It may be, arguably, better, but it's not legal under the Code.
The Oath does not say it, but it is part of the Peripheral Code, one can safely assume that it was enshrined either in the First Tribunal or in a Grand Tribunal, thus covering the entire Order.
A lot of apprentice focused sagas often have the apprentices learning Latin prior to their apprenticeship and possibly even have tutors trained in Magic Theory who can teach that to their apprentices. Teaching Latin 1 season per year isn't bad, either...
Well, that does explain why every apprentice doesn't leave with a minimum in 5's in everything. Although, I still think saying that 5/15 summae are /easy/ to obtain really doesn't jive with what we see as a whole in the books. Most of the NPCs are not built around the idea that such efficient books exist.
It also turns the first few years of a saga into, "everyone reads some books" instead of "everyone does their best to figure out how to explore the arts they are about." And it rewards the Magi who put all his points in the 5 techniques, and started with no forms.
Taking an apprentice is 15 seasons (minimum) of the master's time - almost 4 years of work where you'll get a measly 30xp for your trouble (Exposure). It takes a very good apprentice (the ones Bonisagus magi snatch) to save a magi enough time in his research/work to compensate for those 15 seasons.
Sure it does, the purpose of the primers is for the master, not for the apprentice. Although they can be used by an apprentice, the purpose for the books is to ensure that a prospective master is able to train an apprentice properly and not give him any deficient Arts.
I don't follow this reasoning at all. You're presuming that all sagas start with newly gauntleted magi or apprentices? And even then you're making an assumption that all magi want to train an apprentice ASAP? I have two current characters who have apprentices, but not out of the choice of, I want an apprentice, and instead out of a sense of duty and obligation. The first is the Mercere mentioned previously, and the second is a Tytalus weather maga whose princeps was also a weather maga (Tremere) and she was killed prematurely. Tremere never claimed the apprentice, so my character did, to finish out his training. She couldn't possibly open his Arts, because she would have inflicted 10 deficiencies, and she has no desire to take an apprentice for several years after this one gauntlets. The Mercere had to spend a lot of time improving his Arts, too, but he had the House breathing down his neck because of his illegitimate lineage. But because he's a skilled bargainer, he was able to get the primers, the Roots (and other good quality primers) for his deficient Arts on loan for free, for several years, which everyone at the covenant took huge advantage of. My character just had priority on learning from any of the volumes. Once he was able to open the apprentice's Arts, the books were returned to the House.
No, many people don't want an apprentice. But getting to a 5 in an art in 1 season is pretty darn good. It's up there on the list of best possible uses of your time for a little while. Especially for rounding out your character. And if a Saga starts a while after gauntlet.. they get 15 exp a year to improve thier character. Which is much worse than what these books provide early on.
Also, people are talking about being able to get these books for a couple of pawns each. That's very different than a Mercere Magi using his significant clout in the House to get access to books that would otherwise be hard to get. There's nothing wrong with using the fact that you're a Gifted Mercere to get access to books that most other people could only wish they could get. There's another to say that 5/15 summae on 90% of all forms exist and you can pick them up at your nearest barnes and noble.
A +5 bonus, which is pretty small and easily achievable with a bit of investment can have a huge impact on learning spells, saving seasons of work, and with access to a lab text, gives you a whole magnitude higher level of spell that you can learn. Sure, you might have trouble casting it, but that's a different problem.
When investing effects into an item, you can push in more uses per day, additional penetration, over and above what you would normally be able to do.
It's definitely worth having an apprentice, but you have to be ready to have an apprentice. All too often, I see characters with apprentices, scrambling to improve their Arts or other knowledge gaps to take full advantage of the apprentice. IF the character decides when to take an apprentice, one should definitely have some sort of plan for the next 15 years of his character's life...
Lots of sagas start with magi NOT right out off apprenticeship. 10-20 years past is average for our group, because of this very issue. Making a freshly gauntleted magi who has half-decent utility is difficult. Getting them past that first 10 year hump fills out a lot of concepts.
How is getting to a score of 5 in an Art good? It's only worth it to my characters if it improves penetration, or makes spells that he already knows easier to cast (avoid losing fatigue). In some cases, learning an Art to a score of 5 is meaningless, because he has no spells in that area, and being able to spontaneously cast 5th level spells usually isn't worth it. As my weather maga would say, if I can't do it with Auram, it isn't worth doing. This is also the maga who used The Incantation of Lightning successfully as a tool of diplomacy.
My Mercere has zero clout with the House due to his Illegitimate lineage. He was forced to take an apprentice. He said if I'm forced to do it, I need these books, so I don't make an apprentice with 10 or so deficient Arts. But yes, paying a couple of pawns each for each Root is not unreasonable, and from a story perspective it opens up the area of a whole bunch of different stories, about the master and apprentice. I don't see that as a bad thing. And a generous master who acquires these books for himself, might let his apprentice read one or two if it's not going to impact the time spent in the lab.
Yes, if you're working at the end of your efficiency curve. For example, let's say your lab total is 45, and the apprentice pushes that to 50. That means your level 25 project gets done in one season instead of 2. That's great. OTOH, if your project is a 30, the apprentice's presence is only a buffer against missed days. If it's a 20, the apprentice is just making you life in the lab easier or tacking a level 5 project on top. If your project is a 40, the apprentice does save you tons of time, but if you're doing a 40 starting with a level 45 lab total you're not working in an efficient manner to begin with. As you said, you have to be ready for your apprentice in the first place to actually take advantage of them.
I have just a minor niggle.
An apprentice allows one to work at the upper end of the efficiency curve, for example that level 20 project at a lab total of 50 means that there's 10 levels left over for a utility spell. Boom, two spells in one season.
And in my experience this doesn't happen until the suggested post gauntlet age of 30. It can happen earlier for a motivated character/player, but the results are so much nicer if you manage to wait. My Mercere's first 5 years with an apprentice were something of a logistics nightmare. Even when considering the time he had in advance, to get the rest of his Arts to 5, he still had a lot of other stuff to learn/do. All Arts at 5 is the minimum necessary to open the Arts without creating a deficient Art. That doesn't mean it's the best time to do it...
Note I mentioned "a level 5 project on top" at level 20. That said, level 5 spells are seldom very good. Also, teaching a Familiar Magic Theory often has the same effect for less time/effort and it lasts until the familiar dies, so an apprentice is sub-optimal unless you already have a familiar going. Another good reason young magi shouldn't take apprentices!
My experience with an apprentice was similar. I had 20 years post gauntlet made before play, and some few years of lead time (a redcap had a Gifted offspring but was not related to Mercere), but it was a scramble to get ready.
The best reason to get 5 in an art is for the +5 Magic Resistance it offers (Form). Techniques, you should have at least 5 in each ASAP regardless.
Level 10 with a lab text. Utility spells are utility spells. If you have the time to learn a 5th level spell, and it's one you can envision casting, then you learn it, because it's much easier than trying to spontaneously cast the spell later on.
My character was 4 years post gauntlet! But I was able to defer opening her Arts for another 5 years beyond that, because the character had so many responsibilities and so many deficient Arts. I designed the character with a Corpus score of 18+3 at gauntlet. You can imagine what his other Form scores were...
Uhm. First of all, note that the Roots are in generic "Arts". Nowhere does it say that they are in the Forms. In fact, I'd say that Techniques are more likely to be covered than Forms, particularly Forms like Aquam or Herbam.
Second, as has been stated but perhaps not so clearly, Hermetic Magic rewards specialization. It's often far better to have a 10 in two Techniques and two Forms (a total of 220 xp) or a 14 in a single Form and single Technique (a total of 210 xp) than a 5 in every Art (a total of 225xp). This becomes even more true if you through in Virtues like Affinity or Puissant Art or Magical Focus. So while Roots do provide a lot of xp per season, they are often xp of limited utility: Perdo for a healer, Aquam or Herbam for your stereotypical Creo Ignem Flambeau, etc.
Oh, and someone might have stated it already (though I can't find it), but magi after gauntlet get 30xp/year, not 15 (that's for grogs and most companions). In fact, most people on the forum agree that 30xp/year is a bit on the low side compared to what you'd get in most sagas if played out. However, Ars Magica generally tends to "reward" playing stuff out ... PLUS, if you play stuff out, you tend to have less control on actual allocation of your total xp, which partly balances the difference.
Very true. If you stop thinking of the progression of a magi as a collection of seasonal XP activities and see them as people who have the freedom to do stuff they want, they progress far less efficiently. For example, 30 years after gauntlet a magus decides to visit a friend he made right after gauntlet, who lives three tribunals over now. He spends a season getting there, stays two seasons hanging out, meeting new people, doing stuff that really doesn't get him tons of xp, then goes home. He's been gone a year and probably gotten 8xp (likely some swag from his friend). People do that sort of thing if they have the time and money, which magi definitely do.
I also believe that it is not in the best interest of a master to have his apprentice reach 5 in every Arts just by reading Roots.
During the gauntlet, the master's peers will say "What ? Just barely able to cast a third magnitude spell ? An Archmagus's apprentice not able to manage at least a 5th magnitude spell... What a disappointment".
The apprentice will pass, but the reputation of the master as Lousy teacher is set.
Finally, I know that the rules don't prevent apprentice to learn from book. However, when you don't know a topic at all, it is really hard to learn by yourself from a book compare to when it is taught, even by a bad teacher. There is nothing in the rulebook preventing such shortcut, but I find hard to believe that somebody with just some basic in MT and Latin can figure out magic as efficiently as somebody else with some functional knowledge of magic (eg: level in Arts, plus knowledge of spells).
The other thing is that most magi hoard their power, and the tendency to do so is so ingrained in the culture that even Durenmar laughs at its obligation to spread all its knowledge. They don't want to give their apprentices too much power for free - it'll spoil them for later. They want their apprentice to be just powerful enough to impress the Tribunal after their Gauntlet. They don't want their apprentices to be so powerful that they don't need their parens anymore; after Gauntlet, the parens can dole out seasons of reading his books and Lab Texts in exchange for more work.
The other thing that prevents teaching apprentices by sticking the Roots in their hands is tradition. It's obligatory to teach an apprentice personally for a season a year, period - there's an exception for fosterage but not for giving them a Root. Now, a 6/21 Root might indeed be a better starter for a particular Art than the parens himself, but it won't satisfy the Quaesitores that the parens' teaching obligation is complete - and again, except in specific circumstances that amount to Skilled Parens or the equivalent, a magus really doesn't want his apprentice studying anything more than the minimum.
