Yes, but you are comparing apples with oranges and then complaining that the oranges don't look like apples.
Those certainly are role-playing games in some sense of the word. However, they are indie rpg games (or at least the ones that I know of are; I don't know anything about The Beast of Lindford or Smallville). There's nothing wrong with indie games. I like them. I own quite a few.
However, indie games are essentially designed around gimmicks, and are designed for short-term/one-off, casual play with "Story" being the main focus. They are not designed for long-term, on-going, detailed play. They are not designed to sell multiple supplements. They are totally different sorts of games to ArM5.
ArM5 does have something in common with indie games. It has a gimmick (the magic system), and it has (at least pretensions) to be story focused. However, ArM5 is not an indie game.
Being jealous of indie games and trying to change the rules for an ArM con-game to make it seem more like the rules of an indie game, doesn't seem to be a good strategy. Particularly if you are trying to attract long-term players to ArM. If you want to design an indie-style game set somewhere vaguely like Mythic Europe, then that's fine...and I would throw away all the ArM rules and start again (but definitely keep the Latin terminology!). But you're not running an ArM con-game then, you are just inventing a new game.
The sorts of scenarios, however, that indie-games use --- that's something more profitable to look at. Indie games are very definitely about the PC characters, and often have stories that are player vs player.
That's what I mean by vocabulary. They don't have the vocabulary to understand and describe what their characters are capable of doing in the given context.
This is nothing to do with immersion, and this is nothing to do with whether things are labelled "Creo" or "Create" (which is why it makes no difference if you change those labels).
at the point a person is choosing which con game to play, saying "Ars is harder to learn because it is not an indie game." is not a useful sales pitch. Why should they care?
Prime Time Adventures is designed for campaign play, as is Smallville, so in those cases, your point doesn't hold true. Indeed, Smallville isn't indie.
I can lay on other examples. Doctor Who's a lot simpler than Ars and isn't indie. Leverage isn't indie. Less complicated than D&D or Vampire is not the same as uncomplicated.
That's an imputation of motive. I'm not "jealous" of indie games. I just think they can teach us something about rules simplification.
I'm not suggesting that is a good sales pitch. The fact is that ArM is more difficult to learn because is not constucted in the same way as an "indie-style" game is. Being "easy to learn" is the pitch of the indie games. You need a different pitch for ArM.
The obvious one being "it has a cool magic system"...which is why I think it is a disaster to radically change the magic system for a proposed introductory con-game. The bits you are removing are the pitch for ArM. The pitch is the title of the game. Without the ArM magic system, ArM is just another pseudo-medieval rpg (albeit one with excessively researched supplements available for it).
You still seem to be wanting to introduce players to a game that is not ArM. Which seems to be defeating the purpose of having a con-game to introduce players to ArM.
Do you genuinely think anybody will be playing them in 23 years time? Will anybody be playing them in 2 years time?
Smallville certainly, since its core mechnaic is being built into games which are due to be published past that timeframe. I don't see Margaret Weis ditchign the system although it will rebrand for other TV IP.
PTA has been around for a while and has a very low cost base, so it may last two years, sure...
Very well, I'll do that for him. Ars Magica's mechanics are a miracle of simplicity; the complexity comes from the other end of the system, namely the player.
With the exception of Twilight (and some of the more esoteric Mysteries), everything boils down to "Add some simple, clearly relevent numbers and compare to a pre-determined difficulty". There are very few things which cause exception to this, unlike many other games, and in my experience the only bit which people have had difficulty grokking has been the combat system, where the opposed rolls, size-considerations and multiple derived stats get confusing quickly.
Having run other games with freeform magic systems (notably oMage and nMage), the problem is that when you present someone with a lot of options, he freezes. It takes time to get used to all your options not solely in terms of difficulties and numbers (frankly, I've never met anyone who had difficulty with the fact that big Creo and small Perdo meant that they were better at making rocks than breaking walls) but because when presented with CrTe 30 and PeTe 15, or Mind 4 Gnosis 3, people spend so long trying to think of what they can do or could do that they never actually do anything. They also tend to try to do everything with magic at first, and that bogs things down more, and often leads to people giving up because CrTe isn't very good at opening doors, for instance.
I have never seen any freeform system handle it better or worse. If you do not know the system and setting, you will always muddle through things like that. It does take time for people to learn what the numbers mean in any system. In D&D (pick your edition), a sword +5 is extremely powerful; in HARP it's essentially just a really well made mundane sword; in Ars Magica that's a fairly hefty boost to the damage but not earthshattering.
Ars Magica exists within a structured setting, and the game is designed for long term play. As such, wholly freeform magic is, unless your players are already well apprised of the setting, chaotic and out of place, and it always falls down in con-games and other short term situations because it is not designed for those. Motorcycles make very poor cars and vice versa, for all that they are both vehicles.
Play with less lazy, more interested people then. Pretty much every RPG can be reduced to "roll a die, add a number and describe what you want" and tacked on to any setting at all. That said, trying to run anything tactical with Storyteller is doomed to fail thematically, and trying to run anything which does not involve heavy combat means that 90% of the D&D4 page-count is useless to you. Ars Magica has fairly tight integration of system and setting, and without the latter the former isn't worth much; without the latter why are you playing it at all? I can only speak of my own experiences, but my players have all loved the use of Latin and the depth of the setting. They've all also described it as daunting, but also worth it in the long run. The way the XP system works means that you see rewards for long term activities and that in turn encourages them, as well as making everything you do significant.
Very droll. Yes, toting up numbers isn't in itself fascinating, but it also takes very little time and occurs less and less as time goes by. When your magus knows that a given spontaneous effect is trivial for him, the player (and SG) no longer needs to do any real maths unless the situation is very different. In those cases, I found that going through the numbers, searching for every bonus, weighing the need to burn Vis, all these things added tension by giving an out of character struggle to mimic the in character difficulties. Yes, it can take a while for new characters to get used to it and to get a feel for it, but then my group have also been playing D&D 4th Ed for a year now and we still constantly have to look up the damned fiddly combat modifiers and exceptions. Making quick reference to the spell guidelines is much easier and faster in comparison.
In a con game, you don't choose who signs up for your table, though, so you can't just demand a higher quality of player.
Again, this is for a -convention game-. The experience system is not relevant, except insofar as it tells the player characters that their books are worth saving.
And in a con session which runs, perhaps, two hours, where is this "little while"?
I know I am a bit late for the jargon debate, but I just wanted to add this.
I GM a small saga with (now only 2) novice players. One of them is even a novice roleplayer. Both players had and still have difficulties with the mechanics of ArM. It takes far longer than with experienced ArM players to just "do the die roll".
BUT, at no time in the game, was the difficulty the Te-Fo combinations. All players immediately grasped the concept, immediately knew the combination strategies. The Latin words were of no problem whatsoever. What takes longer is that they just need more time to think "okay, I know this is Creo Ignem, but what do I need? R/D/T? Base effect?". The problem is that every spell idea needs to be looked up, and if you're not familiar with adding magnitudes for R/D/T, it'll just take a bit longer. And only about 5% of all spell ideas are actually cast in the end.
IMHO, if you take away the concept of Techniques and Forms, and use English rather than Latin words, you take away most of what new players will immediately grasp of ArM. It's the magic that counts, and the system that allows for total freedom and creativity.
What really needs to be much, much, much more simplified is combat die rolls. A combat will take us ages and forever to resolve, and I regularly stop combats when it's obvious who will win.
In a con session that lasts two hours, you have ZERO time for any rules. Play a political game, give each character a few faormularic spell that they can cast. If you absolutely want to have spontaneous magic, tell them "you're an Ignem specialist (fire magician). You can reasonably do anything with fire that you want". I'm always surprised at how reasonable players are if you let them.
But really, for a two-hour play, you need to drop all rules. I wouldn't even explain Castle Falkenstein rules for a two-hour game. Just give them a concise, simplified charactersheet and explain in max 2 sentences (written!) what they need to do to accomplish stuff as the character.
There isn't any. As such, Ars Magica is a poor choice for a con game for novices. There's no time for introducing the setting in any real depth, and no time to internalise any more than the dice rolling conventions. Trying to make a motorcycle out of a luxury car is time consuming, inefficient and unlikely to produce anything which compares favourably to a normal motorcycle.
I am not understanding the issue at hand. No one ever showed me how to play Ars, I bought the book, read it, and had no problem understanding it. To this day I still purposefully mispronounce the Arts (based on my initial impression of how the word looks like it should be pronounced, so I say "PER-do" instead of "PARE-do"). But I never had any probem grasping what these words ment. From day 1 I understood. It seems to me that some people have the goal of dumbing the game down for people who, frankly speaking, might not be that smart if they are having the difficuties you guys describe.
I don't want my game watered down and reduced to the lowest common denominator, and I know many people who feel the same way. I honestly believe that such an effort would loose more payers than it gains.
Now as far as Conventions and Blogs go, these are different animals and are not representative of the majority of gaming, and granted there needs be some adjustment to the environment. But still, it seems to me that the motive here is to dumb down the game so you don't have to put any effort into teaching others or helping them understand. And I think that is pretty weak.
Ah, so when I ran a poll and most people said that they wanted me to write a intro/con game for novices, the right thing to do would be to say "Ars can't do those. Pick again." Your constructive input on this whole thing is that it's a bad idea and shouldn't be done.
Thanks for contributing to the thread, but you must see that this makes your opinion irrelevant? I accept your, and Richard's, vote is "don't bother". The thing is though - I am going to bother regardless.
10 points for being able to take my criticism in good humor
I actually have difficulty understanding the problem though, since it has been my experience that players grasped Spont magic quicker than other spells.
Granted, since ArM5 I have mainly played with experiences Ars Fans, and when I was new to the game (ArM4, circa the Mythic 90's), many of my gamer buddies were just coming off of WW games such as Mage, so the spont system seemed intuitive.
I am formulating an idea....
(yes be very afriad )
Give me until the end of January. I wil write a con scenario for you that will at once satisfy these issues, maintaining a fair and fun level of complexity that is still intuitive and easy to grasp, and containing a fun to play story.
Marko, I gather from reading your other posts that you started playing in the days of 3ed edition if not even earlier. Back then the rules were somewhat less complicated and certainly didn't extend as far from the core as in AM5, the published material was spread over fewer books, and the "Mythic Europe" setting was less self-referential than it is today. Most important, imo, there were plenty of adventures on sale that gave very good examples of how the game could be played.
Things are different today. For all my griping about rules, I truly enjoy the depth and consistency in this edition. But I really have no idea how someone can go pick up the rulebook and figure this thing out on their own now. The complexity is an issue that extends well beyond con games and really ought to be considered if we ever want to see new players.
The right thing to say would be, "Ars doesn't do those well. To make it work you need to narrow the focus significantly and that loses a great deal." I wish you luck in it, but I suspect that your end result will be a really fun con game which is then going to make for a very confusing experience for anyone who actually picks up a book. Fallen Fane is an excellent example of a con game, narrow of focus and with easy to grasp characters and goals. It is also totally systemless, and jettisons so much of the setting that all anyone unfamiliar with the game would take away from it is, "Wizards argue a lot, and the resulting politics can be great fun." Anyone who is familiar can riff off known concepts and add depth and detail for others likewise, but it's not required. It's a good advertisment for Ars Magica, but it is not Ars Magica 5th Edition nor does it try to be.
That's not my experience. Even after eight years with my current troupe we still end up holding our breath and counting on hesitant fingers when it comes to spontaneous magic, and all that while two others pore over two different Forms looking for a useful spontaneous spell option.
I think Timothy's experiment/approach is perfectly valid and probably pretty useful. Would I want it front and centre in the rule book? Probably not. But would I want it playtested under con conditions so that I can benefit from his work? Absolutely.
I appreciate any kind of lookup tailored to my character that tells me at a glance what I can do (where do you think the lab total table in the Metacreator templates came from..?). If I appreciate the effort to make things easier for me, imagine what novice con players will appreciate when they only have a three hour slot.
I started playing Ars 2 years ago, with the 5th rule.
First session with a companion, I didn't understand the magic system but quickly received the 5th core rule book. Read it, came to this forum, read it again, had my 1st session and I was quite correct in the mechanisms. I do find the book really easy to use, but you have to read it 1 time (to receive a global idea of the construction of the game) then another one, picking the parts you want to go in depth. My first character was build with help of the SG but some months later, I was able to design NPC (as I became a BSG).
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