The cost of Technique and Form vis

Games Discussion Ars Magica
21

I think you raise some very interesting points @loke , and points with which I agree:

The price-ratio that you get from Mercere is probably the worst one available, but it has the benefit that you can always use it. The Mercere are always willing to supply any amount of vis, of any art, assuming you can pay. (It is tempting to raise counter arguments like "can the Mercere really raise any amount? but remember that the limit is that the players have to be able to pay.)
I also think that the rates charged by the Mercere are so exorbitant that they are never used by anyone except the truly desperate and those who need so large amounts of vis that they can negotiate for better rates.

You can problably get better rates if you are willing to wait and have a specific conversion in mind. E.g. if you only ever want to convert 4 Animal vis to as much Auram vis as possible then you have the luxury of seeking out a specific environment with a favorable conversion rate for just this specific conversion, and can afford to not bother with the wider market. E.g. making friends with a local Animal-vis hungry magus who has an abundance of Auram vis, and then you can make a specific favorable agreement that would not be available in a broader market context.
If you find yourself in this situation the broader state of the market doesnt matter.

This may sound far fetched but most magi dont really need "generic" vis rather they tend to need specific amounts of specific types of vis. Often with a marked preference for certain types. This leads to lots of situations where individual magi often find themselves in non-generic situations and are able to exploit the fact that their individual needs dont line up with what the market expects.

I think it is worth mentioning that while not all vis is consumed equally, it is likely that the supply of in-demand vis is higher than for less demanded vis, because magi are a lot more likely to seek out sources of e.g. Vim, Corpus and Creo vis, than they are sources of e.g. Aquam vis. Thus sources of "useful" vis are more likely to be discovered, and creatures that yield "useful" vis are more likely to be hunted than those that yield less useful vis.

I do think that bookkeeping with generic vis is a useful tool that magi likely use in managing their accounts. I think in practise settling accounts in whatever types of vis are available to those settling accounts. I imagine that often bulk debts are settled primarily in whatever types of vis are abundant locally. In practise it might happen something like "covenant A owes 20 vis to Covenant B and when it comes time to pay they offer 20 of the locally abundant Aquam vis. Covenant B demands that the payment be done in more useful types as they need vis for ongoing projects, none of which are Aquam related. In the end they reach an agreement for a payment of 6 Vim vis and 14 Aquam vis." In all likelihood the 14 Aquam vis will be passed on to another less than happy victim later on and so the cycle continues.

22

Until that one Aquam specialist comes along, and is willing to give Auram, Ignem, or Terram Vis for the poor Aquam Vis...

23

Yes. That's banking. Banking is just emerging in ME, and there are very good reasons why it could not work earlier in the dark ages. It depends on volume and on trust.

It is an open question if the Order of Hermes should be avant guard or lag behind. As I read the canon timeline, there was very little Hermetic trade before the Schism, but the war was a wake-up call and trade rapidly increased, making widespread banking more sustainable and plausible.

We can go all the way, and have the redcaps, with their backbone network of Mercere portals, ship goods across Europe. In a liberal interpretation, they may be able to portal into the most remote corners of Novgorod and the Levant. They can trade in promissory notes and interest rates on savings. In such a setting, vis of account quickly becomes a necessity.

In a much more restrictive interpretations, there are only a few Mercere Portals, and vis transport is considered very risky. Specific arts will always be missing locally, and the barter economy is dominant. If the world is low on vis, most of it may be used for magic and it becomes critical to negotiate the art when a trade is agreed. This is also a very plausible setting, a little at odds with the Mercere chapter, but not completely unreasonably within canon.

I saw one saga where a young magus with Good Teacher and high Com, could author a couple of tractatus early in his career. Selling the copyright to House Mercere for 30-odd pawns of vis a piece, he had about a queen of vis which he could bank at 20% interest annually. That's quite a vis income. (The magus was himself a Gifted Mercere which probably made the payment more favourable, but still.) Interesting setting. It makes a very sudden change to how players have to think about vis.

There should not be set rules on this point, because RAW very explicitly leaves a lot to troupe decision, like availability of vis and the number of Mercere Portals. Copyright law and understanding of interest are also considere controversial. All of these elements are critical to a functional modern economy. If there is too little or too much vis in the world, it does not work as a currency. Trade actually depends on their being a relatively stable stock of unused vis available within the Order. If the Order suddenly harvest a lot more vis than they use to fuel magic, you would see massive inflation.

1 Like
24

Thats a feature, not a bug. If the Aquam vis in my example were to be truly useless to everyone forever, then it would not be useful as a means of transaction. The only reason why you could get away with using Aquam vis for payment between parties where neither have any use for it, is on the assumption (or if you prefer, speculation), that a magus interested in Aquam vis will be willing to exchange it for "useful" vis in the future.

Note that I dont mean to suggest that Aquam vis is inherently useless, I just picked Aquam because it is more easy to write than "unspecified locally unused vis-type". In some settings it will be Aquam vis, in others, it will be other types.

25

It has to be assumption. Speculation does not work. Money work because the assumption is agreed upon. Speculative markets are unstable and generate huge risks. Only experts thrive in such markets.

26

It should also be pointed out that while very early economies did rely on consumable commodities (especilly grain) s their basis for exchange it was far more common in more advanced economies to use materials which were rare but not consumed such as silver or gold, up into the modern economies where the medium f exchange is either paper or simply digital ledgers.
The Order of Hermes is extremely anachronistic in that they have a fairly well developed banking system despite the fact they use consumable commodities as their system of exchange. Of course an aspect of this is simply the fact that with magic just about any medium of exchange becomes something that can be produced or consumed...

27

I would consider it to be somewhere between the worst and average for transactions that require a long time (since it can easily run seasons). A Magus who needs the Vis ASAP can expect to get gouged by a nearby seller since they are not waiting.

The biggest thing about the Vis handling of House Mercere is not the exchange, but that they are a Vis bank. Vis that a Covenant or individual Magus has "deposited" can be accessed at a different location. If using House Mercere as a go between for the trade of items (books, enchanted, etc), if the buyer already has Vis deposited it eases the transaction. Vis deposited with House Mercere is tracked by type also.

28

Aquam vis useless? While some canon rituals like Wizard's Flood may be used rarely, there are some fairly cool use of Aquam rituals, including Enchantment of the Scrying Pool, or the ability to permanently create a water source to help agriculture or transportation in a water scarce area for example. Also Aquam spells can kill.

29

The Mercere exchange rate will be the worst if it is the fastest- there are issues of Mercere as bank mixed in with Mercere as post office here, and if all vis transfers are happening through the Mercere network then none are likely to be much faster, unless the banking aspect is exceptionally slow. What it does provide is convenience since you can do all your vis trading in one central location with fixed prices instead of haggling with (frequently) no ability in merchant.

30

Yeah Agree for the Mercere rates.

In our campaign we changed it to 20%

31

For this reason, we never use technique vis in casting spells. Besides, we find harder to include it in our adventures since we do not really see them happening in "nature". (Or more rarely.)

Most of the time, we will use some to add to the (form) vis we have to attain the number needed to cast a spell or exchange it for useful other form vis.