I can’t speak to 4e, never played it. My apologies for not specifying 5e in my original question.
I think it’s pretty well accepted in the forums that you can invent multiple spells in a season.
It is pretty clear in 5th edition that you can conduct multiple activities of the same type in the same season with a high enough lab total, as covered by the “Multiple Laboratory Activities” section on p.102.
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The rules say the following on creating a lab text
You produce a Laboratoty Text as you create an
effect, and this requires no extra time
So it becomes a matter of when you say the effect is “finished.”
I’d personally say no- I wouldn’t allow a magus to finish the effect before the season is over and thus produce a lab text. But that’s less because I think such a rule is unbalanced and more that I feel the effect is created at the end of the season.
Perhaps I’d allow a magus produce it 10 days before a season ends using their “break days”
I recall the rules vaguely saying somewhere that multiple seasonal activities are simultaneous so one doesn’t happen before the other, but I can’t find the statement. Might be unique to the sahirs.
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Is it really that unbalancing?
I mean, in the example I gave, you could make 2 of an item the first season instead of 1.
Then, assuming no improvement in lab total, you could make 3 of the item every season after that. So, in 2 seasons, you’re either making a total of 4 or 5, depending on the interpretation. Is that really game breaking? To the extreme, in 10 seasons you’re making a total of 28 or 29.
You cite something as being in ArM5, page 103 in your other reply, but that’s not anywhere in ArM5.
And it doesn’t say anything about multiple seasonal activities being simultaneous in ArM5.
And allowing the 10 days to be used at the end of the season kind of kills the “astrological” needs of the item argument, vs the RAW that the magus needs to be in sync with the seasons, IMHO.
In any case, thank you for your opinion.
At the end, it is just another angle on how powerful you want your mage to be in your saga, and how quickly you want them to grow in power. Because at the end, this question about creating an item using a labtext while doing to research is about saving one season.
And we know that time is most valuable currency for a magi. Vis, books can be purchased/acquired, but time is the limiting factor. So allowing such things is about slightly increasing the power growth of the magi.
Once you are aware of that, it is easy to find the answer you want or you need for your saga. It is one of this thousand of area where the rules can be interpreted one way or another. So instead of trying to find the absolute truth - which you won’t find in this forum since there is always several (usually contradicting) opinions - it is more about weighing the consequences of allowing this practice in your game.
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Fair enough
Lots of thoughts. (Underlines to make my points easier to find, not for emphasis or anything)
As always, YSMV, but everyone says that. I would not allow it, I don’t think you’re doing anything terribly wrong by allowing it - just take a moment to look at the implications and knock-on effects. But the game rules do strongly imply that isn’t how it works.
I like the mystique of lab work being seasonally locked, and the game rules do support it heavily. If you shift it so that the lab work can be done in short time (Lab total 60, making something that requires 20 lab total will only take 1 month) then your seasonal time becomes a chaotic mess because magi will try to min-max their seasonal expenditures. Really, it adds nothing to the game in my opinion, but you may like it.
Books can be read with 29 days of lost time with no loss of quality.
Labs can work with 10 days of time lost without penalty.
Adventure experience, inexplicably, actively requires the entire season no matter what. This is clearly a game balance reason.
These could, theoretically allow you to do (non adventure xp) things around those times - if you read two books, back to back, that theoretically gives you 58 days of free time to use for other things, you workaholic. (Comically, you could ram a book in there at 2/3 Quality.)
Now, that’s the reason why I personally don’t like the idea of fast-tracking seasonal work. Here’s the game-rules logic I found:
The argument is, basically, ‘I should be able to change from invention to lab text easily’. I would personally consider going from ‘Item Invention’ to ‘Lab Text use’ to be a shift in lab activity, and therefore, a distraction. With something taking 1/2 a season, you give each task ~45 days of distraction. By the lab distraction rules (p102), this makes it unfeasable.
However, if you miss eleven days or more, your Lab Total is penalized by 10 points, plus two points for every day over ten that you miss, up to a maximum penalty of 30 when you miss twenty days. If you miss more than twenty days, you cannot perform a laboratory activity at all, as you lose your synchronization with the cycles of the heavens.
The penalty for rushing things is not a loss of percentage, but a flat rate with a hard cutoff. Again, I don’t see a problem with you making a house rule to allow shifting from creating an item to re-creating an item, as long as you don’t let them juggle around to other things, but I think its obviously a house rule rather than an interpretation of canon.
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The argument is, basically, ‘I should be able to change from invention to lab text easily’.
Per the rules (in various places, under various headings), anytime you do something, you’re inventing it (although you only get inventive genius if you’re not working from a book), even if you’re learning it from another magus, or working from a book. The teacher and the book just make it easier.
With something taking 1/2 a season, you give each task ~45 days of distraction. By the lab distraction rules (p102), this makes it unfeasable.
Working in your lab isn’t a distraction. You can do multiple things in the lab in a season as long as they’re the same TeFo and the same type of project (with some exceptions such as longevity rituals).
Page 103, last sentence under Distractions (emphasis is mine):
If you miss more than twenty days, you
cannot perform a laboratory activity at all, as
you lose your synchronization with the cycles
of the heavens.
You can work on multiple things if they’re the same type and same TeFo, per the rules. The question here (which is up to each troupe to decide) is that if you’re making something other than a spell (because once you know a spell, you wouldn’t invent it again), can you take advantage of the lab text from the first iteration if you have the lab total to make another with the text in the same season. IMHO, the quote above is about the magus’s link with the seasons, not the link of with the season.
Anyway, I appreciate your opinion and understand where you’re coming from. I’m old, this is the third AM saga I’ve played in, and neither of the previous two have gone on long enough for me to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish. I joined the game already in progress and one of the players already had piercing shaft of wood with a mastery of 4, I think, and now his mastery is 7 (flawless magic, and dumping XP into it) and he casts 8 every round. So, we already have to either have runs that don’t involve fighting, have enough targets, have tougher targets, have targets with immunity, to make things interesting without making it a grind. I think spell mastery should be limited to your magic theory, or intelligence, or something, but that horse is already out of the barn.
And in any case, it’s not that big a deal. It’s one extra item made, if they were simple items you wanted to hand out to grogs, you might spend 3 or 4 seasons making them, and in the end you either have 7 or 8 after 3 seasons, or 10 or 11 after 4. It amounts to 1 extra item, I’m not going to sweat it either way the troupe decides.
Woof. 
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As I said, it is not particularly unbalancing in my mind.
Rather, the lab text is created after the effect is created.
And the effect created at the end of the season- or at the very least, I wouldn’t let a magus cast the spell until the season ended.
I don't think people are making a Gamist argument that it's unbalanced, they are making Simulationist arguments about how seasonal activities “ought” to work.
I don't have a strong opinion. But I do disagree with Raccoonmask, I’m afraid: I think if you're devising spells or enchanted items, you can use a combination of Lab Texts and original work freely.
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From the ArM5 102: You produce a Laboratory Text as you
create an effect, and this requires no extra time.
From ArM5 91: Time between stories is recorded in seasons,
each of which is enough time to accomplish a
single long-term laboratory activity. Each of
those activities is described in this chapter.
Then there are subheadings for the long-term laboratory activities, Creating a Laboratory, Arcane Studies, Fixing Arcane Connections, Vis, Spells, Magical Enchantments, Longevity Ritual. By “single long-term activity” they mean one of these, and some of them can be done multiple times in a season as long as your lab total his high enough, such as “Spells” or “Magical Enchantments.”
No where, can I find it in the rules, that an effect is created at the end of a season. And if you’re creating multiple spells, are you saying that they’re all going to be done at the end of the season, simultaneously? Isn’t that kind of silly, especially if you’re writing up texts? “Okay, it’s the end of the season, time to dot the Is and cross the Ts of the lab texts for the 3 spells I invented.” Yes, you can’t go out adventuring more than 10 days (or 20 days with some penalty). But if you work all season, and then leave to go somewhere 20 days before the end of the season, and have the lab total to complete your project, are you saying that the spell or enchantment isn’t done until the end of the season, when you might be on a ship 100s of miles from your lab?
If that’s how you want to play, sure, that’s fine. But it seems silly to me, IMHO.
Lab activities seem to take an entire season, as it talks about working the remainder of the season in the case you miss days.
You may miss up to ten days from any lab-
oratory activity, and make up the time by work-
ing harder during the remainder of the season
Covenants provided more information on this
The standard lab routine assumes
that a magus works in the lab for ten hours
a day, six days a week. On work days, this
leaves precious little time — only a couple
of hours — for other activities, apart from
eating and sleeping. On his rest day, a
magus might engage in the writing of
letters or diaries, socializing, attending to
household tasks, engaging in noble pas-
times such as hunting, worshiping (if he is
religious), or simply relaxing or meditat-
ing. Occasionally, important lab tasks that
cannot be interrupted require a magus to
skip one or more rest days, so that he
will have about ten rest days in total in
a typical season. Up to ten work days
can be missed in a season (in any order)
without penalty, provided that the lost
time is made up by working on rest days.
However, a magus who is absent from his
lab for more than ten days in a season suf-
fers the penalties to his Lab Total given in
ArM5, page 103
If you could create an effect before the season ends, I feel you wouldn’t be limited to 10 days.
Based on all this, I’d say the effect- or whatever else the labratory produces- comes at the end of the season.
Generally- yes. The magus needs to synchronize their labwork with the stars. If they’re not there, things may go wrong.
Mind you, the horoscope of the various aspects of the labratory is likely relevant following the Principle of Astrology. It is plausible the magus needs to take advantage of specific dates everyweek to do effects, and one of those dates may well be during that 20 day period.
In that sense, the magus isn’t truly finished with the project until the stars turn.
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Is this ridiculously unbalancing? No.
Also, about balance. It’s never been a key concern of Ars Majica. If one was so inclined, a just out of gauntlet magi could cast 5 group target Incantations of lighting, while flying and invisible, killing hundreds a minute. That sounds Overpowered…..
If the troupe wants to let it work, great. Troupe say no, there is logic to it.
So you’re saying that the the magus takes the lab text on the ship with him and dots the last i and crosses the last t at the end of the season?
It is plausible the magus needs to take advantage of specific dates everyweek to do effects, and one of those dates may well be during that 20 day period.
That doesn’t make sense. If it’s lab work, they need to be in the lab. Either they can leave (meaning the lab work is done) or they can’t because lab work needs to be finished. You can’t do lab work on a ship without a lab. IMHO.
Anyway, we have to agree to disagree. I understand your points, I just don’t agree with them, but I appreciate the input. Sometimes I change my mind, sometimes I don’t. 