Generalist will tend to have a noticeably higher total XP in arts than Specialist if built up during play in most cases. This comes about because they will do things like read all of the high value books across all the arts and thus have access to high value sources far longer. Sure you can say the specialist could do the same, but then said Specialist will also develop into a Generalist with a slight focus in one area. The three Generalist in our saga have 1,000+ more XP in Arts than the four Specialist (1/4~1/3 more total).
This is really only important if building a Generalist using the quick method, since with this method they will have the same total points as a Specialist and thus be under powered. In other words there is no method to build an effective Generalist other than by seasonal activity without them coming out weak.
Although, being a character-defining major virtue, this would worry me less than it would otherwise.
As a totally out-of the blue, non thought-out mechanic, what would something like this give, in your opinion?
When you get XP in an art, you get as many XP in MT. When you get XP in MT, you get as many XP in your lowest art.
Ballpark: this is +100% xp, so around the same as 2 affinities.
I'm not sure this is a good idea for this virtue, though. This would lead to magi only studying the arts, which is, IMO, not an ideal outcome.
Which feeds right into your above comment
@ErikT : I believe this works. We just leave the idea of insight, IMO, which I find sad.
Hum... Still going with the "secondary insight" theme and throwing things at the wall. When you gain xp from Vis or Twilight, you gain xp based on the source quality in your 2 lowest arts.
Or same thing, with lowest art and MT?
@loke I tend to agree about the concepts. If there's little difference between a magus and a companion, play the companion. So how to make these magi attractive? And is this shifting the thread? And shouldn't I be freaking working instead of just posting nonsense here?
That would be the killer virtue for every Bonisagus lab rat heading for original research. During the course of upping ten arts to five, so that you can take an apprentice, you have also got 150xp(+) in Magic Theory. That's the increase 3->8. Still only half-way to 11, but keep reading something else.
We looked at making it a Minor Virtue for a while.
It's probably on the strong side, but it fits better as a minor than as a Major.
We've also considered breaking it into 2 Minor Virtues, but IIRC we never got around to testing that.
I have always thought of its niche as being a virtue that boosts xp gain for seasons where you gain exposure xp. This is the case because I misread the virtue for a long time. This caused me to think that you would trigger its bonus whenever you gained xp in any art for any reason.
However I think that this specific niche is actually a valid one for an errata'ed Secondary insight virtue to occupy.
Something along the lines of making the virtue grant 4 one-xp bonuses that apply to any art, with the caveat that the art in question cannot be advanced by any other means in that same season (including gaining another 1 xp bonus from this virtue), and that the xp granted is not an advancement total (i.e. not modified by other xp-boosting virtues).
Thus with this virtue you always gain 1 xp in 4 different arts. This is kind of a mediocre bonus (relatively speaking) when triggered in a season where one gains 21 xp in an art from reading an L6Q21 summa but it is pretty great when triggered in a season where one gains exposure xp (e.g. from labwork).
I am on the fence on whether the virtue should just work outright, or if it should require xp to be allocated in an art to trigger.
I had a similar thought to those suggesting Secondary Insight granting xp in Ablities, but regarding spells.
"Whenever you gain experience in an Art, you gain an equal number of points which can be used to invent a spell (one point per level). This must be a spell that you could normally learn or invent."
This could be refined to allow the player to "bank" those points, but this should probably be limited in some way. The objective is to allow the character to learn not just low-level spells with this.
Why not the other way around? Learning spells give you points in the Arts? Say one xp per magnitude of the spell (or one xp per 10 levels of the spell if one wants to be more conservative with xp), and no more than one xp (from this) may be assigned to a single Art in one season.
There seems to be a consensus that, as written, Secondary Insight is about right for a Minor Virtue â maybe on the strong side, but nothing serious.
On the other hand, there is no consensus on the best way to make it strong enough to be a Major Virtue. A lot of the ideas are interesting, such as learning Arts when you create spells, or vice versa, but they are entirely new ideas, and I have no idea how they would impact the game. They might be great, but they might also, even as Major Virtues, have unanticipated effects.
So, I am inclining towards the view that, as errata, the best thing to do is the boring thing, and just drop it to minor, clarifying that you get to choose the Arts every time. Thus:
Secondary Insight
Minor, Hermetic
Your method of magical study is especially versatile. When you spend a season studying one of the magical Techniques from a book, a teacher, or raw vis, you also gain a single experience point in any 4 Forms of your choosing. When studying one of the magical Forms, you also gain a single experience point in any 2 separate Techniques of your choosing. You may not put more than one bonus experience point into a single Art, and may choose different Arts to receive the bonus experience points in each season, even when continuing to study the same Art from the same source. This Virtue is especially suitable for generalist magi.
What do people think? We've had less than 24 hours, so we don't need to reach a final decision yetâŠ
Just to confirm. That single experience point to secondary Arts does not count as a Study total, thus an Affinity in the secondary Art doesn't increase that experience point?
Still, I can see this as being favoured by Tremere magi (or really any magus with a favoured TeFo combo). No matter what Arts the Tremere study, they also get an xp in either their two favourite Techniques, or two favourite Forms. Useful late in a campaign when you can't get enough Tractatii to increase their scores above 30 or 40, or whatever the practical maximum is in people's sagas.
I did like this example as a major virtue. If I was going to adjust it any way, I'd change it from lowest 3 arts, to any art with a level half or less of the art studied. If there are no arts under half the level of the art being studied, the three lowest arts get the XP.
Why not the three lowest? My idea was to make it a good virtue for a generalist, so that it always improves your lowest Arts, keeping your Arts more level.
Yes, this is why I think Secondary Insight is too powerful for a minor virtue. Maybe David is right to conclude that this is «nothing serious». If one, say, reduced it to 2xp in both cases (two forms when studying a technique), I would say it fits perfectly as a minor virtue.
Yeah!
Thinking about this yesterday, I had the same idea
Further reasoning, based on Book Learner giving +3xp and Affinity giving +50% led me along the way, for a Major Virtue, of When you generate a Lab total, you may forego exposure to increase your two lowest arts, gaining 4 xp in each. This gets to 5 if you're experimenting, 6 if you get a discovery
Generalists are going to invent lots of spells, so this suits them. The boost for experience felt both thematic and a way to encourage players to use it.
I'm still not sure this isn't under-powered for a major virtue (Giving +6 to +10xp compared to exposure) and I gfrget what I was fgonna say
While just going the easy way and making it a minor virtue makes sense for an errata, I think it's a shame.
There are too many defining Major Hermetic virtues, and this could have been a chance to broaden the scope of characters, just like the new elementalist did.
For what it's worth, my reasonning yesterday:
Secondary means that the benefit is not linked to the primary, whatever it is.
This means a wording like this: "When you do X, you get Y" (type 1) or "When you do X, you benefit from Y" (type 2)
We then must decide if it applies when adventuring or while in the lab.
Then, what type of characters we want to benefit from the virtue.
Then, find mechanics that fulfill that goal.
As an example, the old virtue was type 1, lab, generalists.
I think this is a fine niche, since these characters are already seldom played.
Turning it into a minor is certainly the "safest" choice. I think, however, that no consensus has coalesced on how to oomph it up to major simply because there are many (interesting) directions that could go. Perhaps a consensus could be found if we impose the constraint that the following properties of the original version shoud be preserved (it's an erratum, after all):
Secondary Insight should be
a) a major Hermetic Virtue, that
b) benefits a magus when studying Arts from a teacher, raw vis, or book
c) by providing xp in Arts other than the one studied
d) in a way that's especially beneficial for generalist magi
In this way, the only question is which Arts benefit, and how many xp they get.
Every Art other than the one studied receives 1xp would be my choice.
First, it's really really simple.
Second, while it appears generous (+14xp/season spent studying the Arts!) for most magi a significant fraction of those xp (probably at least half) are put into "dump" Arts that the magus is uninterested in developing. It is a great help to really broad generalists, but those actually need the help.
Third, and related to the above, it does not seem to interact with other Virtues in any significant way.
