So would you then agree that item creation is Formulaic magic since a magus with Verditius Magic and Unstructured Caster has their strongest power in item creation? Or are we cherry-picking to make this work?
No,no, by that definition a magus with Verditius Magic and Unstructured Caster cannot exist, since their full power can't be used through Formulaic Magic. 
But see now you're using the if-then statement as I said, not as you said. If it goes the other direction, then this full power defines Formulaic magic, not the other way around. So the magus should have no problem existing, right?
Hopefully you see there is a huge problem trying to say that everything the description end covers must be Formulaic magic.
It would all be much better if the glossary were to say a little less while including both Formulaic magic and Ritual magic, keeping them distinct. Then the rest of the rules would work very well and this one issue would be resolved.
We have the definition:
Formulaic magic: Spells that have been worked out in detail ahead of time.
And the following explanation:
They have one effect each, but magi can only use their full power through Formulaic magic.
For magically crippled Verditius this just implies, that they are prevented from attaining full power - Alas, Alack and Alaska!
This is by necessity generalizing and typical for glossaries.
Again, it would be much better so say less and make it agree with your earlier statement:
"Indeed. Giving short, precise and correct definitions is the typical purpose of a glossary." Sticking to that would be great.
Unfortunately, to say this includes Ritual spells means you're all accepting that this entry is not a "precise and correct definition" while insisting it must be. Your statement above is specifying that the second sentence isn't part of the definition, while it most clearly is part of the glossary and you're claiming the glossary entry is the definition. Either the whole is the definition or people are just cherry-picking to make it work how they want.
I would fix the glossary something like this:
Formulaic magic: Spells that have been worked out in detail ahead of time and are relatively simple to cast.
Ritual magic: Spells that have been worked out in detail ahead of time and are relatively difficult to cast.
Those would both agree with all the rest of the book as well as avoiding all this mess.
Sorry. Just study a few glossaries, and you will see how they are written. Then you can try to fix the one of ArM5.
EDIT: Here's a short how-to.
I generally trust what you say because I've seen you reason well and do good research. So last time this came up I did exactly this. I went and studied a whole bunch of glossaries to see how they are written. While by far the majority of entries work fine either way, as a general rule the glossaries I looked at did NOT agree with you. If you read these glossaries in technical subjects as you insist, you will have misunderstandings of some things in mathematics, physics, etc. Sure, for the most part there won't be an issue. But if you insist on me studying other glossaries to assess this, then you're instructing me to disagree with your stance here.
Meanwhile, do you all really agree with yourselves? A Hermetic magus is suspicious of a Hermetic crime, investigates it, and presents evidence of the crime at Tribunal. Do you all insist this magus is a Quaesitor regardless of standing with House Guernicas? A grog with Skinchanger (eagle) flies back and forth between two covenants as they coordinate against an immediate threat. Do you all insist this grog is a Redcap?
I think it’s pretty apparent that in some places in the rules ‘formulaic’ is used by the glossary definition and some places ‘formulaic’ is used solely for non-ritual invented spells and in some places it could work either way and we don’t know except for David Chart’s comment above. This could definitely be clearer but I am unsure if the sheer number of references makes it easily possible to fix this via an errata. One possible fix would be to refer to ‘formulaic casting’ or ‘formulaically cast spells’ where the spell is not a ritually cast spell. Another possible fix is using the term ‘invented spells’ where the inclusive definition is meant and change the glossary to reflect this, changing the ‘formulaic spells’ definition and adding an ‘invented spells’ definition.
One errata that keeps bugging me although it never effects play- in ROP:I it is stated that demons no longer have the ability to chose to side with the divine because they made their choice a long time ago. It then states that most demons are in fact children of demons and not actually fallen from heaven. So when were these children of demons given an opportunity to side with the divine? They did not rebel against heaven, they were simply born to those who rebelled.
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Fortunately, in a very large number of cases both "Formulaic" and "Ritual" are stated, whether to include both or to include one and exclude the other. The only spot anyone has ever pointed out to me where Ritual spells not being a subset of Formulaic spells is the glossary. There are a few (very few) instances (e.g. Life Boost) that would still function fine and so not need errata if the glossary part is edited to make it clear Ritual spells are not a subset of Formulaic spells, though maybe we might want to reexamine a few. If Ritual spells are made to specifically be a subset of Formulaic spells, however, there are many contradictions that necessarily will need errata and all those things that might need to be reexamined in the other case would still potentially need to be reexamined.
ArM5 p.40. Affinity with Art explicitly mentions to round all fractions up. Affinity with Ability does not.
Which leads me to wonder if my troupe has unwittngly played with a house rule all these years: should Affinity with Ability round down?
In general, ArM5 tends to specify in all cases whether one should round up or down, but maybe it would be nice to have a default clearly spelled up early on, e g. on p.6.
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My reading of situations where they say Formulaic Spells and explicitly remove ritual spells is that they are using the glossary definition of Formulaic Spells. I’m not sure how you can read it otherwise.
Life Boost works fine as a virtue either way but I find it surprising that one with that virtue could not expend extra effort (fatigue) to boost their ritual casting totals and definitely believe the intent there is that it can be applied to both styles of casting.
Hence my two suggestions for how this might be ameliorated by slihtly more distinct verbiage.
If that's the case... how about removing from Diedne Magic (ArM5 p.41) the last paragraph:
"You must keep your lineage hidden from the Order, giving you the Major Story Flaw Dark Secret. This is in addition to your normal allowance of Flaws, and does not grant you any points with which to buy Virtues"? This removal would achieve two things.
First, it would rebalance the Virtue (without the Flaw I'd say it's on par with Life Linked Spontaneous Magic; and in fact most people I've seen discussing the Virtue say that with the Flaw it's unpalatable).
Second, it would allow more Story versatility for the magus. Perhaps his lineage recovered, or preserved the magic of the Diedne (maybe to better confront it in the future) and this is known but disliked, yielding Enemies. Perhaps he was taught the magic by a Diedne ghost that wants revenge, making him Plagued by a Supernatural Entity. Or maybe the idea is that the secret will not appear prominently in stories, that will instead focus on the character's True Love.
Finally, if the paragraph is not removed, I think it should be clarified whether the magus can freely take another Story Flaw (since the Dark Secret "is in addition to [the] normal allowance of Flaws") or should not ("to avoid having a single character unduly dominate the saga" ArM5 p.37). As it stands, it's not really clear to me.
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TME p.103, Binding the Mundane Codex: the description claims that a base Individual of Animal is a "quaternion", which I take to mean 8 sheets (given that the spell's limit is 800 sheets at Group +1 size)..
It seems rather small to me, given that a base Individual of Animal is a pony.
I think the description should have no practical limit to the size of the book it binds (I mean, which book is larger than 10 ponies?) and still have that +1 size modifier knocked off from the Level calculation.
A "quarternion" (TME p.103) is an olden term from bookmaking. It means 16 pages from 4 sheets folded in half. See: The Life and Typography of William Caxton, England's First Printer:
Occasionally, but rarely it is called now quaternion, which today tends to mean a concept from algebra - a non-commutative extension of the field of complex numbers - used mainly in computer graphics.
EDIT: It looks as if Covenants p.50f New Guidelines provides the guideline for TME p.103 and suggests adding one or two magnitudes for greater complexity - which in a newer book like TME might have led to reduction of the size of the Individuals instead.
If they just did that, I would totally agree with you. But they didn't do just that. They also reversed it. We could say the same thing about explicit inclusion, that they are not considering Ritual spells a subset of Formulaic spells, and with the same certainty not be able to read it otherwise. Since they've done it both ways, at least one of them must be for clarity, and we don't know which one; that means we cannot ascertain anything from this. Here are the cases I've seen:
p.42: Flexible Formulaic Magic includes Formulaic spells and explicitly excludes Rituals.
p.58: Poor Formulaic Magic includes Formulaic spells and explicitly excludes Rituals.
p.83: The non-Ritual options include both Formulaic spells and Spontaneous spells while explicitly excluding Rituals.
p.86: Spell Mastery includes Formulaic spells while explicitly including Rituals.
p.92: Faerie Magic includes Formulaic and Spontaneous spells while explicitly including Rituals.
p.98: Attunement bonuses include Formulaic and Spontaneous spells while explicitly including Rituals.
p.115: General spells include Formulaic spells while explicitly including Rituals.
I don't think anything can be concluded based on there being one more inclusion than exclusion, either. That's close enough to an even blend of the two. As none of these would need errata either way and there are plenty of each, all we can really know is that many of the are there for clarity; they imply nothing more.
On top of that, there are a whole bunch of non-exclusionary statements that must be exclusionary to avoid a contradiction. There are a great many statements that require them to be separate. This is why there are so many items to put in the errata if this decision is made. There is only one spot I've found (just did) outside the glossary that pushes strongly toward Ritual Magic being a subset: p.111's "Level Guidelines."
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However, now that I've found it again, there is one statement that, outside of not using the word "subset," is an explicit, core statement that Ritual spells are not a subset of Formulaic spells:
(p.115) Spells requiring rituals are those that fall outside the categories listed for formulaic and spontaneous spells...
Outside of using the word "subset," there can't be a much more direct an inarguable statement that the book specifies Rituals are not a subset of Formulaic magic. That's because this distinctly and clearly places Ritual Magic as a subset of the complement of the set of spells that can be done with Formulaic/Spontaneous Magic.
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Yes. And the same is true for Cautious Sorcerer (though technically unnecessary here), Method Caster, and Mythic Blood, as well as for learning a spell from Twilight, Verditius magi casting spells, and designing spells with odd R/D/T. The only two that really gives me pause is Mythic Blood and alternative R/D/T. With Mythic Blood losing no Fatigue is very far from losing 1-3 Long-Term Fatigue Levels, and the jump from 0 to 4 is rather abrupt. Of course, Mythic Blood is pretty weak in general so making sure it gets a noticeable boost wouldn't be a bad thing.
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Here are more items for the errata if Rituals are made a part of Formulaic magic. I'm including the three from above so David can have all the potentially new errata in one place.
p.59: Slow Caster becomes contradictory, as Rituals would now be listed with two different times. The beginning of the second sentence should be changed to "Your non-ritual formulaic spells take two rounds to cast..."
p.81: (This is a whole bunch rather than one.) Many items become contradictory because there would be two sets of rules for Rituals. Some sort of exclusionary statement would be needed. The upper box should probably be labeled "Non-Ritual Formulaic Magic." The third title in the left column should probably be labeled the same "Non-Ritual Formulaic Magic" and its formula "Non-Ritual Formulaic Casting Total." That gets rid of a large portion of the new contradictions. But the paragraphs under that third title need to be edited similarly, probably more simply with things like "these Formulaic spells" rather than "Formulaic spells."
p.94: "Formulaic spells are a major measure of your power because they determine those things you can do easily and predictably." This would be better if changed to something like "Non-Ritual Formulaic spells are a major measure of your power because they determine those things you can do easily and predictably." The reason why is the book has already devoted a large portion of a page to explaining that Ritual Magic is not easy (very tiring) and adding lots of botch dice as well as requiring a stress die (making them less predictable).
p.114: "Ritual spells take longer to cast than formulaic spells and require vis." This would need to be changed to something like "Ritual spells take longer to cast than non-Ritual Formulaic spells and require vis."
p.114: "Formulaic and spontaneous spells may not have Year duration." This would need to be changed to something like "Non-Ritual Formulaic and spontaneous spells may not have Year duration."
p.114: "Formulaic and spontaneous spells may not have Boundary target." This would need to be changed to something like "Non-Ritual Formulaic and spontaneous spells may not have Boundary target."
p.114: "Formulaic and spontaneous spells may not have a level greater than 50." This would need to be changed to something like "Non-Ritual Formulaic and spontaneous spells may not have a level greater than 50."
p.115: The essentially explicit statement that Ritual spells are not a subset of Formulaic spells, "Spells requiring rituals are those that fall outside the categories listed for formulaic and spontaneous spells...," would need to be deleted or changed entirely.
p.160: Wizard's Boost (which I know is receiving changes anyway) says, "This does not allow spontaneous or formulaic spells to reach Year duration or Boundary Target, unless the Wizard’s Boost is a ritual." It should be changed to something like, "This does not allow spontaneous or non-Ritual Formulaic spells to reach Year duration or Boundary Target, unless the Wizard’s Boost is a ritual." Or "This does not allow spontaneous or formulaic spells to reach Year duration or Boundary Target, unless the original spell and Wizard’s Boost are rituals."
p.225: The formula for Formulaic Magic should be changed to something like "Non-Ritual Formulaic Casting Total" to avoid contradictions for Rituals.
If the decision is made to leave Ritual Magic out of Formulaic Magic, this one should be fixed:
p.111: The "Level Guidelines" paragraph should explicitly include Ritual Magic alongside Formulaic Magic and Spontaneous Magic.
Regardless of the decision, it might be good to look again at Cautious Sorcerer (p.40), Life Boost (p.44), Method Caster (p.46), Mythic Blood (p.47), learning a spell from Twilight ("New Spell" on p.89), Verditius Magic's casting tools (p.93), and alternative R/D/T (p.114). In each of these cases an explicit comment about Ritual Magic for clarity would be helpful. None of them technically need errata regardless of the decision, but these are all cases where more clarity would be helpful.
Good catch. I was confused with your numbers because the same spell in Covenants is written with different numbers. But that's irrelevant. In the core book on p.116, it specifies that one piece would be an Individual but then Group still handles the full mass, as you've said. I don't know if that means one quaternion or one sheet of parchment should be an Individual (not Base Individual), perhaps and probably either; I'll have to think more. But certainly a book the size of 10 ponies is way more than sufficient as you have pointed out.
For @David_Chart (calling you so this doesn't get lost in all the text) I would like to point out that both this spell (TME p.103, as originally pointed out by ezzelino) and the two in Covenants (p.97) have the same unneeded +1 size. Ezzelino is right that the writer(s) seem to have confused Individuals ("Note that an Individual is a single hair, a single hide, or a single tusk." - ArM5 p.116) and base/basic Individuals ("A basic Individual for Animal is an animal of about the same size as a pony, Size +1 or lower." - ArM5 p.117), and Group uses the latter to determine how much (ArM5 p.113). Also, since two of them have the same name, it would be good to get the two versions of Binding the Mundane Codex to agree with adjustments only for a device v. a spell.
Yup. We use them a lot in physics in some spots, though I'm sure there are many more programmers doing graphics.
I will add that to the errata.
Removal is too much of a change. Changing the language to allow the choice of a different Story Flaw is probably a good idea, though. (It should be obvious that you still shouldn't take another Story Flaw — the fact that the character has Diedne Magic does not somehow mitigate the chance of the character unduly dominating the saga.)
Yes, it seems so. Corrected.
I think I'll do this. Thinking back, I am now pretty sure we decided to split Formulaic and Ritual as game terms, to avoid the need to write "non-Ritual Formulaic magic" all the time.
I guess so…
Aegis will have to wait for tomorrow.
Honestly, from both logical and simplicity standpoints there is no real value to putting Ritual Magic within Formulaic Magic, so it doesn't surprise me you went this direction way back when. Just wherever you want something to apply to both, you say so, which was already done a bunch of times. Double checking that short list should be done regardless. Only p.111 now needs fixing, as you've seen. I'm mostly writing this post now to identify a post above where I suggested you might want to make a change and an addition to the glossary, something like these:
Formulaic magic: Spells that have been worked out in detail ahead of time and are relatively simple to cast.
Ritual magic: Spells that have been worked out in detail ahead of time and are relatively difficult to cast.
That won't do. Text like "are relatively simple to cast" and "are relatively difficult to cast" are unclear and have no place in definitions. They mess up a glossary.
Getting one's glossary clear, precise and correct is important.
I suggest the following:
Formulaic magic: Spells that have been worked out in detail ahead of time, to be cast in a few seconds. They have one effect each and constitute the main magical power of most magi.
Yes, formulaic spells can be mastered for fast-casting or ceremonial casting - but they are still worked out for casting in a few seconds.
Ritual magic: Spells worked out ahead of time just like formulaic magic, but taking many minutes or even hours to cast and the expenditure of valuable Vis.