My magus has bought a Casting Tablet with AotH 20, Pen 20 as he was setting up his own lab in the middle of nowhere. He doesn't have WC or AotH as spells, though in-game he has taken part in at least one Aegis ceremony.
Hmm, I just re-read the AotH description, there is nothing in there about WC. It says that magi don't need to be able to cast it to take part, or even be magi. They just have to be involved. As long as there is someone who can cast AotH most campaigns don't care if everyone knows about Aegis.
You see, if it is mandatory for mages to partake to common casting of Aegis or other spells, it might reveal some aspects of their magic that they might not be willing to disclose: inability to cast ritual (Diedne magic or Unstructured caster ?), weakness that could be used during future Certamen (Deficiency, or other similar flaw), etc.
Depending how paranoid you consider your average mage in your Saga, you can make as big a deal you want for a mage to participate in a join ritual.
By the way, the participation to the Aegis ritual - the way I read it - is to give immunity to the Aegis' effect to the participants (and the tokens), not to help in the casting or to achieve higher Penetration. It is also quite important for Supernatural companions, characters with Supernatural abilities and familiars so they can still use their ability within the Aegis.
I don't follow. You could have two magi with Day of Communion (I think also called Wizards' Vigil, just to add confusion.) 50 (counts like 40), two magi with Day of Communion 25 (counts like 15), and one with Day of Communion 20 (counts like 10). 40+40+15+15+10=120. There is no need for the levels to all be equal. But, I think Brutus's point was a little different: what do you need. You can have one extra magus per magnitude of the communion. So you can have magnitude +1 magi. You need to reach double the level of the spell. Let M be the magnitude of the spell to be affected and let C be the mean effective communion level, and we'll assume the spell's level is divisible by 5. (M+1)C≥2*5M. So C≥10M/(M+1). As M gets larger, this leads to roughly C=10 as what is necessary, though that could mean a lot of magi are involved. For the sun-duration version, that would be level 20, as Brutus said, right?
How does it not behave like another MuVi spell? Let's say Magus 1 has Muto 40 and Vim 40 and cast Wizard's Reach (Corpus) 20, and compare this to Magus 2 with Muto 15 and Vim 15 casting Wizard's Reach (Corpus) 30. They are both using the spell on a formulaic MuCo 5 spell. Do the different Art scores change what is done to the MuCo spell? Do the different levels of Wizard's Reach change what is done to the MuCo spell? When it comes down to it, the Art scores control the ease of casting the spell (and penetration if needed) while the level of the spell determines the limits of its effects. That sounds just like Wizards' Communion to me.
Is there? I'm not aware of that at all, and no one's suggested to me that I alter what I wrote up on Aegis of the Hearth. There is such near-universal agreement that Aegis of the Hearth must penetrate to ward out beings. But with spells and effects, they need to successfully penetrate the Aegis of the Hearth, not the other way around.
I meant that there was no mention of each magus casting their WC spell or making rolls. There was nothing about them possibly failing to make such a roll. All that is mentioned is if the lead magus botches the roll for the desired spell. It is assumed that if they are doing any casting, that it seems to be automatically successful - that doesn't seem like magic.
I agree that Aegis needs to Penetrate Might, and doesn't need to penetrate spells.
Oops, I missed that point! Yep, if you have enough magi, you can get away with quite low level communions. And if you have a Mercurian magus who automatically gets a high level WC, it puts even less 'strain' on the rest of the covenant.
I'm afraid I don't see your point at all? It is a spell. It does not state that it behaves in any way differently from any other spell, save that it is not fully integrated and as such can't be freely altered, but why would it in any other way behave differently from any other spell?
Muto Vim Guidelines (p. 159): Replace the final paragraph with the following: "Muto Vim spells work by altering the magical energies that create the spell as it is being cast. The spell is the result of the combination of the base casting and the Muto Vim effect, and has its effect once both the casting and the Muto Vim effect have finished. This means that a Muto Vim spell must have a duration at least as long as the casting of the target spell, but need not last for as long as the spell itself. For normally-cast formulaic spells, a Momentary Duration is sufficient, but if the casting time is longer for any reason, the Muto Vim spell must also have a longer Duration; Sun is sufficient for any practical Ritual."
This is why Day of Communion and Wizard's Vigil need to be Sun duration.
Now, to me, this talks of spells, not knowledge of spells: You need to cast a MuVi spell for it to alter the energies of a second spell, simple knowledge isn't enough.
Why would Wizard's Communion be any different, a MuVi spell that doesn't need to be cast to alter another spell? And if it was, why would Sun duration be mandatory for it too? This could also mean that, so long as several Magi are together, their formulaic spells would automatically benefit from a WC
I'm trying to see the implications of this. So if the "effective level" of the Wizard's Communion reaches 50, then it's a ritual that must be cast before an Aegis ritual, effectively doubling the vis cost? Does each participant need to make a roll to cast WC and potentially fail or even botch, before the single roll for casting the Aegis?
This sounds risky, expensive, and cumbersome in ways I would not like. I don't think this was historically the was WC was used in games, certainly not in my experience. WC is written as a spell by the rules, but it's also a legacy capability from older edition of the game and is explicitly non-Hermetic, so I don't know if it should be forced to behave this way.
Another option is to use a Wizard's Boost variation to get it up from D:Conc to D:Day. That means you're capped at lvl 45, rather than 40. However, that does start to get into a fairly complex chain of things that can potentially go wrong.
(Alternately, use Flexible Formulaic magic, in conjunction with Wizard's Boost - that'll get it down to 40.However, that obviously may not be available.)
And personally, I like the (visual) idea of the Circle, as it brings geometry into the ritual.
Cumbersome and dangerous indeed. This is not necessarily bad.
WC works by sharing the workload between a number of people.
So the more magi you have, the better you are, and the less high-level WC you need. You're not supposed to use WC with only 2-3 magi involved, not really. Mercurian rituals involved as much people as possible, after all.
If taking an "average" covenant of 5 magi, a lvl 40 Day of Communion is enough for any ritual up to 75, which is high enough IMO (how often do you see these?)
Sure, if they're trying to cast a lvl 120 ritual, they'll need a ritual Day of Communion if they can't get more members. For such a high level effect, that doesn't bother me: They're making up for missing communions by using ritual magic, which makes sense.
This also has the added benefit (to me) of making Mercurian Magic more worthwhile, which I'll take any day
Note that even 3 magi using a lvl 40 Day of Communion can use it on any lvl 45 of lower Aegis, which is already pretty good.
=> If casting really, really big rituals, it either forces huge number of magi to work together (Flavor and diplomacy ftw!) or makes it a dangerous, dramatic attempt (drama, yeah!) while bolstering Mercurian Magic a bit (Wait, my major virtue is useful? Yeepee!)