[House Rule] Weaker Magi. Seeking opinions/help

Magi will have far less time to do things so lots of other things will be reduced within the setting to.

Longevity potions will be less potent on average. On average magi won't live as long. Fewer old magi means even less total magical knowledge.

Less time+less knowledge=a lot less books. What would qualify as high level summa would probably be comparatively low.

Fewer seasons for adventures and vis hunts so the vis economy would be tighter. Even harder to do really powerful enchantments and other vis heavy activities.

It would be harder for magi to get to the point where they could train an apprentice. Once they have an apprentice it would be harder to devote the time to train them.

Overall most any magi with an apprentice, a familiar, and a talisman could probably claim to be an Archmage in this setting.

I could see something like this working in a saga where the the Order of Hermes is significantly weakened or doesn't exist at all. Maybe it's been destroyed by demons or the church (or both) or collapsed by infighting. Hermetic magic could still be suppressed and have enemies. Covenants could be built on far fewer points and run in secret like folk witches covens. Having to work in secret with out a support system could also explain why magi don't just cast spells to get rich regularly.

A very good question and one I really need to work out. I mean, the level of power a magus can achieve is based largely on the reasources available... and the availability of training and texts depends on the power of the magi who came before. I guess I need to sit down and start crunching some numbers and making some assumptions.

Drat and blast... another of those house rules I forget is a house rule. :slight_smile: No making gold, period (no permanently creating something from nothing, period) and improving crops IMS isn't perhaps as effective as is generally assumed in others (I don't recall any firm rule on the effectiveness of Bountiful Feast... I just assume a moderate increase in yield, as from a good year).

What about making things grow faster than normal, e.g. maturing in a day? Or creating salt from seawater? Or constructing buildings over-night? Or....

I don't think there is a real way around it - magic didn't exist in the middle-ages, and it changes things. I am all in favor of reducing the power-level, but I don't like to "cover the loopholes". I prefer the standard ArM approach here, actually - keep magic out of the way politically, but keep it powerful enough to do all kinds of cool stuff. I don't want the game-upsetting stuff to be EASY, mind you; but I do like to keep it possible.

I take a slightly different approach... I favor the Mythic Europe concept, that magic exists the way the people of the middle ages believed magic exists. Maturing a plant in a far, or raising a building overnight is something a powerful wizard can do. But they generally don't because a) you don't have that many powerful wizards laying around and b) the ones who are around have better things to do with their time then growing crops and doing carpentry... that's what serfs are for. Also, really powerful wizards have long grey beards because they are old and they have been studying magic for decades. That kind of power is something your character can aspire to and maybe achieve, but it's not where you start. OTOH, nearly every village has a witch who can put the Good Word on your crops or curse your neighbors. Physcians are required to cast horoscopes for their patients before treating them for a serious illness.

At it's heart, magic is mystery. A secret grasped by only a few and if that secret is shared too much it is diminished.

We actually share a similar view but I keep magic in check by attitude rather than politics. In the end my goal to enjoy the Europe part as well as the Mythic part... to be able to have magi involved with nobles and churchmen and peasants as part of the world, rather then hidden away from the world in a tower on the edge of a magic forest.

Those do make it more difficult but real money making schemes should seldom be as vis intensive as flat creo ex nihilo. The magic system is so flexible you have to seriously hamstring it to slow down a creative player. You don't even need to be that powerful. If you can make a wand that boils water a covenant can make a pretty penny producing sea salt. Or rego craft magic or just good use of intellego. (Yup there is gold, silver, pearls, or truffles right over there)

I think the biggest limit to Magi in this setting is time. If they had more free time they could make money if they had more money they'd have free time.

Overall most magi in your setting have half as many seasons before they die to become great. Maybe a lot less once you figure all the ways being less powerful compounds.

You realize that by requiring a social status and having Magi take seasons to support themselves your creating a system where many Magi are growing crops and doing carpentry. (Or scribing books, treating the sick, tending to a figurative or literal flock) They just aren't apparently using magic to do it.

Don't get me wrong I actually like a lot of your ideas. It's giving me some ideas for running a low powered saga of my own. :slight_smile:

Stupid question (since I'm sure you've already thought about it): Why don't you just drop the quality of books? Or even just magical books?

Since the problem is magic, you could very well say that explaining magic is difficult, so that any study total is reduced by 3 (or even 6 if you want to be castrative).
That would drastically reduce the power level of magi, while still allowing you to keep the covenants and all, and avoiding the (IMO irrealistic) issue of the magus who could use magic to easily make a living (thus freeing 2 seasons) but don't.

You should forget hermetic magic in this case. Supernatural virtues cover this concept far better. And goetia.

Yeah, I know. The trouble is, I like hermetic magic. It's fun and, with a few tweaks, it is flexible enough to cover all manner of "mythic" magic under one system, rather then a lot of micro-system. The "trouble" is the sheer amount of not "mythic" magic it also allows... and that, IMO, falls under the social contract of the game. We agree not to pull the kind of stupid crap mentioned in this thread (no offense intended to anyone).

Ahh... I see the disjoin. Rather than saying a magus should take a social status virtue, what I should be saying is a magus should take one of the following social status virtues: Clerk, Gentleman, Magister in Artibus, Priest or Wise One... that clarifies my intent much better. Thank you.

Do gentlemen work?

What I see here is that magi DO deal with mundanes in a way that weould blatantly fall into a breach of the code. Even if you pass over the quite obvious problem of the king of france pressuring the local bishops to give him more of those fire-throwing clerks for his next chevauchee, magi acting as court advisors and doing magical stuff for their patrons should be fairly common here. The level of interaction with mundanes is much higher than in the official setting...

So a Verditius swordsmith is out? Or a Bjornær huntsman. What about Redcaps gifted or otherwise?

I understand where your coming from and am not offended. But using magic to make money is really more clever then stupid. Exactly the sort of thing bonifide super geniuses would come up with so they don't have to deal with mundane crap like making money. The logic goes that if I the player with far less then a +4 intelligence can come up with half a dozen ways to use minor magic to cover expenses my character could come up with four score methods during breakfast.

A gentlemen's agreement not to use magic that way can work but it can also break down as a game goes on. For instance the first time needing money becomes part of the plot. Or when the table notices how much faster the characters who took Wealthy are advancing. Or if quite by accident a windfall lands in the players lap.

That's why I recommend external forces, like an even greater need for secrecy, as limiting factors. Although I'm not a fan of the peer pressure within the order reasoning. Are you going to piss off the guy who spends twice as much time as you studying, researching, adventuring and otherwise becoming a magical bad ass by saying, he doesn't know what real magic is for. Especially if he could brew you up the best Longevity Potion in the order or write that summa you really really need.

So... why exactly hasn't the king made some of these fire-throwing gentlemen landed knights, again?

You might want to completely axe learning magic (well, Arts, spells, and so on) from texts. Each magus has a unique Gift and understanding of magic - that's why one needs to invent spells instead of learning them, after all. And magic is a mystery that cannot be conveyed in words; learning a spell is a matter of self-transformation, not the accumulation of knowledge. Personal teaching still goes, and also raw vis - the scarcity of both methods should limit magical growth considerably.

Has anyone noticed that throwing lighting from your fingertips has a +4 magnitude modifier for being very unnatural, but hurling fire from your fingertips is a cosmetic effect?

Clearly, I'm just going to have to sit down and revise the entire spell list and probably many of the spell guidelines to better fit the vision of Mythic Europe my saga embraces...

At what point does it stop being house rules and become a completely different game "based on" Ars Magica? :smiley:

I would rather take YR7's system and customize if it needed. He made a lot of calculations already.

Your concept has an obvious weak point what I wrote earlier: what happens if someone will be able to free himself from working? The reason can be anything, charming a rich npc or creating a rich one for example. Are you able to investigate and eradicate every such issues?

It makes perfect sense to me. In setting Auram magic was based on weather control magic so it has artifacts of that style of magic, particularly the unnatural effect modifier. Meta-Game it balances out the legacy spells. Game balance Auram is way powerful so it needs something to hamstring it.

For all it's warts ArM5 is still one of the most consistent setting/system combinations ever. (I'd say I was brown nosing but it's not a very high bar to jump) In broad strokes almost all the major features of the setting, and most minor ones, inform details of the system and vice versa. You change one without changing the others and you can loss some of the cohesion that makes the game what it is. But I'm a dramatic simulationist so that crap is important to me.

The point where ArM stops being ArM is the point where the people your playing with are annoyed that your still calling it Ars Magica. Or maybe the opposite is true it stays Ars Magica as long as no one would let you get away with calling it something else.

Not necessarily. We have played "Ars magica" with homebrew systems before, keeping only the setting but not the rules at all. :slight_smile:

A very interesting variant.

Not sure I'll ever use it, but muse about it? certainly!

Changing guidelines so they suit your "feel" better is almost certainly THE BEST way to adjust power level, but beware though that it´s not exactly easy.

In comparison, in my last game PeCo Guideline Kill a person is Base 50 while some of the low end guidelines are the same as originally, most of all what the change i´ve mostly played with has done is stretching the distance between tiny effects and "uber effects" guidelines.

Another useful option is to make more fatigue from casting normal.
A suboption to that could be to change it so you have to devote part of the casting total to avoid fatigue.
So if for example you say that the normal is 3 Fatigue from casting and a magi needs to use 5 from the casting total to reduce by 1 Fatigue level, that means magi either gets less penetration or more fatigue.

If you want labwork to be less "easy" you can use a rule that ALL labwork uses up at least 1 Vis or the labtotal takes a penalty, like say it gets halved if you have no Vis.

This(or something very close to it) was discussed before here. Roughly speaking, Incantation of Lightning "wastes" a few magnitudes -- but this "stretching" seems necessary to simultaneously achieve all of the following:
a) maintain coherent and concise Auram guidelines
b) keep Incantation of Lightning at the same level as it was in previous editions
c) keep the damage coherent with that produced by a "realistic" lightning bolt
d) keep the level necessary to deal that damage with Auram at least as high as the level necessary with Ignem -- the "gold standard" for damaging spells.