Ok I need to plot out a major magical confrontation between multiple covenants, of which the pc's are a small proportion of the participants involved.
As such I need a quick and fast set of stats for lot's of wizards. I've crunched some numbers into a spreadsheet but am looking for some feedback as to whether these look about right:
AP (Ageing Points) based on a Longevity Ritual of about 50, with death from old age resulting around 150. To be adjusted for Wizards focused on Creo and/or Corpus.
WP (Warping points) based on 1/year +1/year when the Longevity rituals kick in, leading to inevitable twilight around 170.
P-P (Parma/Penetration) based on about 10% of the characters abilities points being focused on each of these areas.
Art1, based on an assumption that a character will spend 25-30% of his art points on a single arts, % decreasing with age.
Arts2, based on an assumption that a character will spend 35-50% of his art points on a few secondary arts, % increasing with age.
Total points based on 30pts/year split 5(abilities), 10 (spells) & 15 (arts)
30 points per year in spells in not reasonable at more than 20 years out of apprenticeship. That doesn't mean that the characters can't spend 15% of their time getting spells and items but they'll acquire more than 30 per year because of their larger lab totals.
yep, my Flambeau tendencies are showing through again. I like to bring it up to 8 before I am comfortable. Erix's take on Penetration is accurate. Many magi never bother to take it to more than 3, but the dedicated take it to 5 or 6. Magic Theory is a continuous sinkhole, but I am usually happy around 8 to 10. I favor dumping my Lab Exposure xp towards mastery of the spell I am working on.
Faster investment in Parma till 5/6 maybe around 60 yrs with a significant boost to combat/duelling wizards. The Flambeau factor.
Penetration I’m going to keep at the same level as Parma, simply because I’d like to see to avoid a 1st World War scenario where no-one can touch each other.
Magic Theory retro fitted in, but not directly relevant for the scenario I have in mind. Age: 25(4) 40(5) 50(6) 60(7) 80(8) 100(9) 120 (10) 150(11) 180 (12)
The output needs to fit within the character generation guidelines i.e. 360pts to start +30/year, which seems to model our PC progression pretty well.
The design above plans for that, 30pts to be split 5(abilities), 10 (spells) & 15 (arts)
Eric, if you reckon Magi will accumulate spells much faster than this, then at the expense of what?
And do the art levels look alright? The lvls suggested are without the effects of any applicable virtues.
I've seen the 1 per year+ 1 per ritual assumption before, and I've always wondered were the 1/year comes from.
Botches:
How many stressful spells do you cast in a day?
High powered effects:
Healing? Medium wounds can be healed warping free and incapacitating wounds can be bandaged with a lvl 10 spell (+9 on recovery roll Dur: concentration) by most magi. Teleportation is personalized.
Why do you need these stats? If the players will fight only with some of them most of these stats are needless.
However I think level 50 longevity ritual is quite weak. A specialized magus can make at least level 80 rituals. The key point is his magic theory to use the ritual on older magi, too.
I suppose you underestimate the importance of specialized magi. 30+ art levels is available far earlier. I improve with my magi a TeFo combo usually.
The current one is an exception he is 33 years old and his highest art level is 21.
Magi with age 170 or more? I don't know much how many warping points the pc magi get. This would be a good starting point to get a general picture the maximum age of magi.
No thats the point here, character generation produces weaker, or much weaker characters than if the same are played up to a certain age.
Why at the expense of ANYthing? As Erik said, higher skilled mages will be able to learn much higher level spells just as quickly as a lower power mage learns easier spells.
If you insist on using the 30XP/year standard, then DONT count spells learned into it. Just add spells to them as suitable at the end.
And i may be mostly dealing with high powered games, but your Arts assumption is rather low.
Assuming it is the only source of warping besides longevity rituals and that the spells are only cast in ideal conditions (1 botch die), 1 warping point per year corresponds to a grand maximum of (a bit under) 2 stressful spells per week.
Any other cause of warping (research, experimentation, mysteries, enigma's gift spells, etc), or spells cast in less than ideal situations come to reduce that total.
In the single-botch case, the "intuitively obvious" result is actually correct. With a 1% chance of getting 1 warping point per spell, you'll get on average 1 warping point for 100 spells (with 0.36 probability and 0.98 standard deviation from the binomial distribution).
That's 100 spells for 365 days, i.e. 1 spell every 3.65 days, 2 spells every 7.3 days... roughly 2 spells per week.
Let's see if I can work out some confidence intervals...
One botch die situations are hardly ideal. Non-Stressful situations have 0 botch die for Formulaic and non-fatiguing spontaneous spells. And then there are mastered spells as well. The average Bonisagus sitting in his lab (with a high safety) might not cast a stressful spell in years!
The system says give them 30 levels per year. Yet it also gives the option of taking time out to do lab work for a season or two.
As the character gets older a year of labwork does a heck of a lot better than 30 levels of spells.
Look at your example for age 60: you've got arts at 19, 15, 13, 11.
Give the level 19 puissant and add in a magical focus, three points of aura, a point of lab improvement and magic theory 6 you've got a lab total of 22 best art & puissant +13 third best art+ 13 (magical focus) + 6 theory (specialty in best art) + 3 aura + 1 lab quality = 60 that gets 30 levels of spells in one season, not one year using the second best art combination.
There are also bonuses for similar spells and lab notes, lab routines, enchanted items giving lab boosts, apprentices, familiars and other lab assistants, and so on. 30 points per year is OK for young magi but too low for older magi.
Considering I've explicitly limited my calculations to stressful spells, 1 botch die is ideal. It is also a useful metric to which other warping activities can be reduced.
Figuring out the population probability distribution that is what fraction of magi cast how many (stressful) spells per year is a completely different problem - the one I was alluding to in the last sentence of my previous post.
Per the rules, the Order as a whole adheres to the 1wp/year statistic. Meaning that each stressful spell your Bonisagus doesn't cast, every botch die reduction he may benefit from is statistically compensated by another magus who might cast more spells, or cast the same number in adverse conditions (e.g. a Flambeau).
And since it hasn't been linked here in a while and since the forum search seems to have dropped all the older posts , I'll link The Ultimate Aging and Twilight Simulation page.
Keep in mind that its population assumptions might not match with yours. In any case, the code is available...
Hardly, since that would be rather anachronistic (I don't think statistics - except descriptive statistics, which was not called statistics in the 13th century - is thinkable without the Gauss theorem)
But that Konstanz guy certainly has some impressive statistics (thank you a lot for the link).
I still believe that most Verditius, Mercere, Bonisagi should be Reckless
-25 or something because for example a longevity potion specialist doesn't get that much exposure tobotches: He has to study from Vis from 15 or so onwards, but only for about 82 seasons (aura 3 assumed), so that is about 6 botches (with no more than 6-7 botch dice each on average), not enough for Nirvana. Then he'll never ever make a botch again, because he can stay in his comfy lab and let the Flambeau get themselves killed.
The argument that Flambeau (and other reckless) mages have a higher warping stands - and certainly influences the average, but in debate on how old a magus can get and how older magi might look in numbers, it must be considered that Flambeau only influence the numbers till they've killed or twilighted themselves out of existence.
It looks like a good rule of thumb to me, and from my perspective mainly from high auras. Our saga is set in Russia so lots of +5/+6 auras around. Not a lot of books though.
I’m happy to stat up the opposition, but want some quick simple stats for the pc’s ‘allies’. It’s looking like a large confrontation with 25-30 wizards involved,
A Longevity ritual of 50 looks like a good baseline, and I’m happy to fudge the numbers for wizards with higher arts in the relevant areas. I’m highly suspicious of the idea that wizards would hire someone else to cast a longevity ritual for them. Sounds a bit trusting to me.
Is this true? 30 pts/year seems about right, but I’m open to other numbers if people can suggest them. I guess it depends on the resources available (i.e. books to research), the obligations placed on the wizard, and how much time they spend in research compared with doing stuff.
The character I have to hand spends:
1 season/year training an apprentice (2xp as exposure)
1season/year in covenant type labor, e.g writing a book (2 xp as exposure)
1 season/year doing something for personal gain, e.g. distilling vis, or making something (2xp as exposure) More if inventing a new spell (10-20xp equivalence)
1 season/year in hard core study.
The hard core study looks like reading a book (8-12xp), studying vis (10-15xp), or studying spells (20-40xp equivalence).
On the basis of this he’d struggle to accumulate 30pts/year
The reward from studying spells/inventing spells is much higher but I’d suggest over time would even out. 30pts/yr still looks about right.
Thanks from me, too, for the Ultimage Aging and Twilight Simulation link. It demonstrates quite a bit about what I've been thinking. If one wants to live a long time as a Magus, live in a low Aura. Whatever gain you get from it in the short term, it tends to cancel out in the long-term. Unless one is a dedicated Arts researcher with Free Study, it just isn't worth the cumulative added risk.
Big issue when it comes to learning spells is the availability of grimoires. Any Magus with access to a large collection of grimoires will learn spells much, much more quickly.
That's part of the point with the Parma, isn't it? Makes it possible for magi to trust each other like ordinary people.
In my vision of Mythic Europe trade is important, both among magi and among mundanes. We have a house dedicated to produsing "cool gadgets" (Verditius) and I find it very unlikely that they don't sell a lot of this stuff to get resources for themselves.
So what is the most limited resource for a magus? Time, of course. In my opinion you would have to be a very paranoid magus to rely only on your own powers when trying to get more of this very valuable resource.
And what do you have to fear? That the well known longevity ritual maker will kill you in his sanctum? He probably have a special lab set ut outside his sanctum just for making these (for an extra price, of cource). You will be there helping him in the lab all season, so he would be hard pressed to do anything strange with the ritual.
I am playing a magus fokusing on living forever and now 10 years out of apprenticeship he produces level 75 rituals. With more help in the lab (apprentice + familiar + recipient as a minimum) and more time for study this will rise quite fast to level 100. And that is before he goes all obsessed with it...
I think Magi generally are like most humans: greedy, selfish and opportunistic. As a consequence some will be selling longevity rituals, and many will buy them, since the effect of having a specialist ritual level 100 (and that is the cheap end of the market) saves them so much time to use on their own pet projects (like controlling the Order or blowing up dragons and hedgies).
yep, my Flambeau tendencies are showing through again. I like to bring it up to 8 before I am comfortable. Erix's take on Penetration is accurate. Many magi never bother to take it to more than 3, but the dedicated take it to 5 or 6. Magic Theory is a continuous sinkhole, but I am usually happy around 8 to 10. I favor dumping my Lab Exposure xp towards mastery of the spell I am working on.
, I'll link 
