In the three different sagas I’ve played in, someone inevitably takes Flawless Magic (which is an awesome virtue) and then takes the virtue that dumps points into spell mastery, then keeps dumping experience into mastery, and ends up with a level 6 or 7 mastery in a spell like Pilum of Fire. Then blasts out 7 or 8 multicasted spells with high penetration.
I had a thought to slow it down a bit and cap mastery to max out at your Magic Theory, and to make MT more important (I feel like in a game based on magi, that MT isn’t as important to most players unless they’re Verditius).
I know if they’re dumping a lot of XP into that one mastery, they’re forsaking other arts/abilities and limiting themselves, and if they run up against something that’s immune to that spell, they’re kind of hosed.
Anyway, I’m not planning on implementing this in the current saga. I just wanted to know if anyone else has experienced this and if they just let it go and planned around it or what they think of this idea.
I played a magus with Mastery 6 in Pilum of Fire. And yes, when conflict occurred, my Magi would usually cast it, but it didn’t always work out, and I did play him as trying to be more than a one trick pony.
One day I want to play a flambeau that legitimately only has Pilum of Fire and a stupidly high mastery in it lol
As for capping- not really, and I wouldn’t do it. Masteries already take hefty time investment- if someone wants so much mastery they have a score higher than 3, let them have it I say.
!!! I feel that Magic Theory is so key to every Lab Total (and things like limits on vis use) that making it even more important is exactly the wrong direction to go.
Magi characters always agonize over where to put their experience, so much that they’re usually weirdos with no Social Abilities to speak of (on top of their Gift penalty). Spell Mastery is another thing that demands experience, and someone who dumps 50 xp into a Mastery is going to be falling behind in Arts compared to other magi.
It is possible to have a starting magus with Flawless Magic + Mastered Spells who can have a quite impressive Mastery ability for one spell… for a cost of a Major + Minor Virtue. But it’s trivially easy to make a powerhouse starting magus who’s a one-trick pony; it’s almost a design goal of the game.
I’m playing a Verditius with Flawless Magic and the demand for experience in Abilities & Arts is painful (need Crafts, too). I feel that the temptation to get up to 6-7 Mastery score is a real newbie trap; the smarter ploy would be to have multiple spells with 3-4 Mastery so you’re not the one-weird-trick magus.
In my current saga, people had got so tired of people relentlessly multi-casting spells that we instituted a house rule that you had to make a concentration roll to multi-cast with the difficulty increasing with number of copies cast. So Zelron isn’t the only one to be frustrated by this.
That’s interesting. I did have to start making one character who would float off of the ground and get pulled around by an unseen servant start making concentration rolls when he was being pulled.
I am always truly amazed when the GM/SG has a problem with a character having only one trick in the sleeves.
A PC has a Pilum of Fire Mastery 7, ok.
How does that help when:
The child of an important grog is missing.
The locan noble thinks they (the magi) are potential threats and initiated an Interdiction in the court of the local bishop. That causes widespread disloyalty in the covenant.
A Faerie messenger brings the decree of the Faerie King: they should pay tribute or invoke the wrath of the king on their head.
It is particularly useless when killing someone/thing makes the situation even worse.
When it's time for physical confrontation it is not a problem that a character specialized for that scenario shines brighter then the others… Problem is when every problem is about physical confrontation.
The one-weird-trick magus with Mastery 7 pilum of fire multicast with high Penetration means that – unless they’re mid- to late-career – they’ve also focused their Arts scores to get that Penetration up. So, they’ve only got a hammer to work with and everything is going to have to get nailed. With fire.
That might be a problem if you’re running preplanned adventures, but in a campaign they should quickly get a Reputation for their one weird trick and then be facing opponents it won’t work on. And then they’ll be scrambling to put experience into anything else. It would make for a good opponent to the player magi, though – scary on first encounter until they figure out his trick.
The high penetration is a combination of things but includes choosing penetration as a mastery.
They get Te + Fo + Sta + Mastery for casting total, then add mastery again for penetration plus a point or two of the penetration ability. With a 7 mastery and 2 penetration, that’s +9 penetration.
There are other balancing factors. In the current saga, the player with that focused mastery is has it in a lower-level spell (10 vs. the 20 of pilum of fire), so the damage done is typically only +10. Higher soak enemies, more targets, can also be used to increase the challenge, so it’s not insurmountable.
It is a fair point that, even with Flawless Magic, he has invested a fair amount of XP into it at the cost of other abilities/arts.
In Ars Magica there is a different axiom behind the scene compared to “other B.i.G. RPG”-s.
While other RPG about cellars and giant, intelligent lizards is often centered on physical confrontation and the question seems to be wether the PCs are able to win the fights -
vs. Ars Magica it is like 100% sure that PCs are going to win physical confrontations. (Partly, bc they are the PCs, partly bc they can say in any situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTfVTxvchi8 ). So based on my experience it is more beneficial to shift the focus to the in-world or local consequences of using magic instead of making a big problem about the fact that 2-3 semi-capable magi (with half a dozen grogs) can destroy a decent mundane army of the historical period.
Consequences like:
after a big blast of fires (using PoF recklessly) local folks started to tell tales about the devil in the wood. Some faeries jumped into the role, now the forest is really unsafe bc of these (dark faerie) devils. Even covenfolk starts to be afraid of going to the woods. It is clear that gossip started after that particularly fiery confrontation…
after his 3rd knight’s disappearance in a row the local noble got a spy network into motion: he get to know that the “natural philosophers in the woods” are more then that: they have serious magical powers! Does he start to fear them, or does he want to control them?
using CotMT the magi erected their towers, knowing nothing about the law of the land: one needs a permission from the local lord (spiritual or temporal) to build stone buildings. The 3 towers are standing now, so how can the magi smooth out the tension?
Ars Majica is nearly always asking if one should do something, not if one could. AM is not the game to choose if you want lots of combat.
This one trick pony can blast things with fire. Great. The magi with a ReMe sleep spell does the same crowd control with a lot less XP and less noise. The PeTe expert creates a level 30 pit of gaping earth that makes a 15 foot pit 120 paces across. He’s gravely wounding or killing a lot more people than 7 fast cast pilums. Let the fire mage have his fun.