That declaration came from the man who's been in charge of the creative direction of the game for over ten years, and wrote the past two editions of it. I was as surprised as you are, at first.
I suggest you read Sub Rosa to get the full version, because David's article is a well thought-out essay, not a tweet, and has nuances that don't come across in what Timothy or I wrote in commenting about it.
Personally I quite like the simulationist elements of Ars Magica. There is a real push across various media industries right now to make things very simplistic, but what that really translates to is having good onboarding and good scaffolding. Its very much the case in the games industry at the moment, albeit with different terminology.
I think it potentially is something that can be done within the context of 5th edition, but it needs a push to help new players find it and get it. And that probably means some attention directly from Atlas. A website-based PDF with a similar production quality to the existing books, for example, can be distributed free both on the Atlas site and potentially pushed out to the various online stores as a free product.
Tacking such an exercise on to a new rules edition is the low-hanging-fruit approach. A new edition tends to attract attention anyway, so you are essentially piggybacking your onboarding/scaffolding product marketing on to the marketing (both company-driven and word of mouth) of the new edition. Expensive, since your marketing cost is essentially the cost of making your new edition.
Which brings up the big question: is the cost of such an exercise (even with fully fan-created content) worth the expected gain in market share? Just how many new players would such a thing bring in? How many players would turn from single-book buyers to investors in the product line?
The exercise for a fan-created product is working to ensure the cost-benefit from Atlas' perspective looks promising enough for them to invest in the necessary marketing work required. That means pushing out something of very high quality (not just well edited text, but formatting, illustrations, layout, etc.) for probably free. I'm sure we have a community that can likely do it, but it is a huge undertaking and wants someone to manage/direct such a project - not to mention getting buy-in from the line editor and the publisher on the concept lest all the work be for naught.
I like the Simulationist aspect of Ars Magica. It is a great part of the appeal to me. I play Heroquest 2 a lot, and also lots of Indie/Forge narrativist games - Prime Time Adventures is a particular favourite - but I'm immensely fond of the crunch of Ars. The game is often touted as a game that inspired Forgeites and narrativist gaming, and it can still be played that way -- and many aspects support it -- but fifth ed is a very crunchy game, and does lend itself equally well to simulationism.
However, I certainly think there is an issue of how we can attract new players, and make learning the system easier. The rules put me off for a decade from playing Ars.. From the essay on my blog here - jerome23.wordpress.com/2012/09/0 ... ying-game/ I have attempted as Timothy and so many others have to find ways to try and overcome the high investment of time needed to learn the system.
Recently as Darkwing noted i have tried another approach - getting Ars books in local game shops, running Ars at conventions, and of course organising the first Grand Tribunal UK and several more since, which in turn created through Erik Dahl Grand Tribunal USA as an offspring. Most recently I have run the Kickstarter game on the Black Chicken forums, still going strong, and have recruited personally a number of new players, taking the time to teach them the rules, run sagas with them (I run Ars three days a week now and work on other Ars related projects at least another day or two) and encouraging them to start sagas of their own.
I have one more project, that has stalled a bit owing to my recent illness. I have checked it is OK with Michelle and John (though they have not seen the final version yet) , and it will be a free fan resource that will hopefully make introducing Ars to people just a tiny bit easier. It's not something that has been done before, and if i can get it to work it should hopefully amuse even die hard fans for an hour or so -- but I need to get it right. I will reveal what I am up to once I have a working beta version, and will then ask for help making it useful, but I don't want to say more just yet. I would encourage everyone to try and think of new ways to address the problem, and I think Sub Rosa is a wonderful resource, and writing adventures for it is something I REALLY encourage folks to do, because I agree absolutely that adventures are the ideal way in. The only problem is people won't see Sub Rosa till they have already got interested in Ars, so maybe also publish some adventures on your websites? Dunno. Word of mouth remains our best advertising strategy in the end!
Anyway just a few haphazard thoughts. I guess thinking about it I really might be as I am described on one Ars site -- "an Ars Magica activist" 
cj x
My own preference vis a vis narrative and simulationist approaches is pretty close to the approach taken in Ars Magica 5E.
Even though I haven't read David's article yet, I'm not entirely sure that Ars has a problem drawing new players...
If so, however, might I suggest trying something along the lines of a online collection of character templates for Grogs, Companions, and Magi as seen in previous editions? Creating charactes ala carte isn't exactly hard, but can be somewhat daunting and time-consuming when one's not familiar with the virtues and flaws.
Hi,
Interestingly enough, D&D4 does a very good job of "onboarding" and "scaffolding," yet is pretty much not "narrativist" until the combat stops, at which point the game becomes very narrativist, if only because the rules stop providing coverage.
I'm not sure that narrativism is about not having rules but relying on GM fiat. In its own way, D&D4 is a very modern game, with rules that constrain the narrative and guide the kinds of stories that are told.
I like GNS, but these days I think more about games being "guided" versus "unguided." I suppose that's a combination of onboarding and scaffolding, but also for the GM and not just the players! Guided games restrict any of the kinds of stories that are told, how they are told, how they resolve, what can be done, what can be said in-game. AM is extremely unguided. I think its closest relative is GURPS, even though AM constrains the setting. Both games are skill-based, with ever-growing lists of skills (despite the welcomed aggregation of skills for AM5), with virtues and flaws, an attempt toward simulating a kind of realism and well-researched source books. On the other side we have games like Polaris, My Life with Master, Dogs in the Vineyard which guide the stories in surprising ways, helping both players and GM move things along.
Interestingly enough, some of the principles of these games can easily be applied to AM. Quick vis hunt or covenant issue plus Polaris, for example? One player is the magus, another is the opposition (which can be rolled on a table, if you like), another plays allies, including the grogs.... With four players, you can quickly play through a year of each magus handling covenant affairs while the other magi do 3 seasons of lab work.
Is that less simulationist than what we have now? Depends on whether applying the current rules yields the results expected from the system being modeled. I start off with expectations of the system, then look at results produced by the model (in this case, a set of game rules) and see if they match.
I don't know AM1. But AM2 does not seem to be more focused on narrative than AM5. The AM5 rules are simply better-defined. AM5 allows a lot more handwaving when it comes to covenant design compared to AM2, if that is a preferred measure of narrativism. But AM5 also provides better advice, such as explicitly urges a group to choose each Hook for the stories it will provide, which is a nod toward narrativism but which provides no guidance beyond "Hey, GM, remember to tell stories about the monster living beneath the covenant." AM2 provides much less than that. Which is more 'narrative?'
The "Long School of Promoting Storytelling by Presenting Terrible Rules and Advice to Ignore Said Rules" does promote both narrative and gamist models, in a degenerate DIY sense by making simulation futile. That's not quite the same as rules that guide a group through their first session or three, making all of GNS easier.
AM presents special challenges: A rich vocabulary of magic means that player actions are deliberately unconstrained, even compared to a starting GURPS wizard with 50 spells (let alone a D&D4 wizard with 2 at-will, 2 encounter and 2 daily spells of which only 1 of the latter categories is available at a time, and whose effects are quite limited.) Because the game is designed to support the play of powerful magi, normal grogs and everything between, simplifying assumptions to support elegant rules for PCs becomes a lot more difficult. Instead, rules need to provide consistent coverage of a wider domain of character possibilities.
I think the most productive areas for effort involve simplified story construction and simplified NPC construction.
Anyway,
Ken
Also: Thanks David for the interesting article!
My thoughts:
When I raised a post regarding 'fluff' fiction for a theoretical new edition and book, I had people who were dismissive of the very idea. I thought that was interesting, because I was coming at it from a "new people coming in" perspective. I was interested that some of the forumgoers here were not supportive of an 'onboarding' system.
Narrativist: Ars 5th (the only one I particularly care about) isn't really narrativist - its mutliple systems through all of its game books simulate the lives of various magicians and other things. IMHO games like WOD or Scion aren't narrativist either, they are just systems that understand their modelled stories bypass their rules systems on multiple occasions.
That being said, I personally believe a narrativist system is one which controls the 'flow' of the game, more like FATE, FUDGE or BURNING WHEEL. Ars has story flaws, but the application of the resolution of those is done through simulationist means.
Scaffolding: I'm going to pull out this one - I'm an intelligent guy and I didn't get ARS until Kidgloves who had played previous editions ran a game and ran us through the rule system. I'd run multiple game systems of varying complexity previously but I could not begin ARS because it was basically incomprehensible to me. I find this is a problem - I imagine that after Ars 5th won its award, lots of people (like me) bought it. And failed to play it. And failed to buy any expansions. This isn't a super cool business model.
My suggestion for onboarding/scaffolding: I would avoid moving toward a narrative system completely, but I would agree a free PDF for an intro to the game (NOT Calebais) and its various rules and systems would be super useful for getting into the game.
Another simulationist game I've recently got into is very impressive - It's just as old and twice as annoyingly complex for minor rules in some other book somewhere - Battletech. They explain openly in the beginning of their books how their modelling takes place and I would suggest that for some mythical 6th ed (or a new 5th ed product) could benefit from the ideas. Both Battletech and White Wolf use these prodigiously... and WW is successful and BT is regaining popularity.
I don't think whether a game is simulationist has much to do with whether it is popular. I say that the onboarding and scaffolding of the systems have far more to do with that than anything.
Their idea: Art, Fiction, Introductory Rules, Full rules.
What does this do?
ART: It gives a particularly evocative image in the minds of new people for what battletech 'is'. White Wolf follows this intensly. Desperate people in frightening artwork. Battletech has powerful looking mechs with giant guns striding over and owning the countryside.
Fiction: While I was dismissed by some people on the boards here, Battletech uses this as an integral part of their system for getting people in. They have decent writers (I don't say great writers, but decent) showing pilots of battlemechs and other things that demonstrate key parts of the setting. High lords politicking. Mechwarriors fighting honorably or dishonorably. The poor little people who get stomped on.
White Wolf are one of the most successful companies today - and not because their system is any good. It's broken, doesn't do what it wants itself to do, has deliberate limits on the system to prevent exploitation - and then is easily exploitable anyway. It's just not a great sytem. Why are they so very popular? Because they focus on the story. They present the story in short (fairly mediocre) fluff text, and have fluff fiction littered through their work. White Wolf are one of the biggest sellers out their, rivalling D+D if not outselling.
Both BT and WW have multiple published books in their setting which are likely from fans. The fans (and newbies) buy the books, see the adverts inside the books and this is yet another scaffolded step onto buying the game itself.
Introductory Rules: Battletech does this in full colour with a sample mission as a part of their (very worthwhile) Introductory Box Set. White Wolf had those little sample adventures they put off for free. Both act as an easy step into the real thing. I assume that WW actually made the sample missions to be played... but I suspect they acted more as teasers for people who would then go out and buy their core books. Both of these are glossy, colourful, and interesting to look at as well as functional and playable.
Full Rules: WW is easy to get a grasp on, BT is.. not 
. But in both of these cases they have scaffolded, produced high quality and interesting stuff to look at, and are both relatively successful in their fields.
If Ars, the niche simulationist game that it is, employed these methods - then it doesn't really matter if the system is complex. The system is robust, far better than WW systems. It rewards great stories and it rewards campaign, long term play. It's only real failure is that short term play isn't rewarded overmuch. I can only imagine that if Ars did some of these marketing tricks that it would achieve more sales - and get more newbie Ars players in rather than them just drifting along to D+D or WW like most newbies do. I know that these things take a fair chunk of money, though .
...
I got excited there, sorry
Whatever anyone else says after this post, I just wanted to say I enjoyed reading this.
awesome.
Across nine years of play with my last Ars Magica troupe, we still had moments when it came to spell casting and spontaneous magic where the fingers and toes came out to work out the casting totals.
Now, we may have been spectacularly ill-prepared, but one thing that I think could help is a character sheet that doesn't just record what you have but actively walks you through the numbers, making the totals clear and accessible. I think that could be done today for the current rule set. It's one of the things that I think that default Pathfinder sheet gets right. I always found it a little daunting, but actually once you get past what looks like a confusing array of boxes, the results are pretty clear. I'd like to see something like that for spells, abilities, and even spontaneous magic; just something to give the numbers immediacy and reduce the on-the-spot maths needed.
I'd also downplay the one thing that we always point to as the system's strength - the ability to cast pretty much any spell at any time. Spontaneous magic is damned useful, but it isn't the easiest thing to grasp or work out on the fly. Your list of spells (essentially just powers) on the other hand are pretty set.
None of that makes much of an impact the simulationist side of the game, especially given that it goes nowhere near long term events, but giving some clarity to the numbers is going to help.
p.s. I finally got a handle on Pathfinder character creation by watching a couple of YouTube pieces on "Pathfinder Basics". It did get me wondering... Why don't we have any YouTube walkthroughs?
A) No-one's had the idea?
B) You'd need 2, possibly 3, covering magi and companions/grogs separately
Three preliminary points.
First, I didn't write ArM4, although I was a major contributor.
Second, anyone who hasn't read my original essay should buy Sub Rosa 12 and do so. Support the zine!
Third, I don't think it's useful to frame the discussion in terms of increasing sales. When comparing to White Wolf, for example, you should remember that ArM didn't sell as well as the World of Darkness when it was published by White Wolf, using the same techniques as they used for the WoD. It's also worth bearing in mind that WW have stopped producing conventionally printed products; while I suspect that WoD products currently sell more copies than ArM supplements, I wouldn't bet much that I was right. All the rumours I've heard about RPG sales suggest that ArM has come through a period of catastrophic decline in the RPG market relatively unscathed. ArM might actually be doing as well as it can in the current market.
So, let's talk about onboarding and scaffolding. I agree with Timothy that these are important things to take from narrativist games, and with Arghmark that the elements he mentions help with this. Roughly, I'd say that art and fiction primarily help with onboarding, while introductory rules are scaffolding.
An important part of onboarding, possibly the most important part, is telling players what the game is about. What will they be doing? What sort of characters are they playing? What is the world like? You need to supply the characters' common sense. This is where licensed properties, if done right, have a massive advantage. "You are playing in Middle Earth. You are heroes fighting against the Dark Lord Sauron and his agents." "You are playing superheroes. You wear spandex and fight crime." "You are playing in the world of a Game of Thrones. There will be treachery, murder, and incest, possibly all at the same time." Later on, of course, you can add nuances to this, but for beginners it's a great help. Some independent games also have an easy in for this. "You are vampires in a darker version of the contemporary world." "You are warriors piloting giant walking robots."
The further removed from experience the game world, the harder this becomes. Ars Magica is a long way from the experience of its players, so onboarding is hard.
However, this does not mean that all games should be close to experience. Exotic and unfamiliar settings are fun and interesting, and can raise interesting issues and stories that just don't fit in a game based more closely on what we know. It does mean that you have to work harder on onboarding.
Scaffolding is also important, because no-one can learn all the rules at once. It really should be easy to sit down and start playing a game; half an hour's preparation is an absolute maximum. Ars Magica is really not good at this, although I would say that Tenra Bansho Zero is actually worse, at least for a western audience. (It doesn't help that TBZ is designed for short stories, not long arcs -- I suspect that you would spend longer reading the rules and background and designing a character than you would spend playing. This may have been fixed a bit in the English translation, but I haven't read that yet.)
However, I also think that the scaffolding should be an integral part of the game. The scaffolding should lead organically into a long-term campaign, with a sensibly generated character, and not make you want to throw away your first characters and start again now that you understand what is going on. This is also hard. What's more, I think you need to design the full rules with the scaffolding in mind to make this work. I don't think it can be done for Ars Magica 5, and I think a version of Ars Magica it could be done for would be very different from the versions we know.
That said, there are halfway houses: introductory adventures are a good one. The players might well want to make new characters afterwards, and the SG has to put in a lot more than half an hour of preparation, but you can get players involved quickly, and introduce elements of the background one at a time.
So, in summary, these are difficult problems for games like Ars Magica. You can make them easier by having simplistic rules and familiar settings, but even then they are not trivial. And then you have to remember that the original version of D&D, which started the whole hobby, was, by all accounts, really bad at both. D&D wouldn't work in theory, but in practice, it was a great success.
(This may appear twice; the forum software appears to be misbehaving. If so, my apologies, and I'll try to delete exactly one copy.)
Three preliminary points.
First, I didn't write ArM4, although I was a major contributor.
Second, anyone who hasn't read my original essay should buy Sub Rosa 12 and do so. Support the zine!
Third, I don't think it's useful to frame the discussion in terms of increasing sales. When comparing to White Wolf, for example, you should remember that ArM didn't sell as well as the World of Darkness when it was published by White Wolf, using the same techniques as they used for the WoD. It's also worth bearing in mind that WW have stopped producing conventionally printed products; while I suspect that WoD products currently sell more copies than ArM supplements, I wouldn't bet much that I was right. All the rumours I've heard about RPG sales suggest that ArM has come through a period of catastrophic decline in the RPG market relatively unscathed. ArM might actually be doing as well as it can in the current market.
So, let's talk about onboarding and scaffolding. I agree with Timothy that these are important things to take from narrativist games, and with Arghmark that the elements he mentions help with this. Roughly, I'd say that art and fiction primarily help with onboarding, while introductory rules are scaffolding.
An important part of onboarding, possibly the most important part, is telling players what the game is about. What will they be doing? What sort of characters are they playing? What is the world like? You need to supply the characters' common sense. This is where licensed properties, if done right, have a massive advantage. "You are playing in Middle Earth. You are heroes fighting against the Dark Lord Sauron and his agents." "You are playing superheroes. You wear spandex and fight crime." "You are playing in the world of a Game of Thrones. There will be treachery, murder, and incest, possibly all at the same time." Later on, of course, you can add nuances to this, but for beginners it's a great help. Some independent games also have an easy in for this. "You are vampires in a darker version of the contemporary world." "You are warriors piloting giant walking robots."
The further removed from experience the game world, the harder this becomes. Ars Magica is a long way from the experience of its players, so onboarding is hard.
However, this does not mean that all games should be close to experience. Exotic and unfamiliar settings are fun and interesting, and can raise interesting issues and stories that just don't fit in a game based more closely on what we know. It does mean that you have to work harder on onboarding.
Scaffolding is also important, because no-one can learn all the rules at once. It really should be easy to sit down and start playing a game; half an hour's preparation is an absolute maximum. Ars Magica is really not good at this, although I would say that Tenra Bansho Zero is actually worse, at least for a western audience. (It doesn't help that TBZ is designed for short stories, not long arcs -- I suspect that you would spend longer reading the rules and background and designing a character than you would spend playing. This may have been fixed a bit in the English translation, but I haven't read that yet.)
However, I also think that the scaffolding should be an integral part of the game. The scaffolding should lead organically into a long-term campaign, with a sensibly generated character, and not make you want to throw away your first characters and start again now that you understand what is going on. This is also hard. What's more, I think you need to design the full rules with the scaffolding in mind to make this work. I don't think it can be done for Ars Magica 5, and I think a version of Ars Magica it could be done for would be very different from the versions we know.
That said, there are halfway houses: introductory adventures are a good one. The players might well want to make new characters afterwards, and the SG has to put in a lot more than half an hour of preparation, but you can get players involved quickly, and introduce elements of the background one at a time.
So, in summary, these are difficult problems for games like Ars Magica. You can make them easier by having simplistic rules and familiar settings, but even then they are not trivial. And then you have to remember that the original version of D&D, which started the whole hobby, was, by all accounts, really bad at both. D&D wouldn't work in theory, but in practice, it was a great success.
Thank you, David.
It occurred to me that Semita Errabunda (look toward the bottom of that page) was an attempt at scaffolding. The project seems to have kind of fizzled, and to hazard a guess I would say possibly Atlas Games' staff found that making products they can sell takes up all of their working hours.
Some kind of ready-made covenant would be useful, and interesting to do. The fan community could take over Semita Errabunda, or start a parallel project that's similar.
You mean like stating up everybody in the covenant explaining the stat-up process? Quite a few characters have already been developed...
Xavi
Not exactly. I was thinking more about creating a ready-made covenant with some interesting NPC magi and covenfolk, so you don't have to design all that when you are just learning the game.
There are lots of those here on the PbP forums. People scan and use material from the on-line posted games all the time. Perhaps we need to spread awareness of these resources
There's also meta-scaffolding : defining a process where the Troupe designs the saga and its elements, how the SG rotates, how to negociate a story. If it is well done, rpgers from outside will come and have a look, if only to apply these ideas to their campaigns.
Let me say at the outset, I haven't read David's piece in Sub Rosa 12 and I don't know all this fancy theory... onboarding, scafolding, whatever.
That said... when it comes to being introduced to the game, to understanding how to play and what the potentials are... for me it all started with Severn Temple. I had played in one brief ArsM game in college, which died shortly after I joined, and tried a couple false starts without much luck. Then I stumbled across the Severn Temple website and spent literally days reading this groups in character journal of the events in their saga. I was hooked. I loved it. I understood it. The rest, as they say, is history.
As for understanding the mechanics, ArsM is actually very simple. Roll a d10 and add a couple of numbers, compare your total to the difficulty of the task to see if you succeed. Easy. The rest... advancement, designing spells, lab work, etc... that can all be introduced in stages and involves a fair degree of referencing the books anyway (I've even seen season lab work planning played out in character treating the rule book chapters as if they were summae from the covenant library).
I agree with those who say that the hard part is getting "the story," the concept behind the setting... but even that isn't so hard. "Imagine medieval Europe, where the legends and folk tales are real. There are giants in the hills, faeries in the forests, and wizards in that lonely tower... and you get to play the wizards."
Onboarding for one-off play should not be hard: the participants play wizards in a realistic medieval world, in which things are as medieval people thought they were (so, god, the devil, geocentrism and crystal spheres). The core rules (stat + skill, target number depends on difficulty or is contested) are simple. For a saga, its a bit harder: characters will spend a lot of their time in downtime, inventing things and writing books - which goes against the adventure focus of traditional rpgs.
Scaffolding is the hard bit. The rules for what the game is all about - magic - are fiddly and require odd maths. And the social setting for the game, from which stories flow - is even harder to explain. You can get around the first a bit by having no spontaneous magic, and spells as basically a list of powers. The second is a bit more difficult.
And this is why I don't run Ars Magica at conventions. I'd love to, and I know there are people who would love to try it. But the amount of infodump required compared to something like e.g. Fiasco (or even Call of Cthulhu) is prohibitive. The one time I tried it (with "Subtle and Quick to Anger") it was an unhappy experience.
A well-designed intro adventure with pre-generated (or mostly pre-generated, with tick-box options, Dungeon World style) could get around some of this. Or a D&D Red Box style narrative introduction / choose-your-own-adventure for the social context (a newly-Gauntleted apprentice at their first Tribunal?)
That's not the basic mechanism, though.
Let me compare Ars to a game which is so similar you might claim a certain amount of inspiration from one to the other: Doctor Who.
The basic roll in DW is, in Ars Terms:
Characteristic + Ability (+/- bonus or penalty for virtue or flaw) + 2d6. This is compared against a target number, which is generally 9,12, 15 or 18. (easy, medium, hard, very hard).
Now, superficially that looks like Ars, but the thing is: this is the mechanism which is used for travelling and talking, the key things the doctor and his companions do.
In Ars, that's just the unopposed skill resolution mechanic.
The mechanic players want to use during the games I've run at cons are not the unopposed skill mechanics, because that's not the big hook for the game. The core mechanic for the game is the magic mechanic. It reads like this:
Choose if you wish to use a spell you know.
IF YES AND YOU ARE USING A PREGEN
Roll 1 stress die (explain) with modifiers (explain) and compare it to the number of one your pregen sheet next to the spell.
IF YES AND YOU ARE NOT USING A PREGEN
Before this you should have worked out the casting totals for all of your spells, to speed time in play. You need to rework them every time your character gains relevant experience. If you must do it at the table, it is STA + Art + Art (capped by Requisites?) +/- Virtues and Flaws + Aura + Vis.
IF NO, then:
Select a effect you want on difficulty scale spread across ten separate pages in the rulebook, with another three pages describing how Range, Duration, and Target work, remembering Target size modifiers and that the magnitude scale switches at 5.
Sta + Art 1 + Art 2 (+/- modifiers due to Virtues and Flaws) + Aura. then IF
Casting with fatigue divide all by 5 OR
divide all by 2 and add a die where
1 roll again and double
0 roll twice and report zeroes to SG.
all others as per pips.
(Add vis results here. Explain vis.)
Compare to difficulty level.
That's the core mechanic in this game, because this is a game, at its very core, about wizards. Communities, sure, but the game's about wizards. And that's the unopposed mechanic. I haven't talked about Penetration and Damage.
Now, there are good reasons why the core mechanic is like this, but burying our heads in the sand and saying "Oh, it's a simple core mechanic" is not helpful, because it really and truly is not, IMO. It's really complicated.
This.
And even this leaves out the critical "choose whether to roll a simple or stress die" and "how many botch dice..."