I posted how I sell Ars Magica above (medieval europe were legends are true and magi do funky stuff). I think it is the thoughline of the game?
Why do we play? We really like that setting.
And we really like doing REALLY CRAZY STUFF with magic. Biggest things so far have been replaying the flute dude from Hamelin (just that we did it in Cordoba) and relocating mount Snowdon to the middle of the Irish sea because we needed more land for our covenant. Oh, and having a dragon as our guard dog. Those crazy projects (and the year or so it took to develop each one in in-game years) were quite hilarious to us. Battling the pope in a ninja-like and mystical duel along the city walls of Rome was also pretty cool, specially when both the main PC and the Pope used shadows to teleport around, and the battle was being fought at night.
In terms of maturity, you hit it on the head. You can run a very high-brow, mature DnD game. I've played in and run some, and they can be great. You can also run a really basic 'hit monster, take treasure' game with next to no depth. Ars Magica doesn't offer that lower end as effectively; you can do it, but it isn't quite as elegant.
A big draw for DnD (and the Storyteller games hooked into this too) is making the slate less blank for entry. Classes or Clans or whatever are great for hooking concepts off. They promote stereotypes a great deal, which provides a lower barrier to entry. Ars Magica goes to the opposite extreme: the House you choose has next to no bearing on the magic style you go for, which can be summed up almost as 'whatever you want.'
Paralysis of choice can put people off very easily, which is why I think any 6th Edition core book needs to include some strong sample characters - both with stats and with 'how to develop this character' guidelines. That's also what the fiction, etc. in the Storyteller games does - it helps the reader shape their own play experience by giving them some creative help.
I'm not surprised that we all have different thoughtlines on Ars. All of the ones I've read here are interesting and thought-provoking. I'd be especially interested in hearing if there's a single core thoughtline from Atlas that ties together the work of the various writers.
My own thoughtline? Play a powerful wizard, like the ones in the works of great fiction which have inspired me since I was young, and do it in a world of unmatched complexity and depth.
This obviously excludes lots of facets of the game that are important to other people. I'm not so interested in companion and grog stories and don't feel that the rules system is very good for that kind of story anyway. I'm definitely not excited by the theme of great but unusable power; if things are too high powered I'd much rather just reduce that power level than come up with angsty reasons to be impotent ala White Wolf.
I know people are trying to be non-exclusionary by writing broader and broader thoughtlines, but the idea of the thoughtline is to exclude some styles of play from the core of the product so that you can detect system bloat. Let me give an example:
Take the thouhgtline you have formulated.
Explain how the Confidence mechanic supports that thoughtline in such a specific and significant way that it deserves to stay in the system, compared to other system which were knocked out of the main book.
or another:
Take the thoughtline you formulated.
Explain why the rules for creating your personal magus come before the rules for creating a covenant in the main rulebook.
The idea of the thoughtline is to try to cut back on system bloat: that means it really does need to narrow stuff down. It's not about finding the broadest definition for what all of us are doing: it's specifically about avoiding the barnaclization of the system.
95% of the mechanics in any system do not need to stay there to support the thoughtline at all. You only need 3 totals in DnD to support your game: attack ability, defense ability and how many blows you can take before dying. The rest is innecessary by that definition. Same for Ars Magica or any other game out there. Reducing ANY game to its mechanics is just a mistake IMO. Ars is far from optimal mechanically (it comes close to horrible, right now, with all the subsystems and new rules being thrown into the system supplement after supplement) so the confidence score is the least of your problems, really.
Awesome factor throwing spells has been pointed out. Community management in a magical world has also been pointed out. Very deep and rich medieval(magical) universe as well. Power and its consequences too.
I do not find any of those to be wrong. Just different approaches to the game from different people that highlight preferences and aspects of the game. Narrative games tend to have that.
As I was reading this thread and taking in all of the comments I was struck by the thoughts posted in a link by Leonis_Bjornaer.
Then as you read further down the comments:
It got me thinking that the core of any Ars Magica game I have ever been in is "How can I solve this problem with Magic?".
Story guides give our character's problems or we push problems on ourselves. He then think of a clever way to magic the problem. Are we powerful enough to do that? No, so we must improve our skills to solve the problem. Then other problems occur and we repeat and by the end ( or middle) we have a magical legacy built on solving problems like moving a mountain to the Irish Sea. Making a Covenant in a active volcano. Draw an accurate map. Or make a cool beast/device to carry a giant sized enchantress.
It is why I tend to not like characters that can not cast spontaneous spell ( or it is difficult). It is just a large part of the game.
It is why we can easily take the game mechanics and make Ars Magic 2020 or Ars the Renaissance. The magic system fits and the setting can be in flux. But we tend to strive to solve the problems with magic.
No, barnacles and barnaclization is appropriate here. (As I read him,) Timothy is talking about avoiding rule subsystems that latch on to the primary rules system and work with the system without really being a part of the primary system.
Not Balkanization, or the fracturing of the rule system into multiple distinct subsystems of equal use.
You mean stuff like all the extra magic systems? The labour point rules? The rules for mass combat? Creature creation rules? Specific rules for a debate? It seems that Ars needs a new rule (and new mechanic) for each think in the setting.
In any case I do not think that ANY rule is important at all for what the core of the game really is, so I have no idea why rules crept in a conceptual discussion. I think that jebrick hit the nail in the head with his comment: how to solve the stuff in the story with magic.
I think that the rule systems in Ars Magica have grown and branched the way that they have, precisely because the game's "go forth and do" is not "solve problems with magic," or at least not for everyone. For some people, the game is about solving the problems that magic cannot solve, or about dealing with the problems that magic causes and that magic cannot solve. There is even an entire house of Hermes devoted to the idea that magic is not the end-all and be-all.
The rule systems push and pull. For example, rego magic can in theory create works of art or duplicate a craft and work, except that the rules for this have become so onerous that it is pointless to try to create great works of art using magic. I was not part of development, so I do not know why exactly this occurred, but I can speculate: if a level 10 spell can replace an artisan, and a level XXV spell can replace a village, then it's difficult to support a classic saga in which a continent needs a village. So, the finesse rules become extreme, the guidelines are tweaked so that the spell levels become higher, and craft and art magic becomes a bad idea unless a character undergoes extreme optimization for this. Oh yes, and many story guides will make every finesse roll a stress role, making the attraction of this kind of magic even lower. It is easier to destroy Paris with hermetic magic than create a good work of art. not surprisingly, the rules for this kind of magic do not dovetail well into the generic crafting rules. I will probably get an argument about this last comment, but that's another conversation.
There is a tension within the rules, then, about what the game is about.
I see the Ars Monica rules as more of a toolset to build a game, rather than a set of rules by which to run them. There are simply too many rules, and they do different things, and it's possible to use them in different ways to get different results. One of my favorite examples of this occurs in the book Maki of Hermes, in which 2 Magi in the book have almost the same spell, but at wildly different levels, because the designer of each chose a different guideline to represent the base effect. Neither of them is wrong, and the rule for each is reasonable, but each had a very different assumption about what makes sense for the kind of saga the wizard belongs in, or even what the canonical saga is.
Depending on the emphasis a story guide decides to put on one rule versus another, hermetic magic can be struggling or be dominant. if you want to run a game in which medieval medical thought is totally wrong, and medieval scholarship as well, entire books must be avoided.
I claim that there is no thought line, or at least, no single thought line to the game. sort of like GURPS, but with a more selective focus. If you don't want powered armor in your medieval fantasy, don't use Gertz high tech. If you don't want to focus on the conflict between heaven and hell, ignore realms of power for divine and infernal. If you want a high-powered high fantasy saga, the chapters in covenants about tracking the number of blacksmiths you have available, and how many axes they can put out every season, might not be useful to you, and in fact is likely to get in the way.
I suppose that GURPS and Ars Magica have something else in common, and maybe that is the thought line: read some of the best written, best researched role-playing game books in the business.
Oh, I forgot to talk about confidence. Confidence has a critical place in the Ars Modica system, or at least it used to: confidence acts to attenuate the wild swings caused by rolling a d 10 whose result is often greater than the skill and attribute the die modifies, and that can actually botch. Nowadays, very few characters can use confidence to avoid botch, but that wasn't always the case. Of course, every time confidence was used, it was a chance it could be lost permanently, so a player really had to decide whether a role was important enough to risk permanently losing a resource. But the player had the choice, to avoid a botch or 2 increase in important role.
(Some people love botches and fumbles, others do not. Indeed, quite a few game masters and story guides put together only the most rudimentary stories, and run botch driven games, which are often enjoyed, because they evolve in interesting and unexpected ways.)
It's probably not a coincidence that Dungeons & Dragons lacks a general confidence mechanism, but Warhammer has one (fate pointsthat can either be spent or burnt.)
The rules haven't crept into a conceptual discussion, the whole point of the thread was, at the onset, to define the thoughtline of the game, and the point of the thoughtline is to prevent rules bloat. That's what the thread has been about, ab initio.
My broader concern for rules bloat, in its most basic form is this:
I try to get new people to write for Ars and Sub Rosa from local gaming groups.
They say to me "Why would I do that when I can write for Dresden/Dr Who?"
I ask "Why would you prefer to write Dresden?" and their answers are basically:
I know and love the setting already.
I can get up to speed on how to write for the game by reading just two books.
People respect my writing more when it is attached to a well-known franchise.
When I do write, the mechanics are simpler, so I'm doing less work.
There's no chance that after I've written something, a playtester is going to point out two lines in some supplement somewhere which says I can't do it.
Now, there's nothing much to be done about us not having a TV show, or a line of fiction. So, as things which could be considered, there's the question of, are the other objections valid, and can the writer pool or fandom make it easier for other people to join the writer pool?
So, in part to test this theory, I've just done some writing for another publisher who I can't name due to NDAs.
It is so much easier to write something that's not Ars. I mean it is ridiculously simple to write non-Ars. Sure, Ars has a more disciplined production method, so you always know where you stand and when things are due and the playtesting is great and you can get research assistance, and all of that is fantastic, but I recently wrote up the same monster for Ars and for (another system) and the Ars version takes about 45 minutes to get right and the Other system version took about ten minutes, and the 45 minutes is only because I'm relatively experienced with the ruleset. Writing Ars is actually quite difficult compared to Other Systems, so that objection is, I feel a valid one.
So I'm asking for us to concentrate on the thoughtline so that we can say to potential new authors: the bit you need to focus on is (this). You can just ignore (that).
On a larger level I have a theory about RPG publishing, and it works like this:
Robin Laws said at GenConAus that there are only ever two people who make their living as RPG writers. One is him, and the other is whoever is the lead writer on D&D. At the timne he made the comment it was Mike Mearls. Every other RPG writer has a day job and is writing on the side.
When RPG writers train each other, they talk about "being professional" and they are drawing in skills from their day jobs to say what professionalism looks like. I have this counter-theory that none of us are really professionals because none of us actually write for a living. My local tax people say I haven't been a writing professional since SoI came out: I'm a paid hobbyist. I think they are actually right. I am a paid technical writer in my day job sometimes, and its very different to writing for Ars.
Now, every single game you have ever seen (even indie games) saving those written by Robin or Mike, are dependent on hobbyist authors who sell their work at well below commercial wrtiting rate to publishers. The better publishers like Atlas explicitly say this, and thank their authors for doing it, generally with statements like "We wish we could pay you what you are worth, but the market won't bear it". I'm aware of the counterargument made primarily by certain American publishers that you work is worth whatever they are paying you, there are plenty more where you came form, and they are doing you a favour, and I'd be happy to debate why they are wrong in another thread, but for the sake of clarity go with me here. My point is that authors for games have many of the workplace characteristics of volunteers, not "professionals", like mobility between workplaces, and that it might be easier to get new authors in the pool if we looked at the things which make volunteering attractive as ways of getting new authors in the pool.
That pool of hobbyist authors is vital for the health of any game and that includes Ars. When I try and get authors to pitch for Open Calls and they say "No. I am going to instead pitch for Dr Who." that really does seem a problem to me because it means our community is not attracting that volunteer.
A focused thoughtline is a tool which makes author recruitment easier, and I think that's important, because I think getting new blood into the volunteer pool is important.
I can see I've rambled on enough, but for me that's where this is coming from. I'm kind of tired of asking other authors to give us a go, and having them say "X is easier to write and thus more fun for me" and not having any real answer to that other than "Fair enough."
The rules haven't crept into a conceptual discussion, the whole point of the thread was, at the onset, to define the thoughtline of the game, and the point of the thoughtline is to prevent rules bloat. That's what the thread has been about, ab initio.
My broader concern for rules bloat, in its most basic form is this:
I try to get new people to write for Ars and Sub Rosa from local gaming groups.
They say to me "Why would I do that when I can write for Dresden/Dr Who?"
I ask "Why would you prefer to write Dresden?" and their answers are basically:
I know and love the setting already.
I can get up to speed on how to write for the game by reading just two books.
People respect my writing more when it is attached to a well-known franchise.
When I do write, the mechanics are simpler, so I'm doing less work.
There's no chance that after I've written something, a playtester is going to point out two lines in some supplement somewhere which says I can't do it.
Now, there's nothing much to be done about us not having a TV show, or a line of fiction. So, as things which could be considered, there's the question of, are the other objections valid, and can the writer pool or fandom make it easier for other people to join the writer pool?
So, in part to test this theory, I've just done some writing for another publisher who I can't name due to NDAs.
It is so much easier to write something that's not Ars. I mean it is ridiculously simple to write non-Ars. Sure, Ars has a more disciplined production method, so you always know where you stand and when things are due and the playtesting is great and you can get research assistance, and all of that is fantastic, but I recently wrote up the same monster for Ars and for (another system) and the Ars version takes about 45 minutes to get right and the Other system version took about ten minutes, and the 45 minutes is only because I'm relatively experienced with the ruleset. Writing Ars is actually quite difficult compared to Other Systems, so that objection is, I feel a valid one.
So I'm asking for us to concentrate on the thoughtline so that we can say to potential new authors: the bit you need to focus on is (this). You can just ignore (that).
On a larger level I have a theory about RPG publishing, and it works like this:
Robin Laws said at GenConAus that there are only ever two people who make their living as RPG writers. One is him, and the other is whoever is the lead writer on D&D. At the timne he made the comment it was Mike Mearls. Every other RPG writer has a day job and is writing on the side.
When RPG writers train each other, they talk about "being professional" and they are drawing in skills from their day jobs to say what professionalism looks like. I have this counter-theory that none of us are really professionals because none of us actually write for a living. My local tax people say I haven't been a writing professional since SoI came out: I'm a paid hobbyist. I think they are actually right. I am a paid technical writer in my day job sometimes, and its very different to writing for Ars.
Now, every single game you have ever seen (even indie games) saving those written by Robin or Mike, are dependent on hobbyist authors who sell their work at well below commercial wrtiting rate to publishers. The better publishers like Atlas explicitly say this, and thank their authors for doing it, generally with statements like "We wish we could pay you what you are worth, but the market won't bear it". I'm aware of the counterargument made primarily by certain American publishers that you work is worth whatever they are paying you, there are plenty more where you came form, and they are doing you a favour, and I'd be happy to debate why they are wrong in another thread, but for the sake of clarity go with me here. My point is that authors for games have many of the workplace characteristics of volunteers, not "professionals", like mobility between workplaces, and that it might be easier to get new authors in the pool if we looked at the things which make volunteering attractive as ways of getting new authors in the pool.
That pool of hobbyist authors is vital for the health of any game and that includes Ars. When I try and get authors to pitch for Open Calls and they say "No. I am going to instead pitch for Dr Who." that really does seem a problem to me because it means our community is not attracting that volunteer.
A focused thoughtline is a tool which makes author recruitment easier, and I think that's important, because I think getting new blood into the volunteer pool is important.
I can see I've rambled on enough, but for me that's where this is coming from. I'm kind of tired of asking other authors to give us a go, and having them say "X is easier to write and thus more fun for me" and not having any real answer to that other than "Fair enough."
Fair enough is probably the correct answer, which is probably why the buck has stopped there.
The Dresden files has a large pool of fans from which to draw want to be writers and appreciative readers. This system is dead simple. The research needed is small to nonexistent. (the Dresden files rulebooks are completely spiffy, for what it's worth; I read the series because I 1st read the rules. I am not a fan of the fate rule system, because stuff like "head has just been chopped off" is a generic tag sort of makes me uncomfortable, but I was extremely impressed with the 2 books, comprehensive, colorful and entertaining.
Ars Magica… um, no. probably a lot of work, probably very little money. The Main reason to write for Ars Magica is to write for Ars Magica.
If the main reason to write for Ars is to write for Ars, wouldnt it be a good idea to make it easier to write for Ars? The point of a thoughtline is to minimise how hard that is. You can say to people "Mechanic X doesn't matter." It'd make the load of getting up to speed a lot easier, for one.
At the moment, "The main reason to write for Ars is writing for Ars" gets us into situations like the Berklist coming back to life for one day - just long enough to pillory Alex for creating a fanzine to the point where he regreted hanging around in our community, and then dying again.
Why write for Ars if it is harder than writing for other games, and you are going to get less recognition, minimum, and treated like crap, maximum, for your trouble? What's the value proposition for the volunteer?
However, I think a thought-line helps with (or rather thinking about a thought line helps with) an author/editor making decisions about how she writes and what she writes, when she is writing ArM. I can't imagine someone choosing to write ArM because of a thought-line, but once someone has chosen to write ArM for some other reason, then thinking about a (or several) thought-line(s) helps to focus that writing.
A thought-line really is just a bit of jargon that stands for "think about what is important in the game you are writing for".
sure, it would be a good idea, but that's not always possible. For example, I can come up with the fog line for convincing a computer programmer to do Linux kernel programming rather than some application level Python and Perl scripts. The pay is pretty similar, but the 1st is much, much harder. The only answer for doing one, rather than the other, is desire. Or maybe a knack.
I would kind of turn this around, starting with the ease of playing auras Magica. Because if you have more players, you'll get more writers. One kind of writer will notice that he's playing the game and likes the game and so why not write the game. The other kind of writer will notice that there is a lot of activity around this game, and any work sunk into learning its idiosyncrasies is likely to pay off over multiple works.
But maybe that's where you started, talking about the fog line for playing.
I'm not sure this is easy or even possible without totally changing the game.
(I'm now considering that Harry Potter makes wizard cool, and I am wondering what a role-playing game of that universe might look like. Unless one owns the franchise, it wouldn't be possible to use anything specific to that world, but it might be possible to better understand how to popularize a role-playing game centered around wizards by understanding what kind of game system would be needed, along with an prototype storytemplate or 2 so that people understand how to be wizards and why doing that is awesome. Even here, though, I do not feel very confident. The main character of the series isn't very good at being a wizard, and makes it through the series using only a very few spells.)
Even afterward, Ars Magica places an extra burden on the writer, that of accuracy, because we are talking about real folklore, real history, real religions, real cultures…
I'd say that this discussion shows that there is no single thoughtline for the game of Ars Magica. It's surprising when you think about it how many different approaches there are to a game which really has a a very small fanbase, but there you are.
The rules bloat is part of a general problem of sprawl, wherein there is a very large amount of published material and it's all presented as somehow interconnected and relevant to everything else. This is obviously different from, say, a pile of D&D adventures. The solution here, in my view, is to explicitly design material to be used as a toolkit, as Ovarwa notes, rather than to pretend to an unmanageable canon. With this approach, your thoughtline suggestion works well for focusing individual works.
I'm not a writer but as a fan I like it that way. Sometimes hobbies are best regarded as hobbies. I don't think I'd enjoy AM books nearly as much if they were written by professional writers lacking the obsessive interest in our specific niche of the hobby. Anyway it's not as if we're suffering from a shortage of AM books - my closet is overflowing and I can't keep track of the material as it is. New blood would of course be great among the writer pool, but only from true fans, imo.
This is the key. The fanbase is small and I don't see it going anywhere but downward as long as one needs access to over a dozen gamebooks to play the way veterans do. Sprawl...
I don't see this going downward, so much as not being likely to experience explosive growth for interest.
I think that Timothy hit it on the head, in a sense, that writing for Ars Magica is a hobby. This does not speak to the quality of work, but to whether it pays the bills. (If Robin laws is being used as an example, I suspect that he'd already be writing for Ars Magica if he thought he could make it work. Heck, if I remember correctly, he even tried to use it for Rune…)
