Teaching: Specialties

Huh?

If you're teaching one-to-one you get a +6 bonus. That means the +1 provides a bigger fractional bonus when teaching groups, not one-to-one. Also, with groups each student gets that +1 bonus. That means the +1 bonus saves more seasons (is more efficient) for groups than it is one-to-one in general.

Chris

If your teacher is called Useless Joe, going one-on-one with 9 is the only option. But for any teaching-oriented mage it doesn't apply. For instance my Bonisagus bookworm is 12 vs 18 and getting 18-24 is doable.

If I teach one-on-one, it'd take me 2 seasons per student to reach 36xp. If I teach 3 students as a group, I save 3 seasons while each student loses 1 season. I could charge half the vis and take additional student as pure profit.

I guess it depends if you are playing the student or the teacher. All things being equal, the teacher is usually the senior and his season should be worth more. All this to say that unless I have no choice, one-on-one will never happen.

I think we've reached the "In My Saga" point. In mine, the idea that a handful of post-gauntlet magi would congregate in a single place so that they could take a class at the feet of some other magi for an entire season would probably lead those magi to get bad reputations as incompetents. In someone else's, maybe the Order centers around those +5Com, Good Teaching, Teaching 5+2, MT 5+2 people who leave apprenticeship and become force multipliers for everyone else in the order.

Ceteris paribus of course. You seem to be implicitly comparing a "Joe Average" teacher for one-on-one, and a Super-teacher (Good teacher, high Com) for group teaching. That same super teacher could also teach one-on-one. And to get the same result from group teaching as from one-on-one, the group teacher needs a Teaching ability of 6 higher than the other. Ceteris paribus, of course.

All talk about group teaching for magi is only about MT (Arts can only be taught one-on-one), and there are plenty of books on MT. A group teacher would only give a comparable XP to a book (good teachers comparable to good books). That's not why you want teachers. You want teachers because they can give you MUCH more XP than a book, but only if they teach one-on-one.

No, Magic Theory was but one example, an example chosen because it had happened in-saga. How about Finesse, Penetration, and other Abilities that magi might find a lot of use for? And let's not forget THE biggie: Parma Magica. Many sagas don't have any books for that because of the risks.

I think you have miscalculated. Let's look at the Good Teacher since that's the one likely to be involved in this kind of situation. Tractatus: 6+Com+3(GT)+Resonances. Group teaching: 3+Com+5(GT)+1(specialty)+Teaching. The difference: group teaching leads the tractatus by Teaching-Resonances. For comparable effort Teaching will easily be well above Resonances. (At low levels just stick with summas; they rule there.) Since the example I gave was from a real game, how many tractatus do you find of quality 20?

I'll grant you that teaching one-on-one grants much more experience, still. But that's not the only reason to go to a teacher. First, the teacher can be used repeatedly, like a summa and unlike a tractatus; and then you can read your tractatus later, after the teacher's level limit has been reached. Second, the group teacher can be much more cost-efficient. Based on Covenants, a very nice tractatus such what we're looking at above would cost well over the 2-3 pawns for a standard book, reaching up to those not-for-sale items that are mentioned. Meanwhile, such a teacher could gather 10 magi, charging them 3 pawns each for 2 seasons of teaching, well under the cost of a high-teens quality tractatus. The teacher would be earning 15 pawns per season. Knowing that that is a good deal for the students, the teacher would be unlikely to give up a season for less than a dozen or so pawns of vis. So, would you rather pay perhaps 24 pawns of vis to this teacher for 2 seasons of quality 26 (using my teacher) or 3 pawns for 2 seasons of quality 20, leaving you 21+ pawns left to buy plenty of stuff. I guess the question comes down to: just how much spare vis do you have sitting around? (Note, the actual ratio would have been much bigger. I wouldn't have taught for less than 30-40 or so pawns of vis since I was charging 2 per season and doing it rarely enough and well-enough advertised that I had plenty of students (started with nearly 10 from my own covenant between the magi and their familiars), not 1.5.) Third, as you can see from the previous note, you could bring your familiar to learn MT (or even other things). The one-on-one bonus disappears, replaced with the two-student bonus of +3.

Now, if this were to happen often enough, I expect the market would come out closer to 1 pawn per season of group teaching, 1.5 if you bring your familiar (for MT), and those rare great teachers would probably have 10-20 students (counting familiars for MT) at a time or they wouldn't do it. So if this were happening beyond a single magus, I would expect the magus's season to be worth 12-15 vis or so. 1.5 vis for a season for you and your familiar, or 12-15 vis for a season with +3 experience for the both of you? Is that +3 each worth 12 pawns of vis?

Chris

I thought of a way to make the choice clearer using my teacher. I'll use the costs above but move them more in the favor of the one-on-one student: my teacher charges 1.5 pawns per season of group teaching and 10 pawns for solo teaching. Magus G takes group classes for 4 seasons, costing 6 pawns and earning 80 experience. Magus S takes solo classes for 3 seasons, costing 30 pawns and earning 78 experience. In the fourth season Magus S works to earn the vis to pay for those seasons, earning 2 experience from exposure at the same time. In the end they have both received 80 experience over 4 seasons. Magus S made a wise choice if he can earn at least 24 pawns of vis in that one season. Otherwise, he chose poorly.

Sure, we can mess around with numbers to get different cases favoring one thing or the other. But that's absolutely pointless. The point is that you don't have to use solo teaching to make using teachers a good way to go. There only need to be examples to show that group teaching can be worthwhile for the student to show solo teaching isn't the only way to go.

Chris

self-quoting:

You did not answer the main point: who's time is the most valuable, the teacher's or the student's?
Why does it has to be in a single season, why can't you be taught a third season for those 12 xp you "lost" by being in a group?

I think you failed to catch the point. If you have a fairly good teacher providing 20XP to a group and 26XP to a single student... Lets say the group consists of 5 persons... Thats then a total of 100XP in a season, vs 26 for teaching a single student one on one. In 5 seasons you would provide those 5 being taught as a group 100XP each, teaching them one on one instead would require "just" 4 seasons per student, but a total of 20 seasons. So, its 4 times faster to teach as a group in this case. And the larger the group the more effective it is comparatively.
Or simply, in 5 seasons you teach a group of 5 500XP, while one on one you teach a single student 130XP.
If the group has 20 students, the ratio is 2000XP vs 130XP.

I don't think that's entirely true either. For example, who would go to a teacher who could teach 50 at a time for 2 points each? You'd get the 2 points out of exposure anyway, so it's worth nothing. Yet that's a teacher providing 100 points in a season. This is why I was comparing costs. There are points that move things in both directions. Low-level teachers will find they can't teach groups well enough to get a bunch of students, but with the +6 they may find individual students willing to pay them a little. For high-level teachers it swings the other way.

Chris

Lol, nonono, now YOU didnt get the point that i was essentially repeating... Or rather, you scrambled it into something it wasnt...

A good teacher will simply get far more done, be far more effective, by teaching many, and this is more prominent the better the teacher is.
You´re pretty much arguing the exact same thing i am, just from a different viewpoint.

Direwolf, I was just showing you never want to calculate it based on the total experience a teacher can give out in a season when dealing with magi or other individuals. That would only be relevant with many drones, which could be considered if you have lots of grogs and they'll obey your orders well, for example. The important factor for magi is how efficiently an individual student can learn from the teacher, as Arulentus was saying. That determines whether or not they will become a student of the teacher. However, Arulentis went off track by leaving out some of the costs and so mistaking some of the efficiency. That's why I showed an example of how it can be better for the students to use group teaching, and as a result better for the teacher, too.

Chris

NM...

You have convinced your storyguide that it would be worth it for enough mages that your character could clean up a great deal of vis by doing this. If I was your storyguide, I would bring up the following objections to this plan.

  1. Purchasing a tractatus and studying from that tractatus leaves you, at the end of the season, with some XP in some ability and a tractatus which can then be sold or traded for another tractatus. Studying from a teacher leaves you with just the XP. In comparing the cost of paying for a season of study from a teacher to studying from a tractatus, you are undervaluing the residual value of the tractatus.
  2. A tribunal is probably less than 100 mages, since there are 13 tribunals and around 1200 members of the Order of Hermes. I do not believe that there are enough mages who would a) consider the subject you want to teach a priority to study, b) consider your character to be their superior in this subject so that it would be worth their while to study under you c) be free that season the course will be taught d) have vis to have large classes which I define as more than three students. A lot of these restrictions are negatively correlated. Young mages might be convinced you could teach them but not have that much vis. Older mages either already have a superior score or just don’t care about that ability, the 80 year old Criamon might only have a Magic Theory of 4, but he doesn’t want to spend a season improving it anyway.

So while I am sure that everyone in your game is having fun with it working that way, I don't think the analysis works for most games.

Well, first, that would violate the cow and calf oath, which in canon is fairly central to the Order's book trade. So I find this highly unlikely. You could, however, buy it as a covenant and thus share it between the interested magi within the covenant. Second, you'd have to do this at least one and a half times if not twice; there's no way to make a Quality 20 tractatus. (Actually, there potentially is, but it involves more cheese than I've shown in my cheesiest examples of how to get high Qualities.) Third, you can keep studying from the teacher, but you can only use the tractatus once. It's better to use teachers first then turn to tractatus.

foreward) Why are we discussing tribunals? Magi can travel great distance with relative ease in a number of ways. I can limit things somewhat, but still.
all) I was starting with close to 10 from our covenant alone.
a,i) Magic Theory was what I was teaching. I don't think that's an issue.
a,ii) You didn't count familiars. That messes up your numbers quite a bit.
b) Considering my authorship and that conversations could be had, I would expect many would be below Magic Theory 10.
c) This is why I chose a season well ahead of time. With two years to plan, most magi could be free if they want to.
d) You've just said you don't believe there are many magi who have two or three pawns of vis. I'm guessing you meant something else.

It's not like I was talking about teaching 40 magi at once. All I needed was to find ten magi with familiars, and that would provide me with twenty students and plenty of vis. If I recall correctly, I think I gave a discount for familiars whose masters were in attendance. In all I probably got about 20 magi (Well under 2% of the Order; would you say 2% is overkill for the number that might attend?) to come to the thing as it was. The storyguide was able to run a cool adventure built around it. It also helped us flesh out a whole bunch of other magi in the Order.

Chris

I don't think you are reading the Cow and Calf Oath right. I admit, it is somewhat ambigious. The text from Covenants (p95 of Covenants for those playing at home) says "... the purchaser will not sell, or freely give, copies of that book without the sellers permission." I read that as saying a buyer can't go making copies from my copy of the text and competing with the original author in the book in selling that book. If they wanted to prohibit the purchaser from
trading his copy of the text, the oath would say something like "...the purchaser will not sell or freely give the book or any copies without the sellers permission."

In the section on Excellent Books, (p95 of Covenants) it talks about "...under the conditions of the Cow and Calf Oath, that the book will never be copied without the permisison of the originating covenant, or magaus." I understand that to be a restating of what the Cow and Calf Oath says.

Like I said, I think the game you are in is using much different assumptions than would be true in many games. I am not saying there is anything wrong with that, it just keeps me from viewing your example as being one that illustrates what should happen in those games. First, you seem to be playing in a medium or high vis campaign. When I look at the material for the Rhine and Normandy Tribunal, it looks more like a low vis world as the default. The Normandy Tribunal talks about 1 pawn per mage per year as a minimum for a covenant and that loosing the source would not cause the covenant to dissolve. If a mage is going to have 10 pawns of vis a year to do with what he pleases, 2 pawns for a class is not a big deal. If they get less than 2 pawns a year, it will be a big deal. If you assume that there are 400 to 500 pawns of vis total appearing in the Normandy Tribunal in a year and most vis is grabbed by the more powerful mages, it is reasonable to assume that junior mages will not have any vis except what they scrounge up on their own. In the game I joined, the covenant has 16 pawns a year, for six mages. We cast a L20 Aegis of the Hearth, and we are already down to 12 pawns per year, which is 2 pawns per mage per year. With that baseline, paying that much for a class just isn’t worth it.

So, when you casually talk about mages traveling from throughout the Order, which presumably would entail using Mercene portals for another couple of pawns of vis each way, I have to think you are referring to a game with a whole lot more vis in it than what I am playing in. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with this. But it shouldn’t be held up as an example as what would naturally happen in the Order.

Just about any mage can draw at minimum 1-2 Vis per season spent on it. Since both Creo and Vim are among the more valuable Arts, 3+ is more common.
So with a 1-2 year advance warning, even the lowliest of junior magi will have a fair chance to aquire enough Vis.

If there´s one thing i realised concerning Vis, it is that any player who wants to aquire a lot of Vis, can usually do so fairly quickly, even in a low Vis game. Unless you run around using it up on items or study, you often tend not to use so very much.
(otoh, your saga seems to be very Vis poor, and if i was a player in it, i would most certainly at least consider making a high CrVi character with a Focus applicable for drawing Vis, in a low Vis saga, such a characters easy availability to Vis means they can get VERY good access to books much of the time)

No doubt, but then it becomes a question of marginal value. 20 XP for a single season is a good deal. 24 XP for three seasons (one being taught, two spent refining vis from an aura and taking exposure experience in order to get the vis needed for the trip and the tuition ) doesn't seem that good of a deal.

Well, there is the odd longevity potion and ritual healing spell. If you do a lot of adventures in a year, it feels like it takes forever to accumulate vis.

If I had it to do over again, I might have done smething along those lines. When I joined the already ongoing game, I asked how much vis was available, and the Alpha storyguide said he didn't know how much was average, but that it was more vis than in the previous games he had been in. I was certainly thinking more along the lines of 4 pawns per mage per year than 2.

Ah, thats a bit of a buggar... And makes me really wonder how low they were running on Vis in the earlier games!
Oh and dont forget for the future about the "Personal vis source" virtue! It can sometimes be very handy.

IMS we are currently at 7 pawns per magus. For us, that this is an AMAZING feat, but we are playing in Mann, and this is supposed to be an extremely vis rich environment. We buy our right to be there with vis, basically.

In all the sagas we have played so far vis Was a scarce commodity. In fact it was the lack of vis what limited the amount of magic items in ME. Yes, nobody has ever played a verditius around here.

Do note that that book is a copy.

Also, note that passing around a book to avoid copying it has exactly the same effect. Everyone who writes books would thus be opposed to it, and anyone who wants their books would probably have to back them up at tribunal or they'd never be sold books again.

We generally play between canon's low and medium. To give you an impression, it's a struggle to make sure we have enough vis for our Aegis.

That you cite a note about only a minimum to make implications about the average makes me seriously question your reasoning.

Considering my group plays below what canon defines as average, we should expect there to be more vis available for any discussion here. That you play with even less shouldn't be held up as an example. Remember, there are canon examples for average.

Edit: I forgot to mention earlier: how vis-rich or poor a saga is has absolutely no bearing on the argument. If vis is worth twice as much, the price for teaching will be half as much vis, but so will be the price for books. Same thing the other way if vis is worth half as much. The argument showed that students can learn more cost-effectively from teachers and teachers can earn more all by doing group classes.

Chris