Frequency of Twilight and sources of Warping

Games Discussion Ars Magica
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This is an important point that wise GMs should consider.

One of the possible effects of Twilight is that your character vanishes from the story. There are a few injuries players take more personally than anything else: being mind controlled, being deprived of their powers, and being told “you can’t play the game.” These are all issues of player agency.

Don’t wait to address this. Reassure players that if their magum enters twilight that doesn’t mean they can’t play. Their story will continue in the Magic Realm, and that story will be relevant with interesting choices. It will still be fun, and not just a pointless time waster. Moreover, encourage them to bring out their Companion, while their magum is in Twilight.

Don’t let Twilight prevent players from playing the game.

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22

A big question is why would one desire twilight? I consider warping and the gift world building mechanics.

The order having the power it does, why is feudalism not replaced with a Magiocracy? The gift answers that.

Magic being so useful, why does a magi not have a dozen buff spells at all time? Warping answers that.

Without warping, I would expect a magi to cast a bunch of ReMe and MuMe every morning. Improve concentration, social skills, memory, etc. ReCo and MuCo, make pain feel like pins and needles, skin of the rhino to improve soak, I’m sure there would be more Co out there. Protection spells to make them fireproof, cold proof, acid proof, etc. Depending on the mage’s power, sun versions of a bunch of things. Why walk when one can ReCo levitate all day? Why not have Eyes of the Eagle at all time, Thought within babble, etc?

Warping stops that as while rolling for twilight will not happen often, the higher the warping score, the higher the chance of final twilight. And you want this stopped as working out how many buffs and what they are could be tedious.

Warping and the gift make the world the magi live in sort of make sense. There’s still some issues, like why are there not thousands of tractatus around the order, but I won’t derail.

Twilight sucks. A player is removed from the adventure, or the other payers are removed from the adventure while the SG runs the twilight. The gaming adage “don’t split the party” is not just “Apes together strong”, to use a movie quote, it’s to keep everyone engaged.

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Not necessarily.

When I run twilight, i give a role to play to each of the other players as the teilighting mage is having their lynchian trip.

So for example, a botch on a spell would have one player perform as the technique and one the form, while I as SG set the scene and give the initial set up of the scenario. The mage must make some kind of choice based on the conundrum placed before them by the two arts’ personification.

This was something that my old SG uses to do and it works really nicely.

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24

My players carefully avoided botches, with careful sorceror, the gold cord, and high safety in their labs. I eventually got them into the magical realm itself to play out a twilight-similar experience, including the time dilation and general weirdness. One stayed, just to explore the Realm, which he enjoyed so much he called me during the week to get into some one-on-one storyguiding. But they still avoided Twilight, they wanted to choose for themselves to visit the Void, a matter of agency.

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One bid meta game question is how much does twilight take you out of the story. If you run an adventure every season then twilight taking you out for 5 years is 20 adventures. If you run one adventure every five years then it may take you out of one. If a moderate length twilight is just another way to spend time between adventures then it isn’t as scary as if it takes you out of multiple adventures.

an obvious way to deal with this is to simply decide that adventures stop coming while the magus is in twilight and everyone else gets that much downtime to improve their characters. Some people might even find they prefer twilight to avoid the bookkeeping.

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I can say for certain that Twilight is something my players respect and are even slightly scared of, but it’s a kind of forever away.

The rules are very lenient. In my current campaign (early chronicles translated here somewhere on forum, but not complete) we’ve done 165 sessions (average 5-6 hours each). There’s been a ton of magic (and they nearly always have to roll, due to botch and warping). As magic should always be a bit dangerous to play with, my baseline is always 3 botch dice (instead of one) and usually 5 base if stressful. All four characters have familiars with gold cords (from 2 to 4). The campaign runs a lot with travel to full regios (i.e. double dice), not seldom up to aura 8, and we even had a situation where it was “12” (very special ocassion). Mainly faerie, but they’ve also had plenty of occasion for strong Infernal and Divine auras. They even had the whole covenant in aura 6-8 for a few years (which inflicted some hilarious warping to covenant staff and grogs), and in a sneaky Infernal aura for a year (pro tip: do NOT cast Aegis of the Hearth with Infernal vis! Oopsie)

The characters do shun original research due to warping (which grinds my gears, since there’s a good meta around it), and do pick their poisons as well as any group - while still being great players by choosing the risky and fun path for story before the safe. They’ve covered as they could with Gold cords and they take decent use of Spell Mastery for some favorite spells, but it’s mostly spontaneous magic and insane rituals and items of 12-24 magnitudes going on.
All of them default to experiment with +2 or +3 for lab activities (with a few fun results) at least half the time.

Still, they’re now all only around Warping score 2-4 (even after I threw extra warping on them for a few things encountered story-wise), and there’s been only a handful of “light” actual twilights, nothing beyond hours (meh!) - and I think that was after a massive seven or eight “0” on the dice… Not sure if they’ve been continuously lucky or what.
One character did manage to cast Enigma’s gift (he’s not criamon, but he picked it up in Twilight) on an insane age 150 maga (arcane connection, and at the right optimization and timing) which did send her packing to likely final Twilight. No character has been anywhere close themselves, so as campaign has moved on - it’s still a far off enough issue they don’t care (but still don’t want to do the research… gah!). Even after I’ve bumped base botch dice and force most simple dice to be stress dice (pretty much all where magic is involved, except table stuff).

My conclusion for quite some time has been that Warping and Twilight needs an overhaul to have a meaning for “shorter” campaigns (which in Ars Magica seems to be anything below 100+ years or so lol).

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27

The game is set up for twilight to be very undesirable, unless you invest heavily in Enigmatic Wisdom.

Comprehending twilight pits your intelligence + enigmatic wisdom against your warping score. Botch dice is based on the number of warping points that sent you into twilight, increases the time spent in twilight, potentially lethally.

If you do comprehend the twilight, the story guide picks from

a) twice the number of warping points gained in xp. This isn’t worth it. 1 warping point is 1 year under a Longevity ritual, which has 4 seasons. Even if you just gain xp through exposure, you get 8 XP per year.

b) a new formulaic spell with a magnitude equal to the warping points gained. This is also a bad deal, unless you get a non-hermetic effect. Again, 1 warping point is 4 seasons of lab work. you can invent a lot of spells with that time.

c) a new virtue IF you got 7+ warping points, This is actually pretty good, as gaining virtues is deliberately set up to be difficult. but, your chances of even qualifying for it are 50% if you were sent to twilight by 2 warping points.

But you probably aren’t comprehending twilight unless your a very new magi with high intelligence or a Criamon that invested heavily in enigmatic wisdom. Even then its not a great bet.

With the way its set up, players will rightfully expend a lot of effort to avoid it. Making it harder to avoid will only increase the value of things like the Golden Cord and Flawless Magic, Which don’t need to be more attractive. If you want your players to be less twilight-adverse, I’d recommend.

  1. Reducing the penalty for Botching a comprehension roll to a multiple of the base time in twilight. Removing the risk of death is important if you want players to risk it. This might not be enough – a single botch with a warping score of 8 would take a magus to twilight for 14 years under this, and that’s still not a lot of fun for the player.

  2. Make comprehending twilight a viable option for non-Criamon.

  3. Make the benefits attractive enough to to be worth the new risk.

On the other hand, this is probably a key reason why Hermetic Breakthroughs are rare. Accumulating 60 breakthrough points isn’t so hard that there should have been none since Bonisagus’s breakthrough in four and a half centuries. But if you don’t have all the hard values in front of you, it would be very easy to be scared off part way though. Even if you do have the rules, it gets uncomfortable when your warping gets high – which is most of your warping points before final twilight.

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I mean, this is frequent enough. Rituals + fatigue spontaneous + combat and similar tense situation provides enough chances of botch.

Early game spontaneous casting (by early game, I mean pre-familiar with golden cord), and casting in foreign regios. Many twilights come from exploring infernal and faerie regios.

Author fiat. May as well be honest :joy:

We tend to consider botch die as 1 in a very controlled environment like the sanctum, base 3 otherwise + complicating factors + hostile auras. My players aren't scared of twilight, typically half of the first few ones end up giving them free virtues, since twilights are geared towards comprehension when you have low warping.

Character builds matter a lot. I have a Verditius whom I played the last two and a half year that hasn't had a single twilight. Tbh, I regret it, since I'm missing on those free goodies. But he fights with a sword, has weak spontaneous casting such that he's never sponting at all, and most of his formulaic are either buffs or utilitarian, plus he relies on magic item such that he's almost never found casting with a stress dice. On the other hand, I have many other characters who have had a twilight episode every 3-6 months.

The reality is I expect most magi take the majority of their twilight in early years, when they're adventuring, and as they age, they become more sedentary. Then something major happens where they lose patience, do a wizard's war, and disappear for a year if they're not killed. But yes, if you have a decent golden cord plus Cautious Sorcerer and buy spell mastery, you can forget about twilight episodes outside high level foreign regios.

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On the other hand, this is probably a key reason why Hermetic Breakthroughs are rare. Accumulating 60 breakthrough points isn’t so hard that there should have been none since Bonisagus’s breakthrough in four and a half centuries. But if you don’t have all the hard values in front of you, it would be very easy to be scared off part way though. Even if you do have the rules, it gets uncomfortable when your warping gets high – which is most of your warping points before final twilight.

To take this the other way round (though this doesn’t help Kandahar at all), maybe the Order has recently had an unacknowledged theoretical advance that means everyone gets less warping. Like how longevity rituals are probably better now than they were two centuries ago. :slight_smile: So old sample NPCs used to warp faster (uphill, both ways, in the snow) and get more scars, but folks in 1220 benefit from the ‘new normal’ represented by the current rules.

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Looks like we agree on one thing: Twilight as it’s written doesn’t really work. But I will say that my intention is not to make Twilight harder to avoid. I want to make it so Twilight doesn’t suck.

I got to say, I feel a bit relieved to see TheOriginalMadman’s post, because I thought I was going crazy with my stance on this. To me, Twilight as intended is not supposed to be a deterrent, but a necessary evil. The problem is that the other parts of the system (and the core Twilight rules) interact with it in a way that incentivises all that avoidance, reluctance and fear. Again, to me this shouldn’t be like that, and the rules should be better to provide a better experience.

Going over to what I consider Twilight to be supposed to do, it should:

  • Make it feel like magic has weight and consequences. The current Warping rules and spellcasting botches make it either incredibly uncommon with minimal investment (Gold Cord, Careful Sorcerer) or incredibly swingy (Twilight Prone) with magi that either don’t enter Twilight at all or enter multiple times a year. The vis studying rules (and to a lesser extent the clearly superior book rules) actually impede and desincentivise risky behavior.
  • Make it so it feels like your magus is advancing. The houserule I proposed à la Folk Witches, with magi reaching “Marks” for each Warping Score increase would both make it flavourful AND make it so your older magi can actually die from Final Twilight.
  • Make it so your character can actually die. Most would see this as an undesirable outcome, but to me this is necessary. In a game such as this, the stakes should reflect that. Do you risk casting? Do you invest in enchanted devices? How do you spend your last days knowing that Final Twilight awaits you?

To this effect, I would propose the following:

  1. First and foremost, a rework of the Twilight rules, making them less swingy, leaving room for unpredictable outcomes, but maybe capping the time you spend in Twilight according to your Warping Score. That way, younger magi (who will most likely be adventuring) won’t have to spend more than a day or so inside it. You don’t strip it from the importance it has, but you also make it so you don’t waste a season on a crappy roll.

  2. Second, a standarised botch die rulings for spellcasting, making it a bit harsher and heavier to cast spells in stressful situations. The way it is at the moment, a base of 1 botch die makes it almost impossible to fall into Twilight unless you are inside a foreign regio, which doesn’t happen too often (never in some sagas).

  3. Third, a mandatory Twilight check for Warping Score increase, which as said above makes it both flavourful and makes it so your PC can actually die meaningfully instead of in a bed of old age.

  4. Last but not least, a rework of the vis studying/use and book writing rules. The way both are setup, it’s almost never worth it to study from vis. I would maybe limit the utility of books in some way while they remain incredibly powerful, while I buff vis studying and use so that players know they’re going to get their bang for their buck.

Of course, all of this would depend on how well the Twilight check rules are reworked, but I believe it can be done very well. It would mean that Twilight would be overall less dangerous, less swingy, and more potentially rewarding at the start, and the complete opposite as you get older.

What’s everyone’s thoughts on this?

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What is the definition of “meaningful” here? I'm not sure that dying because your Warp score went up from the yearly Warping point due to Longevity Ritual (the main source of passive Warping) is more meaningful than dying due to aging rolls. Both are generally resolved at the end of the year as an in-between season thing. “Oh, I guess I died” still happens. I suppose that does depend on how extensively everything else was changed, but “I died at the end of the year because my Warping went up” and “I died at the end of the year because my age went up” seem equally unmeaningful to me.

I do agree though that something should happen when your Warp score goes up, even if it's just picking a cool Twilight/Warp scar. Advancing magi post-gauntlet, getting to 2 or 3 Warp score and nothing happening is a bit of a bummer and more than a little dull imo

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I said it that way partly because I wanted to be overdramatic to get my point across. But in reality, isn’t dying from Final Twilight way cooler than just pissing off in your bed?

Of course, the “I guess I just died” situation will never happen in a sane table, as those occasions should receive the time, care and focus they deserve. But many, many traditions benefit from actually being able to have a magi that dies from Final Twilight. Bjornaer, Criamon or Merinita specially come to mind.

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As I said, they are the same to me. You died because a number on your sheet went up at the end of the year.

Yes, what I meant was “I guess I just died” is then followed by the sensible thing with the focus on it, but the bit that happened, was you dying with no meaning inbetween things happening.

I thnk those 3 houses are the only canon 3 that have special things happen with Final Twilight? I think maybe every hedge tradition has a weird different thing happen instead of Twilight, but I’ll assume you’re putting them all under the umbrella of “thing that happens as warping goes up”

I do agree though, those 3 should be more incentivized. Criamon have the enigmatic wisdom so they can get some nice goodies from twilight, but Bjornaer are the second worst thing written in the game (imo) and their prize for warping with the inner heartbeast initiations is not worth it at all. Merinita I’m not familiar enough with, so I can only think of the Becoming a Faerie thing they can do to be immortal and basically that’s all I know of it, is that it exists.

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Your thoughts are dovetailing with mine; with a few exceptions

I don’t like the mandatory twilight check when warping score increases. There are a lot of warping methods and almost none of them have an effect on both gaining 2+ warping points and increasing warping score. Its one or the other. The only exception I can find is Fatra Bayna, which is better than hermetic twilight, and the only downside to increasing the warping score is the character gains a corruption point that has no effect untill the next fatra bayna. Since fatra bayna isn’t effected by thier warping score, and can be fairly easily ensured to be a good outcome indefinitly, this is likely to be their only penalty for warping.

I do like making risking twilight more attractive by improving Study from vis/nerfing books for high art magi. Continuing in that vien, maybe modify expirimentation to make it more attractive and risky? Adding a ‘Lab Accident’ on the expirimentation table that still gives the expirimentation bonus but also gives warping points could be interesting. Might need to make the benefits for picking a higher risk modifier better too..

The current twilight comprehension rules aren’t actually that swingy, EXCEPT for botching, which is a generally low-chance but extremely high penalty. The check is Stress Die + Int + Enigmatic Wisdom vs Warping Score + Stress Die. Probabilisticly, the two stress die actually reduce chance for extreeme values as they focus the distribution on 0 and it doesn’t matter how much you fail by**.** Its just very likely to be bad.

Your stamina is on a 1-3 scale, which can be expanded to 1-5 with virtues or high level CrCo while your warping score goes from 0-10. Young magi already have an edge, as with the warping score low the chances that their Intelligence is greater is pretty good. Its just the edge disapears fast as the simple die warping points will quickly chew through the early warping score and its not long before, your chances are less than a coin flip and every point of difference just makes it worse.

Its unclear to me if the comprehension roll is supposed be effected with confidence; after all it could represent quite a long term effort (years even!), and to me its vibes are most similar to ‘studying from vis’ which you explicitly can’t spend confidence on. If you can, then twilight comprehension botches are much less of a risk (dramatically reducing swingyness) but self-confident is also even more valuable.

Avoiding twilight is also not swingy, but it is very easy. Stress + Sta + Concentration + Vim Form Bonus VS Warping Score + Enigmatic Wisdom + warping points gained. Since Stamina and Concentration are both generally useful for magi, and this can definitely be boosted with confidence, this is a pretty easy check. The only downside of succeeding is you are vulnerable and magic-less for two minutes.

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Studying from Vis, which I'm now suspecting is the major contributor to those stat lines.

This is one of the things that changed with the game mechanics across editions. It used to be functionally impossible to improve your Arts past 20 without studying from Vis. And it was pretty rare to be able to get even that high from books. This both made twilight more likely to happen and constrained super high Arts scores, because you either didn’t have Vis or you were eventually sufficiently Warped that you were scared to study from Vis any more and did safer things.

Now, of course, many players believe it is unutterably foolish to study from vis, ever. There’s also many, many more ways to reduce the number of botch dice you roll.

The fiction of the world hasn’t really changed even though the rules have.

It is intended in the rules that early career Twilights make you more powerful and later career twilights put you on the path to transcendent retirement. If your Warping Score is <3, you are more likely to comprehend Twilight than not. And comprehending Twilight is a much faster way to get out of Twilight and back into the real world, not to mention it gives you stuff.

As an aside, when Ars was conceived the designers thought players would enjoy playing Grogs. So the fact that you were playing a grog while your wizard was twilight’ed out wasn’t thought of as a downside. This is less true than they thought. :smiley:

Finally, it’s going to depend on your players and their playstyle. I’ve had players who wanted nothing to do with Twilight and players who trusted that even a flaw would be something that made things fun.

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36

One change that would make vis more attractive would be to increase the potential xp in studying from it. as things now even aside from twilight you have to spend multiple pawns of vis to get anywhere from 5 (assuming an aura of 3) to most likely 12 xp, which is about the same as studying from a tractatus. Sure you might roll a 1, but even then the possible gains aren’t that high (50% chance you are still essentially in the same range even then), and it is the same as the risk of botching. Now if the roll for xp were multiplied by the number of vis spent rather than the required vis being based on the current score this might be a much more attractive method for learning.

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For my anecdotes, a large number of my saga adventures end up touching on Faerie. Though Magic is in the world, Magical auras and might tend to be away from the world, away from society, and often avoiding magi. Faeries are actively trying to interact with people, and so I’d say a good 30-60% of our adventures involve interacting with a faerie. A good number of other adventures involve going into a larger politically charged city, which will have a low-level Dominion aura. That’s the source of most of our Twilights.

Our last saga had a Flambeau with Twilight Prone, and when the covenant went to help their magus who was being harassed by a Faerie Queen, the Flambeau went into Twilight four times in one adventure. He’s an outlier though. He was very free with spells, did not care about how many botch dice he had, and any adventure involving a hostile aura, he’d probably botch once.

If you have players who view Twilight as an undesirable outcome, then you will find it very easy to avoid Twilight. If you, like me, have 2-3 players who consider getting into Twilight good fun, and consider losing an arm a great opportunity to invent a ‘grow an extra hand’ spell, and regularly try to invent spells just out of their reach with the specific goal of experimentation…

Then you’ll see a Twilight episode every few games.

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Exactly. Only the most reckless person would use Vis. One would hope Summae gets a magi to 10. If using vis to get from an art score of 10 - 15, it takes an average of 7 seasons which is 21 vis. I’d think a magi could trade for a decent level 15 summae for 21 Vis.
16+, 4 vis a season, 21+, 5 vis a season. just trade for a bunch of tractatus.

I think that is too extreme. 1 pawn of Vis per 10, +1 to the study result per pawn used, +2 or may +3 per pawn use in excess of what was required, would be better.

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A Vain Tractatus has a quality of 6 and costs 1 pawn, a Sound Tractatus costs 2 pawns has has a quality of 11, and higher quality cannot gennerally be purchased. They can also be used by multiple magi, have no risk of warping or twilight, and even possibly resold to recoupe cost.

I think a +3 per pawn is the minimum that would make it a viable choice (unless tractatus are also nerfed), possibly more, unless you have a high vis saga.

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No one ever voluntarily chooses vis as a way of advancing Arts, even in earlier editions. You did so because it was literally impossible to improve in any other way.

If you use the Covenants rules that suggest widespread trading and resulting cheap availability of books to study from, there will never be an incentive to study from vis.

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