Sound Summae unrealistic?

Games Discussion Ars Magica
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Trying to catch up on this chaotic discussion... I definitely feel there's a dichotomy between expectation, game rules, and realism. What is the average book writer? should we expect the average writer to be Com +1 or Com +3? While we have a decent grasp of how high most elder magi can get into the Arts, at what point in those advancements are they going to write Summae? I mean, it's pretty easy to say that an elder archmagus who's writing his opus is going to throw a (for him) reasonable amount of vis at making sure his communication is +5.
I think the term vain may be inappropriate for the 'moderate' summae we find. Vain summae appear to be a mix between high-Com med-Art books and high-Art med-Com books. (And worse, which is how the term Vain came to be I suppose.)
I think the game's internal logic needs to re-balance a bit, I agree. Covenants was written and released early in the cycle of production, IIRC. It had a bunch of really neat, crunchy ideas for the game. Great book. I can see (and agree with) the argument that people expected only Arch-magi to write books that can last for generations as a prized book for a covenant to hold - but that doesn't really give younger player characters anything great to do until they've played for a saga for a long time. There needs to be a better gradient of advancement, but we can't easily balance the expected vis value of a book against other books when every saga has a different rarity of vis.

I feel part of the problem is Summae themselves are kind of unrealistic - A single book(L15 Q 11), written in a year or so, that can grant solid and consistent learning and advancement for a reader for 11+ seasons of straight, uninterrupted study seems like a fantastical book. Part of our 'this is unrealistic' needs to accept the basic mechanics are a bit off.

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63

Actually I would say that single book is something like a 12 volume encyclopedia and takes a whole shelf in itself. I always envision every 5-10 points of Quality/season to be a volume in the opus. Makes for larger visual libraries.

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64

I agree. A book may be one or more volumes. Personally, I would assume, as a rule of thumb, that the author writes one volume per season. Thus, if it takes a year to write the summa, it comprises four tomes.

Of course, this leaves the question, can four people effectively study the same four-volume summa in the same season? For the sake of simplicity, I'd say no, and if pushed, argue that the reader will need to cross-reference between the volumes, but the question is valid after all.

As to boosting Com, an archmage might not risk the warping of raising Com. Quite plausible that some/many/most do raise to +5 Com, but there are reasons not to.
For tractatus, it is even more likely that many authors do not have maxed out Com, I think, since tractatus can be written earlier in the career without other drawbacks.

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I think part of the issue may be that the rules were written with the idea that successful summae would be copied and crowd out the lesser. then cow and calf was added, and that looked less realistic, depending on how cow and calf is understood.

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Indeed. One of the things I like of 5th edition is that it does try to think about what happens in a "globalized" Order, where every magus can benefit from the knowledge of every other (which is the fundamental idea behind Bonisagus' Great Unified Theory, after all). In previous editions, the assumption was often that a lot of the books in a Covenant would be written by its magi for the other magi, but except in very special settings, that makes no sense. In 5th edition, most of the books come from the outside world, as it should be in any economic system where book copies can be made and transported very cheaply. I mean, wouldn't it be bizarre if the majority, or even a significant fraction, of the books you read were authored by your extended family (in-laws, cousins etc.)?

I do not think that "cow and calf" (let's call it copyright) makes this less realistic. In fact, it makes it more realistic! Without copyright, there is much less incentive to spread excellent books around, because it dilutes the value of the copy you own. With copyright instead an author can sell a copy of his work to every interested covenant, for a tiny vis price ... and still make a huge profit, because there are likely many interested covenants if the book is better than stuff they have in their libraries. Even very marginally better, if the price is small enough. Thus, with copyright the best books tend to quickly crowd out even marginally worse ones, which is why there is such a narrow difference between sound and vain.

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67

There are a lot of aspects to this, one being the concept of industrial publishing versus hand copying- the right to reproduce your own work is not so valuable when it has to be done by hand. To me the most developed form of publishing would be something akin to a modern publishing house- where you sell your book to a covenant that will pay a comparative fortune for it because they specialize in copying books by magical means and can sell the cheap copies all over the order. Even in the modern world copyright is limited (and regional), where calf and cow can easily extend for centuries and prevent the more efficient forms of distribution for very little benefit.
On the other hand without calf and cow books can be traded and a single covenant will likely make a single copy that they resell to someone else, which is more like how I expect things would work in the early order. Copyright law only makes sense in a situation where copying something can be done cheaply and widely- in the above for example by a second publishing house getting a cheap copy of a book and then making their own copies to sell at the same or lower rate since they didn't have to pay the original author, but until book publication has advanced to where that is a concern it really is more of an inhibition on the spread of knowledge that an incentive- more books may wind up being written, but only because the supply of quality books is being suppressed.

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One crucial issue here is that in the Order copying books is very, very cheap. That's because it can be done by mundanes, and mundane labour is virtually free for covenants of magi. At least on the scale needed by the Order, which is no more than a thousand books/year. And the Redcap network makes distribution (of both new and used/leased books) very, very easy across Mythic Europe. To a first approximation, the cost of providing a copy of a book to every interested covenant in the Order is zero. So copyright should be tremendously important.

Note that if you can sell just thirty copies of a tractatus for just 1 pawn each, that's a tremendous profit for a single season of magus work (safe work, that also probably gives you a good reputation), plus a few dozen seasons of covenfolk work. I think this is one of the reasons why you have to be careful about having PC magi make valuable books too easily: they'll either get too rich, or you'll have to find some contrived reason why they aren't able to sell them to the rest of the Order - because, logically, they should.

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grog labor still costs silver, as well as supplies (which would be a factor magically anyways) and very significantly time. depending on the rules being used a mundane copyist will need either scribe of 6 or scribe+dex of 6, and magic theory of 1, which means they have to be trained in the covenant, along with latin of 5. Not exactly the same as manual labor. then it takes this fairly well trained grog multiple seasons to make a copy of a single book.
Cheap for vis, sure, but hardly mass publication. A single specialized covenant would be hard pressed to put out 30 copies of even a single book in a year, never mind multiple books, which is where a copyright would start to provide incentive to write more books.

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Indeed. The cost of maintaining mundane workers is grossly underestimated in the community. Silver is only one element.

  1. Residents need protection. The more people, the larger the covenant, and the harder it is to protect.
  2. Skilled workers can get other work, so you need to keep them happy, one way or another.
  3. Large numbers of staff is a risk in itself. Why are they loyal?
  4. The Gift strains the relationship with covenfolk.
  5. People, in general, are not that abundant.

Furthermore, there is a question of how large libraries a covenant want to maintain. Staff and building space is needed to keep it. By [Cov] most libraries will decommission books which are not used by its members. This may mean that the books are traded second-hand rather than copied.

While large scale copying is possible, assuming it as the norm is a bit short-sighted, and it spoils a bit of the medieval feel too. Scribal hospitality, renting, and borrowing of books are very realistic options which seem to be underrated, particularly relative to copying.

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I very much agree with you on this one Loke,

It is very easy to say that mundanes cost silver and so are free in hermetic terms. Its also easy enough to slap some numbers for Profession(Scribe), Magic Theory and Latin on a piece of paper but does such a worker exist in or near the covenant? Sure in a well established Autumn covenant focused on copying books they might have the power over their turb to compel people to take an education. In most covenants I would assume you cannot simply force an education on a worker and demand that they work in copying books. People can and probably will go somewhere else if they are not happy with the work they are offered. Even then a scribe like all others will only work two seasons a year.

Scribes are also kind of a luxury worker and employing them is going to require that the covenant produces the necessary economic surplus around to fund a worker that does not directly contribute to the (silver) economy of the covenant. Such scribes will be the first to be let go in times of economic hardship because they don't contribute to the covenants economy.

There is also the issue of the market, I highly doubt that you could sell 30 copies of one tractatus in a year. Sure you might sell 30 copies over its lifetime but that lifetime is likely to be quite long. I would assume that once the first 3 copies are sold in a year that's probably the end of immediate demand.

As for boosting Communication I would say probably most people dont do it. Most of the books in the scarce sources of libraries in canon contain mostly books in the 7-9 range which implies Communication scores of +1 to +3. I think it is more reasonable to assume that magi on average have communication scores in that range. Presumably because magi are trained to express themselves well.

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I would say that magi are not necessarily trained to express themselves well. they tend to be trained to cast spells well, not talk or write. Com -1 to +1 is more what I would say is the norm, as with the rest of characteristics in the human population at large.

That com +1 to +3 is the norm in books it is because these are the ones being bought and circulated. A Quality 5 (or lower) book will not get much traction after the potential buyer peruses the text, even if some are likely to be around as they are brought to meetings as gifts. Bad gifts, but gifts none the less.

I also prefer libraries to be difficult to improve, not a public library service. Per the RAW ArM5 is more of a Gutenberg project in the making, though

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A large monastery in the middle ages could have 2000+ monks. An establishment of similar size could provide all the books the entire Order consumes and more (remember that the same page gets studied by many magi in the lifetime of a book). And if covenants import food, tools etc. moving books is almost trivially easy in comparison. Another way to think about it: compare how much labour it takes to keep a magus fed vs. how much work it takes to provide him with study material every season. All considerations about finding, protecting, training people to do the latter apply to the former as well. So production capacity is not an issue at all.

At the same time, a vis source of even just 5 pawns/year is something that most covenants would strongly consider putting effort into acquiring - certainly more effort than what's necessary to procure, and secure support for half a dozen to half a score mundane folk.

It should then be evident that copyright, however enforced, is essentially the only limiting factor to book availability in an Order with an adequate trade network (which is arguably not guaranteed in times of trouble, such as during or immediately after the Schism war). Note that in the absence of "cow and calf" agreements, copyright can simply be enforced by refusing to release copies of your books, and asking for magi who want to study them to come and visit you, as Durenmar does (skirting the Code, given the Oath for Bonisagus' magi...)

Not everyone is well-suited to working in the book-producing business. But it's comfortable work. It's much easier to find workers with the talent and attitude for producing books than people with the talent and attitude for killing other people and dangerous critters in defense of a magus (a.k.a. shield grogs). And given that on average, there seems to be at least one of the latter for each magus, but significantly less of the former are needed for each magus...

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On a different note... a magus circulating a book should probably get some reputation within the Order. Any ideas of how quickly/high it would build up? I am tempted to say that within a few years authoring a sound tractatus, or up to a few of them, would gain you Reputation 1 as a gifted author. For more/better books, and longer time scales, I'd apply the following modifiers:

+1 exceptional, rather than simply sound, books
+2 worthwhile summae rather than tractatus (good summae being so much harder to write)
+1 prodigious production (at least a dozen books)
+1 after a few decades, if the books remain competitive/in circulation

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My problem was the price of the books. What was written in Cov:

  • sound summa: number of pawns of vis equal to the book’s level
  • sound tractatus: 2 pawn of vis
  • vain books: half price
  • excellent books: price negotiable, Cow and Calf enforced

This price should compensate the work of a magus. The price of the work of a magus is very hard to calculate, now let's go for the easiest way, and let it be the possible amount of Vim vis extraction of the magus. (So 2 for young magi, 3-4 for middle aged, 5+ for old and specialist magi.)

Price comparison from selling point of view:

  • For tractatus, this price sounds fair, as writing them takes 1 season, but copying them is easy and fast, so by selling 1-3 copies the magus's work is balanced, and everything after is profit.
  • For summa, this price also looks fair, because the writing time is 1-4 seasons, and selling just 1 copy will bring back the cost of those seasons.

Price comparison from buying point of view:
Here we need to check, how much vis is saved by not learning from vis, but from books. Here I take Q10-11 as middle value for learning from vis. (And I do not take into consideration the probability for botch.)

  • For a tractatus this is just a season's spending, which goes up as the magus gets older. For young magi (low values) it is about equal (but not worth is, as a high-quality summa would bring up the magus much faster from 0). For old magi, buying a sound tractatus is much cheaper than learning from vis. Even paying 3-4 pawns of vis for a Q11+ tractatus is worth it. And now only 1 magus has read the tractatus, after the second the relative price is much more reduced!
  • The starter summas: there is obvious why is i better to learn 15-20xp instead of 10 in 1 season, but the original price makes this equal - for the first reader! After the first the relative price will be again reduced much more.
  • The normal summas: the seasons usage gets higher by every level! An L22Q11 summa worth two seasons more vis than an L21Q11 summa! But here the price is still linear, and originally only 1 vis or BP difference.

So, there was my problem: the book market is very small, making a new copy is usually not so fast, so a magus will sell the book for the higher bidder (of course, there is also limited info about available books, but let be simple, and say that Mercere house try to inform everybody). Plus, a high leveled, mid/high quality summa will be read by many magus in a 5-20 year term, so the price should be determined by this.

I made a formula:
Summa price = round( (full_xp_of_level_of_art)/100) * quality * tribunal_factor )

  • full_xp_of_level_art: the needed sum xp to reach that level of art (e.g. level 10: 55xp)
  • tribunal_factor: how easy to get books in the tribunal (I set it to 2 for the Roman tribunal, and I assume a value of 4 for Novgorod tribunal.)

Some example prices:

Level Quality New price in vis
21 10 46
5 18 5
11 13 17
7 28 16
15 13 31
20 10 42
26 11 77
11 7 9
7 20 11

I know this is not easily calculateable, and needs some Excel/Spreadsheet, but I think it brings value for the high level and/or quality books.

What do you think?

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76

I love that formula. But as that full_xp_of_level_art = level * (level + 1) / 2, it does something very similar and easier to compute if you just replace that full_xp... by level * level.

I mean: Summa price = round( (level ^ 2) / 100) * quality * tribunal_factor ), where the tribunal_factor is half of what you had, e.g., 1 for Roman, 2 for Novgorod. You remove some complexity, and end having books just 1-3 pawns cheaper.

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a very few monasteries of 2000+ monks existed, through the whole of Europe, and not everyone in the monastery was copying books the whole time- and they were motivated by a presumably deep faith, not dealing with Gifted superiors. hardly the basis for what a standard covenant can do. as I said there may well be publication focused covenants, but they won't be the standard. and 30 copies of a summae may not be what is consumed currently in a year, but that is largely because of high price and lack of supply... if you start cranking out the books the market is clearly there.

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As an additional thought, I think it might be an interesting house rule (or interpretation of rules) for all summae to be also usable as a tractatus if you've exceeded their level. If the greatest mind in Corpus can find inspiration reading Little Willy's Beginner Book tractatus, he should be able to also gain something from the summae. Probably lower of Quality or Level (since you can tank level for quality, which would make this abusable)

I also agree that copying books is relatively cheap in the Order of Hermes, if only because almost every covenant turns into a book-factory within a dozen years.

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Copying books isn't expensive, but most covenants are ill equipped to do mass copying. You probably have one of each skilled craftsman and their assistants, and that gets you a few copied tractatus and maybe a summae each year. So your average covenant might have an annual book output of a summae plus a few tractatus each year (2 seasons of work), but copying spells might also take place. Most covenants should be maintaining a steady output of works every year, so that their craftsmen are kept working rather than lazing away all year doing nothing. But this still means that in a tribunal only 3-4 summae and maybe 7-8 tractatus will be copied or created unless one of these covenants is set up for mass copying.

This really puts into perspective the effort required to establish a covenant from scratch. A spring covenant's library is decades worth of man hours of copying.

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Writing a book => takes times. Using the "vis extracted during that time" is a given base. I know of few persons who do something for payment, and are paid less than if they were just extracting vis.

So for normal magi, writing book is paid by calculating the vis they extract.

But then, nobody will pay you 4x let's say 4 vis pawn if you are a young magus writing a level 10 q 7.

Because it's not worth it.

On the other hand, my archmagus character in our IRL saga will write soon a L18Q11 vim book. (due to certain experimentations in my lab, i'm now able to write vim summae book at more than 1/2 level so I'm looking to take this into account).
At the selling time, it'll have +3 quality due to scribe etc. (for quality, our saga gives a +3 which I never understood where it came from, but whatever, maybe it's the resonancy, because we do not use that)
With a lab specialized in writing (that I called "scriptorium" even if it's not perfect latin [which I don't know] I can write write it in 2 seasons.
Per season, this archmagus extracts something like 16 pawns of vis.
So the basic price would be 32 pawns.
I also have writen a level 10 q14 summa about magic theory, and it took like 4 seasons, at a time I was able to extract 14 pawn of vis.

Even if someone was willing to pay for the minimal price, i'd find no-one to buy it. And the "minimal" price is not good: because if that was the point, I'd just extract vis. I want a capital gain (For comparison, I recently made a -37 LR for a magus, and asked a base of 20 vim pawn for the season, but with a 8 years wait. He asked to go from last to first in my to-do list, and he paid 35. I only accepted because the magus is a PC and a newcomer in our covenant and he let me experiment on a second person LR for a breakthrough (that's a house rule in case you are wondering: we allow a breakthrough activity + a normal activity experimental season so that you do not "lose" your full labtotal (because you do NOT want to do breakthroughs discoveries with a level 150... warping is too costly!, and not allowing it is stupid because it means being skilled for labwork is useless when searching breakthrough, in our opinion).

Then comes the big issue: I can make a copy of this book. I have been voted to manage "dux", "legates" and "mercantes" duties and I have a veto in the council chamber. (That was a political move from a new flambeau member, who wanted to use that to prove that 2 votes for "founders" which I'm among, and he was not) was stupid, but the other members decided to give my character those powers, because they trust him... to be honest, being a beta SG but the main SG, I rarely play the character outside of council chambers where my character has an habit to teleport out, leaving an experimentated "image of himself, fully intelligent, talking and reporting to him" when the topic is about adventures I run (because it would be bad for my character = me to give hints about my own adventures...).

So I can use the 500 mundane inhabitants as I want, and could easily ask our 4 talented scribe, illuminators and binders, to make copies, selling them.

Because I'm a Bonisagus, I did not sell a copy of the MT book.
I sent one to Durenmar , that was something which contributed to my archmagus status in the order.

I made 2 for our own library, which all my sodales have exhausted, and any visiting magus can pay 3 pawn to spend 1 season reading, due to our charter (in provence, meaning = code, and we cannot change the price).

+-30 years after writing, in our covenant, we have had 3 visitors for this book:

  • one PC using it as a motive to join our covenant
  • 2 NPCs came on the proposition made by a player, using that book as a hook to negotiate political support with the NPCs for a future tribunal, during their stay in our walls. (I was SG of this adventure.)

On the other hand, if I were a PC i would not buy a 56 pawn books even if I could use it 15 times (15*14xp in MT, +50 basis is something like a 10 score), because I would not devote 15 seasons to raise my MT only.

The archmagus raised his MT by experimentating every season in the lab etc. so he gained spells, (some of which are wonderful, such as a level 35 peering with sight range and concentration..., or a MuVi giving level 50 ignem spells +2 range bonus (though the guidelin would only give +1), both due to good modified effects with increased power).

In my opinion, book price has always been problematic: the price to sell doesn't match the price to buy.

Same for verditius item: in our covenant, NOBODY has ever bought a verditius item, because low items we do ourselves, and high items, we couldn't afford the vis.

Like my archmagus: I have a lab item quite interesting. Price (verditius style?) is like 150 pawns. Nobody will pay that.

Cow and calf is there to prevent players to make money on basis of the books they have (at start) or acquired through buying or pillaging or adventuring.

If it weren't for it, the issue I discussed here over would arise every year. Our saga is 70 years ingame old so it would have been either deceiving (too cheap selling) or stupid (selling at right price of the book, because 1 year of copy = 1 book... and we would obviously enslave or buy 100 scribes at once... to make more copies).

Here as my character is the only real writer among our PCs, the fact that he is bonisagus (and thus not selling knowledge) is the factor which make it playable.

When a player lost his magus, he started a verditius. 70 years post gauntlet, "slow creation process" mode. I had to devise a number of rolls to decide if his creations were asked or if he had clients, because that's what verditius are about, but we never had to bother with that "trade stuff".

In this thread I'll remember where the "cow and calf" name comes from. It's already something.

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If Ars Magica were a tactical game, I would agree with you.

I play Ars Magica as a narrative game, about characters who model, in a poetic sense, potentially real people. Authors write books to make a name for themselves. Any payment in terms of vis is secondary in most cases.

Of course, I am not saying that no archmage will ever be persuaded to write a book for vis, but I maintain that they are not the typical authors.

Right. So Cow and Calf is game mechanics, to prevent players from doing something. Again we are reducing the RP to a tactical game.

However, I do agree completely that it is very difficult to consolidate the conflicting canon ideas about book and device trade and how it should work in the setting. I just disagree with your mechanical assumptions as starting point. Each troupe has to disentangle this somehow. I don't know how.
Much as I detest your mechanical argument