Why no love for the Tremere?

I still prefer if magi can have a focus. For me a focus is much more than a power tool to good casting totals: it is what defines your character concept OUTSIDE hermetic magic. having a focus makes your magic personal instead of "just another hermetic". I like focuses because they bring weirdness to something that is an art, not a science. Tremere could be perfectly fine with Puissant Certamen or not a focus in certamen at all but more along a close family ties + Mentor structure. Families are a bitch.

I also believe that Tremere are the ones that got the best rewrite in 5th edition. From antagonists that tend to be bad because they are just mean and your average power hungry lunatic to a house well worth playing or to have a saga built around one of their task forces.

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For Tremere, I like Mastered Certamen: All rolls associated with Certamen never botch because this is not a stressful activity for Tremere. This levels the playing field because Tremere don't have a massive power advantage over magi of the same age, but it also allows them to duel without any risk, where opponents might not want to risk Warping and botches and Twilight.

Yeah, they have a good house writeup, among my favorites.

My favorites...
Tremere: as discussed.
Mercere: They are flavorful and get some unique crunch. The Tribunal ruling allowing them to take magi's stuff seems inappropriate, though the magus in question was Ex Misc so maybe that was it. :slight_smile:
Tytalus: Now they're rebels with a cause! Fun stuff here.

Good with caveats...
Criamon: Not everyone's cup of tea, but well-written with good flavor and interesting crunch. Conversations among veterans of previous editions about nailing down chamber pots often begin here, however :/.
Bjornaer: Serviceable. The House was not changed, and the elaborations work fine to flesh things out. There is sufficient atmosphere to make the chapter interesting to read. Demographics become interesting.
Merinita: A little bit dry to read for a House that should be anything but. They do get some very cool stuff.
Ex Misc: If you like the traditions presented, great. I found them a mixed bag. I think that's appropriate, though, since Ex Misc shouldn't be better than everyone else.
Flambeau: I think I like the old version better, but this one's good too. (The Flambeau Primus' speech in the original OoH book is classic! So is the whole House writeup.)

Eh...
Bonisagus: As presented, these guys seem pretty incompetent, an obsolete House that's a historical footnote. I was not impressed. These guys don't deserve your apprentice.
Jerbiton: Not very flavorful to me. And the Imaginem section is a bit unexpected; interesting to read, but it's not what I imagine Imaginem to be.
Verditius: Some good crunch and toys to play with, but the history of Verditius' vendetta seemed silly to me. The House is more fleshed out, but less interesting to me.

Dishonorable Mention...
Guernicus: Spells that totally break the rules, human sacrifice... I suppose the chapter is useful so that people can know about Hermetic Law and how things work, but I find the specifics chosen here to be yucky.

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I like the idea of Tremere magi working together rather than being individually powerful, but I find Magic Focus is so powerful that depriving them of it really leaves them weak. I think the one glaring problem with the House write-up is that it failed to provide either alternative House Virtues, like House Flambeau had, or rules (or even customs!) of Hermetic cooperation that would allow the Tremere to compensate for their lack of Focus.

I prefer to just give the Tremere the Skilled Parens virtues; or an identical virtue with a different name, so that they could still take Skilled Parens. I feel this represents well the benefits of having the House look after your education. I'd also replace the complicated list of Trermere benefits and obligations with a flat 5 Build Point per year in House support and one season per year in learning - for young Tremere. Fluff can then explain how duties and obligations escalate as the PCs career advances, without resorting to setting rules for that. This makes being a young Tremere really useful, as you get a boost in starting and a little further boost down the road; and it uses the BP mechanic to ease-up on SG-player bargaining and set clear guidelines. Which is great, as in return you give your SG a very big story hook.

Overall - I love the Tremere plenty. :slight_smile:

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My personal take on the House write-ups:

The Good:
Tremere - makes the House a reasonable military-like organization, rather than a totalitarian evil one.
Tytalus - brings some philosophical depth and reasonable Tytalus characters, even if some bits are still insanely contrarian.
Criamon - manages to find an interpretation to the Enigma that is both crazy and interesting; I don't mind the chamber nailing. The paths are just meh, though.
Merinita - this is just a wonderful collection of excellent alternatives and even the interesting Nature Mysteries appendix; some misses (Faerie familiars, overly-powerful Mysteries...), but overall great.
Jerbiton - the passion for Byzantium shines through, and really makes me want to play a Jerbiton, cultured, magus.

Eh:
Mercere - insanely powerful and weird magical tradition, married to hit-and-miss ideas on the broader House. The Cult of Heroes is very close to a stroke of genius... but manages to lack substantive content.
Flameabu - the rip-off of chivalry left me cold. That's for mundanes, not magi. Still, lots of people like it, and it at least provides some greater bredth of character concepts.
Bonisagus - reasonable for its time, but superceded. Original Research is better replaced by Integration in hindsight, and research progress is difficult to reconcile with the Order's history. And the political Trianoma line was not well-supported; the Tytalus write-up does social interaction better.
Verditius - I really liked the House's mythology, but don't like Hubris and the Mysteries seem... well, not too great or too great. Having the Founder fall to Vandetta was just silly.
Guernicus - Serviceable Hermetic-law primer, and House structure. Bad non-Hermetic-rituals rules, makes far too big a deal out of the 'human sacrifice' thing. Some questionable law choices (money, unclear "transitionalist" position).

Not... so... good:
Bjornaer: The Inner Heartbeast and Great Beasts is brilliant, and the crunch on shapechaning reasonable, but the ancestor-cult makes no sense, the enmity with shapechangers is weird, the enmity with the witches of Pomerania doesn't work, and the numerous subdivisions in this already-small House doesn't work either. Overall - some great ideas, but the House as a whole doesn't work for me.
Ex Misc - I found the traditions totally unsuitable to be "major" ex misc traditions, and to be too disruptive to the setting. The general mechanics were just "eh".

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We see this again and again. My feeling here - and it is just a feeling - is that the problem is not with the Tremere, but with magical focus.
That it's simply too powerful for what it does.

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Can it be abused? Sure, but so can Book Learner, or almost any other virtue, for that matter. I think depriving an entire House leaves them (the House) weaker than they should be, but that's ok, in my opinion. They make up for that weakness, IMO, by a strong mission and fairly strict discipline.

Even the 5bp would need to scale based on saga. Very powerful in a spring covenant, not so much in autumn. Of course, your idea remains good; a small table based on saga power is plenty simple.

One riff on your idea is to package some minor virtues plus a story flaw into the House Virtue: Personal Vis Source (representing House support) plus Book-Learner (representing a senior magus guiding your study) plus a Mentor story flaw (your senior helps you in various miscellaneous ways but expects things of you) fairly encapsulates things.

I still would want to represent excellence in Certamen somehow.

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Tremere could still take Potent magic from Mysteries to get a focus like virtue. Or change the Certamen focus to Potent.

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I think you may have missed my point.
Any virtue is useful - they should be, you pay for them.
Almost every virtue can be abused - that's still not what I'm writing about.

But if a Magical Focus is such a wonderful, essential thing that people must have it, and discard one of the more interesting houses right out out of the box because they cannot have it, doesn't this indicate that it's not balanced with other, comparable virtues?
If it's purely a matter of flavour, surely they would take potent magic instead and be happy. Why must it be a magical focus?

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I think that magical focus, if weaker, wouldn't do what it does. A magical focus gives the character leave to nearly everything through their focus. If it were weaker then the sparrow magus would move their party across a river by building a bridge with creo herbam rather than a cloud of small brown birds, the oak tree focused character would send in a sparrow to spy on the rough looking sailors rather than an oak tree and so on. It would be just a bonus to be used when appropriate, not a license to use a specific theme for nearly everything.

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Personally, I like the Tremere magical focus in certamen. I really like it.

A more standard magical focus (e.g. in birds of prey, or in metals) is a great tool to create a very flavourful, idiosyncratic magus, and it heavily rewards creative thinking, but it's not a must-have Virtue. In my sagas, if we exclude characters who get it as a side effect (e.g. by being a Tremere, by having Mythic Blood, or by belonging to some particular mystery cult/magical lineage etc.), about one magus out of three has it. That's roughly on par with Affinities.

Without a magical focus outside of certamen, Tremere are not really weaker as a House. That's because a unique magical focus is much more useful to a lone magus than to one operating as a member of a well-coordinated organization. For example, if you are the only Tremere with a magical focus in birds of prey, lab texts of others will be mostly useless to you if you want to take advantage of the focus. Similarly, it's much harder to use standardized tactics, equipment etc. when every magus is a unique snowflake. Tremere are militarized and, like all good armies, they are standardized.

At the same time, a focus in certamen can be a great boon in dominating the hermetic landscape, both at the local level (disputes within the same covenant) and the global one. And it's as much a boon for the House as for the individual magus. So, magical focus in certamen certainly does not cripple Tremere, quite the opposite: it strengthens them at what they are supposed to be good at, and nicely matches the organization and philosophy of the House.

Of course, it does mean that Tremere are more suited for certain roles than for others. But that's true for most Houses. And ultimately, if you want a Tremere character who has a different magical focus, for the sake of playing a "rebel" (like a pacifist Flambeau, or a Bjornaer who specializes in taking many different animal shapes) it's very easy: let him join a mystery cult where he sacrifices his certamen focus as an initiation ordeal for some other focus.

Absolutely, I agree. Magical Focus seems the right level of power. Also, I don't have any problem with the Tremere having Certamen as their only and compulsory magical focus. A Tremere character is still perfectly capable of casting spells. The fact that his focus is Certamen just means that he is pushed into solving his problems /achieving things with Certamen. Much like a sparrow focused magi is pushed into solving his problems / achieving things with sparrows.

Which means that stories about Tremere characters tend to push towards Order focused stories that involve interaction between the PCs and other magi (even if the point of the interaction is to solve some Order external problem). The only reason I can see that this seems to be problematic in play, for some troupes, is that in such Order focused stories there is less of a role for magi who like to roam the countryside blasting things as they ramble with Pilum of Fire / Demon's Eternal Oblivion, which is a problem if that is the expected story role of the other PCs.

My problem with the Tremere Magical Focus: Certamen is that it breaks all of the rules for a magical focus and then on top of it breaks the ability of anyone in the House to have a useful magical focus (potency is close but not quite as good). It's a huge inconsistency, and that's why there is a lot of discussion about how the Magical Focus: Certamen hurts the Tremere player.

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A problem that I have with it, is that it makes certamen not fair in a way that the rest of the order wouldn't be OK with (as opposed to just working to the benefit of the older more well studied magi).

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So, there are issues with the focus from a story and mechanics perspective. Time for a replacement... :smiley:

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I don't see how the Tremere focus "breaks all of the rules for a magical focus" or is "a huge inconsistency". It doubles a magus's weaker Art, like any other magical focus. It just applies to certamen.

It certainly does not hurt the Tremere player. Every House has strengths and weaknesses. Usually, players design characters who focus on the strengths, like a Flambeau specializing in Ignem or a Bonisagus pushing the limits of magic theory. Sometimes, it's fun to play "against the odds", and play a Flambeau who wants to become the undefeated certamen champion of the Order, or a Bonisagus who wants to become the greatest crafter of magical items in the Order's history.

If you want to play a Tremere who does not want to leverage his certamen focus, it's like playing a Bonisagus who wants to focus on magical item creation. He'll be at a disadvantage against his Verditius bethren. But it's not a good reason to say "It hurts the Bonisagus player that his character can't have Verditius magic". If you want to play a character who's good at magical item creation, play a Verditius!

I think this is a better point, and I used to share this view. Certamen is supposed to be a non-violent alternative to Wizard's War. So, to be accepted by the Order at large as a "fair simulation" of a Wizard's War it should allow contestants a chance at winning proportional to the chance of winning a Wizard's War. That's why, for example, Certamen is "fairer" than a coin toss: it privileges the character with stronger magical powers, in terms of Arts, Penetration, Parma, and even vis availability. But it also seems to give an unfair advantage to the Tremere magus, giving him a higher chance of winning than what his sheer magical puissance would entail. So why does the Order accept it?

One of the reasons is that certamen does work well when neither or both of the contestants are Tremere. Another is that it's so much better than Wizard's War for all parties involved that a small level of unfairness may be a reasonable tradeoff. But there's another, more fundamental reason. A Wizard War against a Tremere is much nastier than a Wizard War against another magus of similar individual magical puissance, because the Tremere has a militaristic, united House to support him. The advantage that a Tremere gains in certamen accurately reflects the advantage he'd gain in Wizard's War against a magus of comparable individual puissance thanks to the organization of his House.

This is a very valid point, but it applies to virtually every type of character who specializes in a certain task, or simply has some story flaws. If you are the only member of the troupe who wants stories of type A, and the rest of the troupe wants stories of type B, there could be a problem.

Certamen is used to bully people in A LOT more cases than only Wizard Wars, so I do not buy that argument. it might be a good alternative to WW, but it is also used in civil cases (OoH version of civil cases, at least) to discuss stuff like property rights or anything that does not deal with breaks of the code, so it should be regarded as fair according to your power level.

Xavi

It is fair according to power level. But one House has decided to lessen their personal power to give them a better shot at winning these arguments. And it could be said that the implied threat of Certamen by a Tremere could allow compromise rather than winner take all. It is up to the SG to decided how they want to deal with it. IMHO, a Tremere who was using it to bully for personal gain might find that he loses House support if a WW is declared. The Tremere are very conscious of how people perceive them. I think they would go out of their way to not look like megalomaniacs.

Firstly, certamen isn't a field of magic. Secondly, it is overly broad, in that it applies to all Arts, not just a few, but all Arts, when engaged in Certamen. Finally, it adds nothing to labwork or spell casting unlike other foci do. And, just from a politics perspective, while it isn't impossible for a Tremere to lose at Certamen, the deck is certainly stacked in their favor, and so responding to Tremere challenges for Certamen, or challenging a Tremere to Certamen doesn't happen all that often, in fact, how often do troupes really engage in Certamen? At least other Houses have an alternate House Virtue, some several. House Tremere has none, and the one it does have, IME, doesn't add something that players will build on, generally.

Sure, but that's a different discussion.

Most Tremere are then disadvantaged, IMO.

There are examples of foci that apply to all Arts (e.g. a focus in damage). It is true that unlike any other magical focus the Tremere one applies to just one endeavor; a parallel would be a focus in Spontaneous Magic or in Ritual magic. So, it's slightly different, but it certainly doesn't "break all of the rules" or cause a "huge inconsistency".

In my sagas it happens all the time! Remember, an advantage in certamen does not depend on the other characters being willing to face you. Is there a slight doubt about who has the right to a vis source? To an apprentice? To the services of a certain craftsman? If one of the two parties offers certamen and the other declines, the declining party is giving up on the contested issue.

And while it's true that the Tremere have a sizable advantage, it's nothing insurmountable. Greater age, availability of (and willingness to spend) vis, powerful Faith, or simply manipulation of your adversary into a suitable choice of Arts can all make up for it.

The majority of other Houses only has one House Virtue.
And I've seen every Tremere player in my sagas squeeze the Certamen focus for all it's worth -- in true Tremere fashion. Perhaps your players aren't interested in playing most aspects of being a Tremere? I have the same problem with Jerbiton magi. Our troupe rarely plays them, and when they do they rarely focus on the "essential qualities" of being a Jerbiton.

It seems to me it's the same. You were suggesting that the Tremere focus hurts the Tremere player because it denies to his character some power available to others. I'm saying that according to the same argument, the unavailability of Verditius magic to Bonisagus magi should hurt Bonisagus players, because it denies to those characters some power available to others. I believe both arguments are fallacies. If a player wants to play the magic item crafter with all odds stacked in his favour, he should play a Verditius. If he wants to play a magic item crafter "against the odds", it can be nice to play a character from some other house. The player is free to make his choice.

From my experience, as I said, most Tremere PC take great advantage of their focus.