Close. In my experience any expansion book with new rules becomes tedious very quickly. I have two problems with them.
For some people it becomes an exercise about joining this rule with that rule, exploiting that rule, chain this rule to that rule, and 5 books later broken overpowered character.
Admin. If I have to be referencing a bunch of books all the time, it's time I don't want to spend. I don't want to be referring to a spreadsheet listing which book has the relevant rule. If I found that fun, I'd be a tax accountant.
I appreciate others do not feel this way.
Expansion books for information on the world setting is generally my preference, or one of the limitations one of the bigger two fantasy RPGs systems have, is each player can only use Core Rules + one book when making a character for example.
Any new book would have to unequivocally say it overrides the core rule, and in my opinion, that's better placed in an errata.
Actually, you omitted the first part of my phrase, outlining the critical flaw in your argument. I repeat it below, bolding the part you intentionally ignored:
We tend to focus the discussion on what are the “stoney” properties of a glyphed stone and what are the “glyphy” properties. Likewise we focus on the purely physical properties of these hypothetical golden bands. But we focus on the physical properties in a modern sense.
But IMO this is a mistake. Ars magica exists in a fundamentally platonic world. Objects dont really have chemical properties in the way we think of them. In a platonic sense a golden band made for a purpose becomes a different object. It is now part of whatever class of platonic objects it was made to be, be that a small crown, a huge ring or a normal sized arm band. In a sense the intentionality is part of the physical properties of the object. In the same way that a fire that has burned is a part of the residue left behind from the fire.
This is really hard for me to wrap my head around because I am a scientifically inclined modern person and I dont believe in the platonic paradigm. But @ezzelino has changed my mind. I am now convinced that in making something into something else, the intention behind the change is made into a fundamental property of whatever was made. It is strange and un-intuitive to me but I think it hits closer to the spirit of Ars Magica than my previous (ArM) worldview.
Purpose is not an Aristotelean Category. More relevant for this discussion: the figures that the artificer places in the gold are not substance, but gold is.
Less relevant for the 13th century, but maybe still important for Hermetic magi, Platonic forms of objects do also not mirror purpose of objects in society. The purpose the inmates of the cave assign the shadow shapes they perceive have nothing to do with the forms these shapes are based on.
There is a pretty complex dialogue of Plato, the Cratylus, which attempts a theory of naming. Copies existed during the middle ages in Byzantium, but were not available to scholars speaking Latin until the early 15th century.
The closing topic to which Socrates and Cratylus turn is where knowledge is to come from. Cratylus, despite the damage Socrates has inflicted on his extreme naturalism, still clings to his belief that the study of things’ names is the privileged route to knowledge of the things themselves. But why, Socrates wants to know, should we assume that the original name-givers were infallibly right in the descriptions they encoded?
There remains, Socrates points out, the question where the original name-makers would have got their knowledge from . Obviously not from the study of names, he points out (438a–b). It is only a short step from this to agreeing that no intermediacy, of names or anything else, between the would-be knower and the object known can do anything but impede the learning process. Rather, Socrates proposes, reality should be directly studied in its own right.
The dialogue’s final argument (439b–440d) implicitly identifies the Forms as the objects that require that unmediated study in pursuit of knowledge. Even Cratylus, by now a passionate partisan of flux, can see the point that something should remain stable through the change. For even so self-guaranteeing a statement as the self-predication ‘The Beautiful itself is beautiful’ could not be truly utterable unless the Form referred to endured long enough for the predicate to be attached to it.
Summing it up and simplifying:
There is no True Form of a language or a name. To the contrary, True Forms are required, because a language would not mean anything without them.