I've been thinking about David's piece in Sub Rosa 12...

There are lots of those here on the PbP forums. People scan and use material from the on-line posted games all the time. Perhaps we need to spread awareness of these resources :slight_smile:

There's also meta-scaffolding : defining a process where the Troupe designs the saga and its elements, how the SG rotates, how to negociate a story. If it is well done, rpgers from outside will come and have a look, if only to apply these ideas to their campaigns.

Let me say at the outset, I haven't read David's piece in Sub Rosa 12 and I don't know all this fancy theory... onboarding, scafolding, whatever.

That said... when it comes to being introduced to the game, to understanding how to play and what the potentials are... for me it all started with Severn Temple. I had played in one brief ArsM game in college, which died shortly after I joined, and tried a couple false starts without much luck. Then I stumbled across the Severn Temple website and spent literally days reading this groups in character journal of the events in their saga. I was hooked. I loved it. I understood it. The rest, as they say, is history.

As for understanding the mechanics, ArsM is actually very simple. Roll a d10 and add a couple of numbers, compare your total to the difficulty of the task to see if you succeed. Easy. The rest... advancement, designing spells, lab work, etc... that can all be introduced in stages and involves a fair degree of referencing the books anyway (I've even seen season lab work planning played out in character treating the rule book chapters as if they were summae from the covenant library).

I agree with those who say that the hard part is getting "the story," the concept behind the setting... but even that isn't so hard. "Imagine medieval Europe, where the legends and folk tales are real. There are giants in the hills, faeries in the forests, and wizards in that lonely tower... and you get to play the wizards."

Onboarding for one-off play should not be hard: the participants play wizards in a realistic medieval world, in which things are as medieval people thought they were (so, god, the devil, geocentrism and crystal spheres). The core rules (stat + skill, target number depends on difficulty or is contested) are simple. For a saga, its a bit harder: characters will spend a lot of their time in downtime, inventing things and writing books - which goes against the adventure focus of traditional rpgs.

Scaffolding is the hard bit. The rules for what the game is all about - magic - are fiddly and require odd maths. And the social setting for the game, from which stories flow - is even harder to explain. You can get around the first a bit by having no spontaneous magic, and spells as basically a list of powers. The second is a bit more difficult.

And this is why I don't run Ars Magica at conventions. I'd love to, and I know there are people who would love to try it. But the amount of infodump required compared to something like e.g. Fiasco (or even Call of Cthulhu) is prohibitive. The one time I tried it (with "Subtle and Quick to Anger") it was an unhappy experience.

A well-designed intro adventure with pre-generated (or mostly pre-generated, with tick-box options, Dungeon World style) could get around some of this. Or a D&D Red Box style narrative introduction / choose-your-own-adventure for the social context (a newly-Gauntleted apprentice at their first Tribunal?)

That's not the basic mechanism, though.

Let me compare Ars to a game which is so similar you might claim a certain amount of inspiration from one to the other: Doctor Who.

The basic roll in DW is, in Ars Terms:

Characteristic + Ability (+/- bonus or penalty for virtue or flaw) + 2d6. This is compared against a target number, which is generally 9,12, 15 or 18. (easy, medium, hard, very hard).

Now, superficially that looks like Ars, but the thing is: this is the mechanism which is used for travelling and talking, the key things the doctor and his companions do.

In Ars, that's just the unopposed skill resolution mechanic.

The mechanic players want to use during the games I've run at cons are not the unopposed skill mechanics, because that's not the big hook for the game. The core mechanic for the game is the magic mechanic. It reads like this:

Choose if you wish to use a spell you know.

IF YES AND YOU ARE USING A PREGEN
Roll 1 stress die (explain) with modifiers (explain) and compare it to the number of one your pregen sheet next to the spell.
IF YES AND YOU ARE NOT USING A PREGEN
Before this you should have worked out the casting totals for all of your spells, to speed time in play. You need to rework them every time your character gains relevant experience. If you must do it at the table, it is STA + Art + Art (capped by Requisites?) +/- Virtues and Flaws + Aura + Vis.
IF NO, then:

Select a effect you want on difficulty scale spread across ten separate pages in the rulebook, with another three pages describing how Range, Duration, and Target work, remembering Target size modifiers and that the magnitude scale switches at 5.

Sta + Art 1 + Art 2 (+/- modifiers due to Virtues and Flaws) + Aura. then IF
Casting with fatigue divide all by 5 OR
divide all by 2 and add a die where
1 roll again and double
0 roll twice and report zeroes to SG.
all others as per pips.
(Add vis results here. Explain vis.)
Compare to difficulty level.

That's the core mechanic in this game, because this is a game, at its very core, about wizards. Communities, sure, but the game's about wizards. And that's the unopposed mechanic. I haven't talked about Penetration and Damage.

Now, there are good reasons why the core mechanic is like this, but burying our heads in the sand and saying "Oh, it's a simple core mechanic" is not helpful, because it really and truly is not, IMO. It's really complicated.

This.

And even this leaves out the critical "choose whether to roll a simple or stress die" and "how many botch dice..."

And then, let's not forget spontaneous magic, which requires looking up effects and their relevant bases. It requires time to look something up or encyclopedic knowledge of all spell effects or at least for the specialized form. Spontaneous magic makes the game interesting and very rich, but it is not an easy task to implement, because of the required knowledge/look up necessary to move play along.

I agree that the magic mechanic is an interesting bit of the game, but while it isn't necessarily "simple" I think that you are making a bigger meal of it than necessary.

In play, for a magus character I have a 5*10 table of the Art combinations written down and precalcuated. Each cell in the table has the Sta+Art1+Art2 totals entered into it. So, in play, it is just a simple matter of picking the right number off the table and rolling a dice, adding the aura bonus (if any), and then comparing to a difficulty number (i.e. the spell level).

Also, the really interesting "magic mechanic" is not this bit. The interesting "magic mechanic" is the bit where you calculate the "Difficulty Number" (i.e. level) of Spontaneous spells in play (or formulaic ones in downtime). I think that the rules could be streamlined here, but I wouldn't want it streamlined too much, because the byzantine spell design process is (IMO) the bit of the game that is the "cool thing which makes ArM different/interesting". It's true that the players have to invest some time into learning the spell design process. But that process is playing the game. It is what makes ArM great for long-term play (whether you are playing the same characters repeatedly or not) and also makes it rubbish for one-off play.

I also think that the complexity of ArM is part of what makes its business model work. It might be possible to sit down and write a complete game that was set in Mythic Europe, feels a bit like ArM, and fits on a dozen pages. But if you did that, what would you write in supplements that would really make them worthwhile to buy?

And even that process can be simplified for newcomers by using a table to display how adding magnitudes impact the level. This removes the need to remember the change in scale from level 1-5 to level 10+. A second small table to show the various R/D/T and their respective magnitude increases (and a short definition).

Also having the summary of all spell guidelines in a single place would help. For a specific pre-generated magus, you simply provide the extensive list of guidelines for Arts he is good at. Such magi could be built so that the number of Arts combinations is not too large, further reducing complexity there.

In the end, you can probably produce a one-page summary of the spontaneous magic capabilities of the pre-gen magus, with a second page for his formulaic spells.

Well, if we're talking about this in the context of new players, my suggestion is that spontaneous not be introduced until the player indicates he is ready. If a veteran player is around and can demonstrate how he can cast a spontaneous spell, that's a bit different, but in a group of all new players the best way to handle this is to explain the concept, but then have a scenario contrived so that players can cast the spells they know, not the effects that are possible. When I ran a 3rd edition saga, players were almost always lost in combat, because they were searching for things that they could do spontaneously, rather than focusing on their strengths. Many times, I still had contrived situations that played to the characters' strengths. That's not a bad thing. And then if it's about scaffolding, then you at some later point, once they're used to magic, contrive a situation where they can complete a task with spontaneous magic.

Arthur, do you have such a chart as an example? Perhaps it's early enough in the morning, or I'm suitably distracted that I'm having trouble wrapping my head around what you're describing.

I agree with JL. Teach the system first and ignore the setting.

An intro to Ars does not need any downtime info. It only needs 4 totals/explanations.

  1. General ability use (and what does each ability does, roughly)

  2. Combat rules. this is the largest part

  3. Formulaic casting total

  4. Spont total.

3&4 require an explanation of what the TeFo combos do, but that is fairly easy to explain if the SG is not a noob. it still requires some work, but it is fairly intuitive for the most part.

If it is an intro, examples of what the supernatural abilities to be used do is also quite a boon.

The rest of the mechanics (downtime, healing wounds...) can be achieved later on. The basics also need to include the Fatigue, magic resistance and wound explanations, since they work differently from other games.

Xavi

This is a bad idea for most newcomers. I would instead explain that spontaneous spells are possible, but it's challenging to do because it requires in-depth knowledge of the Ars Magica magic system, above and beyond knowing the formulaic spells your character knows.

To be able to spontaneously cast a spell requires more than a spont total. It requires a knowledge of the base effects and their levels, an understanding or r/d/t mechanics, and how to synthesis all the parts into a finished spell. Even for skilled players, this is extremely challenging to handle on the fly. The same mechanic used to create formulaic spells is the same mechanic used to create spontaneous spells, and it can be a time consuming process and IMO, isn't for the beginner. Now, if every beginner has a veteran player guiding the beginner through the process, yes, maybe, but in a number of cases, the most veteran player is probably the SG, and he's busy running the game.

I too would skip spontaneous magic for an intro. While I agree that it's a big part what makes Ars Magica magic great, but I also agree it can distract and is often of such low levels that it's wasted time for beginning magi. While a single page might suffice to detail the spontaneous magic options of a single pre-generated magus, it's still just overkill. Let the player focus on the magus' signature spells for the into adventure; that will be enough.

I also agree that the tables are needed for a good explanation of the rules. I myself often use an R/D/T table (what each spell parameter costs in "magnitudes"), and think it's sorely missing from the core book. Adding a table summarizing how adding magnitudes impact spell levels is also a great idea for newcomers. For an intro adventure/module, however, especially if you're skipping spontaneous magic, such explanations won't be needed.

I also think, however, that the intro needs to include some down-time to be representative of Ars Magica, as down-time is a big part of the game. I think one of the provided start-up adventures (Promises, Promises?) had such a down-time period, with simplified rules on what to do during it. I think you can just do variations on "Add 10 XP to Ability/Art by reading a book on it", provide one new-spell for each pre-generated magus to study from a lab text, and so on; and explain that the core book provides more options, including the ability to craft magic items, bond with a familiar, invent entirely new spells, and so on. This lets the players "level-up" after finishing the first part of the adventure, and allows them to wrap their heads around how slowly characters heal (wounded characters heal automatically, for this intro, but take a Season to do so...) and how character advancement is carried out.

Finally, the intro needs to be a focus on some element of Mythic Europe and present it. I'd personally go with the Infernal - it provides opponents players can fight without moral ambiguities, much like D&D monsters, while show-casing that demons in Ars Magica are more subtle while showcasing the medieval setting in the background. Faerie works too, if it emphasis Fifth Edition's weird notions like Pretense, that make its faeries different from regular D&D "faerie" monsters. I'd avoid the Divine as too loaded and morally ambigious, and Magic as too like D&D (for dragons etc.) or too esoteric (for Hermetic politics etc.).

First table, about the progression of magnitudes from the base:
[table][tr][th]Base[/th][th]+1 mag.[/th][th]+2 mag.[/th][th]+3 mag.[/th][th]+4 mag.[/th][th]+5 mag.[/th][th]+6 mag.[/th][th]+7 mag.[/th][th]+8 mag.[/th][th]+9 mag.[/th][th]+10 mag.[/th][th]+11 mag.[/th][th]+12 mag.[/th][/tr]
[tr][td]1[/td][td]2[/td][td]3[/td][td]4[/td][td]5[/td][td]10[/td][td]15[/td][td]20[/td][td]25[/td][td]30[/td][td]35[/td][td]40[/td][td]45[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]2[/td][td]3[/td][td]4[/td][td]5[/td][td]10[/td][td]15[/td][td]20[/td][td]25[/td][td]30[/td][td]35[/td][td]40[/td][td]45[/td][td]50[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]3[/td][td]4[/td][td]5[/td][td]10[/td][td]15[/td][td]20[/td][td]25[/td][td]30[/td][td]35[/td][td]40[/td][td]45[/td][td]50[/td][td]55[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]4[/td][td]5[/td][td]10[/td][td]15[/td][td]20[/td][td]25[/td][td]30[/td][td]35[/td][td]40[/td][td]45[/td][td]50[/td][td]55[/td][td]60[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]5[/td][td]10[/td][td]15[/td][td]20[/td][td]25[/td][td]30[/td][td]35[/td][td]40[/td][td]45[/td][td]50[/td][td]55[/td][td]60[/td][td]65[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]10[/td][td]15[/td][td]20[/td][td]25[/td][td]30[/td][td]35[/td][td]40[/td][td]45[/td][td]50[/td][td]55[/td][td]60[/td][td]65[/td][td]70[/td][/tr][/table]
...and so on.

Second table, on R/D/T cost in magnitudes:
[table][tr][th]Parameter[/th][th]Base[/th][th]+1 magnitude[/th][th]+2 magnitude[/th][th]+3 magnitude[/th][th]+4 magnitude[/th][/tr]
[tr][th]Range[/th][td]Personal (the caster himself)[/td][td]Touch[/td][td]Voice[/td][td]Sight[/td][td]Arcane Connection (unlimited distance but you need something the belonged to the target)[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]Duration[/th][td]Momentary (up to 6 seconds)[/td][td]Concentration
Diameter (2 minutes)[/td][td]Sun (until next Sunset or Sunrise)[/td][td]Moon (up to 28 days)[/td][td]Year* (up to 365 days)[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]Target[/th][td]Individual (one thing)[/td][td]Part (part of one thing)[/td][td]Group (up to 10 individuals in a discrete group)
Room (individuals inside a clearly delimited room)[/td][td]Structure (one building)[/td][td]Boundary* (anything within a large delimited area)[/td][/tr][/table]

  • Requires ritual magic to be used.

(Sorry for the basic formatting.)

Basically, the tables diminushes the need for newcomers to do mental calculations on the fly.

No kidding. I thought of how I'd do this, and realised that in order to take someone through combat, I'd need to include mentioning the rule on exerting. However, in order to explain exerting you also need to explain how fatigue works so they know how much they're tiring their character out when they do this. You also need to explain wound penalties. Things like missile combat, group combat and nonlethal "scuffling" could also be useful, and before you know it you've spent a while explaining stuff. You probably do need to cover wound healing so people realise how bad incapacitating and heavy wounds are. You need to know a moderate amount just to know how to play a shield grog in Ars.

As context, I was thinking of doing an introduction where you play soldiers (warrior grogs) on a crusade, so you get used to a couple of stress die rolls, then you do a fight, heal from the wounds, get exposed to hunger or disease, then you get shown how advancement works, so you know about being a grog. Then as a follow-on, you could play a Companion who has Major virtues and flaws and a story flaw (so you get to see this), confidence (so you understand how this works) and a Relic (so you see magic resistance in action) and face a low-powered Jinn so you put it all together.

The more I study the Ars 5 rulebook, the more I find to it and the more amazed I am at how much I took on board quickly.

Actually, I would build the intro in such a way as to gradually introduce the game's features. Explain to the players how the intro is built before running it so that they know that some options are off-limits at the early parts of the introduction.

The steps of the intro could be something like:

  1. Ability rolls: A situation where they need to make Awareness rolls, or some kind of knowledge checks.
  2. Formulaic spells: A non-combat situation where spells that the magi know can be used.
  3. Simple Combat: A small combat where the magi's grogs must fight. This could be a tavern brawl or some other situation where the magi cannot use their magic because there are too many mundane witnesses.
  4. Spontaneous magic: A non-combat situation where the magi must use spontaneous magic to solve a minor but important situation.
  5. Full Combat: A combat situation where, in addition to the grogs defending them using their weapons, the magi can use their spells to fight.
  6. Downtime: Using the library to learn a spell, create an item, improve abilities (grogs), write a book maybe. This could be more than one season, and from a limited list prepared in advance (with some choices customized for the pregen magi).
  7. ...and more: A few more scenes where the players can see the impact of the downtime on their characters.

EDIT: Clarification in red.

In a game about Wizards. :smiley:

This is a bit of a bait and switch, you know. I can imagine something like the following transpiring, "Hey, let's play a game about wizards." Which is followed by some discussion by the group and then an agreement to play Ars. "Now, let's start out with grogs. Then companions, and then we will do magi a few sessions later." I have no trouble opening a saga up like this, but for new players, when your main selling point is the fantastic magic system, and to start out with grogs...is well, a bait and switch. Give the players their magi. Play a couple of sessions with the magi all together, then go to grogs, and then go to companions. Of course, if you manage to convince them to play Ars without speaking of the magic system, feel free to disregard my comment. :smiley:

I find a thorough understanding of the scuffling rules has proved more handy to my longest-running magus than knowledge of spells. Then again, he has the short-ranged magic flaw and so punching an archmagus in the kidneys until they fell unconscious and then drowning them in a barrel of ale was his best moment of magical warfare.

Also, whether or not Ars is a game about wizards really depends on how you're playing it. In the first saga I ever played in, the SG wanted to make sure only one magus adventured at a time, so whoever adventured was surrounded by a load of grogs and companions and in the end we all got far more attached to our companions than our magi. In my current saga, we've had several sessions in a row where helping our companion (who started as a schoolteacher and worked his way up to Lord of Cumbria) with his problems was far more important than Hermetic politics. In practise, I would say the Ars I end up playing tends to about magi shuffling out of the lab, going "hey! look at my invention!" and then barricading themselves away before someone bothers them, while other people try to deal with threats to the covenant.

I suppose my idea of following a crusader is more about getting people into playing in Mythic Europe with some Ars rules than about getting them to play Ars Magica.

Granted, I don't disagree with what you're saying, so much, as the primary selling point most of us rely upon is that it's a fabulous magic system. And then when introducing the magic system to new players, we find it's is incredibly difficult to explain all the things we like about the magic system completely and easily without overwhelming the player.

I think the magic system has to be demonstrated and experienced soon, if not first. I think troupe style play elements can be introduced later. Keep in mind, what you're describing is actually a feature of the game. Getting people into Ars, infecting them involves getting them excited about an aspect, and then building on that with another aspect. Give the players a magus to play, have them experience things, and then explaining that by not adventuring your magus can become more powerful is a huge way to do scaffolding over a long term. Most players are smart enough to also realize that taking their magi out on every episodes will lead to almost all challenges being overcome, which probably should yield very few xp for the magi as compared to the companions and grogs who would be operating with just a single magus.

Magi should be barricading themselves away, but there should also be sufficient covenant hooks which draw them out, or story flaws which negate the player complaining about why he can't leave the lab just now.

Now that's a fair assessment. So long as you're not saying, let's play a game with a fantastic magic system, but not play any wizards at first, that's where I was having a hard time.... :smiley: