This seems to be essentially the same point to me. You disagree with a purely mechanical approach to character creation, favoring rules that are reflected in the narrative (diegetic rules). I agree with this. But, differently from what you seem to imply (possibly based on your experience), I don't really think most of the players have this cynic approach to character design. At least, not your average Ars player (my DnD players, OTOH...).
At the same time, I can't say I'd see a problem if most Ars players had this cynical approach for character generation. After all, the game isn't about who the characters were before apprenticeship or during apprenticeship, it's about the magi they become in the course of the saga. It's ok to have some grey areas in their backstory if they are not important.
Of course, if your game starts with pre-apprenticeship characters then the game is about who they where and how they became magi, but then we wouldn't see the issues you are talking about anyway.
Funny, I see the opposite. Puissant is simple and streamlined, just add 2 (or 3) to your totals. Affinity is complex(ier) and has weird interactions.
But to be honest I don't think affinity is that complex. No.
The perceived problem (from a mechanical standpoint) isn't, in my view, about Affinity, of about the way Elementalist or Secondary Insight are written. These rules are quite simple.
The problem is the way Advancement Total, Source Quality and xp relate to each other. It's advancement itself that is sometimes difficult to parse.
Trying to solve the issue by changing Affinity treats the symptom, not the disease.
And IMO the disease isn't anything serious. It's just a case o bad posture. Correct your posture (i.e. change wording in the corebook to clarify and emphasize things) and your pain will subside. No need to remove a vertebrae.
The pace of the saga, which is actually what you are addressing here, shouldn't be up to guessing. It should be clearly and openly discussed between players and GM so that the players can design appropriate characters (in the same way that everything else about the saga should be discussed). And while this (discussing the characteristics of the saga with the troupe) is clearly stated in the corebook it doesn't even qualify as Ars advice IMO, it's RPG 101 advice. Every group, playing any system, benefits from this approach.
So this is less a problem with ongoing vs. upfront benefit and more a problem of lack of communication.
I like the idea of having lots of virtues for variety / tinkering. Like:
Affinity: gain +3 XP in Ability / Art.
Source Focus: gain +3 XP when studying from a particular source (Book, Vis / Practice, or Teacher)
Teaching Focus: grant +3 XP when teaching someone in a particular way (Book, created Significanto, or Teaching), or when teaching a particular Ability / Art.
I think a flat bonus works better than a % bonus. And I would personally further add that you can only benefit from a SINGLE XP-boosting virtue per season. And calculate max/expected XP gains in the setting and power-levels with these rules in mind.
For much the same reason, I also like having Puissant as distinct from Affinity around. Variety and tinkering in character creation / advancement. However, for Arts, I much prefer the Potent Magic Mystery.
The two big issues I've seen (somewhat personally in sagas and often on discussions of building characters) are that sometimes you have players who are both creating characters but end up vastly disparate in effectiveness [ Which sometimes leads to bad feels], or virtues feeling somewhat...same-y.
I've seen complete covenants where nearly every magus had 2 art affinities, either Affinity or Puissant MT, Skilled Parens, a major or minor focus, and Book Learner.
Maybe that's not so terrible if everyone chooses different Arts to specialize in. If the players are new to the game, going with something simple but effective might even be rather good, especially compared to semi-randomly chosen alternative setups. It does get boring if everyone chooses the same personality traits like Bookworm +2 Lab Rat +3...
If the duration of a saga extends over many seasons, virtues that accumulate benefits every season get better, and often eventually eclipse virtues that provide an immediate benefit during character creation.
If the duration of a saga extends over very few seasons, virtues that provide cumulative future benefits are virtually worthless, because there is no future.
Many (most?) campaigns are intended to last a long time but do not. Some campaigns are intended as short mini-series, but turn into something longer. What happens to any specific campaign is a matter of guesswork, and even the best communication can fail in the face of evolving circumstance.
As an aside, I see game rules as a tool to facilitate communication.
Sorry to offend you! Studying from vis is so expensive for what you get, even with the virtue, that I am surprised magi can afford to do it very often.
I'm curious how often your character got to use this virtue, and what circumstances lavished him with such vis to spend!
It also holds quite a draw for my play style where I love "gambling with the character" mechanics and despite this I would never choose that virtue over any of the other bonus to seasonal study options. Which is not to say I have studied raw vis very often as in most campaigns my characters have not advanced to where their books have been exhausted. In a recent campaign I did use it for two seasons in a row but a number of things were true for me to choose that method:
I needed to raise my Vim score as fast as possible
I had already exhausted our good xp source for it (a root/primer)
My score was currently pretty low, Studying from vis only cost me 1 or 2 pawns of a type we had massive quantities of due to a recent visit to the Midsummer Faire in the Alps and all transactions being paid out in Vim vis
With our aura I had about a 70% chance of getting at least as much xp as the book that would do me any good and a small chance of exploding and doing far better
Personally, I think Free Study should either provide a much larger bonus each time you study from vis or be rolled into Independent Study as Studying from vis is so rare and Independent Study provides incentive for not being a boring bookworm of a magus. I don't say this from any "balance" perspective but the fluff of both virtues is almost the same, (paraphrase) "you learn best when figuring things out on your own and +3 is not enough of a bump to excuse the cost of the virtue or vis cost of studying from vis. I also much prefer Apt Student to boring Book Learner because it also provides incentive to find tutors and seek out RP or stories. That said, I fully understand why book Learner is a favorite among players of Ars Magica.
Dunno, may not be useful. I seem to be pretty risk-seeking in my Ars character generation in a way I don't see many others are. But then magical botches and Twilight in particular are the best part of the mechanics of the game, IMO.
Study Bonus stacks with any of those methods if you make it a apply by the narrative. Read your Herbam book in the Forest; Get taught Auram on top of a windy mountain; Study Vim vis in a powerful Magic Aura.
Definitely. And very often, a book will be nice to bring along for a field trip. But sometimes, you know, you don't want a book in the rain, in a violent whirlwind, or in the middle of an inferno.
In a fast paced saga you cover many years per session. In this case, ongoing benefit pays better. In slow paced you play each season and things are slow to advance, so upfront offers better return.
Duration of the saga would be about how many sessions (not seasons) will the game last, and can fluctuate severely. The pace, OTOH, is much more constrained once everyone has agreed upon it. Duration has little impact in the advancement of the characters (which is more closely related to the pace).
Didn't really offend.
To be fair, I barely use it. And I picked it "just because". But then, there are virtues I use even less.
I remember that the first time I read the virtue I thought you rolled three dice when studying instead of one (read without care) and with a quick math it didn't seem too broken for me. It's powerful (you would average around 15xp + aura), but it's also costly and has the risk of botching.
But I'm also risk-seeking in general (possibly because I'm usually the GM, so when I play, a character is "just one more character"? Idk).
Or cost much less. I can totally imagine the Theban Tribunal sharding magi who waste vis on study. We'd see more studying from vis with different rules.
People have different tastes! I dislike botches/fumbles in any game. Such mechanics makes good encounter and story design much harder for GMs, but also makes bad storytelling much easier, because it is so easy to depend upon the inevitable fumbles to drive events. I particularly dislike Twilight, because it starts off with a botch and ends up creating an interrupt in which a personal story event must be resolved before that character can return to play, potentially taking that character out of play for the rest of the saga due to a fundamentally uninteresting cause. But my mileage varies, and I recognize that what for me is a bug is a beloved feature for others.
I don't see why what someone does with their vis should anyone's business but the owner of the vis. How do you think archmagi learn their primary art anyway? Roomfulls of tractatus?
To add to Temprobe's point which is the main point around vis usage, I also don't see the Theban Tribunal, in particular, as viewing study from Vis as any sort of problem to earn a shard or even merely social stigma. The availability of books on a particular art are likely much less than in other tribunals due to the language issue and how only most Theban magi seem to use Greek as their primary language of magical writings. Smaller pool of writers, fewer folks collecting books from far away (read "in Latin"), an inability by many within the Tribunal to read or translate the works of writers from elsewhere, etc. This also means books in Latin are less available for those magi who use Latin as their primary magical language. Add to this the supposed glut of vis in the Theban Tribunal and I think they likely see it as less wasteful than elsewhere within the Order.
Now, if a Magus is granted vis by the Tribunal to perform a particular task and instead they use it for study, that is a completely different issue and would beg censure in the form of a token.
