Hi,
Ah. While using Puissant MT to get 4 pawns more of vis seems clear, the Shapeshift situation is not, since the shapes do not accrue when the Ability is used. While I'd certainly be willing to err on the side of letting Puissant Shapeshift add two shapes, the overall topic to me essentially boils down to, "Help, my GM is screwing me over." I have a hard time imagining this GM allowing Puissant Shapeshift to add two shapes.
Anyway,
Ken
As written, Puissant does not change the score, it only changes the game-math for determining a Total. And the number of shapes is based on the "Ability", the Score, not any Total or "Value".
If Shapechanging is based on the Magic Realm, then when in a Magical Aura you add to your roll - but you don't gain more shapes. While not identical, this is how Puissant works on a permanent basis. It's a math bonus, not an actual increase.
Hi,
One can argue that Shapeshift is not only "used" to change shape, but is also "used" to learn new shapes to shift into.
Since I see nothing broken about allowing Puissant Shapeshift to add two shapes, I'd rather side this way than not, yet I see enough merit in your side of the argument to accept that view as also consistent with RAW.
The GM in question, however, will almost certainly side against allowing Puissant Shapeshift to be worthwhile, because, you know, he already wants Shapeshift to be worthless.
Anyway,
Ken
The number of pawns of vis usable in a season is based on the "Ability," the Score, not any Total or "Value."
Chris
As I said, if you are under 30 years old you have no choice but to take Puissant. And you are right, Stamina is useless for all shapes and is only there to get a total of 9.
Unless you plan on your character living to older than 30?
Life doesn't really end at 30.
Yes, at score 1, Affinity is 25 xp behind. By score 7 it is still 18 xp behind and will enjoy parity for 12 xp. Assuming a good season brings 10-15 xp, it means Affinity is a full season behind Puissant. At score 12, the reverse happens as Affinity is 15 xp ahead. Note that even at score 14 Puissant still has 10xp of parity.
More on that later.
I have read your error #2 before and I remain unconvinced. The difference between fractional experience and rounding up is a most 1 xp per season, and only if you add an odd value every season. If the ability was worth a virtue, you will spend a good chunk of xp in it every seasons as it is the defining ability of your character.
You have Affinity and put 40 xp of your starting character in it. After 15 seasons at an easy 5 xp per season, you hit score 8.
You have Puissant and put 30 xp of your starting character in it. After 15 seasons at an easy 5 xp per season, you hit score 8.
With Affinity, you had 10 less point to start, and you had a weaker score for 5 seasons. After 34 seasons of the same rythm, you will finally get back 5 seasons where you are stronger. And by that time you will have hit score 11.
Even with a contrived example, trying to make Affinity match Puissant by score 8, we still see that Affinity fails. {EDIT: Considering that everyone believes Affinity to be better, there must be something I am missing.}
2 caveats:
For MT, Affinity is wonderful. We spend so many seasons getting Exposure in the laboratory it's not funny. And it's not seasons of roleplay you use, but seasons of downtime.
If you plan on sacrificing virtues to get mysteries, Affinity is perfect as you will not lose any gains from the past, whereas Puissant is a net loss of 2 levels.
The thread is about min-maxing a starting character to make sure shapeshift always succeeds, except for botches. Because you need to be 30 to get score 6, it severely limits you choices.
And I agree, life starts at 30. 
Depends whether you are min-maxing for the start, middle, or the end of the saga.
I set the rule for this to simply record base XP(with a marking next to it to make sure you never forget it has an affinity) and use that +50% to see what the Score is(or rather, use the quick lookup table i made for it).
Of course that makes the "round up" part far less advantageous.
That however does not account for the ability to teach or write to a higher level which is why i think even your much more realistic comparison is still a bit flawed, or perhaps more correctly incomplete.
Eh, no? If during play you expect to never ever again raise the score, then its a numerically more advantageous option yes. However, if you have taken a bonus Virtue for an Ability, why would you do so if you dont expect to use it alot and thereby benefit from raising it further?
And then again, what if you want to teach/write about the Ability? Affinity is then clearly superior.
Score 12 without Aff requires 390XP, Score 14 with requires 350XP.
Quite so, which is why its much more fun to see the Score go up alot more often by using Affinity.
I usually get the opposite feeling.
And with the former you can the write a level 4 book or teach up to level 8, while the latter is limited to 3/6. Especially for teaching, thats a very noticeable difference.
Of course, for Shapeshift this isnt relevant so often.
OK, first we need a point of clarity. When I mention ranks when you should have taken Affinity, I'm talking about the rank of the Ability you bought prior to any adjustment (+50% experience or +2 ranks). I found it much easier to explain things this way because I could directly reference the experience applied to the Ability. I think you're talking about after the bonus has been applied. So, to translate, in your terms I was saying the transition typically shows up at 9 or sometimes even 8, not at 10.
Yes, here we are just talking about better for use. In actuality, when the Ability with the Affinity equals the Ability with Puissant +2, the Affinity is superior in some ways and maybe inferior in one. So technically ties probably go to Affinity, even though I'm rating them as ties.
Whoa! That's phenomenally good for most Abilities. Exposure: 1-2. Adventure: 1-5. Practice, typically 4 or 5. You generally need training, teaching, or books to get to that 10-15 experience per season. Even then, training commonly won't get that high. Generally speaking, most Abilities won't have lots of books written on them. Also, generally speaking, most people improving Abilities won't be improving them via books anyway. Canonically as an apprentice in a craft you would expect 1 season of training, 1 season of practice, and 2 seasons of exposure.
Yes, magi will have a tendency to improve through study more, though that will still vary a fair amount depending on the type of Ability. Still with a lot of social Abilities and with Magic Theory, there will be lots of gains without books. However, if they are smart about it, they can still manage to pull off odd values, especially 1's, in other Abilities via Correspondence. Of course, you could make this a good season common season if you use your Affinity really poorly, applying the 1's from Correspondence or Exposure to other things and the big periodic bonuses to the thing with the Affinity.
I'm sorry, but your math is incorrect. The straight 1.5 that people use to calculate the break point as 183 -> rank 8 (Puissant) or rank 10 (Affinity) does not take rounding into account. So rounding up provides 0.5 points per season with an odd quality, not 1 point. With an even quality it provides 0 extra. So that's an average of 0.25 points per season that are being ignored when you just use 1.5. Of course, with Correspondence magi can basically tweak things so they always have an odd quality, which can make it 0.5 points per season.
Let's take a look at this with, taking into account the translation I mentioned way at the top. Puissant 7+2 takes 22 seasons. Affinity 9 takes 21 seasons. That's just what I was saying. Affinity pulled ahead well before 8+2 vs. 10. It happened before you put in enough for rank 7, not rank 8, as is typically calculated. The transition actually happened at the beginning of 6+2 vs. 8, which is the situation I said I expected to happen rarely, though it is possible, as your contrivance shows. As for playability, let's look at those seasons. You have only 5 seasons when Puissant was actually better, as you said. They're tied most of the time. So the person who chooses Puissant here has chosen to gain a +1 bonus for 5 seasons of their career, and that's it; the rest of the time they made an error. So we see that Puissant fails in this example, not the other way around. Again, this was a misunderstanding between the discussion of ranks, but now you can see my point #2 kicking in really strongly.
Now let's use a more reasonable example since we all know your example was, as you said, "contrived." Let's say you care about this Ability a lot, but you still have a bunch of other places you want to put points. Let's say you put in 75 points at the beginning. That's pretty close to just making a rank either way, so that's reasonably likely if you're heavily investing in it. During some adventures you apply 3 points and some 5 (you're focusing, but you have other Abilities). You get some trainers and some practice for 11/12ish (need a good trainer for high ranks) or 4, respectively. Let's say have your training is at 11 and half at 12, and you practice as often as getting training. Let's say you adventure relatively frequently, perhaps as often as you train or practice, but half your training/practicing goes to other things. Does this sound like a reasonable split? So you get 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 11, 12. Let's try to balance these some in order to get a rough estimate: 5, 4, 12, 3, 5, 11, 4, 3. That should be pretty balanced between odds/evens, adventure times, etc. for our calculations. I made these up before seeing how it turned out. So let's see... The cross-over point occurs about 1/3 of the way through investing enough for 7th, or 7+2 vs. 9. That's just what I was saying, that some of the rounding would turn things in favor of Affinity typically about a rank before everyone seems to claim. But let's look at another important point. For how many adventures are you better off with one or the other. Here's how they come out in order, A for Affinity being better, P for Puissant being better, E for equal: P, E, E, E, E, P, P, E, E, E, E, A, A, E, E, A, A, E, E, A, A, E, E, and afterwards A always, soon sometimes by more than 1 rank. So Puissant ended up being better during 3 adventures early on.
And you don't get seasons of downtime with other Abilities? Why is that?
Now, despite all this I would commonly choose Puissant for an Ability. Why? Because I won't be able to put so much experience into an Ability. If I can't focus on it, I will never put the 7 levels or so of experience I need to put into it for Affinity to pay off. Also, because if I'm not focusing so much on that Ability, most game sessions will be spent with much lower levels where Puissant is ahead more of the time. And if I'm really, really focused on an Ability, then I'll choose both. Also, if you'll be in a short-lived game, then Puissant will probably be superior because you'll never get far enough along. So generally speaking Puissant is the better of the two. It's just that the level justification that you and others provide is flawed.
Chris
Yes, incomplete. You are correct. I was only calculating for use. You could say it's probably easiest to just say that ties go to the Affinity. Though then there's also the question about how much instruction most characters ever do. But you could turn around and say with the Affinity you'll have more trouble finding instructors. So maybe ties don't go to Affinity. Those seem too situational to me and could go either way. So I'd rather go with the numbers for use.
Chris
Thank you, I understand better now.
You're right in both instances. You see, the problem I have with Affinity is that you will have to roleplay IRL for years before the rounding kicks. So I was trying to stack it up against Puissant.
Yes, except that by the time Affinity got back those 5 seasons, you've reached 11. As I initially said, Affinity with Ability is never a good plan, except for the rare case where you will get above 10.
You don't want to use exposure, anything else is better. Except for laboratory work where the new spell or enchant makes it shine. I didn't mean more than that.
I don't understand at all. If you're stuck in a situation in down time where you get exposure experience, why wouldn't you want to use that experience on what you like if you can? That's exactly the reason Magic Theory gets so much exposure experience.
Sure, you'd rather spend all your time studying/training. However, most characters don't have that luxury. Even magi with lots of free seasons don't entirely end up with that luxury. Anyone who has to spend time doing their regular work for the covenant is going to end up in situations where they get exposure experience.
Chris
I think that heavily depends on downtime. I've heard of sagas playing for many months to get through the first year. I've also been in sagas where a year or two may end up passing in the blink of an eye.
Chris
If it's free, if you have no other options, yes, take it, absolutely.
But if there's any other option for a Study Source, that other option will 99% of the time be far superior to Exposure.
The only reason Magic Theory gets so much exposure is because it shows up for free while another productive and popular seasonal activity is going on, not because "exposure" is the best way to learn MT.
I still disagree about exposure. I don't disagree that you can get more out of other sources, but I disagree with the implicit assumptions that are going into some of the comments about exposure. Let me state my two assumptions for characters in general: 1) each character will improve more than one Ability, usually at least a handful, and 2) each character will have a sizable number of seasons when they can only get exposure experience.
I think it will be easiest to demonstrate this by example. The specifics don't matter so much as letting you see the results. Let's say you have 10 seasons of exposure and 10 seasons of quality 10 sources. You want to raise Ability X, Y, and Z significantly, but mostly Z. You have an Affinity with Z. Option 1: 1 exposure to Z at all times of exposure, and the rest of exposure to either X or Y. 5 seasons of quality 10 to X or Y, and 5 seasons of quality 10 to Z. Now you can have 30 experience in X, 30 experience in Y, and 95 experience in Z. Option 2: all exposure to X or Y. 4 seasons of quality 10 to X or Y, and 6 seasons of quality 10 to Z. Now you can have 30 experience in X, 30 experience in Y, and 90 experience in Z.
The idea is that you specifically want to use one point of exposure whenever you can for Abilities with which you have Affinities. That doesn't mean you don't want to use other sources; of course others provide you with more points. However, you should favor improving other Abilities with the other sources. So, it's not that you prefer exposure, but whenever you have it you absolutely do want to use it for an Ability with Affinity. As I showed above, assuming things aren't done in isolation, sometimes exposure works out as a better source for an Ability with Affinity than do higher quality sources. (Hopefully this is clear enough to be understood.)
Back to the original topic. If your ASG is going to give you so much trouble, don't use Puissant because your ASG probably won't give you more forms for it. You can move Stamina from 0 to +2 for the same price, plus you get other benefits from Stamina. If you are spending enough points in it anyway, use Affinity. The Affinity may come in a little lower, but you'll get an extra form out of it even if it is a little lower. But check first, because if your ASG will let you get forms out of Puissant, that's a good way to go.
Chris