This is all good. A Starter Set would, indeed, be a good way of making it easier for new players.
If there is a Kickstarter, though, could it be a stretch goal?
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"This is how you play this archetype" should be templateable with 6/6 Virtues/Flaws. Complement it with an art patronage package or a nepotism package.
What's the point of Cautious Sorcerer, how do you work around Short-Ranged Magic, who needs Finesse or Concentration?
It's also true of major hermetic Virtues. I don't think any newbie will come up with a proper build for Magical Focus or Flawless Magic, let alone deal with FFM or LLSM. Just having a ReVi specialist that works would be a boon.
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In terms of easily customisable characters, I think its worth stealing the PbtA concept of playbooks. PbtA games usually define these around narrative function, but some (e.g. Dungeon World, Uncharted Worlds) do it around profession. The playbook basicly tells you what sorts of things your character is going to do, lets you make a few choices to refine that, plus some cosmetic ones around look, and usually prompts a few leading questions to establish relationships and personality. They're nicely laid out to guide the customisation process, and include character art to inspire the player. The whole aim is to make character creation quick, so you can run without prep.
For Ars Magica, House is the natural basis for playbooks. They'd be stereotypes, with a couple of basic choices e.g. is a Flambeau an Ignem or Perdo specialist? and a couple of ticky boxes for other stuff e.g. do you have a magic flaming sword or a lion animal companion?
The problem is that there's a lot of information in an Ars Magica character, all of which needs to be conveyed in some basic format. I don't think you'd be able to fit it all in the classic double-sided A4 format, especially with spell lists and virtue / flaw explanations. But you might be able to get it onto two such sheets, by shoving the spell-list and less essential detail onto the second sheet.
(This is of course much easier for companions and grogs: the knight, the priest, the witch, the outlaw all make obvious playbooks there).
This would be a natural product to make ArM5 more accessible to beginners with the new release. And if Atlas doesn't want to do it, then someone (or a team of someones) with the required character design, layout, and art skills / budget could use the open licence to do it.
(And then I see that @Echo beat me to it up-thread...)
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That could also be a project to do through whatever licensing thing becomes available.
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I put a lot of thought into an Ars starter set, even outlining the project and pitching it to Atlas. I can’t do it now, but I very much hope the project survives and we’re able to offer Ars-curious players a way into the game.
These are the guidelines I decided on for BAM (Beginner Ars Magica):
- It’s a box that sells for around $30.
- It’s the same system. We can leave stuff out, maybe even a LOT of stuff. But it has to be the same rules as the core book so players can go from one to the other.
- It has to have character creation and advancement. Pregens are great and it would be wise to include them, but in my opinion a successful starter set needs to show you how to make your own character and advance them a little.
- It has a starter covenant in Provence with a library of books and lab texts.
- It needs to have big maps. A cool fold-out map of the area around your covenant and a map of mythic Europe will forking will blow a young player’s mind and sell this game.
- 6 pregens, an adventure, and then digital expansions for 6 more pregens and a second adventure. The adventure should include a season of lab work and teach Certamen.
- Some d10s
I decided that advancement to age 35 provides a lot of solutions to other problems, because this allows you to leave out all the rules for aging and longevity rituals. I also left out half the Houses (moving the rest to the digital expansion), Spell Mastery, writing books, and a lot lot more. Spontaneous Magic was in, but very much simplified. Spell Design and spell guidelines were out. Familiars and enchanting items were in, apprentices were out. Player character magi were always the same age, allowing us to standardize how many XP they started with, before Virtues.
Obviously this is leaving a lot of things we think as core to the game out of the box. But the point is you could make a character and play that character for 10 years and, if you went to the core rules, your character is 100% still valid. They may not have as many bells and whistles and they didnt have as many choices, but they’re fully compatible with the core rules and the rest of the line.
That’s how I would do it.
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First let me strongly endorse what David said about ArM5D.
Starter set as a stretch goal? No, I would fight that tooth and nail. If it were to be a stretch goal for a crowdfunding game it would need to already be complete, playtested, and going into draft layout, which it assuredly is not. That means we'd be promising something for sometime in the future based on estimates of what it would be like, how long it would take to make it, and what it would cost. That's how crowdfunding campaigns turn into debacles.
I am inclined not to have stretch goals at all. When it comes to add-ons, I want nothing that could derail completion/fulfillment of the campaign, so that means add-ons are only "things that already exist" (or do by the time the campaign runs, or are in a press-ready state or equivalent that enables a specific needed quantity to be ordered at the end of the campaign).
Getting all of the 5e line converted for softcover PDF production was an important step in preparing for ArM5D, so that we would be able to offer every single product in the line as an add-on, even if the original printing(s) were sold out.
Having said that, Ars Magica absolutely could use a beginner set, and I'd love to see one, but I can't in good conscience offer any promises about how Atlas could publish such a thing.
But have I mentioned this open licensing idea...?
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Oh, let me also say that I love Jason's suggestions, and I would pay full MSRP cash money for that product myself in a heartbeat.
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Yes, but it’s lost in the back of the book. Would be very handy to say up front that Ars is not strictly tied to Mythic Europe and can be very easily applied to most fantasy settings
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Boxes are bad. In some countries books are exempt from VAT, while boxes are charged at 25%. Yes, boxes are nice, but $30 even excluding VAT sounds very optimistic for a box with large maps in colour and dice.
When you include dice, do you imagine box targetting players completely new to roleplaying? I always imagined ArM as a game targetting people who already have dice.
Given that I do not believe you could produce this at $30, I think you reap most of the benefits with something like the Nigrasaxa PDF from 4ed. It could be improved with colour, large maps, more material, and even cost €30.
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Yes, BAM as I imagined it was a gift for a first time gamer. Every starter box and beginner box includes dice. Literally every one, except the Holmes edition.
The RUNEQUEST starter box has dice, three maps, 14 fold out double sided pregens, handouts, blank character sheets, and FOUR books, including a solo adventure to teach the rules, a book of 3 adventures, a player book and a setting book. All full color.
$29.95
I was a Paizo employee when we made both the Pathfinder and Starfinder Beginner Boxes. I know what I’m talking about.
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OK. I am genuinely curious. How many copies are sold of those games? And how many would you expect to sell for Ars Magica?
My pessimism relates as much to expected sale volume as it does to the volume of the contents.
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That’s a great question! I don’t recall the sales numbers on the P2 and Starfinder Beginner Boxes, I’m afraid. That was years ago. But! I also don’t know how many copies of Ars 5 have sold, which may be an even better question.
It would be harder to do a Beginner Box as a third party publisher than as Atlas. Atlas might be able to make an intro product as a loss leader, which makes very little profit or breaks even, planning to make money from the new players the box brings to the game. But a third party publisher has to make a profit on the box, and probably right away. That’s an obstacle, for sure.
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It all depends on volume. Definitely the "box means no longer a book" element adds cost in several markets (including disqualifying Media Mail shipping int he USA).
For an example of something we've been able to do in this kind of format, look at our Magical Kitties Save the Day game ($35 currently).
We honestly don't have the spare editorial/production/administrative bandwidth to do such a project by ourselves within the next two years or more. But this is a perennial problem with Ars Magica and all sorts of products, and I realize that we (and people who want to respect intelletual property law) are a chokepoint to wonderful things happening for the game we all love. Hence the open licensing imperative.
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Yeah, and I suspect your $35 was about one third of the total cost when I got it. It was a gift though, so I do not know exacly.
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Since their catastrophe with the Exalted 3 core book, Onyx Path has run their crowdfunding campaigns to support publishing a book with the book manuscript already done. As part of the crowdfunding campaign, they offer stretch goals and premium tiers of rewards to make material to go in a companion book. So there is the book that people funded, and there is also a book/pdf full of bonus material that gets made at a later date.
Would that work for this project?
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Making any future commitments during a crowdfunding campaign is super dangerous, in my experience. Even the most innocuous things wind up stretching out the campaign for years as people wait for promised PDF material, freelancers fail to deliver as promised, staff come or go (or have to set aside other projects to finish and fulfill something, etc.).
If the 5D campaign is an enormous success, it will certainly tempt us to do more. But making specific promises about exactly what more we do, in the midst of the campaign, is perilous. As much as possible, I want to focus like a laser on just making 5D itself. (And at this point, I'm not even sure if that means just one item, or if we will have a standard retail version and a deluxe version, as we did with Planegea for example.)
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I think it is completely fair to have that information in the bit of the book dedicated to "how to put a Saga together". But also worth looking at how Runequest has been reinvigorated by emphasising rather than downplaying the original setting of Glorantha. There are probably hundreds of systems that can be used for your homebrewed fantasy world - but Mythic Europe is a unique setting, and adds to the USP of Ars Magica.
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Boxes are good because they assure casual gamers that they are getting a fun game to play rather than a textbook to master.
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While people are bringing up starter boxes, may I join the voices saying that the Runequest starter box is a thing of beauty? The artwork on the pregen characters really brings the world to life, and the solo adventure makes learning some basic rules straightforward.
I've also used the Star Wars: Force & Destiny starter box, the pregens were OK but the pretty map and the introductory scenario were well chosen to introduce the characters and give them a base of operations and a ghostly warder - sorry, holocron - to base their adventures from. Useful inspiration for introducing a covenant.
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Those Fantasy Flight starter boxes—all four Star Wars ones and also their Legend of the Five Rings—are fantastic examples of a very different approach to the idea of a “starter set.”
They are one-night games in a box. They teach the rules to GM and players one encounter at a time, using pregens. There’s no rules for making your own characters. You do advance, and the character sheets show your choices and where changes are noted. The production quality of the maps and sheets and booklets is great, but the boxes themselves are almost disposable, because you only play the game once.
They’re great products and good examples!
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