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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).