Opening questionaire for an ARS MAGICA campaign

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

I think we're all agreed that knowing what your players expect and hope for from a campaign is the key for success. And that the only way is to ask them.

So what specifically should you ask?

I put the following in front of my players for my last failed campaign. What else should I have asked?

ARS MAGIC QUESTIONAIRE
Please don’t be upset by the number of questions here. Try not to regard it as a job application more as a form for a dating agency: admittedly one that’s trying to get together five or six people rather than just two. I’m trying to put together a campaign that will appeal to as many of the prospective players as possible.

  1. ARS MAGICA EXPERIENCE:
    How much experience have you had of ARS MAGICA? Have you run games, mostly played in them, done the whole multi-sagaguide troupe thing? How much of that was with fifth edition?

(Questions 2 and 3 omitted as they were about arrangements for the on-line gaming.)

  1. THE COVENANT

What sort of covenant would you like to play in? First of all season: A Spring Covenant where you’re setting things up on your own from scratch? Or something from a later season where you have more resources but also more supervision, duty and pre-existing tradition? If a Spring Covenant do you want to be really, really striking out on your own or do you want a patron to aid/annoy you? How wealthy do you want the covenant to be?

Then setting: far from human kind or in amongst them in a big way?

  1. THE WORLD
    How strong do you want magic to be? The default value appears to be: strong but rare, mostly hidden from mortals. But we can go from ‘on its last legs and dying’ to ‘every petty lord has a Magic Sword inherited from his ancestors and dragons appear over the town every Tuesday’.

  2. YOUR CHARACTERS
    Each player will be required to generate a Magus and a Companion. (And you may end up making but not owning a Grog too.) Do you have any ideas about what you think would be fun to play? A House for your Magus? Motivations for both characters?

  3. THE CAMPAIGN
    Please rate the following things from 1 (I don’t want that in the game at all) to 5 (If you don’t include this in the game I’m going home)

a. ROMANCE. Love and passion and eternal happiness or unhappiness depending.
b. COMBAT. Hacking and slaying from dealing with annoying bandits to besieging castles.
c. HERMETIC INTRIGUE. Politics and backstabbing and public relations. There’s bound to be a certain amount of this.
d. RELATIONS WITH THE MUNDANES.
e. RELATIONS WITH THE CHURCH
f. RELATIONS WITH THE FAIRIES
g. HUNTING DOWN DEMON-WORSHIPPERS
h. INVESTIGATION STORIES. Working for the Quaesitores or finding things out on your own behalf.
i. RESEARCH ON THE FRINGES OF HERMETIC MAGIC
j. JOURNEYS TO REMOTE PARTS OF THE MUNDANE WORLD
k. JOURNEYS TO THE OTHER WORLDS
l. HUMOUR
m. HIGH MAGIC ADVENTURE.

Please list anything else you think is vital to an ARS MAGICA game that I have omitted.

Is that good enough? What more should I check for?

2

I've never ever been presented with a questionnaire like this.
It's very player-friendly of you to do so. And a good idea, too.
But being a storyguide is not only altruistic service for your players - it is also for you to enjoy. So I'd make very clear that although you are willing to listen to everybodies wishes and fantasies, there is no guaranteed fulfilment.

But if you are asking:
You could give them a choice of the character's age post-gauntlet development though I wouldn't go beyond 20pg. Playing characters at gauntlet differs significantly from mature characters.
You could give them a choice of Tribunal.
You could give them a choice between a lab game interrupted by adventures, an adventure game, or a mix (the adventures take more rl time, so balancing can be tricky).

3

I did offer them a choice of Tribunal (we ended up with Stonehenge because I'd tried to run a game there before and I really liked HEIRS OF MERLIN as a source for inspiration).

I didn't offer people a 'lab campaign' because I don't see how it could be made a communal activity instead of something players do on their own in consultation with the GM. I know that AM has a strong element of what I call 'model railway' gaming: the system is designed to handle people for whom the development of their mage character is a Big Thing but I've never quite got it myself.

The age post gauntlet thing is a good point and might well help with the problem I noted in another thread: the sheer unlikelihood of half a dozen new magi turning up at once at an established covenant.

4

Possibly add something on the lines of wether they prefer a preset world or "SG makes up as we go along", or at least which direction is more preferred.
(ie. follow a source book more or less closely or mostly rejecting source material as it is)

I think i´ll tag along with JM here and say that what you need to check on first of all is what kind of setting and story YOU as SG want to run. Find that out and then use player preferences to bend that a little(or beyond breaking point for that matter) here or there. Players will rarely know what they exactly want which is why a questionnaire like this isn´t as helpful as you would wish for(it can of course still be a lot of help, just that it´s rarely as much as you want it to be).
An SG starting out with a story they want to tell tend to be most successful in my experience, no matter how much of the original story is left or not after it´s actually been played out.

:smiley:

5

Definitely. In fact, I have in the past provided choices in "Campaigns" I wanted to run, not the whole gamut of options you have going. Something like "Hey, I want to run an ArM game. Here are the campaigns I'm thinking of running, which do you prefer?
A) Turning Back the Mongol Tide blah blah blah
B) Unchaining the Titans blah blah blah
..."

Other than that, some further points you might want to ask about:

Personal Stories: How much personal stories do you want, vs. campaign saga-arcs?

Resources/speed: Do you want lots of resources, or to struggle? In Magic or Mundane too? Do you want a fast saga with lots of resources, so you quickly grow in power, or a slow one with less resources so your growth is slower?

GMS: Are you a Narrativist, Gamist, or Simulationist? What do you enjoy in a roleplaying game and (what do you think you'll enjoy) in ArM in particular?

6

How fast a saga? How many game sessions for the 7 years between Tribunals?
Do you plan to spend lots of time studying, in the lab, in out-of-play travels?
When a story does not involve your mage, what role will you take: companion, grog?
Do you prefer 30min flavor adventures, or multi-sessions long ones?
Do you want quick resolutions or a build up over separate adventures?
Should the players know ahead of time what the characters will play out?
Do you want to mostly succeed and evolve to larger issues, or mostly fail and deal with the same issues over again?
Which candy do you expect out of stories: study tools, casting tools, intrigue tools, material resources, covenfolks?

7

These are all great questions, but most of them make the same basic assumption... that the players are already familiar with Ars Magica. That's great if you have a group of folks who are... but maybe some questions (or a whole different questionaire) for people who don't already know the ins and outs of the game would be helpful.

8

A very good point. And in fact I was starting (last time) with group of people most of whom had limited AM experience...

But if you're starting with complete virgins then the thing you need is not a questionaire but a prospectus. Not so much 'what would you like to do' as 'here's something really cool: here's what I plan to do with it'.

Has anyone done that for AM?

9

And what about creating an "introduction to ars magica" web-supplement? Something like a sketchy covenant, a trio of short adventures and pregen characters to go with them and do some lab work, training and study? Something to set the base for a longer saga if you want, or introduce Mythic Europe to new people?

Sounds like a free Sub Rosa or Atlas website possibility for me. Something along the lines of "5th edition nigrasaxa" layout.

Any volunteers? 1 covenant, 6-10 characters, 3 mini-adventures highlighting several aspects of the setting. For the big guys in the covenant you can use magi from MoH, for example and the adventures could link to stuff in TOME or similar.

10

I am with Xavi's idea.

11

I have one question I need answered (and agreed upon) for all campaigns/sagas. All I have done that have failed miserably have had disagreement on this as one of the problems:

Do you want/expect a location based or character based world?

The difference probably needs explaining as well.

A character based world will always present the players with "suitable" challenges. The GM will adjust difficulties and power of opponents to the character's skills and abilities.

A location based world is a (more or less) predetermined setting where the Dragon in the mountain isn't something the characters can expect to handle the first 20 years and the players should know that unless they spend many sessions and long in-game time to defeat it they need to avoid conflict (or pay bribes or whatever).

My experience is that players used to and expecting character based adventures and settings will be very frustrated (and illogical) when meeting a location based GM and world.

12

Both, really.

We tend to play long term. The character know that they cannot cope with the dragon, but that is their final target. For the first years they will concentrate on achieving other objectives. In general, opponents and challenges can also be incremental. Davnalleus will not appear in your doorstep and screw you, but he will send one of his minions to assess you as a threat (or not) to his own plans. The players themselves do that.

However, it is important to have a world with both stuff that they cannot cope with straight away (or NEVER, even) and stuff that they can pass over easily.

What I have found generally good is when the SG does NOT design the story on his own, but defines the broad story arcs with the players BEFORE anyone designs a single character. Consensus in the story to be told is what makes for a cool story in my troupe. if the players want one thing and the alpha SG wants another thing, the story will not come out pretty.

Cheers,
Xavi

13

While pregenned characters and covenants are all fine and good (and I've downloaded all I could find) what I was proposing was a prospectus to sell the idea of ARS MAGICA to a group of players. Describing what the focus of the game is, what sorts of things come up in it and so on....

Perhaps I should do this myself, both to clarify my own ideas and to appeal to a new bunch of players.

14

A prospectus would be great. Of course, ArM can lead to different sorts of games, so I'm not entirely certain how one would approach this.

Excellent idea too. To which I'm afraid I can't contribute anything :mrgreen:

I would stay away from including non-core materials, however. At best reference them obliquely, so that even if the SG or players don't know them nothing will really be lost. The point of such a web-supplement is to allow someone to pick up the core book and play, after all.

Also, the Project Redcap wiki is supposed to include advice on starting out with Ars Magica and stuff, and can include the start-up saga-pack too if you want. Right now, unfortunately, the introductory material is rather poor. It includes a "ArM in Brief" page, http://www.redcap.org/page/welcome_to_ars_magica, which includes a few pieces of advice. And there is also the FAQ, including the "Which Tribunal to Choose?" bit, that is often asked by starting SGs (but is still only partially written). If someone wants to beef-up the "Welcome to Ars Magica" section of Project Redcap, that would be great too...

Yair

15

Play by Post (PbP) has some unique limitations, but nothing that can't be accounted for to produce a very enjoyable, top-quality experience.

Good point (if not in terms I'm familiar with).

I remember the first time I ran into this - new characters heard about a "terribly dangerous troll bridge" and went to check it out - and were slaughtered to a man. It was TROLL bridge ferkrysake - what were they thinkin'?! Well, they were thinking OOC that the GM wouldn't kill them or let them die - and they were wrong. Not "wrong" in their game style - just in assuming their customary style was the same as that GM's.

GM assumptions differ, and those assumptions should be spelled out before CharGen, before character concepts are even pitched. This leads in to play style, which will be the main point of this reply.

Actually, the Players understand the latter - the Characters only understand the former. But that's so much a part of how you play that you take for granted that the two are almost the same - it's just "how things are" in your game, and that's how it is in every game (regardless of the specific details/assumptions).

Players' Game Expectations and Playstyle.

You mentioned "arrangements for the on-line gaming" - those are the biggest dealbreakers that I've found, and can doom a game before it starts. I hope you included posting rate (#/day( or /week, & what happens when someone doesn't post), writing expectations (one-liner "stage directions" vs. full color description and expansion, as you prefer), OOC comments in IC posts (not/allowed?), (non)posting of game mechanics (formulae and math), "colored speech" (some require it, some hate it), OOC vs. IC comments, etc.

(Note - sites like RPoL.net have specialized posting mechanisms to keep much of the OOC info private in the posts, so all anyone reads is the IC stuff - if that's what's desired. Can't recommend that site highly enough for PbP.)

So - there's that.

It was mentioned that you should be playing what you want to play first. Very true. If you're a decent SG, no need to worry about finding Players - advertise a strong, clear vision, and like-minded Players will flock to you. That won't be a problem. In fact, it will solve a problem before it happens - by filtering out Players who won't like what you do. First rule is for the SG to maximize energy by finding common interests.

Then, AM considerations - play-by-post moves slowly, far more slowly than tabletop. It's often very hard to find time for plot complications and diversions from the main story arc, to the point where Virtues/Flaws are almost meaningless. I try to encourage players to choose Story and Personality Flaws that will dovetail w/ what I have in mind already. Things like Enemies, Driving Goals, Landed Noble - these can actually hurt a Play-by-Post game by adding undesired complications (or forcing you to ignore a Flaw completely), and the rules state that if a General Flaw will not hinder a character or if a Story or Personality Flaw will not enhance the Story (i.e., you won't have time to introduce it into the story, or it would detract time from the story everyone else wants to play), they shouldn't be allowed to take it. Never truer than in Play by Post. Man up, take control of your story even before you (and your Players) start telling it. (See p 36, col i for spec. reference).

So, combine these last 2 concepts together, and state what the "theme" and direction of the story will be ahead of time. This will also avoid Players submitting Characters that are "fish out of water" - a true curse to some Players. A Merenita without any fae in the story, a hunter of the undead without a necromancer to be seen, a flambeau in a story of subtlety and intrigue. How dull. Possibly even deadly to a campaign, as Players lose interest and drop out.

A Saga called "Dark Times" is far less informative than one called "Rise of the Necromancer". You'll get a far different submission of Characters for each.

(If you want to surprise them, that's fine - but be realistic. There are degrees of "being surprised" and of challenging a non-specialized character, and degrees of sheer uselessness. The latter is rarely fun, and never is if long-term.)

So, to some large degree, try to attract Players and then Characters that will fit into the Story you want to tell/to see told, or at least will all fit into the same story. Let them design characters that will work within the setting as they know it, and that will work together (in the story as a story, if not in every scene or socially). Don't let the Players force a tangent or detour on the story with a highly specialized Character Concept unless that is the story you want to run, and you are comfortable allowing that one specialized character to be the center of power/attention for the story, or that part of it. (Doubly so with Companions - better, especially in PbP, if they are introduced after the setting is known, to be introduced organically into the storyline, rather than designed blind and then shoehorned into it.)

(Another option is to get the Players together, and then to collectively come up with a theme/direction for the Story. This is sometimes hard to do with Players who are not accustomed to being part of that process, and we get back to what others were talking about, "expectations". But a consensus of direction and theme/elements is not the same as pre-scripting a story, and it can work well and still leave plenty of room for challenges/surprises.)

16

That is an amazing post CH. Thanks for sharing :slight_smile:

You just defined our design process here :slight_smile: You are right in that it might be less desirable in online games, but for troupes I have found that people playing the kind of story that they enjoy and knowing this is gonna be "sherlock holmes style" or "beast the crap out of the zombie horde" before the game starts is a huge boon here.

Cheers,
Xavi

17

I wanted to add to this, in that I had a friend who write up this list of questions for characters specifically.

I edited it, because it was originally based on Vampire, but I left his name so as to give credit.

BLAIR L********TY'S TWENTY QUESTIONS OF CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT CHARACTERS NAME:

  1. What are the first two things stranger's notice about you (body/facial
    feature, mannerism, mode of dress, etc)?
  2. what two things do you enjoy doing in your free time?
  3. do you mourn your lost humanity? edited: do you miss being mundane?
  4. personal "family" status?
  5. are you easy to get along with? why? why not?
  6. what's the greatest act of good you ever did?
  7. what's the worst thing you ever did? does this bother you?
  8. how close is your tie with the clan you belong to? is this political
    orientation strong? substitute House
  9. what's your financial status?
  10. are you religious? explain.
  11. why are you currently residing here?
  12. name one thing you always wanted to do but never did.
  13. where do you like to 'hang out'? edited: where do you feel most at home?
  14. what is your typical mode of transportation?
  15. name one thing that sincerely frightens you. why?
  16. how old are you?
  17. when was the last time you engaged in sexual intercourse? who was it
    with?
  18. have you ever had a disease?
  19. if you could 'start all over again', what would you do differently?
  20. if you had unlimited financial resources, what one thing would you buy
    first?
18

I think that questionnaires like this are a great idea. The biggest cause of RPG failure is mis-matched expectations between the GM and Players. I understand the arguments against them that some have made, that the GM should think first of what sort of game they want to run. But once that's done, isn't it a good idea to check-in with the players? I particularly liked the questions about interest levels in different sub-plots. Note that the flaws that players choose also tell you what kinds of stories they want their magus to be involved in. That's one of the things I like about Ars Magica.

I also think a properly worded questionnaire can help shape the players expectations. I often give A,B,C,D choices on mine, so they know the range of options I'm considering, but I also leave a "fill in the blank option." This lets players generate ideas for the campaign while its still in the seed stage. This doesn't replace my creative process, but my creative process shapes the questionnaire, and the responses in turn shape my creation further.

Do you want/expect a location based or character based world?
This is a great example of the kind of question that is good to ask players before starting any campaign, although I'd phrase it as a spectrum between the two.

I think Ars supports a good mix of the two. The way I plan to handle it, if the story is one generated by external events or a flaw, they can expect it to be more character based. If I tell them that undead are menacing a nearby village where some dependents live, they should expect that it is at least possible to defeat the threat with means they already have or can discover through investigation. If I merely mention that undead are said to exist on some island off the coast, than players can expect it to be location-based. If they go mess with the undead, they may be pushovers, a reasonable threat, or extremely powerful.

19

I think that questionnaires like this are a great idea. The biggest cause of RPG failure is mis-matched expectations between the GM and Players. I understand the arguments against them that some have made, that the GM should think first of what sort of game they want to run. But once that's done, isn't it a good idea to check-in with the players? I particularly liked the questions about interest levels in different sub-plots. Note that the flaws that players choose also tell you what kinds of stories they want their magus to be involved in. That's one of the things I like about Ars Magica.

I also think a properly worded questionnaire can help shape the players expectations. I often give A,B,C,D choices on mine, so they know the range of options I'm considering, but I also leave a "fill in the blank option." This lets players generate ideas for the campaign while its still in the seed stage. This doesn't replace my creative process, but my creative process shapes the questionnaire, and the responses in turn shape my creation further.

Do you want/expect a location based or character based world?
This is a great example of the kind of question that is good to ask players before starting any campaign, although I'd phrase it as a spectrum between the two.

I think Ars supports a good mix of the two. The way I plan to handle it, if the story is one generated by external events or a flaw, they can expect it to be more character based. If I tell them that undead are menacing a nearby village where some dependents live, they should expect that it is at least possible to defeat the threat with means they already have or can discover through investigation. If I merely mention that undead are said to exist on some island off the coast, than players can expect it to be location-based. If they go mess with the undead, they may be pushovers, a reasonable threat, or extremely powerful.

20

Again, invoke a thread.

An Spring covenant is a must for new players to AM, supposedly easier to begin far from humankind, in a mountain or whatever.
Also very useful to start several introductory (just for grogs / companions) sessions, in order to understand the NON - MAGICAL basics of the game. For example, just decided a new covenant was to be made thanks to 3 or 4 "helping" covenants, so several mundane expeditions need to arrive to it, obviously several months travel. Just some (not so) random events pop introducing, combat rules, the demons, some magical stuff, and so on. Also, they can create several grogs (1 / caravan) and just decide in what one of the expeditions comes his companion. (Mages will arrive several seasons later to the covenant).

The hard part is explain in a short time (unfortunately, real time allowance is usually very limited...) why some godlike guys should obey the "hermetic laws" without everybody reading a lot of AM stuff.