No, but without prior teaching and training, field experience tends to end up with a lot more dead soldiers than experienced soldiers.
Depends on the subject. For things like mathematics, or theology, or a whole lot of other academic subjects, it is difficult to learn anything at all from just practical experience. You need the theoretical grounding from a book or a teacher.
In reality you need both book/teacher learning and real-world experience for many things.
The first to give you the necessary background and tools, the second to give you those "Oh, so that's what they meant!" revelations that makes you internalize the information.
Agreed, might even be for everything, and we are still not even remotely close to justifying that you can get twice as many xp/season from a book than from an adventure.
These are actually two very different issues. Let's not confuse them.
In reality, learning most things optimally requires a mix of learning abstract knowledge, and practicing it hands on (ideally with constant feedback); and the ideal proportions, as well as how much you lose by deviating from them, change depending on what you are trying to learn, how advanced you already are, your personality etc. ArM5 for the sake of simplicity assumes everything mundane can be learned via Exposure, Practice, Books, etc. in arbitrary proportions. Not too realistic - but I do not think it's a bad tradeoff.
The initial point being discussed was not theory vs. practice. At least, that was not how I saw it. It was purposeful vs. accidental learning, with or without guidance. If you spend a season reading a book about ... Faerie Lore, your mental faculties and energy are focused on learning Faerie Lore. Plus, someone spent time and energy trying to organize that knowledge to maximize your learning. If instead you spend a season ... let's say hunting faerie beasts, your mind will be preoccupied with the immediate need of getting things done rather than about what you might learn of Faerie Lore. Plus, you might pick up a lot of rather useless information, miss crucial issues, and simply not have the right framework and tempo to organize everything into a cohesive whole.
So it's not surprising that purposeful learning learning with someone to guide you (books, teaching, training) should be superior to purposeful learning without a guide (practice), which in turn should be superior accidental learning (exposure, stories). In fact, if anything, story xp is unrealistically high, and the only justification why it's higher than exposure seems one of gamism vs. simulationism: a game designer wants players to feel rewarded for playing the game, so there's a push towards providing more xps for stuff that involved players spending a lot of time playing, rather than for stuff that involved their fictional characters spending a lot of time learning.
You miss a critical point of the Ars Magica rules. Adventure xp is, in principle and in most cases, purposeful learning.
the character spends the rest of the season consolidating what she learned under pressure. [ArM5:163]
This speaks up to a oft-quoted mantra in pedagogy.
We do not learn from experience, but from reflecting upon our experience.
In other words, if you go from your story, and back to working as a blacksmith, you have only the accidental experience, and gain only the meagre two exposure xp. It is when you purposefully dedicate your season to learning that you can gain a lot more xp.
You miss an even more critical point of Ars Magica rules, I think. The story (or stories) can take the whole season - and indeed, the "bigger" the story is and/or the more stories you fit in the season, the more you typically learn, despite having less time for reflection, and perhaps no time at all.
Look: if a PC serves the Faerie Queen as a butler (a season spent earning Labor points), the PC gains 2xp. But if your troupe plays out a story in which the PC serves the Faerie Queen as a butler for a season, narrating various scenes - with much more time at the gaming table for the players but fundamentally no difference for the PC - the PC gains 5 to 10xp. I am not saying this disconnect is bad per se (you can see it made even more explicit e.g. in C&G) as it can make players feel rewarded. But in terms of pure realism, story xps are excessive compared to those from other sources, in particular practice and exposure.
Once again, what you learn in stories is "accidental": neither you, nor someone else for you, chooses what type of experiences you might have, or how to pace them and intersperse them with "reflection", so as to make you better at some task; and in any case typically most of your time and energy is not focused on learning but on achieving other goals. I consider this sufficiently evident that I shall not debate it further.
I did not miss it. I simply write it down to inaccuracy of abstraction. Most stories do not fill up the season, so for most stories the model works as intended. You are right that some stories fill up the season with dense activity, and for these stories only, the model is broken.
The ideal story season needs an appropriate mix of surprises which challenge the character's preconceptionsĀ¹ and sufficient time to digest these surprises. Straight-forward chores are just counter-productive. Ideally, this is what the SG should consider when assigning story xp. If the character is never surprised, or is to busy to stop and think, the SQ should be 5, and thus comparable to plain practice.
Ā¹ I think I am referring to Donald Schƶn here, but maybe it is more of Hans-Georg Gadamer.
I think this brings up another issue, which is how mindful is work that normally results only in exposure experience. Obviously lab work that results in developing a spell or improving arts would be a significant distraction from reflecting on your adventures, but doing the mechanical work of pounding out swords or forging nails while thinking about your time on that adventure is another matter. Even fixing an arcane connection might not require a lot of focus so much as going through the motions.
One could ask such questions, but it would just open a wormhole when one tries to determine what work is compatible with adventure learning and what is not. On this point I find RAW absolutely satisfactory. It is a decent approximation, realistic enough in most cases, balanced in game terms, pragmatic, and playable.
And in my personal experience, having to do something is incompatible with thinking effectively about what I want to think about. That does not mean that I could not hammer out nails and still reflect and learn, but it means that I could not have to hammer out nails.
Silveroak definitely has a point, in my 20s I worked at a bunch of different copy shops and I loved the work, especially the really drudgy, tedious stuff because I could think about whatever I wanted while collating or whatnot... interrupted, of course, by pesky customers but...
That said, I think for ease of play Loke is right and Atlas made the right decision on this.
Realistically, how much in-game time actually passes in most games people are running?
A decade (40 seasons)? More?
I ask because this discussion has me thinking about the practical impact of distinguishing between giving 5 or 6 xp. Or even 5 vs 10 xp.
What impact does a 1 xp difference over 40 seasons have on the game? What about a 5 xp difference 40 seasons?
Or how much impact do these distinctions have in the actual practice of running an ArM game over time if most games don't run more than a decade or two of in-game time in which to spend the XP?
With those questions in mind, I think I would encourage a slightly more generous approach to awarding adventure XP.
In the lived (played?) experience of an ArM game, it may not be really all that material to shave the hairs of adventure xp so closely.
Perhaps it depends on the game's pace and consensus on how power should scale over time in the game.
I think it might be worth the risk to be generous with the XP.
The first is that if you are always equally generous with xp - you award 10xp both for major stories and for minor ones - in my experience many players will not see you as generous with minor-story xps, they will call you stingy with major-story xps "What do you mean only 10xp? We stopped the mongol invasion! And we get the same xp that our grogs got for that little trip to sell wine at the local fair?"
The second is that, at a certain point of the thread, many people seemed to argue in favour of awarding Story xp for every Story, rather than for every season of Stories. If a character has a Story every week of a season, even if each earns that character only 5xp, it's 65xp at the end of the season, and that is a big deal.
So is having a Source Quality for story xp greater than 10. But you'll note that some people in the thread have argued for house rules that award xp for every story and/or remove the Quality 10 cap. To each his own; I was simply observing that Bartomeus' point "5 or 6 or 10xp, not much difference" was not quite applicable to what a lot of people had been proposing.
As a side note: 5-10xp as a Source Quality from stories is already exceedingly generous in my opinion, and justifiable only as a gaming device to give a nice warm fuzzy feeling to players who got spoiled by other rpgs where you gain "levels" by "adventuring". In this I completely disagree with loke: Source Quality for (reflecting upon) accidental experiences that are not designed to have one learn stuff, realistically should be lower than that for purposeful experiences, i.e. Practice. And indeed, Exposure Source Quality is lower than Practice Source Quality.
For some reason people assume Exposure is gained only in seasons of drudgework, but it's not! It's simply what you get in a season that you do not devote (almost) entirely to learning. The only difference with Stories is that events in the latter are explicitly narrated in detail - but that's not an in-game difference.
I think that's a feature, not a bug in the system: it makes characters in ArM5 feel much more real. Most normal people would rather be left to their own devices. "Adventure is something that happens to someone else. When it's happening to you, it's only trouble."
But that's what Personality and Story Flaws (and Covenant Hooks) are for. You are not coercing the players. On character (and covenant) creation, they made an explicit statement: "I want stories about this or that for my PC - I expect the SG to provide them and look, while the average person would shy away from them, this PC has a good reason not to." I consider this one of the best innovations of ArM5: it creates a semi-explicit contract between players on what the game will be about, while simultaneously providing a convincing rationale for the characters to act.
Incidentally, while you are coercing the characters with Story Flaws (and some Hooks) you are not really coercing them when leveraging Personality Flaws (most of them. anyways - a few are Personality Flaws in name only). You want to get an Ambitious/Obsessed/Pious/Lecherous character on a Story? Dangle something tickling said Ambition/Obsession/Piety/Lechery. While it may not be worth the xps, and might in fact cost the character more resources than it generates, that story will be appealing for the character who, of his own agency (if properly roleplayed) will embark on it.
Rafael Bessoni has said this better than I could here.
Interesting thought. That means that the turb grogs should be forced to practice weapons (or be trained/tought) in their work seasons and earn only exposure in the free seasons which they would most likely use to tell stories at the tavern or pick flowers in the hills.
It should be an in-game difference. The stories we tell should be those of extra-ordinary surprise. The features that make a story entertaining are also the best learning opportunities. It may be that we sometimes tell boring stories, that should only be worth 5xp or less, but when katharsis is achieved after a well-told story, it is worth 10xp or more.
This is true in general, for early stage learners. However, it misses the point that the accidental experiences encountered in a story worth telling are not average accidents. They should be the extra-ordinarily valuable experiences that are very hard to match on purpose. Note that I argue that good stories should match the typical low-level (sound) summa with quality around 15, and not the sound primer that easily get qualities past 20. (I have also seen in-game teachers with SQ well above 20, but that seems to have been extreme power-gaming.)
Maybe inflated book qualities is more of the problem than stingy story xp.
This also hits on an other issue with Ars Magica. Advanced learning is penalised twice. From 2ed and 3ed we have the steep pyramid scale which makes advanced levels more expensive, which is very fair, since learning has diminishing returns on investment. From 4ed we get the more advanced system of different modes of learning, which allows extremely efficient learning activities with very high xp gains only for beginners. In itself, this is fair, because advanced learning do require different learning methods, but it is a problem because advanced learning was already fairly penalised by the pyramid scale.
Most games? Probably less than two seasons, with a sizeable fraction crashing during character generation.
But there are players here reporting from games that have run for a century. My own longest is past 25 years now.
The question is not the number of seasons, though, but the number of stories. I play sagas where stories often take 3-4 sessions and never less than one. In this case, Ā±5xp matters little, even when compound over every story season, because there aren't that many. I see other sagas where story seasons are processed quickly, and the saga can progress fast even if there are stories every or almost every season. If, on top of that, the same characters take part in every story, the difference is massive.
I am not 100% I understand the causal link ("that means...") but you do bring up a somewhat sore issue about ArM5 experience. Characters are workaholics! Any PC with free time, whether it's a genuinely free season of contiguous time or a season "spread over" a year, tends to spend it studying, crafting, etc. like an obsessed maniac.
Now, you could make a case for grogs (and other characters who have to take orders) that they can't spend their "free" seasons as they wish: "you are not expected to be on guard from noon to early afternoon so you can practice your swordplay with your instructor". But characters with power, like magi in a relatively comfortable covenant, or even a placid shopkeeper without great ambitions? I can see a few being obsessed with ... whatever obsession they have, and I am not claiming that everyone else would spend all their free time doing nothing either. But I find the way most characters tend to be played unrealistic.
ArM3 took this into account: the average character was supposed to earn 2xp per year (the equivalent of 10xp in ArM5), but lazy characters were supposed to earn 50% less, and characters obsessed with advancing themselves could earn 50% more.Yet in virtually all games I saw, almost all important characters ended up being obsessed one way or another to claim the bonus.
I wish ArM5 had a mechanism to reward roleplaying human laziness in seasonal advancement - at least in those characters who have no pressing need to become better at what they do, or do more of what they typically do. It can't be xp, of course: a character obsessed with improving swordplay should advance more quickly, ceteris paribus, than someone who feels fine about himself. And for the same reason it can't be labour points: working like a dog does boost one's business.
So, what should the reward be? For companions and magi, bestowing extra Confidence seems a good option: someone who is serene, well-rested etc. will probably perform better in a sudden crisis than someone who is already stretched to the limit. But this does not work for grogs. For older characters, a bonus to aging rolls is also an option. And the truly dedicated roleplayer will just feel a nice warm fuzzy feeling at the idea that his favoured grizzled grog is spending time happily doing nothing. But from my experience, none of this is usually a powerful enough motivator. Ideas?
I do not think the increased confidence of the lazy is even remotely realistic.
A bonus to aging roll is probably better, but in reality laziness is as destructive as exertion, it is the golde middle path that makes a healthy life.
Does not matter, it was sloppily phrased, and I think we agree on the essence here.
Sure, but: how do you reward then characters who take that "golden middle path"? It's obvious that they should not advance as quickly as those who are consumed by the desire for advancement (intellectual, financial etc.). And how do you reward players for occasionally roleplaying a genuinely lazy character?
"What do you mean only 10xp? We stopped the mongol invasion! And we get the same xp that our grogs got for that little trip to sell wine at the local fair?"