The Mysteries, Revised Edition, in it's chapter on Curious Common Magics (Ch. 4), included an Ability and several Hermetic Virtues that were commonly available.
Some of these - the Ability Art of Memory and the Virtues Performance Magic, Potent Magic, and Withstand Casting, and the Flaw Vulnerable Casting - made it into the Definitive Edition.
Some - the Virtues Spell Binding, Planetary Magic, and Vulgar Alchemy - did not.
Anyone know why? I really liked Planetary Magic and hate to see it go.
It's not that they've been abandoned. It was more about there being limits to how much could be included in DE. Compare the Virtues and Flaws. Potent Magic is extremely broadly useful, especially for Tremere with their Magical Focus. Spell Binding is so much more narrowly useful. Vulgar Alchemy would have been really cool to include, but it takes something like 5 pages and it's a pain to deal with without altering it some.
Now, I didn't make those decisions. Those were made before my work. But that tends to be the theme behind them: if the combination of narrowness and pages needed is likely to mean many pages ignored by most players, it probably didn't make it.
Those virtues aren't gone just because they didn't make into the Definitive Edition.
The DE rule book only replaces the standard rule book. All the other books are still there and part of the game - though a few things in them may have been changed by the DE.
As for why lots of stuff didn't make it into the DE? Simple - there are only so many pages in the DE, so there was no way to fit everything in there.
So all of 5th edition will still be "canon", except where it is contradicted or supplanted by ArMDef? Is that correct?
That's pretty much how I understand it, Donald.
Just so.
Except for some minor fixes here and there, the DE isn't really intended to change anything, it is mainly supposed to be a better version of the core rule book.
Yes. And hopefully the adjusted stuff all hits the errata, so it really doesn't change anything.
From how I understand it, it just means that it wasn't necessary to change/errata them, and they weren't considered 'core' enough that everyone needed them to be in the main book.
Does that make sense?
Yup. Thanks!
That is correct.