As I'm rewriting my character, I notice that I have a Profession Scribe skill of 4, allowing me to copy 240 levels of spells in a season. That's 48 build points, right there.
I understand that we are going to have the challenges of setting up a new covenant. But we will still have to spend a season to learn any spell on a Lab Text. It's not as immediate an improvement as a Vis source, nor as generally applicable as
Is it allowable for us to supplement our Build Points with a season of copying, or will that have to take place after game start?
Very good suggestion on initial spells. I have some BPs yet to spend but some of the spells I think I'll add to my character instead of as books. (Edit: and some of these I'm sure can be spont cast in a pinch)
I've assumed that our BP resources are sort of character centric - Am I out of sync with the other players?
I was thinking we ought to plan on each spending a season or two scribing spells at the beginning just to get the library filled up with some lab texts.
I assumed it was a mix. Some for us; some for the covenant. Not sure what the distribution should be, though.
After several hours, I've rebuilt my character. Calpurnia now is 40 years past Gauntlet. Following Arthur's setup, I built her in three distinct phases. One of the posts in my character thread has the Build Points breakdown.
Did you know that if a character has X experience points in an Ability, the Level can be found by solving (-5 + SQRT(25 + 40X))/10, rounding down if necessary? Sorry, my math geek came out for a while. Thankfully spreadsheets can automate this.
I agree that we should coordinate on how to spend build points. We won't have that much available, so overlap would be bad. And since we can assume that the characters will have written to each other, at least, then some coordination would have been possible.
So far, the following have been declared. If I am missing anything, or if things change, let me know and I'll post an updated list.
For my part, Batholomeus will probably have gathered a number of skilled workers in the last period of his advancement, mostly outcasts and people hitting a rough spot in life. I will also go for a summa (since we can only get one for each magus) and a few tractatus, although the subjects are still undecided.
Am I correct in assuming that grogs and non-specialists workers do not cost build points? Do we want to build companions as well as magi? That might help fill some of the more important mundane roles in the covenant.
I notice on that post that you spent vis from your Personal Vis Source during advancement. Did you catch the post where Jonathan ruled that if we do so, the source will no longer provide vis once play begins?
Of course, with the most moderate of advancement, a PVS is still plenty valuable, even if all it does is provide vis during character generation. Longer advancement just means that it's even more valuable. Consider that Calpurnia's PVS would give her 120 pawns of vis during character generation (assuming 3 pawns a year). That's a lot of vis and almost certainly worth spending a Virtue point on. It over doubles the amount of Vis she has available. And any excess stays around when the saga starts. What's not to like?
Agnarr's BP spend is in his character thread. It's a work in progress at present as I am adding spells and item lab texts.
I have really liked the vis and book limitation in this character generation as it makes me consider other options.
It can be a pain to have to look up at all the character threads to locate the build points, then summarize everything together. I may resort to doing that anyway, but please notify me if you change anything there.
Summae are probably the most important to coordinate. Tractatus are probably not required. Other things we may want to coordinate are lab texts, vis sources and specialists. Having duplicates provide little added benefits.
I may start putting together a spreadsheet for that. Later, probably tomorrow.
I will add those for Bartholomeus as soon as I have decided them. Do I understand correctly that the "Spells" tab is for spells that are known by each magus (as opposed to actual lab texts purchsed with BPs)? And that the "By Category" is a summary of the covenant's resources purchased by BPs?
Well, any of us with personal lab texts would have to scribe them for them to be useful to the rest of the covenant anyway. So this list of spells is only in the potential right now.
I don't think any of the magi will have their personal lab texts scribed in a way that others could use. We will all have to take the time to scribe them down if we want to make them available to the others -- unless we spend some seasons doing exactly that during advancement.
The goal of the list is to make sure that we don't use our build points to purchase lab texts for spells that we can easily scribe collectively.
