By practicing the craft, I understand you to mean making copies of books, etc (correct me if I'm wrong). Actual work of the profession. That would be exposure XP, not practice, IMO.
Note, in this case, unlike a Magus who derives benefit makes a copy of a book, which he can then trade, and gets exposure XP, the professional staff only get paid in silver, and XP.
Let me see if I can make my case plainer. A scribe or a magus with scribe can copy 1 tractatus or 6 +Profession:Scribe per season. Period. It presumes little free time (this is the magus paradigm at work). So, pretend I'm a magus, and we hire scribal staff. RP aside, you tell me your skill, so I expect you to provide 4 Tractatus a year or 4 * (6 + Profession:Scribe) in summae a year, but I only get half of that, because he has to have free time? I as a magus know I could produce double the amount of work in the same time (Scribe scores being equal). I get half the value I perceive...
With other professions, I can see free time, but the rules for scribing are pretty clear. And they're meant to not overpower a game which derives most of the experience from books. I'm not advocating a point of view, I'm just trying to understand the process. PC's should expect half production from scribes, because they get free time? How many people actually play like that?
I really like this approach. We are using the detailed covenant rules so maybe we were a little bit lost but I think your "abstract" approach is better in terms of bookkeeping. With your permission I think I will use it
I think that this could be considered as Practice. The core rulebook indicates that practice is like exposure but it requires a full-time activity. In this case, as the specialist is not performing any other thing, our troupe consider that it qualifies as practice of a trade or craft in an environment with immediate feedback and, thus grants 5 xp per season.
Regarding the other question I think that this would depend on what you have in the market. Maybe is true that, by hiring an scribe you are getting half the value but then, how many scribes are there that will be willing to work for a full year without rest? Specially if this is not the standard way for their profession. This may be source of an interesting story, though...
So essentially, you keep the character advancement rules, applying the poor flaw and wealthy virtue based on the covenant's wealth to all characters (except magi, and companions?).
I think this is probably a good thing, although, I'd modify it to be 16 XP, 24 XP or 32XP (depending on the wealth level), where the the 6, 4 and 2 XP come from is exposure for the season where the character is "working," which would go into their professional score, no choice. The 10, 20 or 30 XP can be spent as they wish.
Consider you work for a rich covenant, and you've moved up the ranks, and your role is more supervisory, and less hands on. You have more time to pay attention to other things, and can do a lot just on autopilot, or make comments to your staff of journeymen or apprentices and they fix it and this would represent the exposure XP (1/4 of your work activity for the year). If you're a dedicated worker, you take time to "experiment" in your field or some other field and spend the 30 xp as you wish, in your profession or wherever. If you're in a poor covenant, you're constanty doing stuff, there's no one else to do the work, and so less free time to grow your skills, and learn new things. I think I might adopt this model, tweaked as indicated, for characters we don't want to advance in other ways (story or study) in Bibracte. I also wouldn't object this being applied to scribes, as they could be seen as overseeing scribal staff under them. And your model of having a journeyman available when the master passes away is good, too.
I expect them to have no choice. By custom and societial expectation, their scribal staff is entiled to "loaf around" for six months. Do you expect the scribal staff to tolerate working conditions worse then those of the serfs in the fields? Also, they're not "loafing around" the whole time. They are also practicing, being trained or taught or reading.
Remember that for non-magi the whole business of seasons is abstracted. The scribes don't actually have 6 months of free time. Rather, that also represents the time they have to devote to study and self-improvement as part of regular tasks. In other words, we might consider that while Arnuld the Scribe is copying those 2 tractati per year, he is also being trained in Profession: Scribe (by the chief scribe who oversees his work) and practicing Charm (by courting the chambermaid). He isn't spending the entire time from June 21 to Sept 21 just being Trained any more then he is spending the whole time from Dec 21 to Mar 21 chatting up the chambermaid. He's copying, being trained and practicing at once throughout the year, in addition to spending time off "loafing around" on holy days.
As per City and Guild, working more hours and skipping holy days is actually socially unacceptable and, at the extreme, sinful. The thought of being "paid overtime" to copy more texts would not be attractive to an average 13th century scribe. Instead, it would "slave driving" on the part of his greedy and sinful masters... something sure to lower the scribes Loyality and give the covenant a bad reputation, making it harder to get new scribes after the overworked ones have run off with the chambermaids.
Do you play scribe specialists this way? Or are they always churning out books 4 seasons a year, or at least more than 2 seasons a year? I would imagine that most PC covenants, and even NPC covenants aren't thinking they can only get 2 books per year from their scribe(s). If they are, I'm a bit suprised.
Note, nothing in what I said is about working more days or extra hours. The amount of production is based on a Magus working a standard day, 10 hours, and has the sabbath off (or a rest day, if you prefer). The 10 hours, in the medieval paradigm is probably not all that long a work day. The serf in the field or pasture is probably going 12 hours or more a day. And knowing how farmers are, they are working all day, every day, despite holidays, so the scribe DOES have it easy.
Umm, wow. Condescend much? You come from the Berkeley list? When you say something like that there's a huge latent assumption that you presume I don't do the same.
Note, I said I'd be suprised, I never said I don't name NPCs or think about how the world might work. Some people might not even think about it, some people might handwave it and say it's a different kind of thing than what a magi does. And I'll say that the serf in the field is working 365 days a year, to heck with holidays, because that's what a farmer does (and continues to do in the modern day), while that scribe is kicking back working 5 hours days while developing his professional skills the other 5 hours of the day.
Note, you've completely ignored my contention that the scribal rules are written for magi, not a scribe. I find it hard to believe that the medieval paradigm supports professionals working 5 hours a day on producing stuff, and then lets them have 5 hours to develop skills for their own personal and professional development. But hey, it's a big world, I'm willing to listen to carefully developed and supported points.
Your more precise rules might fit better in your saga. We do not use fractions for non-central characters, though (we still use the 3rd edition XP system for them) but it works OK enough for us.
For names and personalities of the grogs, we look at our workmates, friend groups and families. We have quite a rich personality and name collection We simply abstract 90% of the stats. As said, it is a RPG game, and we despise it being a bookkeeping game. Each group has different preferences on that one.
The reason that mages get 4 seasons each year is that it is assumed that other than days of rest 1/week, they are working on whatever project they want to work on and they do it all day with exclusion of meals and rest. If your mage's quill runs dry, the scribe makes them the ink. If you need a new quill, the scribe goes to get if for you. If you need parchment, again the servants run for it. You can work steadily. You get exposure for it since you are writing but your 'G' is not getting better because you wrote a whole line of them to perfect it like proper practice. You have no hobbies, no family, little outside activity.
Your scribes generally have the day of rest, feast days and special saint holidays, days of community activities, evenings after day's work and so on. THe scribes have to make their ink, trim the quills and so on as well. Lots of little things that they can develop skills.
Except, of course, most of my magi have hobbies, families and lives. My "namesake" Lucius was an avid gardener, had two children and regularly attended mass at the parish church. One wonders whether that ought to have effected his advancement...
Well if you go by Covenants then lab work is 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, with no vacation that doesn't get made up from your Sundays off. That's a pretty intense schedule even for a young nerd professional. The rules for learning from books and other sources are a little easier, fortunately.
Ditto here. And, since we use covenants, I assume that it requires three different scribal folks to do the book production. If my players tries to shoehorn the "only-play-for-highest-skill" rule to get one specialist who does all three pieces of work, I'd have agreed, and then told them that said person takes three seasons of work, since they can only apply one skill per season.
As is, I'm kind, so I let all three sorts of work be done simultaneously. If I really wanted to be ultra-realistic, I think I'd require that any given book spend three seasons in the production queue, as it passes from scribe to illuminator (or vice versa, I can't remember) and finally to binder.
But, indeed, the relatively low book production rate implies that a covenant that is interested in heavy book production probably wants to have more than one scribal team. Keep in mind that in medieval monasteries, scribal work was often an entire cadre of people for precisely this reason.
How does your saga handle the poor and wealthy virtues, then?
If you assume that all gainfully employed folk work four seasons a year (Though I believe you said you were giving them more than exposure experience for working), do they just never learn skills outside of their work?
Are your farmers just racking up nothing but farming experience, or does their tilling of the fields 365 days a year still somehow teach them folk ken?
In our saga, what tends to happen is that while lab work is all-encompassing, many of our magi spend a non-trivial amount of time outside of the lab. Every saga I have been in has actually involved relatively rounded magi, and few lab rats. (One side effect of that is the "here's how to make a magi who can do massive thing X straight out of apprenticeship" builds that people often bandy about on here just don't turn up in my saga.) So they often take a week off at the beginning or end of a lab season to go do something else, or they go have long conversations in the middle of their season reading a book, and so forth. Seasons spent adventuring also often leave a lot of free time to handle other affairs.
Hmm. We are still trying to find our comfort zone with the bookeeping thing. We started trying to use every single rule available but soon we got overwhelmed with the ammount of time we needed out of play in order to keep everything updated. Now we try to focus more on the saga and stories themselves but still sometimes we return to the extreme (you do not want to see the covenant track monster tool we created ....). In any case we more than welcome any new idea that can help us to run the game more smoothly so thank you for sharing yours
Skill level through the ages
End of Year 1. Skill 1
Y2. Skill 2
Y3. Skill 3
Y5. Skill 4
Y8. Skill 5
Y11. Skill 6
Y14. Skill 7
Y18. Skill 8
Quite an easy math evolution, really. I fail to see the problem. A covenant has a highly developed carpeter team. So what? This is way LESS obsessive than most non magi PCs in 99.9% of games and sagas out there, BTW
From a maths POV, our NPC have a main skill, a descriptive profession, V&F if appropiate (like if they have second sight or are fat), a small description and personality traits. I would match them against anyone's saga in the interpretative arena any day of the week and feel confident they would at least tie.
Love this. I wasn't worrying about advancing specialists because it's my first saga and I have enough to deal with, but this scheme takes all the work out of it. Consider it borrowed.
When you say something like that there's a huge latent assumption that you presume I don't do the same.
We simply abstract 90% of the stats. As said, it is a RPG game, and we despise it being a bookkeeping game. Each group has different preferences on that one.
....). In any case we more than welcome any new idea that can help us to run the game more smoothly so thank you for sharing yours 
