Teaching: Specialties

Games Discussion Ars Magica
41

Regarding The Cow and Calf Oath, I agree that the statement “…will not sell or freely give copies of that book… “ to be ambiguous. The purchased book could be considered a copy of the intellectual work, or it could be a physical good, which you are not supposed to copy. The context of what is said on p95 in the section on Excellent books regarding the Cow and Calf Oath, and what is said on p95 in the section on Sound Books, stating that the trade of equivalent sound tractatus is very common, I believe removes that ambiguity.

You seem to be saying that disallowing a secondary market would let the author make more money, so that is what authors would have The Cow and Calf Oath say. That is not good economics. If the price that people are willing to pay for a tractatus is set by supply and demand, the price that someone is willing to pay includes an evaluation of the resale value of the tractatus. If there is a non zero trade in value, the purchaser can charge more for each text, if there is no trade in value, they must charge less. Consider Xbox games or Playstation games. The only reason the manufacturer is able to charge the prices they do at the quantities that they sell is that some of those buying games plan that they will trade them in for other games at a later date. Or look at Magic the Gathering cards. Wizards of the Coast spends a great deal of time making sure that the secondary market for their cards is healthy, because they believe that having a secondary market for their cards allows them to sell more cards and thus make more money.

The Cow and the Calf has to do with monopoly power. The existence of a secondary market does not do away with monopoly power, the producer still controls how many copies of the book are in the market. Allowing someone else to produce your goods at the cost of material and labor does keep you from having monopoly power.

Now, as for what is average vis in canon. The main rule book defines low, medium and high vis campaigns. It does not define what average level of vis for a campaign. On the contrary, the rules are very explicit in saying this is a decision that varies from campaign to campaign. By saying that you are below average, I expect you mean that you have less than 10 pawns per mage per year, since that is less than what is given for a medium vis saga. My inkling is that most people play in low vis sagas (5 pawns or less per mage per year.) Whether this is true or not, doesn’t really change my point. My point, if perhaps expressed badly, is that this description of the economics of teaching large classes only works if some particular assumptions are made, and that if different assumptions are made (travel is harder, there is less communication between tribunals and covenants, there is less vis in the saga) you would have a different result. I have said this before, and I will say it again: There is nothing wrong with being in a game with your ground rules. However, when you were describing what the economics of teaching large classes would be, it seemed like you were stating that this would invariably occur in any game that used the rules as written. I just wanted to draw out those unstated assumptions, so that people could decide whether having super teachers instructing large classes would reasonably happen in their game.

As for how much vis is in canon, I worked from the 200 pawns of prizes that were offered in the Normandy Tribunal as tourney prizes, and estimated 25% of those prizes were books and items versus vis sources and then that only 1/3 of the vis sources of the tribunal were tourney prizes . That works out to 450 pawns a year, so I stated things as an assumption of 400 to 500 pawns for the whole Normandy tribunal. That is around an average of 4 pawns per mage per year. Then I figured that young mages would get less vis and more powerful mages would get more vis. The idea that older, more powerful mages hog all the vis seems reasonable to me, but YMMV. Statements about minimums are justification for junior mages getting less, not for what the average vis in the Tribunal would be.

42

Note that this also has to do with how common the gift is in your saga. Having more than 1 apprentice at a time can be very good, as long as you can teach them all at the same time (using teaching for abilities, and books for arts).

43

That really doesn't follow logically. Just because you can trade something doesn't mean you must not have made it yourself or acquired it without the Cow and Calf Oath.

I find your example particularly difficult to understand considering lots of these companies have nearly explicitly disagreed with you. They've been targeting the used game market because of how much it's hurting them.

You're also not considering how tractatus are used. You use it once and then you're done with it. Keep trading it around for all the books you want. Once there are a couple dozen tractatus available on a subject you really don't ever need to pay for a new book. Your MtG example is very different in this way. Once you've acquired a card you can keep using it yourself, not just for one game or tournament.

I didn't know you wanted to play with semantics. I'm sorry I said "average." Hmmm... So just what does the book say? It says "moderate," not "medium," so you're just as far off with your word choice as I was. Now wait... Let's look up "moderate." Here's what my dictionary says: "average in amount, intensity, quality, or degree." Wow! Look at that!... Please don't play semantics games with me any more.

Besides, as I pointed out before, if you double the value of the monetary unit, you simply pay half as many units for everything and vice versa. Thus the scarcity of vis has absolutely no bearing on the argument.

Chris

44

Regarding what is canon for Cow and Calf, from p95 of Covenants, under Excellent Books. “Most books of the highest quality cannot be purchased. Covenants receive them as gifts in exchange for exceptional service, and almost always under the conditions of the Cow and Calf, that the book will never be copied without the permission of the originating covenant, or magus”

As to why the exchange of sound tractatus being common argues for there being a residual value for tractatus. The average value for a sound tractatus is 11, with resonant materials and so forth, you need Communication 3 or the Good Teacher virtue to write a level 10 tractatus. At the canonical quality of tractatus, they are going to be few authors. For trade to be common requires a source other than just authors trading amoung themselves. If there is significant quantity of tractatus which is outside the Cow and Calf, and the Cow and Calf prohibited secondary sales of books, the non restricted tractatus would dominate the trade and the cost for tractatus under the Cow and Calf would be irrelevant.

As for the secondary market for video games. Ugggh. The conflict between the video game manufacturers and the video game retailers is about channel power. Suppose a manufacturer has a price to the retailer of $30, and in a small town, a retailer would sell 20 games if the price was $45, and 8 if the price was $60 and they can’t resell the game, but 14 games if he can resell the game back at half price, and the retailer can then resell the used game to another customer at the same price he paid for it. If he can’t resell the game, the retailer makes the most profit at the $45 price point, if he can resell the game, he makes the most profit if he charges $60. This behavior of the retailer lowers the number of units sold by the manufacturer, and he doesn’t like it. In Ars Magica, there is no retailer and thus no channel conflict. Communicating market prices happens by Redcap, which is a fixed cost no matter how much or how little business occurs. He makes all the profit that the retailer and manufacturer would make, so he sets the price and policies that maximize his profits.

Of course, that assumes rational, knowledgeable economic decisions. It is entirely possible for an Ars Magica game to assume that those making the rules don’t have modern MBA equivalent education.

As for Magic the Gathering cards still having its value to the purchaser even after being used, whereas a tractatus would not, I don’t see how that is relevant. People build into the price they are willing to pay for an unopened pack of cards the ability to sell or trade cards they open. If that was taken away, Hasbro would not be able to charge as much. As such, they put policies in place to support the secondary market, even when they do not profit directly.
I am not sure what you mean about after a couple dozen tractatus available on any one subject, you don’t need any more books. Are you saying that once there are 24 or 25 Creo Tractatus that are available, no one would write another Creo Tractatus? I don’t know, that is only six years of dedicated study for a Creo specialist. Assuming he has Affinity to Creo and already gotten his Creo up to 20 with a Summae, and that he used quality 11 tractatus, he only got 618 XP in Creo, for a Creo score of 34. This is good, but hardly so good that there is no point in raising it. It would sure cut down on the market for low quality tractatus, which I think explains why a sound quality tractatus is level 11, the good quality drove out the bad .
Are you saying that once someone made 24 or so copies of a tractatus, the market would be satuarated for that particular text? Yes. Are you saying that once someone owned 24 or so tractatus, he is going to trade books rather than purchase new ones? Yes. Are either of those things inconsistent with the Order as described?

Regarding average, medium or moderate vis sagas. The core rule book gives three terms to describe how much vis is in a saga. It also explicitly states that how much vis is in a saga depends solely on the saga. It is not playing with semantics to point out that the levels of vis given in the main rulebook are not supposed to be normative. I apologize for using medium instead of moderate.

Finally, changing the level of vis in the saga does not have a linear effect on how often something occurs. The vis cost of longevity rituals and ritual spells don’t vary by availability of vis in the saga. Enchanted items by Verditius, books, cost to stay for a year in the Rhine Tribunal, the price of using Mercene Portals , all of these things have a fixed canonical prices which presumably could be altered depending on the availability of vis, but in most campaigns won’t be, and if they were, the change would not be linear. Each mage is going to rank the things he wants to do against this list of things that require vis, and whether he takes a course from a teacher is going to depend on what his other choices are. Two pawns of vis a year is going to make a four pawn round trip unpalatable, no matter what the price of the class is.

45

I'm trying to save space, avoiding quoting:

Magic the Gathering: There are several other issues that should be examined in this comparison. The most important is that, generally speaking, the secondary market is not in competition with WotC. The way WotC handles that is the tournament format. They keep rotating blocks out of the primary games (standard and draft). There are a number of other ways they hurt the secondary market, too, such as making certain cards nearly useless, even when those cards had been staples of some sort. A nice, quick example: Crusade. But yes, they do want the secondary market to be strong because resale value that does not directly compete against new sales will increase the original sales.

Reuse: If something can be used again and again, the market effectively grows. Or it could be stated differently, if that thing can only be used once ever, you have a more limited number of sales that can be made. How does this apply to the Order? There are only around 1000 magi in the order, meaning we expect roughly 10 new magi per year. The books have been written for years. If only one sound tractatus is made on a given Art every 10 years and only a few copies were made, then we have close to one sitting at each covenant. Leaving out specialists we can probably guess no one will need to study any given Art's tractatus more than 10 times, even though there's enough to go around well beyond that. If trade of these is common, non-specialists should never need a new tractatus to be made; what's around will circulate and they can get those for free. That leaves only the specialists as the market for a new tractatus. All of a sudden our market size is much smaller. Let's estimate that half of all magi specialize and that each of those specialize in two techniques/forms. That leaves roughly 70 specialists in any given technique/form. That's your total market for all tractatus made. And they only need the new tractatus after exhausting the couple dozen available for free. Plus, under the readily traded assumption, they can trade the new tractatus with each other. Since they're specialists in two Arts, they only need a given one half as often (which I could have simplified above as saying a specialist chooses one Art on average). How long does it take a new book to circulate among 35 magi? Sure, roughly 9 years. That's the rate they're being produced, so they don't need them faster. If the books are produced faster, while they'll want more, there will be many, many more older books sitting around. So there should be just about no financial profit to be made off writing, and the basic cost structure in canon is incorrect with common trade of books.

Best example I can find: We want an example of something used once and then of no more value unless traded/sold to someone else. We also want an example in which the secondary market is in direct competition with the primary market (which is a major problem with the WotC example). Let's look at secondary school textbooks in the US. At the secondary level textbooks are rarely used again by the same person, as opposed to textbooks at say the graduate level that are commonly kept for reference. Also, the secondary school books are traded with high frequency. One time use and common trade sound like the situation we're looking at. What happens in this market? The textbook publishers fight against the secondary market as hard as they can. They attach digital stuff to the purchase of a textbook that can't be transferred on resale. They publish editions rapidly (such as a new one every two years) and try to make teachers move to newer editions so that students can't use old textbooks.

So when I look at the best example I've seen of a modern market equivalent I see that the publisher fights very hard against the secondary market. Also, when I try to analyze how large the market is, remembering that books from many years ago are just as useful as newly published ones, I see a need for the writers to act against the secondary market.

I understand both our interpretations of the Cow and Calf Oath. I just don't see how the market as it's been set up can survive with the cost structure that has been written if copies may be freely traded (the restriction being just not to make new copies). I feel that the systems survives intact when copies may not be traded.

I guess it all comes down to how rare we think the authors are, and that's where our disagreement lies. Three magi able to produce a Q11 tractatus writing one tractatus every two years produce books at the rate I assumed above. If we assume these magi live about 100 years, then we only need to have had three alive at a time for a total of about twelve (serf's parma) since the Order started. So roughly 0.3% of magi being able to produce Q11 tractatus is about my assumption. (Or 0.15% at once a year, or the equivalent.) You're assuming a much lower percentage than this or the best writers writing less frequently than about once every two years. I'm not sure how low a percentage you're assuming or how infrequently you assume writers are writing. Myself, I think 0.3% and once every two years are probably low estimates based on HoH:TL comments. (In a case I would not use as an argument since it's so situational, our Com +3 Good Teacher Bonisagus PC has cranked out 5 tractatus in his first two years past gauntlet, every season he's not been busy with adventure. So we're definitely seeing higher quality tractatus at a faster rate.)

Chris

Edited for a numerical typo, and then edited back because I wrote it right.

46

You're right. However, we've been talking about two non-vis related activities in terms of their value in vis. So, while the value of vis will not scale linearly with the vis's prevalence, the relative value of two non-vis related activities in terms of the vis will not change.

If we had to deal with extraordinary travel times, expensive travel, and other things, sure, those would adjust some costs. But, as I pointed out, you don't need tons of magi for this to work. It works out with just one or two handfuls of students. (In my particular case, I had nearly 10 students just counting the magi and familiars from my own covenant.) So that cuts down on travel times anyway since you don't need magi from all over the Order. Travel itself is pretty cheap; especially if you're decent at Rego or Muto. (Mercere Portals are generally a bad way to travel unless you've got lots of stuff to move, and even then they're may be questionable. Mercere Portals are something canonical that jives with the rest of canon.) And if you're a teacher like this, you could invest in being able to travel cheap, and then move around where you're wanted for teaching at virtually no expense to yourself and cutting down on travel issues for your students who may not like Rego or Muto. It's not like copying books is fast or free, either.

Chris

47

Callen, the objections you bring up make me feel that you don’t understand my argument. I am saying that if a) someone can control the production of a good, and thus has monopoly power in terms of controlling the number of units that exist, and b) the price of the item is set by supply and demand, the price set by supply and demand allowing resale will include the value people have in terms of being able to resell it. So, yes, Hasbro prints a bunch of cards for a set, sells them and doesn’t compete in the secondary market. Even though they could print sheets of Mox Emeralds and Black Lotus while the current price is in the thousands, they don’t. Because the value of a healthy secondary market for cards in supporting the sale of their new sets is greater than the money they would get from doing so.

As for the market for undergraduate textbooks. If you are in the business of making tarter sauce, and the price of fish triples, you sell less tarter sauce. How many textbooks you sell has very little to do with price, it has everything to do with which text the professor chooses to use. So textbook publishers have little motivation to support a high resale value, the price they are able to charge doesn’t include a premium for resale value. That is not the situation with tractatus at all.

Look at the prices of houses or cars. Car manufacturers spend a great deal of effort trying to make sure that their cars are considered to have a good resale value. This is because they expect people to sell their car to someone else and then use that money to buy a new version of their car

As for my understanding of the Cow and Calf not supporting the canonical market for books, I expect I have a different view of what the market is. I figure the market can support one copy of a tractatus per tribunal, so long as it is of good quality. So, I figure that tractatus have about 12 copies total. It would take a scribe six years, (two seasons working, two seasons free) in order to make that many copies of a tractatus. In the Guardians of the Forest book, it talks about magi visiting at Durenmar trading seasons of service copying books in order to stay there. This suggests that mundane scribes trained in Magic Theory are not all that common. Magi can refine vis from the aura, and most of them can refine more that the two pawns that a tractatus is priced at. With those economic assumptions, it is a lot better to charge market price for a book that can be traded around than it is to charge market price for a book that can’t be traded around so that more copies are needed. My understanding is that 2 pawns of vis is this market price. If you were selling books that only one person or covenant could use, you would have to make the price much cheaper.

Which brings us back full circle. If your starting assumptions were correct, the two activities (teaching or buying a tractatus) are of equivalent value, and your statement saying that are equivalent follows logically. If my starting assumptions are correct, the two activities are not equivalent, buying a tractatus is a long term investment and taking a class is a one time thing. That is when the relative gain in XP vs the relative cost in vis becomes more important.

48

Important: Note the big discovery near the bottom. The canon books seem to be in contradiction with each other. That seems to be a major part of why we're working from different visions of the Order.

I understood. I don't think (know for sure in one case) you understood what I was saying, though. Of course, as I was saying in the end and as you're saying, too, we are working off different assumptions which is why we disagree. I'm really interested in looking into those assumptions so we know what choices about the prevalence of authorship and the interpretation of the Cow and Calf oath do to the market, or perhaps what choices are needed to maintain the market as written.

This is why I showed all the numbers I showed. They don't control truly control that number if free trade is allowed. This happens because the books never devalue over time and because, until you've used it, any one tractatus is the same as any other tractatus of the same Quality and Art to you.

This is another part of why I showed all the numbers. Resale will be cut into dramatically because, with the exception of advanced specialists, almost everyone's already got what they need.

I mean no offense, and I don't even know if you're from the USA or deal with this market. Either you misread what I wrote or you have no idea about this market. The US secondary school textbook market basically functions around two main points: 1) the individual teachers' say in the textbook that is used is relatively minor compared to the overall market (This regularly makes national news, though not everyone understands that that's why it's showing up in national news.), and 2) the majority of those choosing the books are highly interested in the secondary market - they push it extremely hard, though as a student you don't need to follow their policies. Those falling outside of these two points are relatively minor (unfortunately for me) parts of the market.

But they don't expect two things: 1) that the used car is just as useful as when it was bought, and 2) that the seller of the used car will take the other person's used car (which is also just as good as when it was purchased) instead of money to use for a new one. That's where tractatus trade would differ.

Yes, we agree that this is where we disagree. I don't think we disagree on market mechanics. We disagree on supply and demand sizes, which is absolutely essential to understanding of such a small market. That's why I was putting all the numbers in my last post. I was trying to be clear on my view of the market supply and demand sizes. I'm trying to figure out where it shifts from my market view to yours. Clearly, if all of a sudden we have a million new magi in 1221 (don't ask where they all came from) your tractatus market view is much better than mine, and with three magi left in existence after 1220 (don't ask me why the rest died) my tractatus market view is much better than yours. But just what is the market we're dealing with?

I'm trying to start before this assumption (with the production of tractatus) for my own view, and I'm trying figure out what your assumption implies about the production of the tractatus. There's nothing wrong with starting in either place. As we've both said, we're working from different points. No big deal. I'm certainly learning from the discussion.

What I'd really like to figure out is what this does to supply and demand in the market or what it means about the number of authors, depending on which other premise you're using. Could you answer one of the two things about your assumptions:

  1. How prevalent do you think an a writer who can produce a Q11 tractatus is and how often would such an author publish a tractatus? Of course, this is an average, so some Q12+ authors will balance some Q10 authors, so we probably want to examine how prevalent a writer who can produce a Q10.5 (average) or so tractatus is. Don't forget to take into account that for 6 or fewer vis a Mercurian can bump up your Com by 1 to a maximum of +5 using canon spells if they're good enough with CrMe. (And if they're really smart they could invent circle or group versions and do it much cheaper.)

  2. If there are 12 copies of any given tractatus, how many different (not copies, but different books) tractatus are there on one Art in 1220?

Ah! I now think some of our disagreement about the canon market is due to a disagreement between canon and itself. I tend to agree with your analysis, though I do also see the possibility that the Durenmar magi just really don't want many mundanes in the library at all. I, however, was working off:

"Many" magi and covenants using scribes suggests there are enough scribes to go around, which does jive terribly with the whole Durenmar thing. The part about magi not usually making more copies jives especially badly with the Durenmar thing. The above section combined with the ease with which scribes can be taught Magic Theory 1 - just have them study a book for a season, and they probably don't even need the full season - led me to believe they aren't uncommon. Or, if they are uncommon, it's trivial to change that.

Actually, that is exactly opposite to my starting assumption. My assumption was that a teacher who takes this route can easily provide a much higher quality than a tractatus can provide but the tractatus will not be capped - specifically that the two are not of equivalent value (teaching is better earlier and tractatus are better later).

Chris

49

Although interestingly they can both come from the same source...

I can spend time in your class learning an ability to match yours, and they go away with the tractati that you wrote (and are therefore based upon the same pool of knowledge)to surpass your ability!

I can see that sort of thing somewhat skewing the market (making the books more valuable than they perhaps should be) - another factor is that according to RAW derivative works provide the usual benefit, when a fair argument could be suggested to diminishing returns (i.e.: the derivative work will provide less benefit than usual if you have already read the first work).

Finally, works go out of date - especially on scientific subjects. A 500 year old tractatus on MT may well contain information which has been replaced by new theories and ideas. Logically these books should provide less XP than equivalent books written today, making new books more valuable than older books (helps keep new books in circulation). I'm not saying that they will be useless, but they should certainly not be top-draw in quality if they are part of an evolving field,

50

Yes, I totally agree with you, Gareth_Lazelle. Those are a big part of what is changing the market drastically. If we were to house-rule things so that books lost a point of quality every quarter century or so, then we would have a more realistic market. (That could be interesting.) As-is this is like the situation where the used car is as good as straight off the lot.

Tractatus and level limits are very tough in my opinion. I think of tractatus like professional scientific articles. Then you get things where two persons may both be at the same level but both be able to teach each other things because they have different specialties (trying to use ArM5 terms). But certainly in the situation you describe it does seem whacky. It shows up in reverse, too: I teach you an Art to my level of 6, you write two tractatus of Q12, and I study those to get to level 9.

Chris

51

Maybe I am wrong, but aren't Gift of Reason and its ilk powerful mystical effects? Do you think the warping gained is worth the extra saving, or do you believe one can design it "for a particular target" that is more than a single individual?

52

Interesting suggestion,

While I tend to agree, I would generally expect the efficiency of the exchange to be quite low, as there will be a lot of knowledge that they do both know (and so, any information exchange would include a lot of redundancy) unless you had truly totally different backgrounds - in other words, the quality should be quite low even if you are a good teacher (my gut feeling is that at high ability levels your "learning" should mostly come from conducting [practical] research, or reading the results of others research),

Incidentally, on the subject of specialities, when do you allow characters to change specialities (or do you)? I've been allowing changes whenever the ability level changes, but can't find much in the rules about it,

53

Not only that, but even if the theory is still sound the language has evolved. Compare books written 100 years ago, versus 20 years ago, versus now : the writing style is completely different, the approach to problems and solutions has changed a lot. So yes, great classics from a century ago will stay in use, but minor tractatus will be replaced with modern language.

54

Yes, they are powerful mystical effects. But if you're already a decent writer, a couple more points of warping for Communication (since that's all you really need, though you might want Intelligence, too) are no big deal. If there were lots of warping from it, that would be another thing. But it's a single point per +1. That's really not too bad. It's a much better return for risk than a number of other learning/lab situations.

As far as I understand, according to ArM5 you can make two persons safe from warping: yourself and one (the) target (target, not Target which can be a group of targets) to whom the spell is tailored.

Oh, no kidding! I've read a tiny bit of the original English translation of Newton's Principia. Ouch!!! Even when I know what it's saying it's hard to read.

Chris

55

I just had a funny idea with target: bloodline :smiling_imp:

56

That has to be contrasted with the idea that the past is better. For example, a 500 year old tractatus could be written by somebody more familiar with the magic of the Cult of Mercury, and thus contains secret theories and the hidden insights of the Roman masters that have been lost to contemporary (1220) magic.

Canon ArM5 tends to hold to both the ideas that magic is improved incrementally through research, and that magic is improved by recovering the lost secrets of an historic Golden Age. So, an old tractatus could be either much better or much worse than an contemporary one.

Also, some of the above analysis seems to assume that magi are acting economically "rationally". However, there doesn't seem to be any cause to assume that. The Cow and Calf oath works because magi follow it. They don't follow it because it is their economically rational best move. They follow it because they believe it to be the right thing to do. Not because it is the right thing to do.

57

Very true. That´s something that should never be assumed "just because".

58

Callen, I have to apologize. I didn’t read your example regarding high school text books carefully. I took secondary in secondary school to refer to secondary as in secondary market and your contrast with graduate texts to be the texts that graduates use in contrast to the texts undergraduates used. Thus, I thought you were talking about undergraduate textbooks. Mea Culpa.

That being said, I am not sure what to make of your example of high school textbooks either. School boards buy text books not for a single class year, but to last as long as possible. I remember paper being taped around the covers to make them last longer, and having to sign for their condition when I was issued a textbook, and it being examined when I returned it. The reason school boards replace textbooks is either that the text no longer meets state standards or that too few copies are in good enough conditions for the number of students the school currently has. Those are very different reasons than a magus would have for wanting a different tractatus.

As I was asked, and with the understanding that this is very much YMMV territory. Since I don’t see any canonical covenants with large dedicated copying staff, I view large dedicated copying staffs to only exists where there is a reason for it to happen. I figure if a covenant has a magus with Good Teacher and Com +1 or better and uses the optional rules regarding resonant materials, or a mage with Com+4 or better and uses the extended rules regarding resonant materials, the covenant can make sound tractatus, and has an economic reason to have scribes making copies. My Verditius mage has Good Teacher and Com+3, and eventually I expect our covenant will have three or four scribes. While my Verditius is alive, he can write new tractatus about subjects to keep them busy. Once my Verditius is dead, or Final Twilight or whatever happens, these scribes would not be replaced when they get old and died. Since at high levels of skill, level can be traded for quality and I figure levels in the high fourties, low fifties are not unreasonable for specialists, practically any covenant might have rights to sell copies of a sound summae and those that do will have a copyists. Otherwise, I expect covenants to put their resources elsewhere.

As for the section on how books are made in covenants, I figure it only applies to where books are made and is not an expression of what happens across the Order as a whole. If I describe how sourdough bread is made in America, I am not saying that sourdough bread is made in every kitchen in America.

I have to say, The idea of teaching someone up to the same rank as you in an ability and then that person reading tractatus that you wrote to become even better than you in that ability does not make much sense. If I teach someone up to my skill level, I taught them everything I know. The things I wrote in the tractatus are things I know. How is someone going to gain a superior level of knowledge by only studying things I know? By the rules as written, that is how it works, but applying the rules this way gives you results that don’t make sense. Why would someone do that?

59

Exactly. My point is the way in which it is handled. They are effectively sold to the students like some furniture, with no payment for a year. At the end of the year you can sell them back at the same price or buy them from the school. Ideally for the schools, they get almost all of them back. It's nearly an enforced secondary market. That that market doesn't exist throughout gives it a little less of an impact.

In my analogy, the student is the magus. The school boards would be more akin to the tribunal or what have you in a situation where trade in texts is allowed and is frequent. The idea is like trading in one year's books and getting the next year's books. If trade in books is very common, there ends up generally being a small market: the number of tribunals, or perhaps fewer because their books last and eventually they'll have enough. The specialists would be where the writers have to make their money, and that's a much smaller market than the entire Order.

I do wonder what numbers you deal with. I wonder what other markets look like; it's certainly different than ours. But just how different? I'll talk about what's typical in our sagas. In our case we're well above the 0.3% good enough writers publishing at 1 book/8 seasons example above. I'd say we probably play closer to 1% (still only getting up to about a dozen authors in the Order) at 1 book/6 seasons or so. That means our Order generates books at roughly 4.5x what I have in my example above. So if we allow trade of books (one interpretation of the Cow and Calf oath) and more than one copy was made of many of the books, our Order will be awash in books and even the specialists will rarely need to buy one. But if we don't allow that trade (another interpretation), then we have a market for books.

Hmmm... I need to calculate... Roughly 500 years of the Order, right? If I use 1200 magi in 1220 and 1%, then we now have about 12 authors. Make that the last 50 years. 10 in the prior 50, 8 in the 50 before, 7 in the 50 before, and then 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. So that's 58 solid authors. If I give them 90 years to write and they write 1 book/6 seasons, that's 60 books each. Let's say some are summas and make it 50 tractatus each. That's 2900 different tractatus. Let's divide that by 20 (15 Arts and MT, Finesse, etc.) to get 145. At this point I expect about 145 different sound tractatus on each Art. If they're traded freely and two copies were made beyond the original, then each tribunal has about 36 different sound tractatus on an Art. Yup, I was right about our saga being awash in books if we allow free trade. (Ideally I would have had more authors earlier and then have destroyed a whole bunch in the Schism War, but the two should balance fairly well and doing so makes it easier.) If we don't allow free trade, then if we figure about 9 covenants per tribunal, each magus would have access to about 4 sound tractatus on an Art immediately available instead of 36 nearly immediately available. They would have to travel and spend time at other covenants' libraries or pay for more books or study from other magi. Yes, that's much closer to how we have things. OK, Just wanted to check to make sure free trade of tractatus in our saga would really do what I said.

I agree about the dedicated staff. And the Cow and Calf oath basically reinforces this since most places won't be allowed to copy things they didn't author, and so if they're not authoring books they don't need scribes much at all. I would expect such scribes only where there is a good author.

I figured that since as a general rule the only place allowed to copy a book is the place that made it, that this would apply quite strongly since it's talking about where they're made and thus generally where they are copied, too. Of course, this is with the exception of the secretive magus violating the Cow and Calf oath or some other special situation.

I think we're all in agreement here. I think the trouble is that we don't all want to track which persons taught you at different times and compare that to whose tractatus you're studying. It's enough of a pain to make sure you know exactly which tractatus you have or have not used.

My example shows how it can be even worse. You can teach them all you know. Then they can put that knowledge in books for you to study and improve. Then you can teach them all you know now. Then you can write books that they can study. Then they can teach you a little further. Then (with the numbers I was using) you can each write one more summa so you continue this mess a little further, until Art 13. Pretty scary that from Arts 0 and 6 you can get to Arts 13 and 13 by teaching what the Art 6 person already knew back and forth. While true that you can advance beyond the Art 6 with each other, this would be more like practice in the real world, not simply going back and forth with the same stuff.

Chris

60

There's a general tendency to overestimate the role of the teacher, and underestimate the effort of the student, when talking about education. All learning is about constructing one's own knowledge. Has there never been an example in the history of the world where a student came up with something that the teacher didn't know, even though the student started out knowing less? Has there never been an example in the history of the world where a reader of a text, who is also spending days and weeks playing with the new ideas with active experimentation and thought, got more out of the text than was strictly written within it?

In other words, I believe the results actually do make sense, once we think carefully about how people learn.