On game balance, again.

Games Discussion Ars Magica
21

This is the crucial issue, yes.

However, one can think of a level-assignment process that runs as follows.

First, you assign a general level to any abstractl result (killing, healing, scrying etc.) regardless of the specific effect used to reach it, possibly with modifiers due to Arts. Say, killing a person without fuss at good range should be level 40, maybe 35 if using Perdo, increased or decreased depending on range (kissing the target deserves -5 to -10), restrictions on use (only works in a forest? -10 to -15), quickness, side effects etc.

Then, the player describes a concrete effect, and the troupe thinks of all its possible abstract uses. E.g. if you can move any boulder lying aroud, you can use it both to kill and to destroy stuff (though probably not in confined environments, and you need the boulder around to start with ... but then with such an effect you can probably always carry one around), as well as to build fortifications and other structures, to fly (on top of it) etc.

Finally, the troupe assigns to said effect the level based on the highest abstract use it can be put to, increased by significant flexibility (say, something that can be used to kill and fly and build/alter structures) and possibly decreased if its appropriately mythic (having mist rise slowly from the ground is more mythic than having a cube of mist 10 paces on each side suddenly materialize).

This does not create the problem of rock-creation being of a different level depending on whether they are created on top of someone's head. It solves game balance. It also solves what I call the "unmythic problem", which is in my view not so much a game balance issue, but an aesthetic issue:

However, this approach by necessity takes away that component of fun of ArM5, namely to find the easiest way to achieve a specific abstract result (e.g. killing an opponent) with the "cheapest" possible magic. It's a tradeoff.

1 Like
22

Oh boy how much I hate that.

So a PC comes with an original and creative idea to slam an enemy down with a low level spell just to have the SG policing his idea out: "no, that would be so much fun!, you can't do that. Go back to the lab for some years, learn arts you don't care about to insane levels, and then come back with the proper spell!"

Come on Lee, it's a game, it is expected to be funny!

That should be marked as the solution to this thread.

This game isn't about power balance. It is about what happens when you are at the top. Going back to how easy it is to kill a mundane. Stories shouldn't be things like they would on other games, kind of "oh look at that evil noble dude in that castle over the top of the hill, you'll have to spend a whole Saga trying to fight him!", because that story is going to last a handful of rounds in the hands of most magi. The Ars Magica story starts after that, and deals with moral dilemmas about what you become when you smite lifes like flies, or on how to deal with it when Quaesitores come asking, or what do you do when your powers just aren't enough (because, well, you can always throw in the whole Order, or a good nice dragon, or a rival archmage, or a powerful fae, or God) and you are forced to find your way though.

3 Likes
23

Original and creative is good. Cheesy rule manipulation is not. If everyone is happy, fine. Unless the whole party are happy with bending the rules as far as they go, the joy of the rules bender will probably come at the expense of someone else, as the rules bender has taken away the other character's chance to shine.

5 Likes
24

The big question is not the level at which the spell can be achieved, but the range of situations the spell can resolve. A clever idea which resolves a given situation tend to be fun; it challenges the player's creativity and it breaks expectations. It should be cherished. The problem arises if the same clever idea, easily achieved at low levels, get you out of most, or even many, situations, because then the story becomes repetitive, and the players are no longer challenge for new cleverness.

The low-level kill spell is problematic if the saga is full of situations which just require a kill.

It follows that game balance is not an objective feature of the system. It is always relative to the stories that the troupe tell. If there recurring patterns of challenges, powers tailored to those situations make a disproportionate weight on the balance.

5 Likes
25

While I agree with your overall point in that Ars Magica isn't a game that concerns itself with balancing stuff, I don't agree in that it shouldn't be balanced. It's one thing to police a game, being a dictator and creating 'Oh, Mother, may I?' situations with your troupe, but we're talking about respecting the design, even if not the intention of the original authors.

Being god-mode is fun, but it gets old pretty quick. For me, Ars Magica is not only about those kind of stories. Of course hubris is involved, but there are also stories of compassion, of struggle for survival, of sodality... there are a lot of examples in canon, and also in the different ways you'll see people engage with this game. And it even isn't as if the game discourages that! (at least in my opinion). The drama potential of the setting and the granularity of play make it possible. The most refined toolkit ever for a 'medieval wizard simulator' makes it possible.

I wholeheartedly disagree. If you want, I would like to know why do you think this game doesn't do mysteries or melee combat. Or more precisely, why does it do it worse than other games, say D&D. The support for mysteries is exactly the same: zero. So I'm curious on why a run-of-the-mill storyguide couldn't just grok to run a mystery for their troupe, or why exactly are mysteries worse in this game than in other systems.

The Golden Rule trumps all: troupe can decide any effect is higher or lower than specified. I could come up with half a dozen "original and creative" ideas to kill anyone with a low level spell. Should my SG give me a reward, a Smart Player Badge for my efforts and then proclaim me king of the table? No, because I'm an adult and I see it's base 30 to insta-kill someone, so I assume the designers purposefully didn't want me to enchant a wand with a level 15 Five Ton Stone In Your Face just so I can be a murder-hobo in Medieval Europe.

I assume hard stuff costs time and effort.

And you will concede as well that is a game about people with sometimes more power than it's worth. It's not only a game about being at the top, because in most situations you are not at the top. Sure, you might be able to kill a mundane or maybe ten, but what about the Quaesitores? What about yourself? You just killed people. Maybe that doesn't mean jack in other games, but in this one you are primed to care about this kind of drama. If I was a 25 years old in Medieval Europe and could kill people with the flick of my wrist, I know I would have serious issues tackling having that power. So no, it's not only about already being at the top, it's also about getting there, and how to do so.

3 Likes
26

Higher-level play in D&D is also very poor for running mysteries, for pretty much the same reason as ArM5:
The game provides too many ways of finding out information through magic. This makes many mystery scenarios trivial to solve.

4 Likes
27

Magic is not the problem, nor is the access to information. Poor mystery design, where stuff gets solved by casting Peering into the Mortal Mind is the culprit, in my honest opinion.

2 Likes
28

For melee combat and mysteries is similar, they have mechanics that make them obsolete which lead to the developers not including much support for them.

Why bother writing intricate and interesting tactical combat when any reasonable magus will want to start and end any such confrontation with a pilum of flame? Why bother writing any cool mystery and clue gathering mechanics a-la gumshoe when scrying, mind reading and reliable magic lie detection is available?

And while they are entirely valid ways to play the game, you will always need to contrive a reason that nobody takes five minutes to talk to a magus and get either advice, scrying services, or a wand that turns somebody into a frog?

Very few mysteries can stand up to the brute force of clairvoyance, mind reading and perfect recall that an invested magus can bring to bear, and if you need to do that extra work to write a story in which the investigators at no point will meet a person that knows something crucial that can quickly solve the mystery, then I will say that the system you are using does not at all facilitate mysteries.

If you gave me the option of running a mystery in ars magica and running it in a system with even little to no actual support but nothing that just solves a large part of the mystery I would choose the latter in a heartbeat.

I disagree, a spell that just does a thing should generally be higher level than using a spell in a creative way to do the same thing, and I believe that this is reflected in the books, for example removing salinity from water is base 15 PeAq, but turning water into steam, which would leave the salt behind and quickly condense would be base 3(plus a pinch for unnatural) ReAq.

Should this spell also be base 15 since it can be used to the same end?
If no, then how much munchkinery should we allow?
If yes, then how similar do they need to be? Boiling water is base 4. freezing water(which does remove salt) is base 5, maybe 10 for the colder temps you need for saltwater. These all essentially solve the same problem of "my water is too salty".

4 Likes
29

I think ArM can support a lot of modes of play. Personally, I like coming up with clever ideas, but I also enjoy getting abilities that were out of reach before, so I don't mind waiting for some good stuff.

I do think ArM tries for some notion of balance: there are a lot of spells in the main rulebook with +1 or +2 levels for intricacy or difficult effect, which I have always taken as code for "too powerful for the calculated level otherwise".

3 Likes
30

I think the same - with a good design (and knowing the players) it makes strores even more fun. I play a lot of mystery stories and players with InMe and other tricks often fail, because they think they can solve it in an easy way. ...

1 Like
31

One of the authors commented on this some time ago. They had to rethink how they wrote story supplements, because the conventional genre was not able to cope with everything an ArM party could come up with.

Mystery stories work but they work differently compared to games where player powers are more constrained. It also works differently in different parties with different powers, which is why story supplements proved so hard to write in the conventional style.

So good design and knowing the players goes a long way. We have to note though, that good design is designing for the particular players and also for the particular characters they play. Since the authors cannot do that, they have left 5ed stories open-ended, leaving most of the design to the SG and troupe.

InMe is no particular problem. It is constrained to what the target knows, and there may be enough mystery around finding the right person to interrogate, and the real challenge is really navigating in the community and deal with all the people you'd rather not subject to your magic.

5 Likes
32

Does anyone care that you made salt? Not really (and anyone reading, please don't start the "Salt is valuable" discussion. Any decent magi can make mundane wealth). Level 3, level 15, have fun. It's only when some other player who has worked hard for an outcome, gets their time and effort diminished by some cheesy rules workaround, that it becomes a problem.

Also, my knowledge of Mythic Europe science is not that good. Would the salt in the water turn to steam? It clearly doesn't in the real world, but Mythic Europe physics is different.

2 Likes
33

Absolutely. If you make enough of it you impact the economy. A lot of people care, and the consequences come back on you.

Does anyone care that you killed a peasant? I am sure their spouses and best friends do, but so what? The real issue is when you kill a few, and the consequences come back on you.

The reason why the OP is a non-issue is that ArM is a game about long-term consequences, and not about individual actions. Both wealth and death have consequences which may lead to good stories.

That does not mean that we have no sympathy with OP and their player. Coming from games and stories centred on individual actions, one is bound to design characters for such action. It takes experience to see the potential of Hermetic magic. The bottom line is that Auram is not a particularly good combat form. It has weather effects which are unique to Auram, and they give many options which the beginner does not see. That leaves two options; give the beginner more tailored advice, or play another game.

3 Likes
34

No. Since antiquity a standard way to produce salt was to take sea water, put it into big shallow ponds in the sun, and harvest the salt once the water evaporated. And the ancients - in particular Aristotle - had a surprisingly good understanding about boiling and sun evaporation being fundamentally the same process (and clouds in the sky being the equivalent of vapour from boiling water).

2 Likes
35

It's not the salt that is important, strictly speaking the problem is desalinating water and what level it's supposed to be.

But even if the problem was to create salt, then why is salt not important enough to have a rule to make it as expensive as the books give a sample solution for, and when does a problem become important enough to have such a rule?

This makes a similar point, do we follow the book that says that doing a thing is level x, or do we allow a cheaper spell to do the same thing in a potentially exploitative way.

I get that specifically killing someone has probably been discussed to death before, and that bringing it up has detracted from my point, but it was never specifically about killing someone. My question, poorly phrased though it may be, was about whether we should follow the spirit of the guidelines, or the letter.

1 Like
36

There are too many rules that are arguably important enough. Hence the actual rules is an arbitrary selection of sometimes important rules and examples.

AFAIK the rules never says that achieving a certain result is level x. They may say that doing a thing is level x, which may mean that achieving the result with that given TeFo is level x. Then there may be other things to do, at different levels, achieving the same result. If I have missed something, please point it out.

This is really the main difference between 3ed and 5ed. In 5ed there is supposed to be rules for everything, and sometimes they are inconsistent and sometimes they make unexpected loopholes. That's what we have to live with playing 5ed. One may try to plug loopholes with houserules, but in my experience, that creates more inconsistencies and become an unwieldly mess.

In 3ed spell levels were based on exemplars and gut feeling, and if it felt exploitative, it should have a higher level. If that's your preference, that's the game you ought to play.

1 Like
37

I didn't think this would work, however, I hoped it would. The point is there are so many ways to make mundane wealth. Salt is just one of a lot of paths. With so many mundane wealth options, from making fruit trees bloom, a season worth of lumber mill work in a day, the same with a quarry etc, it's not an issue.

Spell balance is about making sure one magi doesn't make another magi obsolete and ruin the other player's fun.

3 Likes