How Subtle is a Subtle Spell?

[ezekielraiden]

This. Right here. This is my disconnect.

Ok, run with the arithmetic analogy. When you're faced with a problem that you can't solve easily, you count on your fingers or write it down. As you grow more competent, you lose the need to perform those "somatic components" to solve the same problem. It's also quicker because the somatic components are what took a significant portion of the time. If, however, you're just learning to do without the "somatics", such that it still takes you a comparable amount of time to solve the problem mentally, then it's fairly common for people to pull all sorts of silly faces, humming and erring, sticking their tongue out, stopping anything and everything else their doing to devote the effort to solving that maths problem.

Mental activity is still activity. Yes, you can do it without the song and dance, but it often takes conscious effort to refrain from those visual cues when the activity is significant. Given that most spells take an Action to cast and that an Action could be described as the primary and most significant thing you're doing at any given time, I'm inclined to assume it'll take conscious effort to conceal that Action, even if it's a solely mental activity.

And my response would be: Those are people who haven't gotten to the point of arithmetic being as natural as breathing. They haven't actually eliminated the somatic components. They've gotten close, to be sure--no hand gestures. But they still engage in facial gestures, halted body movements, and other physical signs of thought.

I don't need any of that to do most simple arithmetic. If I'm in a particularly math-friendly state of mind, I can in fact do multi-digit multiplication on the fly. Some of this is practice (I tutored math at the college level for several years), some of it is natural talent (I've always been good with figures), some of it is as I said a matter of mood and timing and state-of-mind. I can still do many derivatives without pausing for thought, and for a while I could do a lot of simple integrals without needing a calculator. Likewise, after my classical mechanics course I was doing Lagrangians without pausing because I find them so unbelievably straightforward.

You may even be right that most people cannot do this kind of thing, even with an enormous amount of practice. Sorcerers who take Subtle Spell aren't most people, they literally do have a special innate talent and the practiced effort (=taking the metamagic option) to pull it off. It really is possible to do complex philosophical, mathematical, or scientific thinking without any outward sign of effort, not even the blank-eyed "I'm not paying attention to the world" look. Most people cannot do that and also do anything particularly difficult at the same time.