I can tell you this as a consumer: I don't buy as many RPG products as I used to.
I'm old, I'm nearly retired and I've seen it all before.
What I look for now are: presents for younger people (and almost nobody in the younger generation in my family is a gamer, alas, although I do have some gamer friends in their 30s), quickie games I can play with my wife while we're both lying across from the room from eachother nursing some ailment of old age or other (just to keep our minds occupied) and solo games.
A few years ago, I would have loved some of these suggestions. But right now... I don't think I'd pick up an ars magica box. I used to love reading through the rules on these things, but my eyes are going and a day of struggling with medicaid paperwork and gnashing my teeth over soaring co-pays can ruin anyone's taste for complex rules sets.
So, if you're aiming a new starter set at anyone, aim it at younger nerds ...which I suspect means something you can read on your cellphone.
Roll for Combat had a good discussion about How to teach a new TTRPG to players. Not specifically Ars Magica but good general discussion about teaching techniques that would be good to consider in the context of a starter set.
I mostly like Jason's list, above; but I strongly disagree about omitting the Spell Guidelines: that's the core of being able to Spont a spell, after all! Cut down & simplified, maybe... but you can't leave 'em out.
I too will happily point to Chaosium's boxed Starter Set for RQ (also one for CoC, and one just dropped for Pendragon).... each of them hitting the $30 price-point, so it's a do-able thing.
I think it's a good point, though, that Atlas could afford it as a break-even project -- or even take a slight loss -- in the assumption that it will drive sales of ArM5D... whereas an independent company likely needs a reasonable hope of profit.
As a purely-fannish initiative -- done for love of the game! -- profit likely isn't an issue; but the collection of skills (and connection to production pipeline) needed to produce a Starter Set that's gonna impress ... that's considerably harder to come by than "love of the game!"
As the esteemed Mr. Nephew says, stretch-goals that need to be created to be fulfilled is a very, very dangerous business. The phrase is "Kickstarted to Death."
People have mentioned RuneQuest in thread... Chaosium (publisher of RQ) is a case in point.
They ran a couple of over-ambitious & incautious kickstarters for their CoC line, and ended up midway through with most of the funding spent, and much of the work remaining. Freelancers weren't getting paid, because they had no money with which to pay them. They were also looking at a case of having mis-estimated shipping, because some of the weights were far above what was expected (in the case of international shipping, ruinously so).
In the end, they merged-with (were bought by) Moon Design, who are now the Chaosium C-Suite; I suspect that the purchase-price effectively went to fulfilling the unfulfilled KS's.
Are you considering splitting it into multiple books, Players/Storyguide? Or something similar-ish, such as Evil Hat did with "Your Story" / "Our Woirld" for DresdenFiles RPG? Even 3 books -- Chargen / OoH+MythicEurope / all else...
Not considering multiple books. no. Having to maintain stock long term on three core titles versus one is very annoying, in my experience. I'd like to have one definitive volume that is the reference work for decades.
There is the argument for slipcases and the like, which we have seen with other lines, but ultimately I think having multiple books for core rules simply makes a barrier for entree for lots of gamers.
There is the difficulty of having a barrier being a book that is hugely massive as well of course, which is why the suggestion of a starter set as an alternative entree point is worth arguing for I feel.
In terms of broader supplemental support, I do feel compatibility with past releases is important. the simple fact that so many supplements (all supplements?) released over several years are now re-available via POD or whatever means that Ars Magica has the type of supplemental support other game lines can only dream of.
Yet, the only essential book is the core rules - which is why I support this project wholeheartedly. If we can also get a quick turnaround from a crowdfunding campaign, by not over complicating it with add-ons and stretch goals, it means that we should get the product quicker rather than waiting for some time in 2027 or what have you....
Different view here: I think that ArM would be best served with a 2-volume core book. While I am not a fan of the WoD games, I do like the separation between the core rules and the various splatbooks.
Book 1: basic rules, all the dice mechanics, rules on how to make a character, character advancement, crafting (books, swords whatever), advice on a saga, basic stat blocks for some grogs and also enemies...
Book 2: magi. this would contain all the hermetic stuff, the magic system (casting and items), some of the general info on the order which is hidden away in the HoH books
The two could be in the same slipcase and sold together, but the advantage that I see is that it separates nice for sorting things by topic and would give the gaming group two physical books to pass around the table so if, for example, one player is looking up something magic related (like sponting a CrCo spell), this doesn't stop another from checking the recovery rules in parallel.
I understand that Atlas is not looking to make a starter set for Ars right now, and is encouraging third parties to do it under a future open license. But I want to point out a ramification of that which is bad for the brand.
A starter set is based on the idea that it funnels new players to the core rules. We've already talked about, in this thread, the fact that allows starter sets to be make little profit on their own because the publisher benefits long term by increased core book sales and adding new players to the game. A third party publisher can't afford to make a "blow your mind" starter set because that costs too much, and a third party won't see any money from those new core book sales.
But there's a clear way to solve this: don't make the starter set use the same rules as the core game.
These forums are filled with ways GMs and players have suggested simplifying/improving the rules to Ars. A short list includes:
Getting rid of characteristics
Using 1d6 or 2d6 instead of 1d10
Reducing spell magnitudes by 2 or by 5
Introducing an advantage/disadvantage mechanic
Basing the whole game on PbA
If I was a third party publisher, and I had the guts and resources to risk on an Ars starter set, I have no incentive to point happy players to the core rules. In fact, I have a strong incentive to do the opposite, pointing happy players to, instead, "Basic Ars Magica" or whatever I want to call it. And the result is something old school gamers recognize instantly: a situation in which there are two competing versions of the same game—a Basic/Expert set of rules and an Advanced/Core set of rules which are not the same, but which have a similar name and a lot in common. Now, this might be tolerable if the same company is publishing both versions of the game. But when one of these games—the simpler one, the more accessible one, the one with new products coming out—is published by a third party?
Respectfully, I don't think that would be in Atlas's best interests. Making a starter set is very difficult. It's time consuming, takes enormous resources, and is a gamble. But you don't want a third party publisher making it. You're setting them up to steal your game and your players.
WoD games don’t separate between Core rules and various splat-books. They used to, for a while, but then reverted back to having self-contained rulebooks for each line. They changed, presumably, because of customer feedback.
The problem with selling a slip box with multiple rulebooks is that a) the slip box is expensive and b) somewhere along the line these books tend to get sold separately. This means it can be hard for somebody coming into the game in a few years to acquire two necessary books to play the game as opposed to just one.
Also, personally, I hate having to flip between books to do character generation which happens in a number of games that use multiple core rule books.
The basic reason why a Starter set would be useful in Ars Magica’s case is as an alternative entree point into the game line as a whole. Making an alternative set of rules for it, that significantly differs from the rest of the line, would be self-defeating.
Ideally, you should be able to make a starter set that is complimentary to a Core Rules books - usually because it provides maps, dice, cards and other paraphernalia that can fit into a box but not into a text book. However, the best sets also allow you to play any of the available supplements, with a slightly narrower focus perhaps, without recourse to a full set of Core rules. For Ars Magica, it would be an opportunity to address the ongoing criticism of complexity that acts as a barrier for entree for new gamers.
Having a Third Party publisher of a Starter set could be problematic if the product is sub-par - that remains the big question and it is impossible to answer at the moment because we have nothing to make judgement on. However, other companies in the last decade have shown it can be done and done very well indeed for their respective game lines. I regard Runequest Starter Set as a prime example.
Yes, but Chaosium made that starter set, and it makes money by pointing people to the core rules.
Atlas isn’t making a starter set, or at least has no plans to. A third party publisher can’t make a fancy set and, more to my point, has no incentive to do so. What they are incentivized to do is point players to another third party product that leads directly from their third party starter set.
An open license means they won't be able to stop a third-party publisher making it. The question is whether any large ones - because a good starter set needs a big publisher - would want to pursue a niche market, rather than do something else.
I think small / indie publishers will inevitably hack ArM for whatever rule-set interests them. There are already some unofficial ones, and an open license would allow them to be properly published and potentially gain wider attention. But PbtA or FitD would give a very different game experience to ArM5, because of their fiction-first rather than simulation-first approach, so will appeal to different people (ArM-D20, OTOH...). And if one of them takes off, a viral open license would mean that Atlas could always just publish for that, if they wanted to.
John Nephew is talking about making all of the rules and background for Ars Magica available under CC BY-SA. People are being given the game — they don't have to steal it. All of the commercial calculations change.
I think we are going to see a lot of interesting rules experiments. PbtA and FitD are almost certain to happen (although the FitD one may confuse people, because the ArM version will have to be BY-SA, which is viral, and highly infectious, unlike the BY license for the SRD). I also think we are going to see a lot of interesting business experiments. A starter set for the existing rule set may well be one of the interesting business experiments.
I appreciate the concern, but we realize this is a risk of open licensing. Hypothetically, someone might publish a variation of Ars Magica that outsells the core rulebook. That's OK.
I think we, Atlas Games, are the stewards of Ars Magica, not sovereigns. To some extent this might be true of any successful RPG publisher (whether or not they recognize or accept it), given the medium. Creative expression in RPGs is the collaboration of players (both in game sessions and in out-of-game preparation, seasonal character development, etc.), informed and inspired by things we publish.
The share-alike element of open-sourcing is meant to ensure that third party developments are not walled off into a private garden, but can feed back into the creative/play community of Ars Magica, regardless of what happens to publishers in decades to come.
What about a ‘So you Want to Run Ars Magica’ book, filled with advice from people who have been doing it successfully (or who talk about what went wrong).