." (p 86)
That's about as clear as rules can get, and that says nothing about "casting" there, nor later in that section.
The only question then, it would seem, is where the xp for a season would come from, whether "casting" would generate a better Source Quality than "studying". The only support for this would be that "Practice" generates a SQ in the 3-8 range while "Exposure" ("doing something yourself") generates only 2.
But I've "practiced" music without playing the whole song (or even close!) - often 1 riff or chord-change is the make/break, and often 1 high note is the challenge. "A song" is a reasonable analogy to "a spell" (admitting that we don't know how magic works in the first place!), and I see no contradiction between "practicing" a spell and not casting it.
Well, I myself was baffled in my first reading of the rules as to where Spell Masteries were initially attained, if not with a mastery lab text. A second perusal of the various sections helped me find this tidbit, which was the basis of my comment in the first place...
Under the Practice heading. As far as I know, only practice, a mastery lab text or possibly adventure xp can be used to acquire a spell mastery. Both Practice and Adventure XP would seem to require the actual casting of the spell. shrug
