Idle question: has anyone played a mage with the Unstructured Caster flaw? It seems quite major for a Major Flaw. How did it play? And were you playing a Verditius?
Most major hermetic flaws are harsh. It's on par with Rigid Magic and Weak Spontaneous. And yes, if you're getting that kind of flaw, normally you either want to focus on enchantments or Diedne Magic, or even possibly on rituals with mercurian magic (though sucking at Spont + Formulaic is harsh).
You can’t learn rituals at all if you have Unstructured Caster. I guess if you’re not really good at sponting, you won’t be casting much. I don’t know which spells are worth the vis to be cast as rituals.
Yes, I was going to say that it takes rituals out of play altogether. No spontaneous magic at all is certainly hard, but it's four points of flaws, not three, and I would think taking both versions is an “anti-combo".
Rituals need time as well as Vis, so you'd want Sun or Moon duration spells. Or not to bother at all!
I can see how it would work for an NPC mage with serious problems, but it doesn't really matter if it's balanced for that purpose.
I don’t really think it’s on par with Rigid Magic. Both of them stop you from casting rituals. Beyond that, Rigid Magic only stops you from boosting your spells with vis, while this makes all formulaic spells take a huge amount of time and cost lots of vis. Unstructured Caster is way harsher than Rigid Magic.
In practicality:
- Rigid Magic → no rituals
- Unstructured Caster → no rituals, no formulaic spells
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Yeah, I get how you see it. I don't use it often. For 90% of characters where I'm debating between the two flaws, I'll take Rigid Magic. But there are a few oddball characters where I'd rather prefer my formulaic spells to require vis than lose the ability to use vis on my spells. Possibly because the character might want to use vis in his spontaneous spellcasting, or has a virtue to substitute fatigue for vis.
So have you actually tried it out? Or are you saying that you think it's playable?
I can just about see an “all enchantment” character being workable, but it seems hard to make it work to me.
The later. An argument could be made the flaw would be better balanced vs existing flaw if you only lost formulaic spells, and not both formulaic and rituals. But it's not the way it's been designed.
It honestly depends on the campaigns. There are games I'm in where I've been swimming in vis, and there are games I'm in where the lack of vis has been a literal source of anxiety. But given that Verditius tend to charge 3x the cost of an item... if you can get sales, you can get arround even the lack of vis at your covenant provided you can get orders for what you craft. Once you've made an item in a season, you can twin that item in the next one, since you have a lab text which means you can make two sales (market allowing) and have one item in two seasons or that you can have two sales and two items in three seasons, provided they are of the same TechForm. And the spare vis for 3 / 2 additional personal items of the same level.
There are ways to make it work. My current Verditius has weak spontaneous casting, and hasn't researched a single formulaic spell since gauntlet. The main reason he has formulaic spells on his list is because the character creation process forces you to buy spell levels, and retaining items costs virtues which isn't something I'm willing to spend my virtues on as a Gifted (redcaps are a different story). On the other hand... I do miss the flexibility of spontaneous casting and the early game twilights that come with it. This character has become, by sheer accident of having utility spells and a sword to deal with stressful encounters, the most twilight resilient character I have.
I don't think it would fundamentally break the concept for him to have unstructured caster instead of weak spontaneous. The question of whether it would be better for him to have Unstructured Caster vs Rigid Magic is a different story, because while a Verditius can swim in vis if they take orders - enough to be able to use it on spontaneous - whether he thinks that makes sense to do so reliably is a different story. If he was a Diedne Magic Verditius - he'd have more incentive. Someone who also has Imbued with the Spirit of (Form) would have additional incentive. However, there are also good reasons to keep formulaic spells on a Verditius - enchant casting tools is a good argument. On the other hand, the loss of spontaneous means that character sucks at fast-cast defense which isn't ideal for someone going in melee combat a lot. I'm not sure he'll bother learning a formulaic spell again unless he needs one for fast-cast defense.
The part about the Unstructured Caster flaw that annoys me most is not the loss of formulaic spells - it's that the hermetic apprenticeship character generation forces you to select 120 spell levels. Part of my reluctance from using the flaw comes not from the loss of formulaic and rituals but from the annoyance of being forced to select spell levels for formulaics I'd treat as rituals because when I pick flaws like that, sometimes, the goal is dealing with being unable to do something, not to spend part of my character generation selecting a list of things I won't want to use. If a table allows the character to swap spell levels for experience or lesser enchanted items lab text level, it would bother me less and it would make sense on a Verditius - even without item retention pre-gauntlet. An alternative ways to fix without requiring troupe approval: Get Hermetic numerology, and get 120 levels of rotes*. Then you need an incentive to use vis reliably. Add Boosting spell mastery on the right Rotes. This character lives with Unstructured Caster just fine, but Rigid Magic would kill the concept.
*designing such a character is by no means trivial to do well.
I briefly played one in a short campaign with experienced magi; and yes, he was a Verditius, but also very very strong at spontaneous magic (contrary to the Verditius trope).
Unstructured Caster is an exceedingly harsh Flaw, because it effectively makes both Formulaic and Ritual spells unusable; in my view this is way harsher than a Flaw that makes just fatiguing Spontaneous spells unusable. In 3rd edition, where it was introduced, Unstructured Caster was worth 6 Flaw Points. The way to optimize for it is to milk it for all it's worth, and combine it with Poor Formulaic Magic and Loose Magic (gaining another 2 Flaw points essentially for free); and then possibly with Rigid Magic (gaining another 3 points at the cost of losing the ability to vis-boost your Spontaneous magic). Note that in ArM5 the presence of Story and Personality Flaws effectively reduces one's pool for "standard" Flaws, so 8 Flaw points is probably more than one can fit "efficiently" into a starting character ... but it works decently with Ex Miscellanea and with characters who are on a Mystery Path with Ordeals.
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Personally, I think that a lot of the Hermetic Flaws that make a magus unable to, or very weak at, performing a particular type of magic (e.g. Rituals, Enchating etc.) should be made a bit more modular and balanced with respect to Weak Spontaneous Magic, Deficient Technique, Restriction or Necessary Condition,. One possibilty is the following:
- Weak Enchanter should be a Minor Flaw (unavailable to Verditius Magi), that makes a magus completely unable to enchant devices - with the exception of a magus's own Talisman, which is unaffected. The reason why I'd rank this as just Minor Flaw is that a magus can hire someone else to enchant his devices for him.
- No Talisman should be a Major Flaw, that makes a magus completely unable to enchant a talisman (including opening it for enchantment) or attune to one.
- No Familiar should be a Major Flaw making a magus unable to bind a Familiar. This should be compulsory for Bjornaer Magi, but still worth 3 Flaw points for them.
- Unstructured Caster should be a Major Flaw that makes a magus unable to cast Rituals, full stop (one might argue that Rituals do not come up very often, but they are the mightiest magics of the Order).
- Ceremonialist should be a Minor Flaw that includes the Virtue Ceremonial Formulaic Magic for free and forces a magus to cast all his Formulaic spells ceremonially.
- Rigid Magic should be a Minor Flaw, that makes a magus unable to use vis to boost spells (Spontaneous, Formulaic, and Ritual) with vis. Note that the 'compulsory' vis spending for Rituals does not count as boosting, but extra vis to e.g. increase a Ritual's Penetration, or to increase the level of a Spontaneous spell, does.
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Hello. I may point out to this comment of mine. This PC of mine was optimized to the best of my abilities to be a generalist mage, spontaneous-only specialist, Mystagogue, Seeker, and would-be immortal with Unstructured Caster and Rigid Magic. So, I daresay it is a treasuretrove of ideas on how to manage this kind of character concept. Feel free to take inspiration from this as you deem best.