RoP:F wasn't perfect because yes, it pulled back the curtain on the faeries of Mythic Europe. Honestly though its a game and we like rules and they help, so I don't know how to dodge this mark against it. So really one should judge it based on what it did for the game rather than, "I liked this better when we just made stuff up".
Making stuff up is cool but if you were happy with that, well... no point in using RoP:F then at all, is there?
EDIT: YR7's desire for a more political Arcadia echoes my own. That's how I do that place up anyway, and it was a negative against RoP:F to categorize them as basically hanging around like actors at a Living History Village or something waiting for someone to happen along that they could tell their story to. "...and this is how we make butter!"
EDIT 2: Also, the retelling of heroic stories portion of the Faerie Realm just seems boring. I suppose it isn't so long as the participants don't know what story they're retelling, but once they know that the gig is up, isn't it?
RoP:F got a huge nod from me for a few reasons:
Their Variable Power Pools (for MnM fans, or Cosmic Power Pools for HERO fans): the ability for a faerie to get a stack of magic tricks all relevant to a single theme. Honestly, this is probably the only time I've seen anything so thematically versatile in ArM magic and that was cool because it was unique.
The characterization of the Fae as feeding off vitality echoes Exalted, but as already noted it echoes fae stories themselves. Without that kind of rigor you end up with a lack of idea on what the fae are, which is good if you are a player and bad if you're an ST. It was a little odd to see the curtain pulled back and yes, while reading the book I thought to myself of just classifying some of the faeries by their AT designations but seriously, who cares? See #1 above. You get to be the ST and say, "this faerie is the symbol for this crazy thing and can do totally ridiculous stuff and here are some rules to make all of that work", and that's awesome.
The distinction between Faerie and Magic is pretty cool when you think about Fae as being man's primal, pre-Divine nature and Magic as corresponding to the Platonic Forms of reality. Which sort of leads into a little head-scratching in A&A about pushing the idea of Aristotlean categories onto Hermetic Magic since it's clear that the ArM reality is Platonically-biased (seriously - Creo is all about Platonic Forms), but whatevs.
NOTE for those that aren't familiar with Exalted: the motivations for the Fair Folk are written up very well, fluff-wise, and have lots of great ideas to them. The game's mechanics may be on rails and fall short of what it was trying to accomplish (the curse of WW), but the Fair Folk fluff is pretty neat.
But when I do consider it, I realize by sending stuff to Sub Rosa, I restrict the conversation to paid subscribers--and I'm not one of them.
I also realize all too well that stuff posted here washes into the archives, yet forums thrive when people post to them. Given a choice of lending energy to these forums versus Sub Rosa, I prefer to see more eyeballs here, more posts here, more responses here.
The Ars community in this forum is fairly small, to tell the truth (unless we have more lurkers than I am aware of) so dunno if tat "more eyeballs" argument works. I have no idea how many people buy sub rosa either, heheh
Except that relatively few gets Sub Rosa, quite few compared i think to those who read here or at the ars wiki which is really where any houserules should be posted for accessibility.
Indeed. Its one thing to make them really like to "create stories", quite another to make them "unreal" as long as they´re not part of any story and unable to be something beyond that.
Try joining together multiple groups from different games. Worked well enough here at least.
Of course, it also means we dont just run AM, far from it.
I don't know where you draw that conclusion from-- I think only Alex can really speak to the actual distribution numbers. I know that I got about 34 responses to the survey I did for Sub Rosa about a year ago. I imagine that the subscription base is probably a bit higher than that.
Regardless, I won't threadjack further.
I have to say I disagree with the OP's issues wit RoP:F. I like the distinction.
I made one of my players (whose character name is Arthur) replay the Arthur stories. He knows it, but he had a great time trying to avoid Arthur's fate.
Knowing the story detracts nothing from the experience. All the members of my troupe read the Severin story in TOME beforee we played it, and we had a BLAST playing it
And that reminds me that I have not put up the last saga sessions....
I read all of the main Exalted books, and I can't think where this idea that the RoP:F authors ripped them off of come from. Solar, Terrestial, Lunar, and Sidereal Exalted, as well as whatever the Infernal ones are called, are all actors who create stories and do not live off of the stories that are created. They have an explicit sentience and agency that the new Faeries mostly lack, and part of the main plot of the world is that they do not often fall into their prescribed roles, but really screwed things up for going outside of them. Where exactly do we get the equivalence?
I think it's only the fact that for some reason the OP thought that Exalted's representation of their Fair Folk was too in line with RoP:F's representation of the fae, as if they were both somehow not consciously (and in RoP:F's case) explicitly drawing on faerie tales to construct those representations.
I don't think it went so far as to link anything else Exalted to ArM.
When I first read Faeries (started the day it arrived at Orcs Nest) I was more than a little disappointed. However, I persevered. I now consider one of the better supplements, a real breakthrough book in that it got me thinking differently. After coming to accept the ideas therein I had a crisis in the sense that what had gone before in my saga "would not fit" but even that is not true: I think most human's understanding of the fae, and their behaviour to humans fits in with the new ArM view of the fae. The point is, many fae adapt to fit the expectations of humans and to create the stories that humans take part that generates the vitality that the fae need. I love the idea that the faerie opposition can be out to lose (though they may not know it). Congratulations to all involved.
Addressing the OP, I can relate to your sense of disappointment to a certain degree. When I first started playing ArM I got the WW Faeries supplement and hated it. It was not good IMO. Here you have a subject that practically begs the imagination and childlike wonder in your soul to open up all the possibilities and spill out a rainbow of candy-flavored yumminess, and what we got was a bunch of boring stats for boring, unimaginative "faeries"--hell, they didn't even deserve to be called faeries. But do you know what my troupe did? We ignored it. Took the one or two genuinely decent ideas in the book and set the rest aside, and we ran faeries the way we felt they ought to be run.
This brings up a subject I've droned on about before, but even if there was a rule on page one of the ArM rulebook that said "You can't change any of the rules in this book" there is no one that can stop you from doing so. A rulebook is a guide, it's not The Law. Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein-Hagen won't break down your door and take your books and character sheets away because you're not playing the game the way they wrote it. I promise.
Faeries sucking "vitality" from people like psychic vampires sounds like a bad Star Trek episode to me too, so ignore it. Faeries don't need a motivation the way people do, they can simply exist and do what they do because it's their nature. What exactly is their nature? Merinita magi have studied them for centuries and never really answer that question. You only need to explain the motive for a faerie to support your story, and no further. You don't need a Theory of Everything to tie up all the realms into some sort of Cosmic Equilibrium. That is God's job. If you want one anyway, make it up if you don't like the ones provided by Atlas.
One of the many cool things about faeries is that it's OK for them to be shrouded in mystery. They have always been such, despite what highly-educated Australian historians write and despite what well-meaning RPG writers say, and I personally feel the game is better served if they are left with more fuzzy edges and mystery than if they are diagrammed like a circuit board. As for players who "know the faerie rules" and thus tip the scales, what you have is a case of a bad SG, not necessarily too-knowledgeable players. IMS it doesn't matter what the players know, each faerie realm and critter is unique and follows its own internal motivations. What works for one will NOT work for the next one.
So you are better off taking the RoP:F supplement not as Law, but as a book of suggestions and ideas. When you look at it like that you will start to see a lot of things you DO like, and the rest you can just skip over. And you will probably feel like you didn't waste your money after all. Just sayin'.
Faeries don't suck vitality away, moving it from one place to another. They thrive on it where they find it and promote it where they don't. When a faerie enjoys the vitality afforded him by the baker leaving a little bread for the oven sprite, the baker doesn't lose anything except perhaps a little dough. There is no "vitality" for a character to lose, it's only there for a faerie to gain.
OK, so not vitality vampires. It's still a needless concept. The fey do what they do because they embody mystery, the primordial. They can be mirrors to humanity (hence they "mock" human behavior with "faerie courts"), or simply raw primordial Wilderness (hence the faeries of wood/water/sky/etc. who have no truck with such things). IMO they are precisely what should not be defined. I disagree with the notion that the fey have to be given a reason to be, it is enough that they are. Let the Merinita and mystics ponder the why, it's irrelevant and stifling to state these reasons. Earlier editions left these things undefined because the SG's are supposed to provide the rationale for faerie behavior, if even that behavior can be rationalized (kind of a contradiction IMO). The players (even the new ones) are sufficiently intelligent to take the concept of faeries and do them justice.
This one likes bread, that one likes beer, another one wants to drink the tears of the elusive White Gilgamak. Is it vitality they seek? Or do they crave something they do not possess, something as-yet-defined? Or are they emulating some aspect of a behavior they observe but cannot contextualize? Why provide an answer for all the players to understand before they've ever put down the book? This particular element of ArM was better served by leaving that story unwritten... except by the players. BTW, I'm not slamming the rules per se but I do disagree with the current trend in ArM philosophy that there needs to be more rules for every aspect of the game. The 1st-3rd editions had many flaws and holes (many of them quite minor, and a couple doozies) but the spirit of the game was to give it to the players to flesh out. They acknowledged it was incomplete, in fact that was planned. There is no way you can quantify every element of myth, story and magic that ArM touches unless you want to end up with a set of ArM encyclopedias.
I'm reasonably certain that you have professed in the past little familiarity with ArM5, so just to clarify here: the latter 'faeries' you mention - the primordial wilderness types - are no longer faeries in ArM5. These are creatures of the Magic Realm. By definition in ArM5, faeries are interested in humanity. Thus the vitality concept.
A little OT but just to clarify something that has bugged me for a few days
The 4th edition book Faerie Stories contains a small story arc dealing with a queen of "bright winter" and a king of "Dark Summer" (old concepts, I know). From my reading of Faeries they would be Magical beings under ArM5, right?
Since I first came across Ars Magica around '90 (2nd ed I believe), it has always had a great and mythic feeling for me.
I like the completeness and well-defined rules of 5th ed. rules. They're there if you want/need them. If not, do it your own way. But some people can't cope with having to make a lot of stuff up. Could be they are unwilling to invent something which contradicts what rules are already written. Or any number of other reasons. For those, the written and complete rules are good. They may not agree, but they can pick and mix.
My point is, the published material can be used as much and as little as you like, as Ironclad rules or just for inspiration. IMHO only two things matter:
You must enjoy it (or at least not be much annoyed!)
Your troupe needs to be in agreement. If one expects some RAW and the rest make up their own...
Because in doing so, they are providing an answer to those poor and harried SGs who want to run stories about faeries that feel right and who also want guidance about how to go about it.
The RoP:F rules are good because--unlike many game mechanics--they do model the desired reality of the game world: apply these rules and you'll get something that feels like a faerie tale. (And by 'desired,' I mean having the Faerie Realm really work like the core rulebook fluff says it does. I regard RoP:M as an utter failure, because applying its game mechanics yields other results.)
'Vitality' is an unfortunate term; the game might have been better served by some other term, say, 'attention.' Faeries are all about getting human attention, and they'll get it if they have to kill you for it. Other models for faerie could work too. But solid game mechanics to model 'wonder' don't exist.
