The internet opens a bunch of options. A 5th ed revised edition can have one page devoted to pointing to a bunch of downloadable online content. Usable example covenants and characters, a few scenarios, etc. Some people will buy the PDF version, which makes this even better.
Page count in a rule book is important. You give a 500 page rule book to someone knew to TTRPGs, that will turn them away.
Having the core rule book with a few example magi, grogs, companions, covenants, etc, is important, but it is important it doesn't take up too much space.
There's always the 2-tomes solution. That gets rid of the "boxed-set" overcost.
Also, if you cut it properly, you can have someone building a House/Virtue set while another one is leafing through sample characters to pick a direction. Then thay can swap, one complementing his magus with Virtues, while the other is finding a sample that matches her House.
Even with 4 Houses (Bonisagus, Tremere, Flambeau, Jerbiton) and a 6/6 limit with a core set of V/F you can create interesting stories. By blocking at 30 xp per year, you remove a few chapters whole cloth. Maybe you can even turn enchanted items into "a spell on a stick" and remove LR / familiar / apprentice for even more draconian cuts.
Later, you can enrich your picks from the full set. If your troupe buys the full Arm5D and the starter pack, you can have 3 players working at the same time.
There absolutely needs to be a much better explanation on how to play the game. Anecdotally, the most common threads on RpG.net (at one point the largest TTrpg website forum) about ars magica were along the lines of "i just bought this game it looks amazing... but I have no idea how what an adventure should look lile let alone a full saga/campaign. "
A valid, in my opinion, criticism I've seen of the 5e core rulebook is that the target market of ars 5e was ars 4e players and no one else.
I definitely think a well-thought-out starter set would be great, as would be some digital tools, but it might also be helpful to have some YouTube or podcast content discussing the game, how the rules work, and maybe an actual play. Personally, I find long-form actual plays to be of limited use but something more limited in scope, primarily designed to show the game in action, could be a good showcase.
And that is why I'll beat the drum again: Ars Magica already has books on adventures (Legends of Hermes, Tales of Mythic Europe), books on sagas and how to end them (Dies Irae, etc.), 'dungeoneering' books... but none of them do anything for new players and storytellers that want to play something of their own.
David mentioned in another thread that you cannot make a quick reference for experienced players and an introductory one for new ones alike, and while I agree with the general consensus that a 'Starter Set' would be quite welcome, that will not help the crowdfunding for ArM:DE, since they are different projects altogether.
What will help the crowdfunding is taking aproximately 20 to 50 pages of the book making sure anyone who has bought it can run an Ars Magica game without having to work out how to do it by themselves. If I'm either:
a) Someone who has a lot of experience running TTRPGs but I'm intimidated by the sheer amount of work ArM is to run, or
b) Someone who is relatively new to TTRPGs that gets enamoured by the system, the lore and the promise of the game as presented in the crowdfunding campaign, or
c) Someone who has run ArM in the past but doesn't want to jump in again without a clear way to jumpstart 'that saga I've been wanting to run'
Then putting that section into the book will only help drive up pledges and more people playing the game, creating a healthy cycle of new people coming, creating content, community, etcetera.
I will not claim to know more than people whose job is in the TTRPG industry, but to me this seems like something of a requirement if you want new people in on a very complex and overarching system as this is. 'How do I play this game? How do I narrate it?' are quite literally the first questions to answer.
You are behind the times.
We are chefs who do magic through food preparation.
Feeding the king hamburger and fries will blow his hose up. Then you somehow bring tomatoes to Sicily and Frederick will give you his daughter. You manage a farm with faeries and your talisman (a magical hoe) to use the freshest ingredients.
Knights of Last Call had a stream recently discussing ArM. Derik was pretty positive about it. The community over there is full of players keen to try out new games. I'm sure a few playtesters with no prior ArM experience for a mini saga could be found on the Discord server.
I agree, except I think it would be even better if that material were available at the start of the crowdfunding campaign so everyone who might be interested has the opportunity to figure out what the game is like upfront.
Given what Atlas has said about not wanting to offer things which are not written and playtested and ready to go as stretch-goals, the best thing people can do if they want to see this is to start writing it now.
I am, in all seriousness, not at all sure what that would look like. We already have quite a few pages on this topic, which are clearly not enough for this purpose (and, also, clearly enough for some people, because there are YouTube videos by people who have understood Ars Magica based on them).
I think there is a "valley of death" here. You can provide the general guidelines that we already have, and those are useful. You can provide a starter set, and that is definitely useful. But the things in between are a lot less useful than you might think. You can't just pick them up and start playing — you need to adapt them to your group, add statistics, work out how the plots fit together, handle the downtime, decide what is in the covenant library, etc. On the other hand, if it's supposed to be inspiration, there is a lot of material that you don't need, and probably won't use. And that extra information might get in the way of what you would prefer to do, forcing you to rewrite the bits you can use.
This is why I am in favour of a starter set as a separate product.
It's not that we haven't thought about the need for this, it's that it is not that easy.
which is why I want to help with starter sets here on the forum, hence my earlier comment on some sort of framework that we could slot our homebrews into.
I very much agree that coordinating our efforts would be good. We can all go off and try to do our own thing, and some of these efforts will probably produce something useful. It would be great to have a collection of starter resources like that, but it might be even better to have a more polished offering that can be the default starting point for those who want more guidance to get started. Having a lot of fan resources floating about can be very useful and provide ideas to scavenge even once you know what you are doing, but it can also be confusing for someone trying to figure out where to start.
There is an apparently smoothly-run open source project for a character generator for ArM on discord, gathering different people to do everything from coding, to contents, to graphic design.
Pending licensing issue, something similar would be nice to do for a starter set. Covenant design, story design, maps, and artwork are tasks that could be delegated to different people. Shared work in progress is also a source of inspiration. The covenant should inspire the story and vice versa.
But it is not easy to take the agile methods from software engineering and make them work in practice in a different domain. It would be an interesting experiment.
I'm not sure about (capital A) Agile, which may or may not work in its intended environment, but I've never seen it succeed outside of it. But a collaborative writing/game design effort isn't impossible. I think it does require some direction, though.
Agreement on goals and scope would be helpful, as would be clear communication about who is doing what. There are a lot of individual components that go into a starter set that could be worked on by several people in parallel, but obviously, everything needs to fit together nicely in the end.
that's where the agility comes in; transparency and continuous dialogue which allows the team to renegotiate targets and roles when original targets and ideas prove to be incompatible, futile, or over-ambitious
and agility is not confined to Agile Methods, but echo a trends in a range of methodologies from different disciplines
discord will be better when somebody steps forward to take a lead role
The problem here, as I'm sure the team is aware, is not if people can understand the ethos of the game, which is pretty clear from reading only the core book. The problem is that it takes a gargantuan ammount of effort to put together a saga if you are new (or even relatively new) to the game. What I'm envisioning would not be a starter set, but rather 'a toolbox to create your own starter set, with an example to boot'.
This here is my main point regarding starter sets. Ars Magica can be played in so many different ways that what new players need is not some fish, it's the fishing pole and an experienced fisherperson to teach them how to go fishing. You can argue that a starter set is already that example, but you're already saying that even in that case you'll be rewriting stuff to fit your troupe.
In a game like this, it's never going to be 'plug and play', I sincerely don't think so. There's so much to consider and decide (either as a group or as a storyteller) that the Starter Set solution will be no more than a nice addition to your library if you want to read it, unless the starter set also includes the tools needed to make your own.
How does that toolbox look like? If you look at the TTRPG scene in the last 13 years (Apocalypse World was released in 2010 if my memory doesn't fail me) you can see a myriad of world-building, planning and narrating tools that can (and in my honest opinion should) get adapted and be readily available to new troupes: Progress clocks, campaign hooks and fronts, faction turns, adversary rosters, node-based mystery resolutions, rumor tables, urbancrawling tools, node-based adventures in general... the list goes on and on, and with a handful of those tools stringed together, you get a framework, even if not exhaustive, that will decrease the amount of work a troupe should do.
Ars Magica 5th might be a 20 years old game, but it's not immune to the passage of time, so modernize it. Every single one of these tools can be adapted and put into a comprehensive exempli gratia that any troupe will feel like they can narrate this game.
Regardless of what Atlas as a company decides to do, there is no discussion that the game needs to welcome new players. The community already does, as it's patent in this thread: there are already quite a lot of volunteers to make this a reality. The point is that, if this work is done in the definitive edition, people will not need to come here to ask 'How do I do everything?' and instead will come asking 'I want to do X. I already know how to but I need some inspiration.' or even better 'I want to customize what the book told me, even if I like it. How did you people do it?'. And if you don't want to or don't know there is a space where people can help you, at least you have got the book, with the tools I already mentioned.
Again, this is just my opinion, and I very well could be wrong. I just hope I got my point across as my exact situation was this one two years ago. I don't mean any offense.
Kudos to the team and specially to you, David, for all the errata work. I'm excited to see it reflected in ArM:DE
I think a partial solution to this is to provide some procedures, you know, like the faction/downtime procedure from worlds without number or blades in the dark or something similar for use during periods of seasonal lab work, this will take some pressure off the gm to be constantly generating hooks and allow them to focus their efforts more elsewhere, and it'll only take up a handful of pages. If you in the osr you can find procedures people have already put together for all kinds of things, and plenty of fodder for making your own.
Just made an account to put in my two cents as someone who's just picked up a good number of AM5e books with intent to maybe run it.
Agreed that while this book does a good job explaining what things are, it doesn't do as much a good job as explaining how or why. What does a beginning session look like? How can I as a storyguide do a good job of going on an adventure with my friends if I don't know how to formally structure one?
All in all I agree with Kandahar entirely, basically, and he has done a much better job of elaborating on my opinions. Now I just need to finish making a test character...
Thank you kindly for your words. I've seen a recent video that labels this game 'A weird TTRPG you will probably never play' and it broke my heart. I've seen it being called 'The best TTRPG you will never run' and it hurt a lot.
Hopefully we can come to a solution to get rid of those nasty labels and claim a proud place in the list of 'TTRPGs you will run and enjoy'
