Secondary Insight

Games Discussion Ars Magica
101

The text is as below.

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. These bonus experience points are not increased by Affinities or any other factors.

I agree with @temprobe about the additional Virtues, as well. I think that would be the fairest way to handle it.

102

Oh man that's going to be a nightmare to keep track of if a character do have Affinity with something: we are going to have to keep track of the XPs that actually are boosted by the Affinity and those who don't (mostly because my troupe and me do Affinities not by increasing actual XPs, but only multiplying them by 1.5 when computing the actual score of the Art or Ability).

Not that we can't just houserule that sentence out. Half an XP don't seem to be enough to go through the pains of updating the excel file we use to keep track of characters. But I just wonder if disallowing that half xp is really needed.

103

This is nothing new. The other bonus ones are also not boosted by Affinities. This is just an explicit statement about what was already implicitly true. So if you were already house-ruling this way with Affinity, just keep your house rule. If you weren't, then you don't have to change anything.

104

That's how it has always worked. Except for at character creation, Affinity doesn't multiply xp - it multiplies Advancement Total.
So if you get extra XP from somewhere, those are not and never have been multiplied by Affinity.

Handling Affinity by multilplying XP when computing the score will get things wrong in a large number of cases.

105

Even though the minor virtue is a decent solution we wanted to try to make a major virtue that would work in our group. This is what we came up with, if you have any thoughts on if it seems reasonable or if there are flaws we have missed, please share.

Our suggestion, with some variants is:

Major Secondary Insight
Your method of magical study is especially versatile. When you spend a season studying one of the magical Arts from a book, a teacher, or raw vis, you also gain a 1/4 of the source quality experience points (rounded up) in each of any 4 Forms, 2 Forms and 1 Technique, or 2 Techniques of your choosing, except the art studied. This xp can never raise a Form above your highest Form or a Technique above your highest Technique, and it cannot raise any art above the gain limit of the source. You 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. These bonus experience points are not increased by Affinities or any other factors.

In addition, when learning spells from laboratory texts, you can learn from different art combinations as if learning from a teacher, substituting your own lab totals as the teachers lab totals.

Not sure if this should be part of it too (might be to complicated):

Similarly, when doing multiple lab activities in a season you can work with different art combinations, but must reduce each lab total by the fraction of time spent on that activity.

alternatively, and less powerful:

Similarly, when doing multiple lab activities in a season you can work with different art combinations. The lowest art combination lab total is used in this case.

And finally, since both minor and major versions can coexist:

You cannot have both minor and major secondary insight.

We thought that 1/4 or possibly 1/3 might be a reasonable value here, as the character can be more focused than the previous suggestions where you have to put in your lowest art, but more flexible than elementalist, and should thus get less total xp. The thought with limiting these extra xp by source level is that a source should never give xp over its limit, even if in another art. I think this version gives more interesting decisions than putting the xp in your lowest art all the time, while still curtailing being able to put the xp in your best arts. More adapted for a generalist that uses 2-5 Techniques and maybe 4-6 Forms.

The rationale for making it easier to learn spells (and possibly imbue artifacts) with different art combinations is that a generalist will probably want to know many low-mid level spells in different arts, and the system as it is makes it very time consuming to do so.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this, and I will try to provide an example shortly to make it clear how this would work if any of the rules text as I wrote it was unclear.

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106

Example:

You have Creo 12, Intellego 15, Muto 11(and 10xp), Animal 10, Ignem 16 and Mentem 16.
You read an Aquam book with Q15L12. This would give you 4 extra xp (15/4 rounded up) to put in either 2 Techniques, 1 Technique and 2 Forms or 4 Forms.

In this case you cannot put the xp in Intellego, Ignem or Mentem as this would give you xp beyond your highest Technique or Form. Neither can you put it in Creo as the Gain Limit of the book is 12 and you are at 12 in Creo already. You can put it in Muto, but you will only gain 2 xp as that gets you to 12, and all other arts are fair game except Aquam as that is the book's own subject.

If instead the book was an Aquam Q17 Tractatus you would get 5xp to put in anything but Intellego, Ignem or Mentem as this would give you xp beyond your highest Technique or Form.

As a final note we need to know how to handle one corner case. What if the book was an Ignem Q17 Tractatus? Then your Ignem would rise to 17. Can you then put the secondary insight xp in Mentem as you would simultaneously no longer consider Menten to be at your highest Form level? I would argue that yes, you can put it there as that seems like the simplest solution.

I understand that my suggested version of the rule might be too trickily formulated for the official rules, but as I know my group is ok with the complexity I am more interested in if you think it is a fairly balanced virtue or not.

107

Allowing learning lab texts from various TeFo suits a generalist and gives an interesting gain that would make this virtue stand on its own as something else than a source of experience points. I would probably allow the logic with working without lab text. At first thought, the proposal doesn't seem broken to me.

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108

Yes, I think this would be too complex for the official rules, but it doesn't seem obviously broken to me, either. I also like the extension to Lab Texts, which probably isn't worth that much by itself, but is a nice thematic addition to the Virtue.

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109

I think a Major Version of Secundary Insight could be

  • one of the options in this part of @Sagemaster sugestion

Another idea would be to make that you could not put the xp in your two highest Te and three highest Fo (to make sure the xp gets distributed in more diferent Arts). But these changes might make the Virtue to become complicated.

110

Thinking about it, I had this backwards.

We know the name.
Now, we decide
A) what type of characters we want to benefit from the virtue.
B) decide if it applies when adventuring or while in the lab.
C) find mechanics that fulfill that goal, being either, based on the name "When you do X, you get Y" (type 1) or "When you do X, you benefit from Y" (type 2)

So, for fun and games (and if someone likes one of these, or it provides inspiration to someone, all the better :slight_smile: ), let's play with this, sticking with mages as character types, giving half-thought out, badly conceived ideas.

In that spirit, we'll also try (and probably fail) to consider the following:

  • Puissant is +3 in a limited fashion
  • Affinity is +50% in a limited fashion
  • Book learner is +3 XP, applying accross the board to a frequent XP source
  • Apt Student is +5 XP, applying accross the board to an infrequent XP source
  • A major virtue, being character defining, can be slightly stronger than 3 minor virtues.

What can we create?

  • Combattants, adventuring, type 2
    You can use your knowledge of a creature, or a supernatural tradition, to pierce its defenses.
    Add three times your appropriate Realm or Tradition lore to your penetration total. OoH Lore applies for the parma.
  • Social Types, adventuring, type 2
    You mastery of the Art of mentem, and extensive study of thoughts and emotions, lends you great insight into the working of minds, which gives you an almost supernatural feel for people. Add your Mentem resistance bonus to all social rolls made with humans.
    A similar virtue exists with Animal, and with Vim for each of the realms.
  • Loremasters, adventuring, type 2
    While studying the art of vim, you have dwelt into the inner workings of each realm of power. Add two times your Vim resistance to each (realm) lore roll.
  • Combattants, adventuring, type 1
    You are adept at figuring out what makes a strong magical defense, or how someone found weakness in yours. When someone penetrates your Magic resistance with a roll of 11 or more, gain 5 xp in Penetration. When you botch while trying to pierce someone's magical resistance, gain 5 xp in Parma Magica (yeah, ripe for abuse)
  • Various, lab work, type 1
    Choose a domain, similar in breadth to a Major Magical Focus. Everytime you learn, invent or are taught a spell, or whenever you create an item, that could be covered by it, you receive the effect's magnitude as XP in one of the arts involved.
  • Generalists, study, type 1
    Whenever you study an art, divide your source quality by 2. However, you generate secondary advancement totals in your two lowest arts, using the full source primary quality
  • Social types, study, type 1
    You can use social interaction as a sort of... what's the word for collections of a thing that you study? Anyway. Your interactions with people, and your knowledge of them, bleeds into your Mentem Mastery. When you practice any social skill, or put adventure XP in it, you receive as many XP in Mentem

I could do more, but this has been on standby for about 3 weeks by now, quite stale I think :smiley:
Now that I think about it, this kinda looks like the basis of a "Create your own virtue" system, but whatever :roll_eyes:

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