ArM 6 : A point of conflict model for Ability selection

I think ArM6 Parma and Resistance is a different thread waiting to happen.

The issue at hand is whether there is a more sensible way of taking and/or quantifying the Abilities you have (Parma being an example of an Ability where there may be a question as to whether it remains).

There's already an RPG which does exactly this for a world wtih for organisations of secretive wizards, wherein exist tangential realities reached through special places, demons and gods, the supreme but subtle power of the Divine, and where there's a difference between formulaic and spontaneous magic. It even allows for non-mage characters to take an active and useful role. The Dresden Files RPG could be reskinned for Mythic Europe with little to no effort at all.

It would, however, result in a completely different style of play, and frankly one which I don't think would suit Ars Magica (as I envisage it, anyway) very well. Ars Magica was explicitly designed as a game where magi are powerful and can grow to be ancient, slowly accruing power through research and study, and as such a reasonably fine system works well. Would it be fun? Depends on the GM and players. It would be very different though, and would put off a lot of long term fans of the game.

I have to say that the repeated meme of "shut the hell up or take it somewhere else" which I'm getting out of this thread does not bode well for a large fanbase working together to create a perpetual electronic edition. Thank you for your relatively discussive response, Mark. 8)

To be clear though, I never suggested getting rid of the numbers: I suggested a broader use of player defined abilities, like Unkown Armies has.

Sure it does, but in vanilla Ars play, how often have you actually done this? Actually played a game where Speak Latin 5 was of equal value to Single Weapon 5, so that this was a fair investment of points of equal value? I'm designing a character now. She was covenant raised, so she gets Latin as her native language. The XP she saves by this is going into a Magic Theory score of 5 at Gauntlet. Can you seriously suggest there are games in which a magus having a score of 5 in French is getting equal value for their points as a Parma Magica Score of 5? An MT score of 5?

"It depends on what game your playing in..." is a great reply, but for two problems:

  • If nobody actually plays the game the way you are suggesting it could be played, the point's moot. You can take knitting as an Ability in Vampire, and, yes, its value would vary by the setting of the chronicle. I really have never seen a game in which Single Weapon was less useful than Speak French 5 for a magus with companions, because speaking's -their- job.

  • The system should tell people how to play the game. A language Ability of equal cost to Single Weapon simply doesn't, because it suggests these are equally likely uses of Ability in the core setting. They aren't. In the core setting Concentration, or Magic Theory or Parma Magica is simply better, for a magus, than Speak French. They should not cost the same at the design stage.

So, speaking eloquently at Tribunal isn't Charm, in your world?

So, to be clear, in your campaign, you make Speak rolls more often than Single Weapon rolls?

I'm just wary of getting the fanbase hyped up with discussion of ArM6, which may be further away than any of us suspect. But despite that, I think these are interesting threads in their own right. I'm not familiar with Unknown Armies (am I allowed to say that round here..?) so I can't really make any judgement on that. But I do think there's probably a more creative way to apply Abilities waiting in the wings.

I'm not sure I'd drive story selection through them, and I'm not that enamoured with buying XP sinks to get rid of a few points here and there. So I'm looking for something that starts with story (i.e. the character's back-story) and suggests which Abilities they should buy or at least have access to. It's not highly original - Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has been doing it for years with their career system. I'm not sure I want to go down that route, but we'll see what comes up.

Just on the XP sink thing... Just assuming that we whittle away a few Abilities, what do you do with the 5 or 10 XP you have left over? Would anyone object to using them to buy arms/armour/tools of the trade? Ars doesn't really have a "stuff purchasing policy". You just kind of have whatever seems appropriate. But what if you're the crusading pig farmer? You might still have your long sword. Normally outside your purchasing power. But what if you spend your remaining 5xp to buy something (your sword) from a higher bracket. Would that work? I'm prepared to hear "no", by the way...

I'd like something similar, how about a multiplier of your existing Forms? So if you are a fire magus, you are quite good at resisting magical fire, but you are not very good in some other areas. If you want to go to War with someone, you really want a spy to tell you what he's been reading for the last few years, because you want to know if he's any good with Terram, or if he's no good with Corpus. It also adds value to the "Buy 5 in everything if you want to breed!" mechanic. Tentatively I'd suggest a multilper of 3, because that means a magus who is competent in a form (score of 5), has a resistance of 15, which is the same as a Parma Magica of 3.

No, I'm cool with it: you can swap XP for labour points, and labour points for named items of quality in the C&G rules, as I recall.

What I'd do with the little points left lying around is put them in a communal pool, or allow buys from multiple abilities per season. So, sure, this season you train with your sword, and you go up from 4 to 5. You have a handful of points over, and you say to your coplayers "Gang: I want to sink these into Athletics 1, because I figure I got a bit more buff during my training." I'd allow that.

I basically don't like that every ability score has a separately tracked remainer following it.

I accept I'm to blame for it, by the way, because separately tracked remainders for NPC magi first appear in SoI. I thought they added to the realism. Now, reading reviews on various boards, I see that they just make the book-keeping tough for people who want to just play the game on a casual basis. So, I'd certainly allow a remainder pool, or a second Ability to be bought, as a house rule.

I don't see how changing the Ability buy system so that you only paid for things which you wanted your character to do would prevent them growing into power over the course of the saga.

Let me put it another way: Currently a score of 0 in an Attribute means you are average. A zero in an ability means you can't use it, unless you have a score of 0/1.

Why not just say "A zero in an Ability means you can do what average Mythic Europeans do." So, you don't need to buy language, because you speak it just like most people. You can roll Athletics to take a quick sprint without 3 botch dice, even if you have no particular learning in Athletics. You can spot vital but obvious clues without 0/1 in Awareness.

This lets you baseline what 0 means in the setting, too.

Personal taste and all but:

  • it makes magi too secure for drama, because there's no risk.
  • it makes the Aegis of the Hearth less important.

This is one of the reaons why if you have sex with a faerie, eat faerie food, or even talk to a faerie, they get a brief, powerful, Arcane Connection to you. If you have a single Ability that provides non-ablative resistance to the very presence and all of the powers of entire classes of foes, then they need to have a chance to trick you out of the protection.

Demons and faeries both get that. Magical creatures. not so much.

I too hope the Nephews aren't reading this, but I've never read or played Unknown Armies. I have read and played using the GUMSHOE system. It has a very simple ability mechanic and only gives abilities for things that matter in the story. It doesn't even have attributes, if you have a high Athletics Ability, it can be because you're a natural born athlete or because you've got years of training. It's the player's choice. If you have a point in an ability, you are presumed to be well-trained in that ability and will succeed at the majority of tasks utilizing it, unless opposed by someone or something. This is very much unlike Ars Magica, where you need to have a 5 to even be considered competent in something and a 7 or 8 to be really considered expert at it.

In any event, I agree that Ars Magica is too simulationist for casual gamers. It can take a couple of hours just to create a magus, and when experience is doled out in one and two point chunks, while Abilities go up in multiples of 5 or more, it makes for a lot of bookkeeping and a perception that advancement is very slow to the casual gamer. I don't know of a good way to appease both the hard-core, number crunching, grognards and the fluffy, feel-good, storytellers. I do think that using a more story-driven and less simulationist approach for attributes and abilities would appeal more to the masses.

I'd be up for something like that, though I think it might still need some work,

I wonder if it might not make MR all-or-nothing (i.e.: the fire mage is completely immune to magic, but extremely vulnerable to anything else), though using tech + (2 x form) or something might ease that issue a little (and BTW, it makes perfect sense to me that a Rego specialist should be fairly resistant to Rego magic, though I understand exactly why it was done the way it was, Techniques already being more economical to buy),

Also worth consideration is that unless you also want arts to advance as abilities (no big deal, but it will mean a lot of work compressing spell levels down, etc) the potential for very high MR is extreme (using the suggested 3x form MR an Ignem: 20 mage has Ignem MR of 60!),

This may or may not be a problem, as that mage will at least be vulnerable to other types of magic,

It is also worth adding that Mages should possibly be extremely resistant to opposing magic arts (aquam for your ignem specialist), but perhaps the intent is that you MR your own arts, and fast-cast a response to your opposing art, which is a neat asymmetry,

And that's called a story...

I am wondering is a low baseline might be a way forward? Maybe "The Gift" should grant MR 10 or similar, and the tech + form could be added? This way non-advanced arts don't totally suck, but are still a real weakness (there is also lots of scope for V&F to tweak the way this sort of MR works),

Off and on, for about 12 years in two different editions of ArsM.

Rolls, no. Almost never make Speak Language rolls. It's just revelent how fluent you are in the lanuage and someone who speaks Latin well is better recieved among those for whom such things matter (like senior magi) than those who don't.

Of couse, we almost never make Single Weapon rolls either because the game isn't about fighting. OK, there was that one time where the Welsh attacked the covenant but there really weren't many Single Weaons rolls then either oweing to some rather aggressive vines and a sudden landslide.

When I'm running Ars Magica, I'm not running a fantasy adventure / swords and sorcery game. If I wanted to do that, I'd run D&D. When I run Ars Magica, I like to run a long, stately saga about mighty wizards studying arcane lore in lonely towers, the communities that grow up around them and the conflicts, politics and schemes of men and women who live for centuries, can bend the universe with a word and are still essentially human beings.

The best, most fun, most loved, character I've ever see in an Ars Magica saga was the cook at Teml ar Fryn. That little spring covenant eventually earned a reputation for hospitality and wealth, based in large part out of the fact that Lowri had Craft: Baking 7 and her death, which was both epic and tragic (another, longer, story), nearly brought tears to the eyes of the players(!). I fear that, in the game you envision Tim, a character like Lowri wouldn't exist... because she started as a non-combantant grog and a bit of a joke. She became what she was by advancing through seasons of development and play. Lowri was, in part, a product of the skill system as it exists (well, as it existed in 4th ed, but it hasn't changed that much).

Tim, you say some skills are more important than others. I say some skills are made more important that others by Storyguides and players who value certain types of role playing experiences over others. If you define, in the rules, which skills are more important, than you have defined which type of role playing experience this game is about and you have de-valued the other types of role playing experiences. You have taken options away. Could I play the kind of games I and my group enjoy in your system? Sure. I could play it in D&D too. I would just be ignoring huge swaths of the rules and enhancing parts that the rules (IMO) shortchange.

My 2 pence. Your millage may vary. :smiley:

I agree. However the target audience for Ars Magica was never the casual gamers, neh?
After all you barely scratch the surface until you spent a few seasons (years, really) in the lab.

I doubt that there was ever a conscious decision by any of the owners of Ars Magica rights to target a specific category of gamer. In any event, it's my personal belief that hard core, niche gamers are a dying breed. Heck pen-and-paper gamers seem to be a dying breed. So anything that Ars Magica can do to open itself up to new gamers is a good thing. I think an important step is a simplified, more story-oriented, system. This might come from using an entirely different game system to do the mechanics? It might mean a Ars Magica and Ars Magica (lite) version? I don't know what the answer is, but I am positive that the current system and its presentation often turns off newbies and casual gamers.

The problem is that there is the danger of chasing off members of the established fanbase. I am not about to invest money in a watered down version of my favorite game.
Also, though there have been some interesting ideas discussed here, I must sate that this is not a direction I want to the the game move towards. CharGen is pretty simple and easy already, no need to dumb it down. And I like the diversity of abilities and the need to round yourself outto create a character that feels realistic.

Of course, if you get two new customers for every old customer you lose, then it makes business sense to make the change. I'm, obviously, not the one making the decision here. If the owners are happy with their business model and revenue stream, then they have no reason to change anything. If they think that they could make more money with a different game and that's a direction they want to go, simplifying things would be a way to go.

Character generation is not "easy." Only a person who has never played other roleplaying games can honestly say that. Call of Cthulhu, Dungeon and Dragons, Storyteller, GUMSHOE, all allow someone who has never played the game before to create a character in about 20 minutes. That's plainly not possible in Ars Magica.

GURPS is a very detailed, simulationist game. It has some of the same negative perceptions regarding its over complexity also. It has addressed this issue with GURPS, GURPS lite, and Optional GURPS rules for the truly hard core. GURPS lite is a freely distributed, simplified version of the core mechanics. The optional rules in GURPS are basically included so people who grew up using the hard core rule set may continue to do so, but new people aren't forced to learn them. There is no reason Ars Magica couldn't go this same direction: very simple story-oriented mechanics, a parallel simplified version of the current mechanics, and the optional rules for the most detail oriented gamers.

as pointed out above, p'n'p-players seem a dying breed, whch means that the exchange is more likely to be the reverse - especially since Ars Magica has always amazed me with it's fanbase

So you would rather cater to the current dying customer than to try to seek more customers in a shrinking market? That's your decision, but for every Markoko out there, I'll bet there are two core people in the fan base that would buy it all anyway. I bought Third Edition and that was a steaming pile of ...

The Ars Magica fan base amazes me also, but I'm not sure that they don't scare off more players, and authors, than they attract. It is a common perception among the gaming community that to play Ars Magica you had better have a BA in Medieval Studies, to run it you better have an MA, and to write for it you better have a Ph.D. The fan base is a main source of this perception. Everytime someone acts dismissively toward "that other game" or "people who play that other game" it just turns off the non-elitist, non-hard core gamers of the world. If you don't want to play D&D or Vampire, fine, but don't pretend that you're a superior human being because of it.

Ars Magica is my favorite game because of the spontaneous magic system and the premise of being set where the medieval myths are true, not because of the way Ability scores are determined.

Its most certainly NOT Etiquette. As its a one-off unique custom and history. It would certainly fall under Organisation lore. It MIGHT also fall under area lore but much less well so.

No. The etiquette of a situation doesnt change depending on mood. But a failure in etiquette might have a better chance of being ignored or overlooked if the people are "happy".

I suggest you read the RAW descriptions again. No they dont specify those limits, but they might as well because the implications from the descriptions are what i have based my usage of them on.
The exception(or more correctly POSSIBLE exception) is Carouse because its very poorly described overall, so the simplification was by clearly saying that they´re the formal and informal version of social competence. While that is implied by RAW, it is not indeed outright stated.

And we never dropped the "Charisma" skill either, as AM5 really lacks a substitute for it.

So what? Those are just opinions. *5 isnt a problem. "just kind of hangs around", yeah we even skipped the need for renewing it and everyones totally happy about it. Why shouldnt it be "static"? Why should it be "exciting" somehow?

It also adds distance between player and character, ie a neat and tidy magi would never forget to renew their parma, but the player might forget it... Sometimes leading to absurd or silly situations.

Exactly. The current setup is fairly ok, but reducing the number of abilities of one sort would mean suddenly any and all characters could be ok in that area and still be good in their main area of focus. Which leads me back to the bad old 2nd ed "my character can do it all" although not to the same degree of awfulness.