Hey all, After a sorcerer has completed his practicals stage of learning a spell and is in the Second reading portion of learning it, what is the difficulty for casting the spell during the time doing the second reading assuming that there is no penalty for a poor first reading? From my reading it seems like the casting ob would be the ob listed in the book, but if that is true how does the second reading affect the casting of spells being learned. Is the sorcerer unable to cast that spell being learned during this second reading time? can the cast the spell but its at a higher OB?
This is all assuming that in the first and second readings of the spell the sorcerer passed his check to learn the spell and so no penalties occur.
Got a follow up question. As a reward, I gave my players a text and included in the text were guidelines on how to cast a few particular spells. Is a character only able to learn one spell at a time or can they be going through the process on 2-3 spells concurrently, and do they need to not be doing anything else while going through the first reading? Is the first and second reading treated similar to practicing a skill (they spend time during the day where they can not “adventure”)? I didnt see anything in the book or forum about this particular issue.
I would say that the reading portions count as practice and the die roll at the end of each reading must be done at the table (as opposed to successfully generated via downtime). That said, just like practice you can spread the time out or write an instinct that lets you slip in some practice time even when game is happening. For example the Instinct “Always study the manuscripts when I have a free moment” is a good hook for getting to count play as practice time.
As for casting and second reading, I personally like to think of it as an intentional halt on casting in order to not reinforce bad habits. If someone wanted to cast a spell while they were in the middle of the second reading, I’d be apt to reset their second reading time. Also don’t imagine that there is no casting of that particular spell during the second reading, it’s just slow, controlled, practice casts to get a feel for how the spell should work.
EDIT: Also, guy’s second thread is good if you want to drift spell learning a bit to allow for Practicals casts during second reading.
I like the idea of turning the studying into an instinct. That’s a great idea.
But how would you handle studying two spells? If, for arguments sake, a player wants to learn two spells and it would take 3 months to finish the first reading for each spell. Would you all run it so that the player could do the first readings concurrently so that it takes a total of 3 months to finish the first readings? or would you rule that the first spell takes 3 months to finish the first reading and then the player would spend an additional three months for the first reading of the second spell for a total of 6 months?