Hi all,
Trying to find the source for the Navigation ability in 5e, as it appears in a couple of places - Maris of Tytalus, Magi of Hermes & Carles Magnus of Tytalus, Through the Aegis.
I’ve also checked the early draft for DE and its not listed there either?
Any info is appreciated
o/
Profession: Sailing?
Don’t overthink it.
Game characters sometimes wind up with skills that should exist, but aren’t actually listed in the skills description/abilities list.
Navigation is probably a specialization of Sailing.
sailing or survival- navigation isn’t just for ships.
You’re not wrong, although I think of finding-the-way-by-land as orienteering. ArM does not lean toward such distinctions.
Nope, both those published characters have it as a separate ability, both with the Specialization of Sea, whilst also having points in Profession Sailor and Survival.
Professionally, I would say that cartography, navigation, and orienteering are all different but related. I had to do all of them for my job, with actual skill proficiency checks (retired 96B/35F). For navigation vs orienteering, it is a difference in accuracy and speed. Orienteering has to be just “good enough” to get you from point a to b: maximizing speed, ‘dead reckoning’, and recognizing the target when it is in eye sight.
I would consider that errata in the published characters.
This is a recurrent problem with Ars Magica editions. The corebook generally does a good job of keeping a small set of abilities, each covering a broad palette of related competences. Later supplements, particularly those with slack editorial control, see an explosion of additional abilities - as each author feels that published ability X is not the perfect match for what he has in mind. Thus, you get infamous stuff like Craft Sex Toys (painful ones) from 3rd edition Iberia, but, just as irksome to me, Profession: Minnesinger and Craft: Poetry in 5th edition.
Instead, in my view the right approach is to ask oneself: can one reasonably do the task with a combination of basic corebook abilities? Only if the answer is "no way, nothing is even remotely related to the task at hand" should one think of introducing a new ability. This is clearly not the case with minstrels and poets, who should use Music, Language, possibly complemented by Carouse or Etiquette (depending on the audience) for correct execution, Bargain for extracting as much value as possible, etc.
It is also clearly not the case with navigation. Navigation at sea is covered by Survival (sea): "Finding food, water, shelter, a direct route, and relative safety in the wilderness", complemented by Area Lore for the area at hand, and possibly Artes Liberales if you are doing complex route calculations (most navigators in 1220 would not). If you are doing it as a profession, combine it with Bargain etc.
While I generally agree that skills in RPGs should be interpreted broadly and lump things that are, IRL, able to be learned separately for ease of play, I disagree about the idea that Craft: Poetry or Profession: Minnesinger are intrinsically problematic the way parsing out a new ability like Navigation from things that already cover that. Obviously, poetry isn’t really a craft skill mechanically, so that’s a nuisance.
Being able to play the lute doesn’t make you a minnesinger, nor can most of the characters with Language 5 (aka everyone) declaim poetry much less at a skill of 5.
So how does a character who wants to be a medieval version of Cyrano de Bergerac indicate that they are so skilled while others are not? I suppose you could require the Free Expression virtue and call it a day. For me, it would depend on the nature of the campaign. If I expected Poetry to be important and used regularly to affect the flow of stories, I might ask for a skill in that specifically. Though possibly a specialization of Artes Liberales would be fine, though there’ll be a lot of non-poets with good Artes Liberales scores. On the other hand, if poetry is just going to be flavor and their ability to wield poesy was almost never going to affect an adventure, I would just let them say “yeah, you are a poet”
On the other hand, I think Minnesinger would be fine just as a social status rather than an Ability, though for a magus with an alter ego as a minnesinger it’s harsh either way (a social status virtue or an Ability).