Possibly a silly question, but I'm new to the system and trying to get my head around (among other things) the spell guidelines. One thing I'm unsure of is how you would make a spell to (say) identify what kind of thing something is, where you don't already know the Form.
To pick a slightly artificial example, say you have something in front of you and your magus wants to know if it is animal, vegetable or mineral. Would you just pick Intellego + any one of the possible Forms (Animal, Herbam, or Terram) and add the other Forms as requisites (with the modifier to the magnitude of the effect)? Or is it more efficient to cast three binary "is this [Form X]?" spells?
Spells checking, whether something is of a given Form, have at most base 1. So their overall level mainly depends on their range - but many of these can be cast as nonfatiguing spontaneous magic.
Most magi can do this also with spells checking for several Forms at once.
In this sort of case, typically yes. The level will be so low that most magi can still cast it spontaneously.
Well, it takes more time :-/
If you're not in a hurry and you could cast these without fatigue, but the other version would require fatigue, I'd go for this choice. It's all about your level of skill and how much of a hurry you're in
