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This is the second entry in this category where I share thoughts on various topics. Be aware, there will be rambling, asides, digressions, and wherever chasing the white rabbit takes me.
This particular topic comes up from time to time and like most things, I have opinions about it. Much of this is based on looking at how a body of knowledge develops in the world and how you gain access to it. Practicing a skill often only gets you so far as this doesn't necessarily force you to learn something new. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
Adepts training themselves is an interesting topic, though never discussed in the text throughout the editions. It is a topic of interest because it bypasses roadblocks, and implies an inherent level of mysticism and connection to magic that can be distinctly appealing. From a purely practical standpoint, there’s the argument someone had to be the first to get there. Rank 10 skills and Fifteenth Circle didn’t come out of nowhere. Well, depending on where you think Disciplines came from, they could have been given fully formed.
The problem with how to address this within the setting is everyone is standing on the shoulders of those before them. The knowledge of a Rank 10 skill was built over generations of practitioners making discoveries, then sharing that knowledge with others. Slowly building the abstraction we use ranks to represent. If someone doesn’t show you what the more advanced techniques are and you don’t have access to training materials, this is a long, laborious and potentially impossible task. You are effectively reinventing the wheel without knowing anything about what a wheel is.
Disciplines present a similar difficulty. If they were developed rather than gifted, this means they were the product of many who came before. Those teachings spread and became true, shaping the Discipline and what it represents. A scholar in the text The Adept’s Journey: Mystic Paths posits Paths may be precursors to Disciplines. This is rightly refuted with the statement there is nothing to support the hypothesis and it falls into the realm of things impossible to test.
Where does this leave us in the context of self-training within the setting? It indicates it may not realistically be possible to advance in Circle or a skill rank without a trainer. Doing so would require a significant increase in the time required. It would be measured in years rather than weeks. However, this doesn’t have to reflect your group and your table. Perhaps the adepts are prodigies who are remarkably in tune with their Discipline. They immerse themselves in meditation, communing with the elements that reflect their perspective on their Discipline, they attempt to open their eyes to possibilities, seeing what they don’t already see. This is a journey of discovery, explicitly learning what they don’t already know. In such circumstances, the training period should be at least ten times the listed requirement. This is almost fancifully low. However, it should reflect what the group wants out of the game. Not what the game wants you to do.
In my most recent campaign, because of the story I wanted to tell, I know that my characters would have to move along in a rather aggressive timeline and that a significant chunk of that would be spent in the middle of no where. I also knew that I wanted my characters to advance into circles 2-4 during this time. To compensate for this, I implemented a rule that they only had a to be trained when changing tiers. I told them that their teachers had given them the foundation to advance through their novice tier and that as they steadily improved their abilities (by increasing their ranks) they could now understand things that had been previously taught, but had not yet understood. This allowed me to keep the aggressive timetable and allowed the characters to advance through the lower tier circles. When we start back up, they will all be approaching 5th circle and they are also headed to Throal, where they should be able to easily find some training.
ReplyDeleteNice to see this addressed from an "almost official" source after all these years!
ReplyDeleteMy suggested rule would be using the Fibonacci sequence for how long it takes to train to the next Circle on your own. Use the LP cost of the corresponding Talent rank for a first Circle Talent, and divide by 100. Then multiply that result by a suitable unit of time. Week, fortnight or month seem like reasonable starting points, depending on how difficult you want to make it.
For Novice circles in primary disciplines, this would allow Adepts with low cash reserves to learn on their own, but once you hit Journeyman circles, it starts to become really time-consuming. And even with weeks as the time unit, getting from Circle 14 to circle 15 in your primary Discipline would still take just under 19 years (987 weeks). It also means that self-training from circle 1 to circle 15 would take a total of almost 50 years (2582 weeks) (and that's only training time - you'd need to earn the LP as well) in a primary Discipline.