I'm not sure I can parse the paragraph above but... why would you see as a game balance problem if a PC has a backstory mentioning that most of his "supernatural potential" emerged after his Gift was opened (as long as his Virtues and Flaws remain balanced)? Mechanically, this is supported even in the corebook, by the General Virtue "Latent Magical Ability". Saying that this makes a high Lab Total useless seems like saying that if magic devices can be won through stories, then having a high Lab Total for enchanting magic devices is useless.
Lol. Your analogy is a bit off.
Why would anyone construct a character with virtues that will get lost? Why would they construct their npc apprentices or children with anything else? Basically to get around the rule. So if building characters which circumvent the rule is the suggestion from players, why the f is there a rule? Other than to give a way players can deny other players interesting characters?
You guys also forget it's the player's choice not mine, not anyone else's, the player says "I had these at birth". That's all the player has to say. Do I now strip the virtues? Or do I make a parens capable to open the arts? You guys are hilarious here. Defending something busted as though I'm a jerk pointing out it's busted. Coming up with Story ideas, on a forum that finds deviation anathema, and changing a player's background and story just because of a stupid rule.
You could just remove dumb rule.
Ok. Have a backstory, it's why I have 5 massive artefacts with no matching virtues. A more appropriate analogy is killing off a character's Animal Companion every time they make one because arbitrarily decided they were poor so it starved.
Because it's not the player, but the SG/troupe that decides the nature of npcs. This means that if a PC magus wants an apprentice with, uh, Second Sight, either the PC a) finds an apprentice with Second Sight, and makes sure it's preserved when the Gift is Opened or b) finds some way to get the apprentice instructed/initiated in Second Sight after the Gift is Opened or c) finds some way to divine which potential apprentice will develop Second Sight spontaneously after Opening the Arts. c) is by far the hardest of the three 
I am sorry but I really can't follow you. Would you mind making the situation a bit clearer?
Well, if the player insists on a detailed backstory (which is not strictly needed), you are perfectly right to require that it should make sense mechanically. So if the player says: "my character had all these supernatural virtues up and running before his gift was opened to hermetic magic, and the opening did not ruin them", then you may want to point out that this would be an incredibly unusual circumstance -- and require appropriate changes to the backstory, that still lead to the same character, or some explanation you and the troupe are happy with (like a wildly successful but not replicable experiment on the part of his parens, in which the character played the part of the guinea pig).
It's a bit as if a player claimed his character has Mythic Blood, of the Bjornaer lineage (which is perfectly ok) and then says "because Bjornaer was my PC's mum". You can say "I'm fine with the Virtue, but the backstory makes little sense: Bjornaer has been dead for centuries. How is it possible for the PC to be Bjornaer's son?" Maybe the character got caught up in a regio or something. But if something acceptable to the troupe can't be reached, it's perfectly ok to veto the backstory (albeit not the character per se).
I confess I just don't understand what you are saying! Character creation runs like this.
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The rules tell you what the endpoint can be (balanced Virtues and Flaws etc.). That's what you get at the end of character creation. No more and no less.
Backstory is mechanically irrelevant at this point. -
Generally speaking, virtually every PC created "by the rules" can be explained by an appropriate backstory that could have happened in play; even if it was a truly rare event that cannot be replicated ("Saint Guineford inexplicably appeared at the PC's birth and blessed him with the ability to understand animals -- that's how he gained the Animal Ken Virtue!"). If player makes a backstory that is incompatible with the character and/or the Ars Magica "cosmology" ("Aliens implanted the character with translation nanoware -- that's how he gained the Animal Ken Virtue") then the troupe is perfectly within it rights to say "sorry, you did get what you said you got, but not how you said you got it". Ideally, constructively ("Maybe it's not alien nanoware, but a blessing by little green faeries?").
You should stop looking at is a negative - yes, there's disadvantages. There's also story opportunities. The delight of the RPG is to craft stories, not crush them. I haven't been in a single game in-person where the group enjoys bullying through a dungeon and breaking the story open (There have been some cases online, but that is because the anonymity of the internet lets people be rude to each other easier). "Why would they construct their NPC apprentices or children with anything else?" you ask. Why would they want to construct their own apprentices? The few times I've had people look for apprentices, they always eagerly asked me what they got, they were super excited when they couldn't train them because they lacked lab total, and excitedly started trying to raise Intellego while hiding the existence of the child from the nearby mages.
Just to confirm my understanding, a player has designed a character, by flooding supernatural power into his young magus, that requires an InVi of 200; He's paid off the virtues with flaws, making it 'balanced' again. You're arguing that he should have infinitely more spells because his parens is a master of Intellego Vim; You're also complaining that this character is abusing the rules and there's no way to stop them? I mean, the troupe and/or storyguide could raise a complaint. This thread started with a simple question, which was answered with a couple rather reasonable answers - all rejected. The latter half of this thread turned into a full Flambeau war about the apprentice book and power gaming. I've almost lost the thread of what your question trying to answer is?
If you're unhappy with it, you can ignore the rule. Go for it. Do your house rules, brother. The boards are offering alternatives, you don't have to take them, but attacking back and forth is not going to help.
Interesting backstory - is this a character being added as a new character? Virtues please. Is a character killing off their animal companion? That's a story flaw, and I'm sure something bad will happen because they're mistreating animals. Minimum, a really bad reputation, maybe as a goat molester, or possibly an infernalist, since they're obviously sacrificing these animals ritually.
You miss the point. If a player takes a Virtue and you just remove it, you're destroying the character. You don't just take Virtues away after the fact whenever you feel like it.
"House rule" lol. I'm on the boards for verification the lab Total of the parens is very large. That's the point. The troupe should say "no" is arbitrarily deciding. Which case why the rule, just decide as a troupe. The problem is when a troupe mixes and matches between using said rules and vetoing other things and hand waving things it doesn't care about.
Very quickly this leads to the perception of favouritism.
The large lab Total is the logical consequence of the ArM rule. So, I want to apply said consequence where appropriate.
It doesn't matter what they got because it will go away if they aren't InVi munchkins. Why spend time as a Storyteller making them? Why would a player character scour a certain area looking for something in particular?
It's like stripping a familiar of all Magic powers. Sorry I know you spent 2 seasons looking, and you found it. But now I'm just going to make it impossible for the character.
No, it's not necessary for the parent to have that lab total. Even if the player insists the Virtues existed prior to apprenticeship, as I pointed out above it could still be that someone other than the parens Opened the child's Arts for the parens.
You're not applying logical consequences. You're choosing one of multiple possibilities and complaining about the choice you've made.
Which were countered. So there is a society that reinforces this? It's and common thing to have people open Arts for others? In Theban tribunal maybe, but not in the order of Hermes in general.
I'm complaining about the baseline rule. Storytellers especially on these boards are going to bend over backwards to explain how the rule isn't applied to your character.
What you fail to understand is if you make allowances for a PC as the new character, you must make the SAME allowances when they open he Arts of their apprentice.
You can't say a character has a parens with different criteria than his character must adhere. Its blatantly punishing the player for being a PC.
What you fail to do is read what I wrote properly. I didn't say make allowances. For instance, I said the parens might have a lower lab total but got a different magus to Open the Arts. There are magi who do that (since they get their Focus to dealing with the non-Hermetic magic. With the actual parens assisting along with both their familiars and maybe the other magus's real apprentice, that could easily be +30ish for the Focus and +30ish for assistance. That other magus could have a lab geared toward Intellego Vim. That can already get us to the 155 ballpark. Now, if you're bound to hit 200, maybe some more favors were called in, and maybe the other magus is the senior-most Pralician with Arts.
If the PC's want to do the same, sure, they can build up the favors and call them in and hire the senior-most Pralician. That can make for a lot of roleplaying fun.
Hi,
I totally agree that the rules allow for the possibility of engineering an apprentice with virtues that require extremely high lab totals.
Heck, the rules theoretically allow for engineering an apprentice whose Arts have been fully opened to both Hermetic and some other magical tradition.
But I think there is a severe disconnect between what a player can casually put together to build a magus using virtues from just the core rules and the lab totals a magus, say, 10 years past gauntlet is likely to pull together on his own.
With the exception of House Tremere, the culture of the Order I have inferred from decades (decades! ugh! don't ask about my failed aging rolls!) of reading Ars Magica books mitigates against apprentice boosting cabals. Of course there will be other exceptions, especially since players need to create them to justify their magi, who must also achieve this kind of excellence if they want unlikely apprentices too.
The rules don't break, but their execution can cause deviation from the 'fluff.'
More generally, I think that default rules that represented accelerated development before adulthood with a looser and more generous allocation of xp and even virtues/flaws, would have served AM5 better than what we have. Especially if those rules made it trivial to justify any legal combination of v/fs and xp allocation. Just me.
Anyway,
Ken
While this may be stated a bit harshly, I think it's the crux of the problem, T Riffix Rex.
When you design a PC you start with its mechanical representation, in terms of all the character's Virtues, Flaws etc.; and this mechanical representation must follow the game mechanics. You might be guided by a character concept, but it's the mechanical representation that determines the character's ultimate capabilities. If you then make a backstory that fits with some of those mechanical aspects but not with others, you have two options:
a) rewrite the backstory, so that it fits with the entire mechanical description of the character or
b) rewrite the mechanical description, so that it fits with the backstory -- but in this case, you must still make sure that the new mechanical representation follows the game mechanics.
Let's forget about magi. You make a companion, and give him the Heir Story Flaw, but you do not give him the Landed Noble Virtue.
Your idea is that this character is the Heir to the crown of England, with many castles of his own, who'll be enmeshed in a power struggle with his aging father. The problem is that the mechanics say that the character has no lands of his own. You argue: "but he's the Heir to the crown of England, he's the prince of Wales, how could he not have lands of his own? It's obvious that he should have them!". That argument does not work: you came up with the mechanical representation, and if you have a backstory that fits some aspects of it but not all, it's your responsibility to fix stuff so that all the rules remain in place.
Under option a), you could just make him Heir to ... something else, with an aging father who holds tightfistedly all his lands. Your character "holds little power and wealth" of his own, as per the Heir Story Flaw. Or maybe he is the heir to the crown of England, and prince of Wales, but de facto all "his" vassals and seneschals take orders from the king, and "his" demesne won't provide him with even a handful of knights without the king's approval.
Under option b), you should take the Landed Noble Virtue once, or twice (per Lords of Men) if the lands he holds already are going to be a prominent feature of the saga.
What you cannot do, is give him lands and power not backed by an appropriate Virtue, just because your backstory says he should have them.
This is what you did, as far as I can see:
- You came up with a young hermetic mage with tons of supernatural Virtues. This is fine.
- Then you argued that the parens must have had ridiculous lab total to preserve those Virtues. This is not necessarily the case, and the other posters provided many examples of how the situation might have happened. Some of those examples might be one-of-a-kind situations, but they are not impossible.
- Then you argued that the young mage would have had a much better hermetic training given the vast knowledge of the parens. This is not necessarily the case, even if the parens did have a ridiculous level of knowledge. For example, the vast majority of the spells he knew might not have been low-level enough for the student; or he might have deemed it better not to teach too much to the student; etc.
The endpoint is that there exists at least one backstory that explains the mechanical representation of the character. I would add that there are several, and some of them quite reasonable. If they are not to your own taste, by all means, rewrite the mechanical representation of the character, while adhering to the rules. But I do not think it's fair to complain about the rules being poor. They are actually pretty decent rules, because I've not yet seen a character with a mechanical representation that follows the rules, and that cannot be given a(n interesting) backstory that fully fits that mechanical representation. Note that is quite different from saying that any backstory can be turned into a corresponding mechanical representation of a starting character that is "legal" according to the rules -- the latter is a goal that very few if any rpgs meet, or should meet.
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This is one of those long threads with lots af arguing which makes it hard to read.
Opening the Gift for someone with supernatural abilities is hard, especialy if you want to conserve it. For someone already opened to another tradition it is almost impossible.
When creating a starting magus at gauntlet, is it really necessary to make sure they character built is possible by the same mechanics as if teaching an apprentice?
IMHO no. The apprentice teaching rules need to impose some kind of balance, since it's easy to teach your apprentice to be way better than the standard starting magus.
If you create a starting magus who also has some supernatural abilities, does your Parens need to have been an expert to have opened your gift? No, he could have outsorced it. Or that character could have had Latent Magical Abilitity (minor, General virtue) which after the Gift was opened developed into something. So no special requirements for the Paren's InVi.
If you in play decide your magus wants to teach an apprentice, and want to use one with supernatural abilities already developed - well then you need to be an expert. Otherwise find someone without such traits. Your own parens might have faced the same situation, and selected the easier to teach apprentice.
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And people with the Gift can also pick up other Magical abilities; They just need a teacher with source quality above 20 (25, 30 as they pick up more abilities) and can be taught shortly after apprenticeship before they've dedicated time and experience to arts.
There's also the possibility they went on a foolish escapade as an apprenticeship adventure, and got granted powers by a faerie/magic animal/angel for their work.
I love this-- it might even be that the apprentice should have Difficult Master, who perpetually places obstacles in the path of the magus, because the parens believes the PC should be capable of so much more. That's just delicious. That they never stop being the parens, just because the magus passed the gauntlet, and so they'll never stop testing, never stop training, never stop caring for or interfering with the magus' life. And because they're so capable, they're going to lay these challenges at the magus' feet, because they want, no they expect their filius to be better than everyone else, because that PC is the living handiwork of this very potent master. Every choice, every act, every mistake reflects upon the parens, even with the slightly limited education they provided.
Oh, it could have been more, it could have been much much more, but the last apprentice had that rich, completely indulgent training, and almost like Bonisagus' prodigal apprentice, the last apprentice had been Marched by the parens, having violated the Code and become a terrible embarrassment for the parens. No, that wouldn't happen again, and this PC is another step in the creation of the legacy of the parens, one in which he has shown he can create a magnificent example of Hermetic potential while limiting himself. The PC is expected to do great things, things which will reflect gloriously upon the foundation the parens has provided, and if he does not, the parens will endeavor to ensure the PC is honed to a razor's edge, or ground into dust in the process. The parens can always just train another one if the PC cannot rise to the challenge.
Not only that, but that this is the true parens of the magus-- the individual the PC believes to be the parens is the person the Bonisagus who stole the PC away from the true parens established as the secret foster parens for the PC, because they were concerned about the well being of the PC in apprenticeship. And possibly that background was hidden from the PC, so that they would not feel the awful weight of this expectation, and even moreso, that the true parens could have even engineered this element of intrigue for the PC to discover as a deep, deep hidden secret.
gleeful clap Oh, please! Pleasepleaseplease.
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So, the Story Flaw of "Secret, Demanding Master"?
A bit like Tormenting Master, but 1) the person you think is the Parens is not the one doing it. And 2) it is not done out of malice, even though most of the time it feels like it, but you should get the beneficial side efefcts of learning something - which is what the original master wanted all along
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Yup. I'd mentioned that, and reaching the needed Teaching Qualities is much easier than reaching the lab totals mentioned. However, those Qualities are not 20, 25, 30, ... You subtract the score, not the experience in the Ability. So let's say you have no more than a total of 15 in your Art scores, 21-15=6 is enough to learn a Supernatural Ability with a score of 1. The next one would be 21-(15+1)=5, which is also enough to learn a Supernatural Ability at 1. So long as that Teaching Quality (factoring in Apt Student) remains below 30, the number of Supernatural Abilities that could potentially be taught is Teaching Quality - 19.
Yes you can. The rules for character generation are expressly different from the rules for training apprentices in play. Why? Because it's the rules, and because a starting PC's apprenticeship is largely abstracted. How one gains one's Virtues and Flaws is particularly abstracted. It may not be possible to do in play what you can do in character generation, and that's fine.
If opening an apprentice with supernatural qualities requires a lab total, does it generate a lab text? Can that lab text be used for opening future apprentices who require an InVi lab total? Even if it only worked for the same virtue Merinita could have a published lab text for faerie blood and strong faerie blood...
I think this idea is brilliant, and though I believe they don't make lab texts (just like extracting vis) and some day I want to make a Bonisagus who's trying to design this lab text. Hey, you can experiment on opening apprentices, right? What could possibly go wrong?
Although the lab text might only be useful for that apprentice, and not for any other.
Only Criamon magi are likely to be interested in those ancient texts from previous cycles....