Let's get rid of Professions!

How much can a skill roll achieve? What are it's limitations? These questions are always an issue. How far down the rabbit hole should one go?

Does one not get to use their communication skill to add to their bargain if an interpreter is used? Is bargain capped at say double the area lore skill if bargaining away from home?

I think in certain sagas the person who chooses profession "Merchant" wants to use that skill to bypass a realistic need to get area lore 1s and 2s when travelling the world, artes-liberales to write down deals, etc.

Do you want a PC to be able to say "I'm a merchant, I've travelled the world, of course I know this area, I use my +8 merchant skill. A 12+ area lore result, tell me everything; I'm used to using interpreters, I make a deal with my merchant +8 skill, etc.

This is the problem of professions which have other viable skill options. Skills should be very comprehensive in their area, however, professions risk covering too wide an area. This enables characters being very driven to get a ridiculously high profession skill as that's all they need, which isn't really the intent.

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I agree with 90% of your conclusion, and that, I suppose, is as close to full agreement that one could ever expect on a forum.

However, I do agree with @OneShot . Bargain is a social skill. Then there is a clerical, administrative skill of accounting/bureaucracy/paperwork/planning, which is distinctly separate. This, I think, is the bulk of knowledge of both Steward and Merchant, and much more important to the steward than housekeeping is. Lumping this complex subject into the bargaining skill, possessed by many shield grogs only to broker Gifted guests into a mundane inn, is pushing limits.

Language, as a skill for the masses, should not cover specialist disciplines like poetry and storyteller. A good storyteller is a very different character concept than a fluent. It could be as broad as a Profession: entertainer.

Labourer and servant, I view as unskilled workers, but I suppose they will acquire some housekeeping and athletics skills nevertheless.

Scribe, I think, has to be retained if we use the Covenants book quality rules, but I am all in favour of scrapping those. If they are justified, the relevant skill is very different from the academic thinking of AL. OTOH Craft: Scribing makes a lot more sense to me than Prof: Scribe.

So to conclude, it is good work to prune that list, but I do not think the elimination of Profession: Entertainer or Storyteller and Profession: Administrator are well justified.. I also think that it is important to keep the opening for custom skills, and making a categorical list is not helpful.

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There are certainly options, but I'm struggling.

Like:
Cap the secondary skill to the level of the profession skill for that use: Would work, but difficult to adjudicate. If I am a merchant, I cap bargain at my prof when selling things, but otherwise?

Increase the secondary skill if the profession is greater: Easier, but leads to... when you easily overpower someone. Yet it would work, also

Crap. Going home, I'm dead.

There is a very good reason why some profession skills become wide. They are non-adventuring skills.

The adventuring skill set has been developed to manage such concerns as game balance, stage time, flavour, problem solving challenges (IC), etc. It is important that story challenges require more than one skill to allow different characters to shine, and hence skills cannot be too broad.

There are some profession skills that are likely to come up as adventuring skills. Sailor and Storyteller are the most obvious ones, at least in stories that I have told. But most of these profession skills excel downtime.

Scribe copies book. Steward/chamberlain affect covenant loyalty (if you bother with that ruleset). And finally merchants and apothecaries manage their own businesses (to earn labour points). While these professions really need umpteen skills, in different combinations depending on their precise situation, we could not as players be bothered with deciding which skills are important in what way. Profession skills are there to give a simple downtime mechanics.

It is an advantage (not necessarily one to trump all disadvantages, but yet an advantage) that the downtime skill is not also an adventuring skill. It certainly biases the narrative if the merchant is also the master negotiator, because his need to master accounting, valuation, market intrigues, etc. made them specialise in bargain simply because bargain was chosen as the one skill for downtime management. Having one downtime skill for the purpose would make a more balanced narrative.

I do not see a single on-stage application of Profession: Merchant. Its only mechanical purpose is to earn labour points, and I think that works. A plausible merchant should have bargain and probably area lore, and many would have leadership, intrigue, AL, law, etc. out of necessity, but not all of them need the same skill profile overall. It works.

Boating is probably an oversight which should have been in the game as a non-profession.

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It seems in this sense that the basic idea is: no (non-Profession) skill covers a) accounting and b) "project management"/planning, so these should be retained as a Profession:Administrator or something. Here's why I disagree.

As for project management/planning - is there any job that does not require that? It's necessary for the humblest farmer. It's necessary for the army general. It's necessary for the guild craftsman. It's necessary for the housewife. It's necessary for the smuggler. Etc. It's so universal to doing a job well (and, before modern times, so fundamentally "shaped" by the job at hand) that I do not think it belongs to a specific job, but it's "embedded" in essentially any job. So no specific skill for it.

As for accounting, I spent some time getting a sense of what cutting-edge accounting is in 1220-1500 is. And I would say that wikipedia does a fair job at summarizing it. I don't want to quote individual passages because I don't want to distort the message. But it seems to me that at least 95% of what accounting is in 1220 is covered by Bargaining + Artes Liberales (the role of the latter is greater than I imagined). In this sense I suggest having a look at what is considered the
"first bookkeeping manuscript and trade manual"(in Europe, at least).

Let me stress that Bargaining is not just a "social" skill. A lot of people who don't do professional deals easily think it's just fast-talking others. In my experience, mostly it's not, particularly at the higher levels. Instead, it's mostly an ability to "cut correctly" what one party has to offer with what the other needs to acquire. Even just understanding what each party needs and can offer is a crucial part. If one party needs the money/goods now and the other not so much, that can create value for both. If one party is shielded from some risks and the other is not, having the first party shoulder them creates value for both. A good part of the deal is providing guarantees that both parties will adhere to it, especially through incentives and by eliminating conflicts of interest. Etc.

Again, this is a discussion we've had elsewhere, but I would offer a brief counterpoint. First, Language does explicitly cover poetry and storytelling ability in the ArM5 corebook. Second, it's obvious that it's central to poetry and storytelling: have you ever tried telling a story in a language you have a score of 2 in (from my personal experience, it feels like playing soccer with your feet tied together)? And finally, note that while it's true that someone can in theory have a perfect mastery of the language but be a poor storyteller (or a great storyteller and an abysmal poet) that's part and parcel of the "broad" skills in ArM5, and something that specialties try to address somewhat. For example, in theory, you could be a great lute player and a terrible singer or viceversa, but Music encompasses both. You could be a great astronomer and a terrible rethor or viceversa, but Artes Liberales encompasses both. You could be great at disguises but a terrible liar or viceversa, but Guile encompasses both. So there's nothing particularly "inconsistent" with Language covering both poetry and storytelling.

Ah, the myth of the unskilled worker! Skill is servants is crucial! I mean, have you ever been at a restaurant with really terrible waiters, or have you ever seen a house devasted by a terrible maid? That is true for most laborers too. My bad for writing "laborer" as a job though - it's too generic.

Yes, Scribe was the last thing that came to my mind and gave me a bit of pause. I wholeheartedly agree that it should, if anything be a Craft. The issue however is: can scribes read and write - with the latter I mean write their own words or those heard from someone else? Because if they can, reading and writing in the sense of "trasmuting" sounds into symbols on a page and viceversa is covered by Artes Liberales (in a very explicit way: if your AL score is X, you know X symbol sets). If, on the other hand, it's the ability to copy symbols from one page to the other (a copyist rather than a scribe) then sure, that's a Craft, but I think it's part of the broader Craft of "painting/drawing".

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I'm not seeing anything in the description of leadership ("getting people to obey your orders and to follow you.") that would suggest it covers project management. Project management is about understanding complex systems, planning, and problem solving - most of the effective project managers I know would be terrible leaders because those skills are not connected to leadership. To your point about every role requiring this, I think that's missing the sense of scale; by analogy any possible job that involves talking to people involves all the social skills to some extent - that doesn't mean they should all be rolled up into the relevant profession.

Quite! Think of Richard the Lionheart or Bohemund for well known examples of lack of judgement and understanding of complex systems, paired with extraordinary Leadership.
Indeed, all over the middle ages you find stewards, justiciars and administrators explaining the functioning of the world to their lords.

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That's a very good point!

From the description, it looks Leadership is how good you are at inspiring others (or pushing them around). However, throughout the rest of the line, Leadership tends to be used as a measure of how good you are at coordinating teams of people towards a common objective: for example, in Hermetic laboratories (ArM5 p,103), in Craft workshops (C&G p.73), in agencies (HoH:S p,140). So I've always assumed it covers the "at a scale" aspect of doing a job, when you need to coordinate multiple people on a task that's too large for a single person to do or sometimes even know in all its details. I do agree that really does not come out from the corebook description; but then, if "team management" were covered by some other skill, that out to be used in place of Leadership in all the formulas I mentioned.

As for planning and problem solving, I really do not think any one job can reasonably claim to be the job where that is the relevant skill. If you are a simple farmer running your little farm, you'll end up planning and problem solving as much as a a large estate administrator. The only difference is that you'll think about how and when to get a fence in better repair, and whether it's worth the cost; how to coordinate with your neighbouring farmer for the use of a pair of oxen or to bring sheep to market; etc. While the administrator will think about how and when to get a certain manor house in better repair, and whether it's worth the cost, how to coordinate with the neighbouring baron for the use of the river's water or to set up a sheep market etc.

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I think some kind of Profession: Administration skill is necessary for covering the ins and outs of less obvious logistics, economics and accounting.

That said, I really do agree in the broad sense that 5E has FAR too many skills, and atomizing professions just takes things too far. The other point is that Ars Magica is a simulationist game, and not a heroic adventuring game like say, Mutants and Masterminds (which ironically has a similar problem with the Expertise skill.) D&D and Exalted have seen massive flame wars of just how granular craft and profession skills should be. This is clearly not unique to Ars Magica.

Just to be clear, I lumped management and accounting into the same skill, in the spirit of a broad skills that you promote, so we are only talking about one competency. I too thought of Artes Liberales, and if that had not already has such a broad application that many consider it unbalanced, I would have been content with that.

What I see, however, are certain recurring game situations where an actual specialist should bring a benefit. A random PC with common and broad skills should simply not allowed to be the expert in something entirely outside their background.

One is covenant loyalty, which is improved by a skilled autocrat. It is unbalanced and bland if the resident magister who teaches letters to prospective apprentices can suddenly do the autocrat's job expertly.

Similarly, the story-teller or poet can often have a critical role to make a good impression at a faerie court. If any PC with positive Com/Pre and fluency in the language is a good storyteller, many such stories are just dull.

But, of course, if these situations are not significant in the saga, the skills are redundant.

Not myth. It is canon. Servants and labourers are the broad categories covenfolk who are paid less than anybody else, have no skill worth mentioning, and who can be recruited implicitly to fill necessary numbers [Cov].

I would argue that this is in fact most of what the large estate administrator does. In contrast, while the farmer is also planning, that's only a small amount of their time, and they're doing so entirely within the grounds of existing abilities. Profession: farmer should include basic farm planning, but I don't think it would cover the type of administration skill that isn't domain specific.

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For me personal what Ars Magica put into Profession Scribe is actual Calligraphy and so should be in Craft. Calligraphy isn't just about knowing the meaning of the writing but instead about knowing different style how you can write something, how to handle the pen or brush without leaving inkblot and also how fast you can write without mess up so that you have to start over.

That's possible, but still tricky. Which Ability in your saga then pertains to the organization, use and trade of books? Which to text organization, indices, canon tables, the very important Latin shorthands, and where to put which illustrations, initials and tables?

I can imagine a Profession: LIbrarian alongside a Craft: Scribe.

That is not really an issue. We already assume that with Craft: Smith, the craftsman is skilled in the organisation and trade of his goods. No need for scribe to different.

Profession: Scribe is off because the principal application in canon is the crafting of copies. You are of course right that there are other applications for which no mechanics is defined, and I would not advocate introducing a new profession skill to cover that.

To me the label has no importance. A scribe is a scribe whether we label them professionals or craftsmen, and I see no practical difference between Profession: and Craft:. (And I struggle with Aristotle's distinction between techne and phronesis too. Distinction ok, but why is it important?)

The importance for the game comes i.e. with Craft Magic that make a strict distinction between craft and profession and make Scribe as profession look very odd.

Oh. That explains it fully I think. I believe Covenants put a ban on speeding up copying with magic. There is a canon spell which explicitly is not faster than a mundane scribe. I don't have time to search for a more specific and universal ban. However, the ban, I believe, is necessary for game balance. By making scribe a profession, instead of a craft, we have escaped the haunt of craft magic.

craft magic from Ex Misc Rustic don't improve the craft it self it just use it for its rolls

Right. I was thinking of Rego craft magic, which is rather powerful. If script could be crafted, libraries could be duplicated in the blink of an eye.

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Librairies can be duplicated in the blink of an eye already. Learn Twinning the Tome (HoH:TL p. 101-102) for +10 lab total bonus, then research a new version with +2 group and +1 size to level 65, and you are creating a copy of an entire covenant's library for the sweet price of 13 vis.

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Interesting. I was not aware of that spell. However, Twinning the Tome is already group target, presumably to target a group of pages. Thus your calculations do not make sense, but I wonder if you could extend with a different argument.

Anyway. This is a ritual, so you cannot cast it in the blink of an eye. And luckily, not using the principles of craft magic, it makes no case for achieving the result with Rego magics and raw materials.