Apologies in advance for the pedantry, but at this point I can't resist.
That's not a typical magus. That's an average magus. A typical magus is the one who never writes anything worth reading, because, among all the classes of vain authors, good authors, once in a lifetime omnibus authors, productive authors, failed authors, and non-authors, he represents the largest class of them all.
Please, don't take this out of context. Personally, my preference is a variety of books and variety of challenges in obtaining the books you want, with the result that you do not get the game mechanically ideal books in most of the arts, and will often have to study vain summæ also past primer level.
The flat XP award is for me the second best, to be preferred when books are so abundant that PCs never study vain books, or even rank-and-file sound books. Filling the saga with munchkin authors, there is no need every to study below Q14. Your L8Q18 is better, but only a little better, and since they only account for 30 seasons (about 24 seasons post-gauntlet) they do not make an awful lot of difference.
With such book abundancy, everybody is a good reader anyway, and the generalist still only get's 36xp out of two seasons with the L8Q18, while the tractatus reader gets 17xp. Now the difference is truly negligible. Your generalist looses nothing worth talking about.
I like the books system because individual books can be presented as treasures with a significance of their own, or trade goods worth bartering for. If books are traded mail order at fixed list prices through the redcaps, they cease to have narrative value, and then, and only then, should they be replaced by a simpler system.
I was working on a premise of there not being a large amount of tractatus, or is the plural tractatii. Anyway.... If there is a huge amount of books, I see how summae get overwhelmed by tractatus, and the whole XP balance collapses.
When there is the premise of that huge library, it is also self perpetuating.
"I'll have 4 of those 8 Rego tractatii and you can have 4 of our 8 Muto tractatii. Each of our scribes will make copies when we aren't studying them. See you in a year," With a lot of books, they'll be swapped freely.
Hi,
If the specialist doesn't have Affinity, he likely isn't much of a specialist!!
But I think you have it backward about who gains from flat xp.
What really makes a character a specialist in AM5 is what he starts out with, not what books he reads later, though of course that can help. I fully expect a real specialist who starts off with, say, Te17+3, Fo17+3, to have a hard time finding useful summae in that specialty. In a saga with few and bad tractatuseses, he has the option to just shrug and either learn spells within his specialty (because a specialization becomes even more awesome with spells that leverage it), create items within his specialty (likewise), do other stuff like train apprentices or find a familiar, or simply round out his Arts by reading those 'vain' summae.
In an important sense, a specialist is better off than a generalist, because he starts with 0 in most Arts and thereby gets full benefit from all those L8Q18 summae in your saga. Conversely, the generalist who started with a bunch of Arts at 5-10 has utterly wasted those points.
Flat xp therefore greatly strengthens the generalist, because his initial outlay of xp on Arts is never wasted.
Anyway,
Ken
Hi,
Following up on flat xp, and I'll use 10xp/season since that has been my standard recommendation since almost the very beginning of AM5.
Geoffrey the Generalist has Art5 and wants to improve it. He does not have an Affinity so gets 10xp/season... except he's a generalist so reads at +2Q instead (because generalists also get vps). He studies for one year and now has Art10, almost Art11.
Spartacus the Specialist has Art20. He has an Affinity because of course he does, for 15xp/season. He studies for one year and now has Art22, almost Art23.
That's not nearly as good progress, even accounting for an Affinity!
And if he was an archmagus with Art30, he would study for a year and still not quite reach Art32. In the same time, he could take an Art from 0 to 8, with a few xps left over.
So specialists suffer from diminishing returns anyway.
Anyway,
Ken
Anyone who is writing a high quality level 20 summae will likely have written 8 tractatus on their way to being able to write a level 20 summae- maybe only 7, but in any case, there will be still more who aspire to writing level 20 summae but never develop that level in the art, yet still will have written tractatus. My rough estimate would be 20 tractatus for every level 20 summae.
I can totally see the aging archmage who never bothered to write anything until very late in life, and being a reputed master of his art, he feels that he should write it down. Especially if there is no branch for the art.
This might well lead to some L20+ Q3- summæ. Or he might seek out a mercurian to boost his Com, just to be able to write L20+ Q11. I can totally see both happening. With twilight threating at every corner, there is no time to write tractatus for practice first.
I can totally see this happening with a Good Teacher too. The fact that you are good at something does not mean that it is what you want to do with your life. Besides, the Good Teacher could dedicate his life to apprentices, until he realises that there is a book only he can write.
sure it can happen, but it won't be the typical, and there will be others who still write.
The bigger issue is generations of books-
when Bonisagus and the first generation of apprentices had no books to study from - assum they spent 1 season every 2 years studying their favored art from vis, over 100 years is 50 seasons- assuming level 5 auras were more pletiful per magus at the time give 10.5 xp per season so 525 xp in the art: so they get to level 31, write a level 15 summae, and produce 6 tratcatus, maybe including other authors get 15 tractatus total on that art. Next generation comes along, reads the level 15 summae and the 15 tractatus for 285 xp before they start experimenting...so they get a bit higher level, and write a new generation of books at a higher level for the quality, and leave behind still more tractatus. Now the old summae are relatively worthless- trade them out further into the hinterlands or pampilset, the point is only the last generation or two of books will truly be being traded. But the tractatus of previous generations will continue on, since they maintain their value for study (economically they lose value as they have reduced scarcity). so instead of 20 tractatus per final book you might well be looking a something more like 50 to 100 sound tractatus per art...
Studying from Vis should have been prevalent for hundreds of years in the order, perhaps for a good half of the order's timeline, until they established a solid network of covenants, redcaps, portals (only a few of them), sound summae, etc. But magic auras should have been stronger overall & raw Vis more plentiful as well.
The truth of the matter is, that even with those assumptions in mind & even with a mistrustful order, the Arts should have been progressed way more than the Core book & even Covenants implies. Covenants refer to that level 41 summa as something that has not been created yet but maybe one day will (by the PCs, of course). That level 41 summa is nothing more than a level 40 Art but with Affinity applied over it (Art level 49).
And yet, even the greatest summae ever created, pales before Teaching.
Someone with good teacher/puissant teaching + 5 communication (via a ritual) teaching a magus with apt student & affinity with that Art is worth more than 50 exp/season. More than double the experience, than the best summae ever written or will be.
So...The Order of Hermes has all the tools in its hands to produce uber-specialists with unprecedented results in the Arts or Lab, but for some reason, it hasn't (yet). And with the exception of Caitlin, almost no one lives for more than 165 years or so. Even though CrCo specialists could produce Lab Totals in excess of 200.
NPCs throughout the editions of ArM are consistent, nobody has extremely high Arts & nobody lives for more than a century & a half or thereabouts. The few of them that do, they are mostly secluded in a winter covenant with little motivation to move forward or use their powers for much at all, even though a covenant of elder magi could probably demolish a King's army with ease. Take as an example Grimgroth or Gwidion (the tree magi), they are but husks of their former self seeking only to be forgotten/left at peace in their final hours.
And why is that?
Because they behave like human beings in an extremely harsh & secretive/misinformed medieval setting. They don't choose their virtues, they get discouraged, they fail, they abandon their projects, etc.
The ArM writers keep it real & consistent as it can be.
Perhaps too "real" but it is necessary as to not break immersion.
So, if you ask me, what is the normal exp/year a magus should have?
I am going below even canon in that regard, I personally consider 25 exp/year more appropriate than thirty.
And those high-quality books don't just fly around in every covenant.
Hi,
As soon as someone has an Art score of 5, he can write a useful book about it.
This will have happened very early in the Order.
It doesn't take very many books before authors can write two useful books about an Art, and that's assuming they mostly read books.
Adventure xp is a better, perhaps even safer way to get xp than studying vis, especially if said adventure nets vis or some other benefit.
As for "behaving like human beings," real human beings who write books tend to want people to read them. That's true now, and it was true then. It's true that they also want to retire. But Grimgroth's late life behavior is what it is because it was written for the Demon Edition of AM, in which he was changed from an outgoing Jerbiton to something rather different.
As for consistency, canonical AM5 writeups are relatively consistent (in the way you describe) because they were all written using the same rules, not because these rules reflect any particular deeper truth, except the truth that if you're going to publish sample characters, it's helpful to adopt a consistent set of rules.
Anyway,
Ken
the other thing is this- many of us have had the players who seem to explode every roll. They can easily get 8 1s when rolling a stress die. So the idea is that such a character has never existed before the PCs? Because 8 1's would mean that studying from vis would net anywhere from 512 to 2364 experience, which means jumping to anywhere from level 31 in a season to level 68, if this was their first time studying the art. For a character who rolls these sorts of scores regularly having arts over 50 would be expected, yet we are supposed to believe it has never happened?
I think your players are using charged dice.
The mean of a stress roll is 5.75 for a reason. if you have a character rolling for Vis xps for a 100 sesons and at the end he is getting way way more than 575 + 100 x aura, + virtues - flaws, then tell him to use another dice.
Anyway: this full thread made me notice that Vis Studying is in fact something quite useful if you want to master an art. As you'll need more vis when your art is higher and more vis comes with more botch chances, the strategy for the expert-wannabe should be 1. start with Summa you can get XPs from, 2. Study from Vis while you pile up useful Tractati, then read the Tractati once vis becomes too dangerous, moving back to Vis study when you don't have more Tractatus to read.
This is a fair point. Let's investigate it.
The probability of 8 consecutive 1s is 10^(-8), i.e. 1 in 100 million. If we assume that the previous figure of 6000 Hermetic magi ever alive, and a bit optimistically assume that they have studied vis once per year for a hundred years, we have 600,000 rolls. The probability to generate that string of 8 consecutive 1s at least once in the history is about ½%. Yes, it is reasonable to assume that it never happened.
However, to generate 500+xp it suffices to roll 6 1s and 8+ The probability to do that is 30 times higher, and the compound probability is more like 15%+. It is still more likely that it did not happen, but it suddenly looks plausible.
Give the order another century, and you'll see that it does not increase much because now the Order has turned to books. 
But, it is clearly worth asking if we want to accept the possibility that a magus goes from 0 to 30+ in a season, or even to 20ish, or if we want to cap the SQ. Reluctant as I am to accept quick fixes, I would rather allow it, but expect a good narrative when it happens, such as a mind-boggling divine intervention. I would even propose coupling such advance with a new flaw, e.g. Plagued by Divine Angel, «now we gave you this Gift, and you had better use it well. Remember we can take it away too.». Of course, that may feel intrusive, but I find that better than quick-fixing RAW.
And to close the loop...
Ouroboros described the best strategy to optimise levelling while minimising botch risk.
So we can consider two cases of magi (assuming that both are keenly aware of the risk inherent to vis study):
The second one will use 5 to 6 pawns of virtus per season of research, thus roll 5 to 6 dices in case of botch. With 5 dices, there is 59 % chance of getting one 0 - confirming the botch, 33% of getting two 0s (thus risking Twilight) and 7.3% of getting 3 0s - I dropped the other cases, as insignificant.
So to sum up, for each season of vis study, there is 5.9 % of getting a real botch, 3.3% a double botch and 0.7% to get a triple botch (1 chance out of 10 to get a 0 on the stress roll, followed by the various probability for 0(s) on the following dices).
All in all, about 10% of getting some form of botch, including 4% of a Twilight episode. Much more likely than a string of 6 or 8 1s...
Going from 20 to 30 requires 255 xp, assuming an average of 5.75 + aura of 5, that's 11 xp per study season, so 23 seasons. The mage will have to be very lucky not to have a single botch or Twilight episodes. Having an affinity will reduce the number of seasons around 16 - still very likely to have one or two botches.
It would have cost more than 100 paws of the Art specific virtus.
Since a lab is not required to study virtus, the mage could look for a higher aura to get a few extra points, but finding a high aura location, with safety and protection granted by a covenant is not so common or cheap.
I will refrain to comment on the costs of virtus or the availability of tractatus since it has been well established that it is highly Saga dependent and opening this can of worms will only results in lengthy discussion 
You forget the familiar's golden cord. BTW. This is the reason why there are no Bjornaer art specialists 
You also assume that the magi are not only fully aware of the botch risk, but also the availability of books in the future. I think many magi will read before turning to vis, in the hope that they can find more books later. As a player/SG, I want them to be wrong most of the time, but that's a different matter.
My demonstration set the base line.
There are many ways to optimise a specialist. Ways that only a PC will be designed, by a player who planned his character over a 50-60 years evolution or more:
This why PCs have a chance to outperform NPC characters - and it is good design that the game left room for the PCs to shine, because otherwise, in a 400+ years old Order, there would not be much space for a mage to have a chance to stand out from his predecessors.
Sure. PCs can be designed with innate traits, and that's why they excel.
The familiar is an IC choice OTOH, so any magus can choose to find one before embarking on a long and risky venture of vis studies. That's why the familiar should be part of the baseline
I have had two players who had this affinity with dice and they were decades apart. Both were rolling my dice. It happens. The fact is that reality does not strictly model based on statistical probabilities, because sometimes the exceptional simply happens. When you have a world structured on the idea that it doesn't, the world is broken.
The exceptional does happen. The reality we live in is as improbable as anything.
That does not change the average, or suggest that the Order should have accumulated much more knowledge than statistically expected. It just means that a ridiculously over-powered world is possible, something which only matters if you actually wants to play therein.
In "The First Law" trilogy by Joe Abercrombie, Archmage Bayaz says at some point, that he is at his most knowledgeable at this point in his life & yet magic overall is weakening...
Perhaps, if we take this in ArM terms, raw Vis & high-strength Auras are fewer than ever & magi are resorting to books in trying to cover the lost ground.
That perhaps would explain the reduction in experience from 3 Die to 1 
regarding studying from Vis.