Organising Wizards
Apr. 8th, 2018 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSo I've been wondering about the social structures of wizardry, and how much they'd be influenced by the nature of magic itself.
If magic is one in a million then you train everyone you can find. The group identification is wizard, or mage, or whichever term means you can do magic. But identifying as a separate country seems less likely, since inside Britain you can barely scrape together a school year between you, and globally you're a small town, maybe.
If magic is one in a million per year then you end up a town inside Britain. That's nice, lots of friends, but once you've got lots of friends there's room to decide to ignore everyone else. But how that relates to being British, for instance if you're raised thinking of yourself as British first or a Wizard first, that... could get interesting. I mean there's enough wizards globally to be a big city, probably, like a million wizards if they live long enough. That's still not big like London, and like half the size of Greater Manchester, but it's kind of comparable to built up area Glasgow. I'm having trouble imagining Glasgow declaring independence from everything though.
But one you've got ten million wizards globally, or a million in one country, it's plenty possible to imagine. Ten million is like Greece, Portugal, Sweden. The EU complicates things but it's still a country, not a big city. You can imagine them declaring a Wizarding Homeland and most everyone moving there, with a big enough incentive.
Mind you there are some tiny countries out there. Iceland has a population around 350K. That's city sized by British standards. There's a lot of factors go in to deciding you're separate. Granted a lot of it has historically been geography. Wizards can teleport, or set up an associative house like in Neverwhere with Door, so their idea of geographic continguity can get complicated.
There are some really tiny countries down the end of the list. Some of them with (UK) after them, like the Falkland Islands with 2.5K people. Maybe my assumptions are wrong and I should study much smaller countries before deciding how many wizards could decide they're all the world they need.
It would depend a lot on tech level they want to maintain and where they get their food supply. I mean if they've got the magical equivalent of replicators then they just need enough people to learn the spells to keep it going. Magic has such different conditions and requirements they'd end up looking quite different to the here now.
Also magic can be tech level equivalent, with the healing spells and all. Sufficiently advanced technology. But then population to maintain tech level comes up again.
If every wizard learns every spell they have to live a really long time. I mean if all they do is learn spells they'd need 200 hours per spell, modified by Magery, 8 hour days, and a lot of self study. They could learn between 10 and 19 spells per year that way, which sounds like a lot, but my character has 75 to play with and with prerequisite chains and all still can't do all the things I wanted at once. And my latest spreadsheet of all the GURPS spells says there's 858 of them.
That's at the barest minimum 45 years of continuous study, with a teacher at all times, no breaks, no holidays, no other skills, no detours for going adventuring, and no time to BE a teacher. 45 years to learn all the spells. No wonder they start them early.
And that isn't taking into account that students will be of varying IQ and might need longer to get a spell up to prereq level, or make it useable or reliable. Students who only have Magery 0 are going to need a minimum of 86 years, because their Magery won't give them a speed boost, and they're probably going to have trouble getting spells up to scratch.
And granted, some spells are probably restricted by legality class, but some wizards will aspire to learn them anyway.
The good news for wizards is there's a variety of ways at the Magery 3 end to extend one's life. The bad news for everyone else is, they're not all as benign as Halt Aging.
With a span of 45 to 85 years just to learn everything, wizards specialise simply because there aren't enough years in a lifetime.
And that's a version of Everything that is just spells. Potterverse canon has every student also learn Alchemy (potions) and Herbalism (Herbology) and ... I don't actually know, many related skills. If they're learning Runes for magical as well as historical or languages purposes then Symbol or Syntactic magic is another sort that works in their 'verse. And every sort adds a whole bunch of years before you could even in theory know it all.
Conclusion: wizardry is like science, too wide, everyone must specialise.
GURPS colleges of magic exist partly because wizards have to narrow their possibilities to extend their expertise, same like the rest of us.
Nobody knows 'magic', they all know a tiny bit of a corner of magic.
And that means they absolutely have to get some social organisation together, or entire colleges of magic could get lose from going out of fashion, and some spells would become impossible from losing the people who could teach the prerequisites.
Finding teachers at all would be a task and a half. The university model looks great, but every hour spent teaching means you're only putting 1/8 of an hour into studying the spell you are teaching, rather than an hour into a new spell. Every new spell lets you make a new and interesting set of changes to the universe. And along several different prerequisite chains some form of immortality awaits. How do you lure someone into teaching when they could be trying for that instead?
You've also got the problem of power. Casting ceremonially gives you a great big boost for that, but means you need lots of mates. Or minions, but they have to be *willing*, in themselves, or else they're a drain not a boost. And spells cast ceremonially can be maintained indefinitely, so if you have a strict rotation of wizards you can keep a spell going forever, but you'd need a shift system that could cover for anyone in emergencies, or else you'd lose a spell your great great grandfathers set rolling.
Wizards have compelling reasons to be social at the same time they have compelling reasons to be isolated and preoccupied.
Enchanters have it worst. They cannot work shifts, being limited to an eight hour day, and every mage who starts the project must be present for the whole length of the project.
... I must say, the 8 hour limitation and assumption of 24 hour days and human sleep wake limitations makes the Magic rules not very Generic. I mean they try, but magic on other planets as written has to work exactly like Earth. Which would complicate hell out of it if you were trying to maximise your hours on another planet with a non 24 hour rotation, you'd have to get up at all sorts of hours to do your 8 hours. And if a day's work is skipped or interrupted it takes two days to make up for it, so it looks like you wouldn't be able to leave it until dawn on the relevant planet, you'd have to turn up at strict intervals regardless, or it would count as interrupt or skip. So now I'm imagining non human species with a non 24 hour clock trying to invent Enchanting but just not getting it because the idea of working 8 hours out of 24 when they haven't even invented hours doesn't occur to them. This is ridiculous. GURPS claims to be generic and yet these rules don't translate. Daft.
But. Enchanters. 8 hour days, every mage who starts must finish, and if you don't put in all the mage days all in a row then they're pretty much wasted. No weekends for you. Just enchanting. Forever.
What kind of incentives can there even be?
That's with slow and sure enchanting though. Quick and Dirty has another set of constraints, where you have to bring all the energy to the table at once but it takes one hour per 100 points of energy to cast it. No years long drag for this. Assistants can help, but "The caster is at -1 to skill for each assistant; therefore, the number of assistants allowed is the number that would reduce the caster’s effective skill to 15. With more assistants, the enchantment won’t work." You would have to grind your core Enchant skill up by a lot, become a Master Enchanter, not only know it at one character point. But doing Slow and Sure enchanting grinds the equivalent of one hour per day. Quick and Dirty is easier to mess up just by existing. It's not like ceremonial casting, you can't enchant by crowd sourcing. As well as the skill drop "If anyone but the caster and his assistants is within 10 yards, the spell is at a further -1."
To learn to Enchant in the first place is 10 prerequisite spells, any one spell from each of ten colleges.
I've done that bit before, the math of how long it takes to make an Enchanter. You can do it in a year if they've got enough Magery. And you'd want to start them early, because once they an assist at Enchantment, they will. "To perform enchantments, the caster and any assistants must know both the Enchant spell and the specific spell being put on the item at an effective skill of 15 or better." So you have to train up your assistant before you can use them as a battery, but exactly as soon as they can assist, they can also cast without you. If they only know 10 beginner spells that nobody wants to buy as a magic item... well, then they still can't help with any worthwhile project. Hmm. Okay, so, the limit is always if they want to spend all those days doing Slow and Sure, or if they can Quick and Dirty it alone. Still, fewer spells they have, more reason they have to stick around.
Enchanting is a Job though, and combining it with Teaching is... a lot of a limitation, if it's possible at all, which I'm not quite sure of. Combined hours can total maximum 12 per day, after that no more, not even through studying alone. So if you've got an 8 hour job and then 4 hours of teaching you're getting half the spells you otherwise might. But your teachers have an incentive to bother keeping you around. Also it could be 8 hours teaching and 4 hours job, but only for Quick and Dirty spells. So there'd be different levels, where the spells can be cast Quick and Dirty so you'd do them 4 hours a day, and where they have to be ceremonial so you must work for 8 with no weekends, and you absolutely must commit to always turn up.
... Healing spells for Enchanters are probably just to make sure their apprentices don't need time off.
The GURPS rule book assumes a Master Enchanter has skill 20 and runs a Quick and Dirty circle of 6, himself plus 5 mages that take his skill down to 15.
Every assistant in that circle has to have Enchant 15 already. But after that they'd be grinding 4 hour days of their job, which means they'd get... 1.3 CP a year? No wait, they need to have Magery at least 2 to learn Enchant, that means they're getting more out of it. ... I'm redoing the spreadsheet to have more levels of Magery in it and it is coming up with different numbers than I got last time. What did I do? Ugh.
Divided between Enchant, Recover Energy, and whichever spells they'd been working on, that's not going to be many CP a year. One hour enchant to fifty minutes recover energy, pretty evenly divided. And one CP is *not* one skill level. It costs one to learn a thing in the first place, to IQ+Magery-2 or -3 for Very Hard spells like Enchant, but after that how many points you need depends on your starting IQ+Magery. It might be 4 per skill level. Then you'd need 20 CP, at maybe one a year. Master Enchanter would then be at least 20 years of job away.
20 years as an apprentice. That's a bit long.
You'd want out from under long before you Master it then. Perhaps as soon as you get 16 and can work a circle of 2. That would be a much more reasonable 1 or 2 year jobbing apprenticeship, working Quick and Dirty Enchantment, and using all your Taught hours to scrape together new and interesting spells.
But you still *could* do it the other way, so there'd be long established Circles of Enchanters where everyone was at varying stages of getting Enchant 20, on a twenty year course of study.
Wizards be in it for the long haul if they get into that.
But if you're doing a Quick and Dirty apprenticeship all that time you're getting 8 hour teaching days, so you're learning 13 CP of spells a year. Not a bad deal.
Except, there's still nothing in that calculation for how many hours of Teaching anyone is doing.
And it's not like anyone stops being a student, if there's 66 years worth of spells out there.
Unless that's why Dumbledore's so old, he learned everything before he started to teach...
So when I sat down I intended much less maths. I wanted to figure out a basic social unit for mages, if the limitations of their magic were where we start.
For most people the limit is span of control, which varies on way too many variables, but I learned it from... http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006707.html Incident Command System, I think, with the phrasing Span of control coming from other posts. There the number is three to seven people, optimising around five.
Which coincidentally now I've done the digging for rules and maths is the number of mages a Master Enchanter can have in their circle at once.
But if they're optimising for hours taught then a Master is only going to work that circle for a 4 hour day. They can work an 8 hour day, so any given Master can either teach 4 hours a day or work with two circles.
So say each Master Enchanter has two circles, two sets of 5 apprentices, working them 4 hours a day each. Then he can either study out of books or go find another Teacher, but because they are both Jobs he can't do another 4 hours Enchanting, and he cannot Teach. His Apprentices would only be there for the experience on the job. Which they could get anywhere.
A Master Enchanter that does Quick and Dirty Enchanting 4 hours, Teaching 4 hours, and Study 4 hours has filled up his day, but he and his students are still slower than they could be because of all that Study.
So he needs a Teacher, and so do his circle.
A Master Enchanter who is past the point he can study under a Teacher, one who is doing study out of books or possibly even Research, could do that for four hours a day after working with two circles for four hours each. He wouldn't be wasting his potential because he couldn't be being taught anyway. But that would only even possibly apply if he knew every spell currently being taught! Extremely elderly he would be.
Here's the solution: There's no upper limit on class size. ... there should be, really, but a practical limit for teaching is like 20 people. So you could fit both Circles in a classroom and each Master Enchanter would give them 4 hours lessons each, including teaching the other Master Enchanter.
So then you've got sets of 12 mages working together, two of them teaching 4 hours a day, all of them enchanting 4 hours a day, all of them studying 8 hours a day.
The thing is, once you've got 12 mages, you kind of really want 13.
And there's always an older Mage.
So a really spectacular Master Enchanter, with an even higher skill, even if it took him many more years, would be able to lead a larger Circle. And he could teach for longer at higher levels.
Granted, in order to lead a circle of ten he'd have to have a skill of 25, and skill caps at 25, but in theory it could happen. ... actually that's an optional rule with a range of 20 to 25, but work with the theory. That would mean one Grand Master could lead a combined Circle of 10 while the two Masters did something else, possibly have a weekend off, since the whole weekends concept seems to be a real world leakage into the Teaching rules. I mean anyone doing Slow and Sure has to kiss weekends goodbye. So the Grand Master gets the circle on weekends, maybe teaches a few hours on week days, maybe hangs around and advises.
Then you've got a set of 13 as a basic unit of Enchanters. Grand Master, two Masters, five in each of their Circles, overlapping teaching hours so everyone gets 8 hours teaching and 4 hours job every day, with the Circles having extra job on the weekends. And each Circle is in some way different from the partner, because they know different spell sets well enough to teach each other. That might be a binary difference that a Grand Master can bring together somehow, or it might happen in many and varied combinations, shifting and changing when they've taught each other all they can. Brighter or more magically talented students wouldn't need to grind for as long before they could lead a Circle of their own, so people would join and leave at different times. But they'd all need to know matching spells to work an Enchantment together, so whether there's two sets or many colleges, each Circle would specialise in particular jobs, then get less distinct and more varied by the time they can be Masters. And Masters would be able to do things their students could not, more and more over time, so they'd want time off for their own projects. Slow and Sure spells might mean holidays, or they could work as a pair on new Quick and Dirty enchantments, but it would work best if their students had someone else to study with when they do. Like a Grand Master who knows all the spells they can work combined, and then some.
And this more or less flows from the GURPS rules for how to Enchant.
But Enchanters would organise differently from Ceremonial Magicians, because there's not that -1 per person for Ceremony. For Ceremonial Magic you want a huge great crowd that all know the spell.
And a lot of magic can of course be cast by a single mage. But learning it in the first place requires either a really long time or a teacher.
So. I guess I just spent hours typing about completely imaginary rules. But.
What if the two sorts of Circle were Light and Dark? And the longer they work together, the more they blur the lines, until a Grand Master can cast all the spells of both.
But people who are not Enchanters don't have that incentive to cross the streams, they might go deep into their own half of the binary instead.
Now you've got a society that needs what Enchanters can do, but only a minority of mages are equipped to be Enchanters, so the majority don't do things that way. Plenty of room for resentment. And if Enchanters need to do their work all day every day for extended periods of time, they're not going to have time to play politics.
Plus they can't spare the time to join in with Ceremonial castings, if they're in the middle of a Slow and Sure. That's antisocial. And if they were called to help maintain a Ceremony anyway they would resent it, because they could be casting an Enchantment that would do the same thing anyway (if they were strong enough, which means if they had studied enough).
So the two sorts wouldn't get along.
... and I did a whole lot more math than I intended to when I sat down.
I just woke up this morning thinking, what if wizards worked in Hands? Groups of GCSE students supervised by one A Level student, who would then mentor whoever went on to A Levels while studying at university, still advised by a final year student who was their supervisor back when?
You'd get one student from each House with one 6th former to supervise 4 of them, but only if only a quarter went on to A levels. And then you'd get gaps when the A level student didn't go to university. So then I poked the numbers more and left the whole school bit behind.
But wizards working as groups of 5 supervised by one who has studied much longer comes out similar too. Like, you could get those circles as 4 GCSE students and an A level student, if they put serious hours into Enchant as early as possible.
But if everyone goes to school you'd have your crowds for Ceremonial magic. So you'd want to use the children as batteries. As you do. And they'd spend ages every day maintaining or casting big spells. And they could contribute different amounts depending on how skilled they were, so they'd reach a certain skill threshold and suddenly find ceremonial casting wipes them out.
All these number rules are boring until they turn into ways people act.
... okay, they're probably still boring, and this didn't go in the direction I expected
but
rules can imply interesting social structures, and that part is fun.
I shall go do something else for a bit and maybe make another post
for the bit I sat down to write in the first place...
If magic is one in a million then you train everyone you can find. The group identification is wizard, or mage, or whichever term means you can do magic. But identifying as a separate country seems less likely, since inside Britain you can barely scrape together a school year between you, and globally you're a small town, maybe.
If magic is one in a million per year then you end up a town inside Britain. That's nice, lots of friends, but once you've got lots of friends there's room to decide to ignore everyone else. But how that relates to being British, for instance if you're raised thinking of yourself as British first or a Wizard first, that... could get interesting. I mean there's enough wizards globally to be a big city, probably, like a million wizards if they live long enough. That's still not big like London, and like half the size of Greater Manchester, but it's kind of comparable to built up area Glasgow. I'm having trouble imagining Glasgow declaring independence from everything though.
But one you've got ten million wizards globally, or a million in one country, it's plenty possible to imagine. Ten million is like Greece, Portugal, Sweden. The EU complicates things but it's still a country, not a big city. You can imagine them declaring a Wizarding Homeland and most everyone moving there, with a big enough incentive.
Mind you there are some tiny countries out there. Iceland has a population around 350K. That's city sized by British standards. There's a lot of factors go in to deciding you're separate. Granted a lot of it has historically been geography. Wizards can teleport, or set up an associative house like in Neverwhere with Door, so their idea of geographic continguity can get complicated.
There are some really tiny countries down the end of the list. Some of them with (UK) after them, like the Falkland Islands with 2.5K people. Maybe my assumptions are wrong and I should study much smaller countries before deciding how many wizards could decide they're all the world they need.
It would depend a lot on tech level they want to maintain and where they get their food supply. I mean if they've got the magical equivalent of replicators then they just need enough people to learn the spells to keep it going. Magic has such different conditions and requirements they'd end up looking quite different to the here now.
Also magic can be tech level equivalent, with the healing spells and all. Sufficiently advanced technology. But then population to maintain tech level comes up again.
If every wizard learns every spell they have to live a really long time. I mean if all they do is learn spells they'd need 200 hours per spell, modified by Magery, 8 hour days, and a lot of self study. They could learn between 10 and 19 spells per year that way, which sounds like a lot, but my character has 75 to play with and with prerequisite chains and all still can't do all the things I wanted at once. And my latest spreadsheet of all the GURPS spells says there's 858 of them.
That's at the barest minimum 45 years of continuous study, with a teacher at all times, no breaks, no holidays, no other skills, no detours for going adventuring, and no time to BE a teacher. 45 years to learn all the spells. No wonder they start them early.
And that isn't taking into account that students will be of varying IQ and might need longer to get a spell up to prereq level, or make it useable or reliable. Students who only have Magery 0 are going to need a minimum of 86 years, because their Magery won't give them a speed boost, and they're probably going to have trouble getting spells up to scratch.
And granted, some spells are probably restricted by legality class, but some wizards will aspire to learn them anyway.
The good news for wizards is there's a variety of ways at the Magery 3 end to extend one's life. The bad news for everyone else is, they're not all as benign as Halt Aging.
With a span of 45 to 85 years just to learn everything, wizards specialise simply because there aren't enough years in a lifetime.
And that's a version of Everything that is just spells. Potterverse canon has every student also learn Alchemy (potions) and Herbalism (Herbology) and ... I don't actually know, many related skills. If they're learning Runes for magical as well as historical or languages purposes then Symbol or Syntactic magic is another sort that works in their 'verse. And every sort adds a whole bunch of years before you could even in theory know it all.
Conclusion: wizardry is like science, too wide, everyone must specialise.
GURPS colleges of magic exist partly because wizards have to narrow their possibilities to extend their expertise, same like the rest of us.
Nobody knows 'magic', they all know a tiny bit of a corner of magic.
And that means they absolutely have to get some social organisation together, or entire colleges of magic could get lose from going out of fashion, and some spells would become impossible from losing the people who could teach the prerequisites.
Finding teachers at all would be a task and a half. The university model looks great, but every hour spent teaching means you're only putting 1/8 of an hour into studying the spell you are teaching, rather than an hour into a new spell. Every new spell lets you make a new and interesting set of changes to the universe. And along several different prerequisite chains some form of immortality awaits. How do you lure someone into teaching when they could be trying for that instead?
You've also got the problem of power. Casting ceremonially gives you a great big boost for that, but means you need lots of mates. Or minions, but they have to be *willing*, in themselves, or else they're a drain not a boost. And spells cast ceremonially can be maintained indefinitely, so if you have a strict rotation of wizards you can keep a spell going forever, but you'd need a shift system that could cover for anyone in emergencies, or else you'd lose a spell your great great grandfathers set rolling.
Wizards have compelling reasons to be social at the same time they have compelling reasons to be isolated and preoccupied.
Enchanters have it worst. They cannot work shifts, being limited to an eight hour day, and every mage who starts the project must be present for the whole length of the project.
... I must say, the 8 hour limitation and assumption of 24 hour days and human sleep wake limitations makes the Magic rules not very Generic. I mean they try, but magic on other planets as written has to work exactly like Earth. Which would complicate hell out of it if you were trying to maximise your hours on another planet with a non 24 hour rotation, you'd have to get up at all sorts of hours to do your 8 hours. And if a day's work is skipped or interrupted it takes two days to make up for it, so it looks like you wouldn't be able to leave it until dawn on the relevant planet, you'd have to turn up at strict intervals regardless, or it would count as interrupt or skip. So now I'm imagining non human species with a non 24 hour clock trying to invent Enchanting but just not getting it because the idea of working 8 hours out of 24 when they haven't even invented hours doesn't occur to them. This is ridiculous. GURPS claims to be generic and yet these rules don't translate. Daft.
But. Enchanters. 8 hour days, every mage who starts must finish, and if you don't put in all the mage days all in a row then they're pretty much wasted. No weekends for you. Just enchanting. Forever.
What kind of incentives can there even be?
That's with slow and sure enchanting though. Quick and Dirty has another set of constraints, where you have to bring all the energy to the table at once but it takes one hour per 100 points of energy to cast it. No years long drag for this. Assistants can help, but "The caster is at -1 to skill for each assistant; therefore, the number of assistants allowed is the number that would reduce the caster’s effective skill to 15. With more assistants, the enchantment won’t work." You would have to grind your core Enchant skill up by a lot, become a Master Enchanter, not only know it at one character point. But doing Slow and Sure enchanting grinds the equivalent of one hour per day. Quick and Dirty is easier to mess up just by existing. It's not like ceremonial casting, you can't enchant by crowd sourcing. As well as the skill drop "If anyone but the caster and his assistants is within 10 yards, the spell is at a further -1."
To learn to Enchant in the first place is 10 prerequisite spells, any one spell from each of ten colleges.
I've done that bit before, the math of how long it takes to make an Enchanter. You can do it in a year if they've got enough Magery. And you'd want to start them early, because once they an assist at Enchantment, they will. "To perform enchantments, the caster and any assistants must know both the Enchant spell and the specific spell being put on the item at an effective skill of 15 or better." So you have to train up your assistant before you can use them as a battery, but exactly as soon as they can assist, they can also cast without you. If they only know 10 beginner spells that nobody wants to buy as a magic item... well, then they still can't help with any worthwhile project. Hmm. Okay, so, the limit is always if they want to spend all those days doing Slow and Sure, or if they can Quick and Dirty it alone. Still, fewer spells they have, more reason they have to stick around.
Enchanting is a Job though, and combining it with Teaching is... a lot of a limitation, if it's possible at all, which I'm not quite sure of. Combined hours can total maximum 12 per day, after that no more, not even through studying alone. So if you've got an 8 hour job and then 4 hours of teaching you're getting half the spells you otherwise might. But your teachers have an incentive to bother keeping you around. Also it could be 8 hours teaching and 4 hours job, but only for Quick and Dirty spells. So there'd be different levels, where the spells can be cast Quick and Dirty so you'd do them 4 hours a day, and where they have to be ceremonial so you must work for 8 with no weekends, and you absolutely must commit to always turn up.
... Healing spells for Enchanters are probably just to make sure their apprentices don't need time off.
The GURPS rule book assumes a Master Enchanter has skill 20 and runs a Quick and Dirty circle of 6, himself plus 5 mages that take his skill down to 15.
Every assistant in that circle has to have Enchant 15 already. But after that they'd be grinding 4 hour days of their job, which means they'd get... 1.3 CP a year? No wait, they need to have Magery at least 2 to learn Enchant, that means they're getting more out of it. ... I'm redoing the spreadsheet to have more levels of Magery in it and it is coming up with different numbers than I got last time. What did I do? Ugh.
Divided between Enchant, Recover Energy, and whichever spells they'd been working on, that's not going to be many CP a year. One hour enchant to fifty minutes recover energy, pretty evenly divided. And one CP is *not* one skill level. It costs one to learn a thing in the first place, to IQ+Magery-2 or -3 for Very Hard spells like Enchant, but after that how many points you need depends on your starting IQ+Magery. It might be 4 per skill level. Then you'd need 20 CP, at maybe one a year. Master Enchanter would then be at least 20 years of job away.
20 years as an apprentice. That's a bit long.
You'd want out from under long before you Master it then. Perhaps as soon as you get 16 and can work a circle of 2. That would be a much more reasonable 1 or 2 year jobbing apprenticeship, working Quick and Dirty Enchantment, and using all your Taught hours to scrape together new and interesting spells.
But you still *could* do it the other way, so there'd be long established Circles of Enchanters where everyone was at varying stages of getting Enchant 20, on a twenty year course of study.
Wizards be in it for the long haul if they get into that.
But if you're doing a Quick and Dirty apprenticeship all that time you're getting 8 hour teaching days, so you're learning 13 CP of spells a year. Not a bad deal.
Except, there's still nothing in that calculation for how many hours of Teaching anyone is doing.
And it's not like anyone stops being a student, if there's 66 years worth of spells out there.
Unless that's why Dumbledore's so old, he learned everything before he started to teach...
So when I sat down I intended much less maths. I wanted to figure out a basic social unit for mages, if the limitations of their magic were where we start.
For most people the limit is span of control, which varies on way too many variables, but I learned it from... http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006707.html Incident Command System, I think, with the phrasing Span of control coming from other posts. There the number is three to seven people, optimising around five.
Which coincidentally now I've done the digging for rules and maths is the number of mages a Master Enchanter can have in their circle at once.
But if they're optimising for hours taught then a Master is only going to work that circle for a 4 hour day. They can work an 8 hour day, so any given Master can either teach 4 hours a day or work with two circles.
So say each Master Enchanter has two circles, two sets of 5 apprentices, working them 4 hours a day each. Then he can either study out of books or go find another Teacher, but because they are both Jobs he can't do another 4 hours Enchanting, and he cannot Teach. His Apprentices would only be there for the experience on the job. Which they could get anywhere.
A Master Enchanter that does Quick and Dirty Enchanting 4 hours, Teaching 4 hours, and Study 4 hours has filled up his day, but he and his students are still slower than they could be because of all that Study.
So he needs a Teacher, and so do his circle.
A Master Enchanter who is past the point he can study under a Teacher, one who is doing study out of books or possibly even Research, could do that for four hours a day after working with two circles for four hours each. He wouldn't be wasting his potential because he couldn't be being taught anyway. But that would only even possibly apply if he knew every spell currently being taught! Extremely elderly he would be.
Here's the solution: There's no upper limit on class size. ... there should be, really, but a practical limit for teaching is like 20 people. So you could fit both Circles in a classroom and each Master Enchanter would give them 4 hours lessons each, including teaching the other Master Enchanter.
So then you've got sets of 12 mages working together, two of them teaching 4 hours a day, all of them enchanting 4 hours a day, all of them studying 8 hours a day.
The thing is, once you've got 12 mages, you kind of really want 13.
And there's always an older Mage.
So a really spectacular Master Enchanter, with an even higher skill, even if it took him many more years, would be able to lead a larger Circle. And he could teach for longer at higher levels.
Granted, in order to lead a circle of ten he'd have to have a skill of 25, and skill caps at 25, but in theory it could happen. ... actually that's an optional rule with a range of 20 to 25, but work with the theory. That would mean one Grand Master could lead a combined Circle of 10 while the two Masters did something else, possibly have a weekend off, since the whole weekends concept seems to be a real world leakage into the Teaching rules. I mean anyone doing Slow and Sure has to kiss weekends goodbye. So the Grand Master gets the circle on weekends, maybe teaches a few hours on week days, maybe hangs around and advises.
Then you've got a set of 13 as a basic unit of Enchanters. Grand Master, two Masters, five in each of their Circles, overlapping teaching hours so everyone gets 8 hours teaching and 4 hours job every day, with the Circles having extra job on the weekends. And each Circle is in some way different from the partner, because they know different spell sets well enough to teach each other. That might be a binary difference that a Grand Master can bring together somehow, or it might happen in many and varied combinations, shifting and changing when they've taught each other all they can. Brighter or more magically talented students wouldn't need to grind for as long before they could lead a Circle of their own, so people would join and leave at different times. But they'd all need to know matching spells to work an Enchantment together, so whether there's two sets or many colleges, each Circle would specialise in particular jobs, then get less distinct and more varied by the time they can be Masters. And Masters would be able to do things their students could not, more and more over time, so they'd want time off for their own projects. Slow and Sure spells might mean holidays, or they could work as a pair on new Quick and Dirty enchantments, but it would work best if their students had someone else to study with when they do. Like a Grand Master who knows all the spells they can work combined, and then some.
And this more or less flows from the GURPS rules for how to Enchant.
But Enchanters would organise differently from Ceremonial Magicians, because there's not that -1 per person for Ceremony. For Ceremonial Magic you want a huge great crowd that all know the spell.
And a lot of magic can of course be cast by a single mage. But learning it in the first place requires either a really long time or a teacher.
So. I guess I just spent hours typing about completely imaginary rules. But.
What if the two sorts of Circle were Light and Dark? And the longer they work together, the more they blur the lines, until a Grand Master can cast all the spells of both.
But people who are not Enchanters don't have that incentive to cross the streams, they might go deep into their own half of the binary instead.
Now you've got a society that needs what Enchanters can do, but only a minority of mages are equipped to be Enchanters, so the majority don't do things that way. Plenty of room for resentment. And if Enchanters need to do their work all day every day for extended periods of time, they're not going to have time to play politics.
Plus they can't spare the time to join in with Ceremonial castings, if they're in the middle of a Slow and Sure. That's antisocial. And if they were called to help maintain a Ceremony anyway they would resent it, because they could be casting an Enchantment that would do the same thing anyway (if they were strong enough, which means if they had studied enough).
So the two sorts wouldn't get along.
... and I did a whole lot more math than I intended to when I sat down.
I just woke up this morning thinking, what if wizards worked in Hands? Groups of GCSE students supervised by one A Level student, who would then mentor whoever went on to A Levels while studying at university, still advised by a final year student who was their supervisor back when?
You'd get one student from each House with one 6th former to supervise 4 of them, but only if only a quarter went on to A levels. And then you'd get gaps when the A level student didn't go to university. So then I poked the numbers more and left the whole school bit behind.
But wizards working as groups of 5 supervised by one who has studied much longer comes out similar too. Like, you could get those circles as 4 GCSE students and an A level student, if they put serious hours into Enchant as early as possible.
But if everyone goes to school you'd have your crowds for Ceremonial magic. So you'd want to use the children as batteries. As you do. And they'd spend ages every day maintaining or casting big spells. And they could contribute different amounts depending on how skilled they were, so they'd reach a certain skill threshold and suddenly find ceremonial casting wipes them out.
All these number rules are boring until they turn into ways people act.
... okay, they're probably still boring, and this didn't go in the direction I expected
but
rules can imply interesting social structures, and that part is fun.
I shall go do something else for a bit and maybe make another post
for the bit I sat down to write in the first place...