Sure, if the magus is only getting exposure for the season. And if the grog doesn't get to do anything else that season. And if you don't decide that in order to even start learning MT, a character first needs grounding in some other skills.
5xp isn't so bad. So the magus is forcing the grog to help out in the lab. Maybe the first season the grog is sweeping the floor, learning not to touch the magic manure, etc. Eventually he is permitted to actually clean the glassware, very carefully. Etc. Of course, it might be completely reasonable to decide that MT cannot be learned by just anyone; Int -2 or less simply won't get it! Or that a score in AL is needed to even start. And depending on the grog, maybe he'll malinger: He doesn't want to learn, and there will be lab accidents. Oops. Grogs are people too, after all. (Almost all game systems are pretty bad about considering characters as something other than platforms to which xps are affixed. AM is no exception.) But it's probably fair to assume that a suitable grog exists.
Finally, iirc, there is a limit on how high a score can get through this kind of practice. Eventually, the normal rules for Practice (4xp with nothing else gained) or Exposure (2xp but there is a useful side effect) apply.
Here, it would be essentially for free... up to a point. And only if the grog is suitable.
Really getting at this kind of issue, I think, would involve a much closer look at what it means to have a profession, what it means to pass from childhood to adulthood to old age. In AM, old dogs learn new tricks as easily as yunguns. This can happen RL, but it's harder.
I would point out that a soldier in the field may well be using awareness full time to make a living (if not actively engaged in battle) and thus might well train a green recruit.
I do think there is a fundamental difference between a drill sergeant actively training a soldier, compared to a veteran in the field making sure the greenhorns don't screw up too badly while going about his own thing.
The latter experience is useful and important, but not really what I'd call training.
More to the point: A game cannot reasonably model everything.
In this case, I think a good general rule runs like this:
A character who achieves a useful side effect during a season can only gain experience from Exposure or Adventure.
A character cannot achieve two useful side effects during a season. Being the reason another character can claim Practice for being forced to earn a living does not count. "Earning a living" is itself a weird category, a latecomer to the rules, but regardless of whether some activity does or does not count as earning a living, if that activity produces some other side effect, no other side effect is possible. So I cannot both train someone and produce something notable beyond "I managed to earn a living."
A character can only gain experience from one source per season, with some side effects providing exceptions (such as a benefit from lab experimentation).
So, if my apprentice or grog is providing a useful side effect of helping me in the lab, he can only gain Exposure or Adventure xp.
If my grog is learning Magic Theory because he is forced to earn a living, he manages to earn a living for the season but does not actually provide any help toward my project, but gains xps for Practice, not Training, which is not happening, since I'm more focused on my project than the grog.
Not a perfect model of the real world, perhaps, but it does model what I think was intended for earning xp. I might be missing something here, since I'm not a great fan of the AM5 economy. (Abstractions should make things easier. Having labor points, pounds, seasons and 4 (5?) grades of income sources don't quite do that for me.)
This is a pretty well-thought out definitions. When something like this came up in my home campaign(with apprentices, not grogs), I said that they couldn't do it until I figured out how it would work. Basically, "I don't know how to respond to your cleverness yet." Talking with my group I came up with a somewhat similar opinion, but mostly with regards to the Apprentice character. If the Apprentice is providing a benefit to the magus, he can only get exposure. If he's Practicing, he's not providing a benefit. If he's being Trained, he's not providing a benefit. Another thing which came up was what constitutes as using Magic Theory? Almost every use of lab work also requires Arts or a Gift. The only action the magi-player in question could think of was setting up a lab; He was allowed to 'train' someone while doing that, but not while doing anything that requires the Gift, because there were too many different skills being used that season, not just the one he was trying to train.
Of course, your answer seems more logical.
We so far didn't come up with an encompassing general rule - likely a house rule - to (ArM5 p.164) train people in the magus' lab.
I recall an example, though, when a magus refining his lab (Covenants p.110) had his shrewd shield grog do the hauling and at the same time trained him in Magic Theory (Laboratories). That situation just looked enough like master-trainee.
Indeed. This is the same situation as I had in mind. Consider a magus with Magic Theory 5.
Train him for two seasons while you set up a standard Hermetic lab.
Now the grog has Magic Theory [lab construction] 2 (1xp); this suffices to improve (not refine) the standard lab.
Let the grog add features and stuff to your lab for three seasons. By exposure, he now has MT 2(7xp)
Do a season of refinement, again letting the grog do the heavy lifting, and train him.
He now has MT [lab construction] 3 and can add improvement to the refined lab too.
This gives a queasy feeling. Constructing highly specialised labs was supposed to be very expensive in terms of time, but using the grog, it suddenly is not so expensive after all. Of course, the training time needed to keep up with increasing refinement reduces the return to investment over time, but there is a massive gain here if the covenant starts with empty rooms which need to be equipped, and if multiple magi may take advantage of the grog, it is even better.
The real question is if the troupe is happy to speed up lab specialisation, but cutting costs in this way.
But that's not an issue of Training. That's just an issue of cleverness. You can do better without training. For example, you hire someone to teach a grog Artes Liberales. You have the grog read a Magic Theory summa. Afterward the grog sets up your laboratory from scratch. All the while you're reading in the laboratory. In the end you're a lot better off than it you did the suggested Training method.
Covenants never says you have to do lab construction yourself. In fact, it makes two specifications on who needs to do the work. The magus needs to do the Refinement, but the requirements for other work are very specifically written differently instead of the same way.
Meanwhile, BP costs are way off from balanced with actual costs. You're essentially always better off just starting with piles of Vis. It's not just the labs. For example, a root costs a fair amount of BP when priced as a summa, but it doesn't cost much at all to purchase one. Mundane books are similar but even more so. So you're far better off starting with a library with no tractatus/summas and just buying them with the vis you start with. That the same is true of laboratories is just more of the same skewed scale.
A summa in Magic theory, in a language the grog knows.
I was talking about a startup covenant with very limited resources. If you design the covenant to train that grog, the problem changes. Using training is opportunistic. It is the cheapest and fastest option in certain cases, not in all cases.
I know. Many players do not like the idea of having ungifted grogs cheaply setting up labs. I agree that RAW allows it. It feels wrong. For for some it feels wronger than for others.
You are right, this is not primarily about training. Training just increases the number of situations where it is feasible.
So, in general, "the person doing this work" needs further qualifications beyond Magic Theory: mason, carpenter, stove fitter, joiner and so on, which most magi don't have and don't wish to acquire.
So, the bright grog craftsman they trained themselves is their logical choice, once they wish to improve their labs. As that grog typically only knows one or two crafts decently (often carpenter and mason), the non-magical means of most covenants for lab improvement are still limited to a few specific Virtues, like Extensive Scores, Gallery, Grand Entrance, Studio, Excessive Heating, Lesser Expansion and Living Quarters. A bright charlady with decent Magic Theory might provide the Spotless Virtue in a season, which an experimenting magus might soon lose again.
IMO this adds to role-playing in the covenant. Just make sure to check the craft Abilities of the grogs involved with the labs, and not only their Magic Theory, when a lab Virtue gets installed or reestablished.
I feel like Labs are inherently a personal space optimized for how a person's brain and particular research operates and would be very difficult for someone else to set up and be effective. At the very least, I'd figure out some penalty for the first couple seasons as the magus makes the lab their own.
Hi! But this creates another problem: in many Covenants, guest Labs of a standard nature are kept for visiting Magi (in Durenmar OTOH, probably the entire Rhine Tribunal there must be other examples), and this would unduly penalize them, I don't think this would be popular at all.
Current rules [Cov] has a very sensible approach to this. A newly gauntletted magus is not very likely to have highly personal lab. Personalisation takes time. And silver. What he has is described as a standard Hermetic labs and for the baseline for lab totals. It makes sense that there is a simple setup which can be used without penalty.
A personalised lab provides a bonus for the owner and a penalty for everybody else. Simple and fair.
The alternative would be to say that it takes years after gauntlet for the magus to construct the personal lab which gives him the default +0 on the lab total.
Consider real-world science labs. They tend to be quite specialized towards whatever the researcher is working on. At the same time, those researchers usually don't build most of their own equipment. Even much of the custom stuff is stuff they ask to have done for them. I can provide many specific examples on a larger scale over a large period of time. So I don't find it odd at all that a magus might hire someone to build a lab or install a piece in their lab.
