Salve Sodales,
A number of new items have just been posted at SHR, courtesy of the brainwaves of Simon Foston:
Five Virtues (Optimal Casting, Adaptive Casting, Matched Arts, Optimal Art and Skilled Experimenter) and one Flaw (Averse to Risks) in the Camera Mysteriorum
A Combat Reference Sheet in Aurelius' Sanctum
Comments, suggestions, and above all submissions gratefully welcomed!
I like the combat reference sheet. Is there a downloadable pdf version?
edit - lol, maybe I shouldn't be so lazy, and just make my own using excel or similar.
Optimal Casting, good one. Useful straight away and balanced enough from what i can see.
Adaptive Casting... ouch? Allows to do MORE than a Major Virtue(Flexible Formulaic M.) as a minor Virtue? Ouch...
Id change it to every 10 points. This is super overpowered, noone would want to be without it.
Matched Arts, oooh very nice. Since there are so many combinations of Tech+Form(edit: and the fact that puissant on the Technique gives the same bonus alone!!!), i think it might deserve a higher bonus, +5-6 would be my suggestion.
Optimal Art, hmmm? Im not sure i get this one? If this Art counts as a primary, then what about the original primary? Is it also a primary or? Im probably missing something here but i dont see the point of it?
Skilled Experimenter, has potential. As its not always easy to regain Confidence points, and also that to be such the magi MUST go run around outside the lab, the combination feels odd. Like the concept but would like to come up with an alternate way to handle it...
Oh and Strong Writer btw? Its totally evil for writing Ability Summaes. Make it a Major and set its level bonus to 1 for ability and 3 for arts perhaps? Just a thought.
Averse to Risks, mmm ok. Seems ok and usable.
Nice site btw.
Optimal Casting scares me. Make spells with requisites easier to cast than spell without requisites? Eeep! I'd just learn a couple art and tweak all my spells to use those as requisites... "Yeah, and all my spells use Perdo Imaginem to damp the smell of the target. That's an extra 5 or 10 levels for an additional effect, but I don't have to worry ever about the other arts". Even for a Major Hermetic virtue, I think that's too much.
Adaptive Casting: same as what the Dire Wolf above said. Majorly unbalanced.
I think the idea is that you wouldn't be taking it alone, but in addition to both Puissant Technique and Puissant Form. Not sure I would allow taking it more than once, though: it's already Flambeau-fodder enough as it is.
Either it works like Optimal Casting but for only one requisite for spells which have multiple requisites, which I think is too much, or it allows you to change what form the spell is resisted with: normally, a MuCo(An) is resisted with Corpus, but you could require it to be resisted with Animal. Whether you get the choice when you cast the spell, when you design it or when you take the virtue (i.e. give the ability only for spells with Animal as a requisite) is unclear in any case. Either way, I think that would be fine for a minor virtue.
I wouldn't allow Strong Experimenter. I someone convinced me to allow it, I would make the Confidence Point add only one to the roll. That's already extra powerful, and makes original research a breeze.
I'm ambivalent about Strong Writer. As the wolf said, it's overpowered for Ability Summae, and it also cheapens higher-level books. Sacrificing quality, in inverse proportion of the quality increase for level drops might be appropriate.
Averse to Risk: not sure this is much of a flaw, but then again, neither is Bound Magic (something one of my player duly noted when he took it as is one and only Hermetic Flaw). I think the Verditius flaw of the same name should be the one to use (completely prohibits experimentation, with no freebie in return).
Easily Distracted. OK, but make it a personality flaw and don't allow it to be taken more than once.
No Aptitude for (Ability): hmm... Ability Block? I mean, if you take the flaw, why take the ability at all? It's not like with Deficient Technique/Form, where magi are likely to end up having to use any of their arts.
Underachiever: Ouch, that hurts. 
Unlucky: Fair enough. Combine that with Magical Air and not only do dogs bite you, but any cow pie is yours to step in. And you know what the worst part is? YOU NEVER LEARNED TO READ.
@ The Baron - The sheet was coded in a way that hopefully makes it easy to print off from your browser. Perhaps this might be a good option?
@ Direwolf75 - Glad you like the site!
I'll leave it to Aurelius to respond to the critiques. 
Lol, guess i should have thought through that one better...
Agreed, it can be misused that way far to easy. Pity, it looked so nice otherwise.
Not more than once per combination was my reading of it?
And who WOULD take it when you get an EQUAL bonus from taking puissant? And when doing so for the tech. means you get the bonus all the time with that tech., as written i would pick Affinity before this as well. But raise the bonus to +6(after rethinking, maybe even a little higher still) and then it becomes an option, getting a bigger bonus in a limited area, or a smaller one for a full tech. or form.
Means you can use a single virtue to specialise without having to do it through a Magic Focus virtue.
I read it as a 1:1 use already? Anyway i dont think it makes it THAT much easier. Well, if it is to powerful then make it a Major?
Yeah, it looks a bit too good. It might be ok if it was placed on an ability that the character is bound to use. But thats not likely to happen now is it...
Not THAT bad, bad enough for a minor flaw though. 
OK, fair enough.
Someone who's already taken Puissant for both that Technique and that Form?
Don't forget Potent Magic which also gives +3/+6 and the ability to include ArM4-style spell foci.
We're in agreement on the +1 then. And having that extra +1 to spend if you don't like the roll REALLY does help avoiding bad results.
Looking at only those which may be potentially beneficial:
50% chance to change Side Effect to No Benefit. If you could afford doing the lab work without experimentation and just wanted to go faster, you've got much less risk of ruining the end result.
100% chance to change Complete Failure (wasted season) to Special/Story Event (hey, at least your season may not be wasted 
)
100% chance to turn a Special/Story Event to a Discovery (which pretty much guarantees that, short of a Botch you'll never run unintendedly into a "story event"... which is sad)
OK, it may not be as powerful as I first said (it only looked that way) but, while I'm all right with a Skilled Experimenter virtue, I'm not quite sold on the mechanics of that one. Grumble.
It also makes the game a bit less exciting for the player, which I don't think is that good a thing.
Note, however, that you gain extra range or duration at the cost of potency.
If your Optimal Art is Creo and you're casting a spell like Wings of the Soaring Wind, i.e. CrAu30 with a Rego requisite, you use your Creo score instead of your Rego score. The Virtue would apply every time you were casting Creo spells with Technique requisites.
Agreed it's not ideal for "stay-in-the-lab" types, but I think they're most likely to be NPCs. I generally expect players to want to get their magi out of the labs and doing stuff once in a while.
Well... if a character with Magic Theory 8 who writes a summa about it, the level of the summa will still only be 5 instead of 4. IIRC it'll therefore take a bit longer to write and one more season to get the additional benefit from.
+1 to study totals??? Are you mixing up quality and level here? Adding to quality id say +3 or +4 is fine(as Good Teacher is +3 AND +5), but adding to level is a very different matter. The big problem is the difference between art levels and ability levels, raising an art summae by 1 isnt such a big deal, but for an ability its a VERY big matter.
Ah so it allows you to disregard any requisites if the primary art is the optimal one. Ok. Hmm not sure how good it is, will have to think about it.
The penalty is extremely minimal compared to the advantage it gives. As long as you have enough casting total you can basically use a lvl 10-15 spell and simply extend on a 1:1 basis with this mechanic to cast it as if it was a lvl 20/25/30/35 depending on circumstances.
Lets say you learn a PoF with range touch, level 15.
And have a casting total before die roll of 35, add +2 magnitudes for Sight range and +2 for Group and you suddenly have a level 35 spell for free. Or +1 Voice, +1 Sun and you have something to keep you warm and give you light all night long... 
Basically, every single spell, just learn them at their most basic and lowest levels and then you can use them for almost anything, adding little or nothing to them if you need penetration or improving range/duration/target if penetration isnt a big deal.
WAY overpowered. And waaay better than the Major virtue Flexible Formulaic Magic.
Hmm, maybe. Its not exactly all the time you get 1s on stress die rolls though(i mean, noone plays the game expecting those), so i really dont think it would matter that much.
Yeah, me to. The idea is really rather neat, but it means a labrat would be forced to "run about in the wild" just to get Conf points back. And i cant come up with a good alternative either... 
Actually i dont have the Potent Magic rules, nor do i know them...
But with a higher bonus, this virtue might be taken INSTEAD of those, allowing a similar total bonus ONLY for that specialty using just a single minor virtue.
And as i said, with just a +3 bonus, NOONE would take the virtue, beacuse taking Affinity with the technique means you get a similar bonus, but you get it for that tech with all TEN forms. Would be foolish to use it.
After looking at it some more, im thinking a +6 or +7 bonus should be enough to make it interesting at least.
Dont forget, this concerns only 1 out of 50 combinations, puissant and affinity otherwise gives similar bonuses to 5 or 10 of those combinations. Thats far far superior for equal investments.
+8 bonus isnt out of the question, as it would still be around 2.5 times higher bonus than what puissant gives to at least 5 combinations.
Hrm. I thought I edited that post so that it didn't say that any more. Disregard what I said, because I looked at it again, decided I disagreed with it myself and changed it. I noted in the edit that the benefit is slightly offset by the extra time it takes to write the book and study up to the extra level.
Ah so it allows you to disregard any requisites if the primary art is the optimal one. Ok. Hmm not sure how good it is, will have to think about it.
The penalty is extremely minimal compared to the advantage it gives. As long as you have enough casting total you can basically use a lvl 10-15 spell and simply extend on a 1:1 basis with this mechanic to cast it as if it was a lvl 20/25/30/35 depending on circumstances.
Lets say you learn a PoF with range touch, level 15.
And have a casting total before die roll of 35, add +2 magnitudes for Sight range and +2 for Group and you suddenly have a level 35 spell for free. Or +1 Voice, +1 Sun and you have something to keep you warm and give you light all night long...
Basically, every single spell, just learn them at their most basic and lowest levels and then you can use them for almost anything, adding little or nothing to them if you need penetration or improving range/duration/target if penetration isnt a big deal.
WAY overpowered. And waaay better than the Major virtue Flexible Formulaic Magic.
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How effective it is really depends on the casting roll - there's no benefit if that doesn't exceed the level of the spell. With Flexible Formulaic Magic you get the benefits no matter what. If you do roll something like 20 over the level, that's 20 to be taken off Penetration in addition to the spell's level if you want to use the full amount to boost range and duration, making it all but useless against something with any sort of Magic Resistance. So in the case of the Level 15 Pilum of Fire with Range: Touch (which you'd have to invent, not learn), that roll of 35 means that you could be taking 15 off the Penetration for the level and then another 20 for a grand Penetration Total of 0 + Penetration Ability. Against any being with magic resistance I don't think that's particularly impressive.
Well, then. First of all, you'd have to re-invent all the spells you learned during apprenticeship to add the requisite, and every other spell you subsequently added to your repertoire would have to be invented, unless some other magus with the same Virtue had had the same idea and his lab texts had found their way into your library. Second, magi without the Virtue wouldn't find your lab texts particularly useful as they'd be screwed by the need to cast the spells with the requisites. Then the whole issue of the requisites themselves...
A spell only requires a requisite if it is essential to the basic function of the spell (in this case nothing is added to the basic level) or enhances it, adding at least one magnitude to the basic level. In other cases, where the extra effect is purely cosmetic. e.g. one that damps the target's smell, no requisite is added - see ArM5, p114-115.
The point is that you can choose freely how much you boost the spell and how much you leave for penetration, that is an extremely powerful advantage.
And, never again do you need to invent any but the base spell, because as long as your casting total before dieroll is enough to up the variables you need, there´s no point at all in doing so.
Which is why you make sure to have enough casting total for what you want and only learn the base level spells.
What it means is that you can learn a touch or personal range, individual target and momentary or concentration spell and then based on situation let it become a group target voice range OR sight range sun duration, INSTEAD OF BEING FORCED TO INVENT EVERY SUCH VARIATION on the spell.
You invent ONE spell instead of perhaps 5, for some spells the variations you could find useful might be 20 or more!
The problem is that you allow the tradeoff on an equal basis, even if you make it 1 magnitude change per 10 over it may still be too good, but at least then it doesnt allow a single spell to remove the need for any greater variant of the same spell as long as the effect part remains the same..
As a major virtue, it is still powerful. As a minor, its ourageously overpowered.
I do see what you mean. However, how is it possible to make sure you have the desired casting total? You either have to go back to the lab and get your Arts up to the necessary scores, which will be seasons and seasons of work and maybe not possible in some cases if you don't have a terrific library, or keep your fingers crossed and hope you roll more 1s and 9s than 2s and 0s. But if you think it should be a Major Virtue it's a valid opinion.
I’d have to agree that Adaptive Casting is, if nothing else, definitely Major. Even given that, it is much, much more powerful that the pre-existing Flexible Formulaic Magic – which, you’ll note, has the same trade-off for potency and only allows a one magnitude bump in one of Range, Duration, or Target. Were I SG, I probably wouldn’t allow Adaptive Casting at all. YMMV.
The fact of the matter is, older magi who find themselves in need of a spell with a higher range, duration, or target probably also have the arts to cast that spell with sufficient penetration for their needs – this trade-off mostly exists at lower levels of power. That really doesn’t in any way decrease the power of the virtue, except in special, usually temporary circumstances (like magi being fresh out of Gauntlet, where the use they got out of this virtue would have a larger luck element).
Having a bad library or having to spend time improving Arts are challenges all magi face, and those who have this virtue actually face those challenges much better because they can spend more time studying and less time inventing spells. Potentially a whole lot more, if they use mostly similar effects that increase in power more than they increase in breadth. My Fist of Shattering can also be used as Obliteration of the Metallic Barrier or End the Mighty Castle, or even a sort of a Pit of Gaping Earth, all with just one level ten spell.
It follows that, with this virtue, you never have to bother inventing spells that go beyond the base guideline levels, since you can always tack on the R/D/T levels at casting time. As was mentioned before, Flexible Formulaic Magic only allows a single, one-step adjustment (and it does affect the level, thus the penetration).
Now, if you also take Optimal Casting...
Cool, I can do just about anything with, say, level 10 PeIm spells, of which I might be able to invent two per season.
Eat your heart out, Diedne.