Check Hugh of Flambeau in Magi of Hermes. He is much like what you aim to do, with a normally bad but quite thematic flaw Short Range Magic. That way you won't ever be tempted to try fireballing asses.
Also... I don't recommend warrior. You will be better off with Puissant single or great weapon.
I'd partially disagree - Warrior has the advantage of letting you put xp into martial abilities before you start your apprenticeship, which can be very valuable if you don't have anything else giving you the same benefit, and the 50 xp it gives won't be outweighted by an affinity until you have an unmodified score of about 6 (=105 xp), or by Puissant until you have an unmodified score of 4.
Note that Knight is a Social Status virtue which doesn't explicitly say it's compatible with Hermetic magus, and therefore can be assumed not to be. Unless you're playing somewhere unusual, Knights are generally too intermeshed into mundane society for a magus to be one without opening themselves up to charges of mundane interference. That doesn't stop you faking being one, but you don't need the Social Status virtue to do that.
The other half of your concept (subtle spells to affect enemies' bravery, fortitute, armour etc.) sounds more like an Apromoran flambeau. Unfortunately this uses quite different Arts and skills to what you want to focus on for Ramius or Vilano - lots of Perdo, some mentem and terram. Probably either quiet/subtle magic or a deft form.
For a Ramian, you probably want to concentrate on Muto and Corpus. The spell list on page 28 of HoH:S has some good suggestions, although I'd add at least Bind Wounds and possibly a CrCo spell which gives you a recovery roll bonus. Later, spells like Hardness of Adamantine and Hauberk of Sublime Lightness are useful (although it may be more efficient to get the latter as an enchanted item, if you don't decide to focus on Perdo).
For Vilano, you want Rego, at least one of Terram and Herbam, a decent Perception and lots of finesse, probably including Cautious with Finesse (reducing the extent to which you have two chances to botch every spell). It's harder to appear a mundane warrior with Vilano than Ramius - you're obviously doing something magical, and you could be hurling quite big rocks about if the situation suits it.
If you're going Verditius, maybe think about the Confraternity of Roland? Its members focus on making magical swords.
OP said " a character aged around 35-38 years" That is at least 10 years past gauntlet. No advantage in warrior, because you will have post gauntlet xp. A score of 4 is 50px. With that concept, he will want to spend at least 75 or 105. Puissant is his best bet.
Thanks for some tips and such.
I've seen mentions of a "Verditius warrior" template here, but haven't found the stats for it anywhere.
Hi! There's a Verditius "knight" in Tales of Power (writeup starts on p.118), you might mine him for some ideas.
There's a magus knight in "The Lion and The Lily" who likes jousting, who may help with inspiration.
My Jerbiton uses Auram magic with a focus in winds, as using "circling winds of protection" to deflect missile fire is very useful, and mysteriously creating winds on a battlefield isn't completely suspicious. Also creating mists which you can see through is useful.
Imaginem can allow illusions to misdirect your enemy, or signalling to people.
Mentem - "courage" counts as a single emotion so is a valid Minor Magical Focus, and manipulating courage/cowardice can give big morale bonuses. Also you can try reading an enemy commander's mind to learn their tactics.
Deft Form allows you to cast without tell-tale actions or words (Subtle magic and two levels of quiet magic do as well, but Deft Form works well for the single-form specialist).
Inoffensive to Animals is useful if you're a mounted knight without a magical steed.
Gentle Gift is useful if you plan to lead people into combat yourself.
If you want to be a Verditius, then Items of Quality is your friend - you can bring out Shape & Material bonuses in your items, so have a sword with a bonus to "destroy human and animal bodies", a bow with a bonus to "destroy things at range", a shield with a bonus to "protection" and armour with a bonus to "Protect wearer", a saddle with a bonus to "affect riding" - with a good enough philosophiae you can make amazing items. It only takes 1 season and 1 pawn of vim vis per item, so you can build up a nice collection for yourself.
Within the rules? Which rules? The rule in ARM5 which says grogs can only have 1 personality flaw or the rule in ARM5 which encourages having more than 1 personality flaw for grogs to make them fun?
The harassment on these forums is unreal.
One single line comment without any insult or anything else but a statement of your mantra dated exactly two months before your reply isn't "harassment" on my dictionary, T.
You should use references. They can be quite useful because, sometimes, while looking for them and actually reading them you can prove yourself wrong, and save others the time to do so. Because we (I thought the same) were wrong! There isn't actually a strict rule against grogs having at most only one Personality Flaw: it happens to be a recomendation:
Emphasis mine.
I think that your other line about the corebook encouraging grogs to have more than 1 is that text at the left of that very sidebox, which says:
Notice the vague words: "should", "may often be". Considering it all it seems that the corebook, instead of being the inconsistent can of contradictions you use to say it is, is actually pretty flexible on this issue. For me, after re-reading it all, means that many personality flaws make caricatures instead of characters, but shrugs in case you actually happen to want to have one in your Saga. I had struggled for years trying to make decent shield/combat grogs with 3 virtue points to be balanced with 1 personality flaw and 2 general flaws, and until the book Grogs came out with a bunch of new minor flaws it was pretty hard to do so without making these grogs seriously limited by these flaws, which I used to pick from among the minor General Flaws. A shield grog with a Missing Eye, a Missing Ear or No Sense of Direction can get into serious trouble in pretty common circumstances. After re-reading this part, a combat grog can get done with 1 minor Story Flaw and 1 or 2 minor Personality Flaws, making it quite competent for what he's up to.
So thanks for your kind reply. Even when harassed, you prove to be quite a help expanding my ways of doing things.
Your response exemplifies why these forums are garbage. I’m wrong, because why exactly? A pedantic explanation of word usage... as a way to defend and back erroneous assumptions on the forum.
“On the other hand, grogs are a great deal of fun to play. You don’t need to worry too much about the consequences of your actions, because you probably won’t be playing this character next week. You can ham up the act- ing, and have the grog do something stupidly heroic, or heroically stupid. If a grog charges into lone battle against a dragon, in order to defend a magus, he might die in a couple of rounds, in which case he is remembered fond- ly, or make some stupendously lucky rolls and kill the dragon, in which case he becomes a hero. With a grog, you can take that risk, while with a companion or magus you will probably want to be more cautious. Of course, it’s also fun to play a grog who debates with the magus about the wisdom of staying to face a dragon.”
“Most characters should not have more than one Minor Personality Flaw, lest they move from entertaining to profoundly irritat- ing. Grogs may often be an exception to this.”
Grogs are minor 2 dimensional characters, archetypes and stereotypes which are there as foils to the main characters. God forbid any understanding of storytelling.
Maybe read the main book before posting?
I got to play Ars Magica for the first time in probably 25-30 years yesterday afternoon. We played the newest 5th edition I last played 3rd, but was mostly running using 2nd at the time, ad had a quite good time despite playing remotely vs. FtF we used Google Hangouts. We playing for 3 hours to get our characters together, and since I didnt finish creating my magus character, I ran a companion character a Basque soldier-type from Navarre.
We began play in England on 31 December 1189, and the DM started us in en medias res, with two of us being thrown into a dungeon cell where the 3rd players PC was already imprisoned. It worked fabulously
It was nice to mentally dust off the game, which remains my favorite magic system published in any RPG, and has a number of innovations for gameplay that I really like and which Ive used when running non-ArM campaigns in the past.
Allan.
I grossly underestimated how long it takes to build an ArM PC from scratch. As it was, my Companion PC was really only about 1/3 done by the time play started too, but we worked through it.