The Ultimate Wizard Aging and Twilight Simulation

[Ben_McFarland]

@Yirkash

@silveroak

So in theory, a magus who always played it safe to avoid twilight could live forever?

I don't think you could live forever with just (vanilla) Longevity Rituals, even barring Twilight and warping.

Your Longevity Ritual requires the expenditure of 1 pawn of vis for every five years of age, and you are still limited to using twice your [Magic Theory Score] pawns of vis for it. So I think sooner or later you won't be able to spend the vis you need to create the ritual. And even though your Logenvity Ritual can last for a long time, the aging roll is a stress one (with not botch dice). So at some point you will roll enough 1's that you suffer an aging crisis, and thus cancel your Longevity Ritual. Then you will need a new one, and that's when you'll have to worry about your vis usage limit.

At 200 years old, you'll need to spend 40 pawns of vis, which means a score in Magic Theory of 20, or 1,050 experience points. That means getting about 5.76 experience points in MT every year for your whole hermetic life, assuming you came out of apprenticeship at 23 and already had an MT score of 3 by then. Doesn't seem too difficult, now does it? But it's highly improbable you'll find Summae higher than, let's say, maybe level 8. So from that point on, you'll need to read Tractati, which in this case means around 87 tractati (I'm assuming quality 10 for them).

I got around this MT limitation for Dama by making her a Merinita with a high Faerie Magic score. A magus who knows Faerie Magic can use twice their MT and twice their FM scores in a season, as long as half of the vis is Faerie vis. Now you can hit 40 pawns of vis with only a 10 in MT and a 10 in FM, as long as 20 pawns are Faerie Vis. That's only 550 experience points, versus the 1050 needed for MT of 20. A score of 10 for both of those skills seemed far more reasonable than trying to go the full MT. Cooperation can help increase the lab total, but then you have to overcome the social aspect of working for another magus. In a troupe, you can handwave this, but for NPCs, you can't.

Additionally, in the case of Dama, she has seasons spent creating her legacy, training an apprentice, establishing her covenant, all of which consume her time and divert her from personal improvement.

-Ben.