When your character fails a stress roll you can actually make a second attempt by using a Confidence Point. Essentially this gives you two chances at success. When you spend a Confidence Point, it is gone for the scene you are involved in. This is up to the discretion of the storyguide, a scene can be a full night or even a full story. This limit reflects the difficulty of addressing your whole will toward altering fate and providence. If you Botch the reroll you lose the invested Confidence Point permanently, besides the normal effects of the Botch. You cannot use more than one Confidence Point to attempt success at a single action.
The storyguide is the final arbiter of what is appropriate use of Confidence Points.
Contributions are encouraged and rewarded. They may take the form of diary entries, art, poetry or any other appropriate endeavor. They will be rewarded with experience points based on their content. It is certainly encouraged that all players keep lab notebooks describing the seasonal activities of their magi.
The only way to receive experience points for time spent in an activity is through writing a contributions. This includes spending a season in practice or exposure as per page 187 of Ars Magica Fourth Edition. You may do contributions for all your characters, including grogs if you feel so inclined.
Developing theoretical breakthroughs is something that takes time and effort. One cannot just expect to enter the laboratory and come out a season or two later with incredible discoveries, no matter what your scores are. It is expected that players interested in hermetic, or other, breakthroughs will write about it in their lab notebooks. The storyguide is perfectly within their bounds to veto any attempt for a breakthrough that is not adequately documented. This can include requiring the season in question to be written up for new spells and enchanted items.
As long as your score in an Ability is higher than someone else's, you can teach them something about it.
The Quality of your teaching is equal to your Communication + Ability in question. For each season of training, your trainee generates a Study Total equal to (trainee's Intelligence + Quality + (difference between trainee's Ability and yours))/5. A trainer can train a number of people equal to his Com + Leadership score (minimum of 1) simultaneously. Training can never raise the student's Ability score above the teacher's.
Training only works for Abilities other than Arts and Knowledges (formal education being, well, too formalized for rough training), which requires Disputatio. Hermetic Abilities (other than Knowledges) can be trained as well.
Last modified: Tues Jan 5, 1999 / Jeremiah Genest