Original Resarch variations. OR as Initiation.

Games Discussion Ars Magica
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First, to answer a question in the "Individuals" thread, here's what YR7 proposed quite a while ago:

I'd also been thinking of giving Insight a greater role, but what I liked most about YR7's suggestion was comparing a total sensitive to Int, Inventive Genius, and MT against a rather high Ease Factor roll. I thought that extremely useful, mechanically.

We're still toying with the numbers, but using a high Ease Factor roll we've come up with a system that's sensitive to Int, IG, MT, and the magnitude of the experimental effects - we wanted to encourage high-level effects rather than low-level ones. There's also a failure state with a push-your-luck-mechanic.

Basically, when you want to do OR, you generate a "Research Total": Int + MT + 3 (if you've got IG) + the magnitude of the effect you're creating + roll.
For Minor Research your "Difficulty" (Ease Factor) is 18. For Major it's 21, and I think we're going with "Greater" (24) and then Hermetic (28). You generate points toward finishing the researched equal to however much you exceed the Difficulty. The Difficulty also increases the botch dice. (Up to 8, for Hermetic.) Points needed: 30, 45, 60, 75

You're no longer fishing for Discoveries. The law of large(ish) numbers still applies, but is no longer nearly as "streaky." I think this makes fine tuning everything much easier.

Minor is for research that doesn't so much increase a mage's power, but rather makes their magic more interesting or unique. It's designed to be relatively quick and easy. Greater and Hermetic involve breaking limits, and a mage needs to have both high Int+MT and high Art scores.

Then you spend a season to Stabilize (though we've fallen into the use of "Confirm") what you've learned - this is when you are actually awarded the points of progress. This gives you 1 warping point.

For any OR you're attempting, you can do this a number of times equal to your MT. This is the failure mode - You can guarantee enough progress with a high enough total, but the numbers can get pretty high: You might try the research without a certainty of success. This can make not knowing the exact number of points needed quite troubling. You can break this MT restriction, but you have to start getting somewhat reckless with your magic, and it generates more warping points. (We're still discussing how many: might go with magnitude - roll.)

We altered the Extraordinary Results chart: 0-4 is Side effect, and 8 is "modified effect" unless it's the last season of work. (This is due to one player who rolled "8" twice in a row early in the saga. We've taken mercy.)

After fiddling a lot with the numbers, we're happy with the results. Minor research will often be easier, which we like, while Hermetic Research is tough*. We're likely to adjust the Difficulty for specific projects. The player currently involved with some minor research was quite happy to switch to making two or three high level spells, that will mostly likely have several quirks, rather than a bunch of mid-level spells. He'll almost certainly get done in two thirds the time, too.

Initiation:
Replacing the Initiation system, the saga's Criamon character will be using OR, with quests and other activities in place of most - but not necessarily all - of the experimentation. Some of these activities will be cult rituals, but reliant on a modified Research Total for success.

*Using 28 as the threshold, a mage with 4 int and 12 MT, 16/20 Art scores with a Focus, and an excellent lab, and inventing 45th level spells in 1 season, will, with average rolls, succeed at Hermetic research after a mere 7.5 years. That strikes me as not long enough. OTOH, for our saga this is a mage of very rare power, and almost certainly rather old, and the last 3 projects will accumulate (using the what-we're-thinking-this-afternoon figures) an average of an additional 12 warping points - 4 at a time - on top of the 12 already accumulated via OR.

So maybe 7.5 years is OK. A PC would have to work hard to get to the point it's possible, and worry about death or Final Twilight. NPC mages can quite plausibly be made to either succeed, or die, vanish, or accidentally turn into a bedwarmer.

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Thanks for the proposition, I really think that is something lacking with the OR, but was thinking to take another approach.

I was thinking that for every 15 BP the player gets some effect, simulating that the character understand something more, although imperfectly:

  1. For Minor Breakthroughs at 15 BP a TeFo guideline, new range, target, duration, spell mastery with magnitude above it should take with the finished research;
  2. For Major, at 15 BP, as above; at 30 a Virtue with lessen effects than the finished one should have;
  3. For Hermetic, at 15 and 30, as above; at 45 BP a non-hermetic effect that can't be varied.

From my perspective, the majority of mages from the order would stay with the firsts results, generating non-optimized effects, other magi that wish to continue the research could use these effects as Insights.

This could explain why the order has not many breakthroughs, many magi are trying to optimize the known effects, not knowing what is already optimal what needs a rethink; the importance of branches and roots (as aggregators of the knowledge reviewed by many mages); and could change the importance of the Colentes Arcanorum and, maybe, vain books (if generated as result from unfinished research - maybe give a penalty for it in Summa Source Quality?).

Anyway, couldn't test these ideas to know how much it could change the setting.

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I like the idea of err ... waypoint benefits. It's not too far off of how we're thinking of handling Paths.

A saga might interpret that as magical knowledge diverging, which could have some interesting implications.

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Oh yeah ... I mentioned square roots in the other thread.
We were trying to reward experimenting with high level effects more, but doubling every magnitude, then taking the square root of that - which makes the figure double every other magnitude - turned out to be too much. Really high lab totals were trumping everything else.

Adding the unmodified magnitude means that high-level experiments aren't slower, but they aren't really faster, either. Though, with the way our system works out, they're necessary for Greater or Hermetic breakthroughs. (Dusting off my troll-part supercollider plans.)

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So, I'm not opposed to the math of it all, but I'm getting hung up on the ludo-narrative side of things that comes of the necessary high-magnitude effect. It feels self-evident that if you're trying to push the boundaries of what magic can do, you would start small so if it goes wrong it doesn't blow up in your face? Or is is that a perk rather than a bug, in that the only way to advance is to dare, hence explaining why the order hasn't had that many breakthroughs because the mages are relatively afraid of accidentally turning themselves into an abstract concept.

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Yep, that was the thinking. We definitely want to dial up the risk along with the requirements, though not by making any and all experimentation riskier.

One might even go so far as to assume that if it was safe, Bonisagius would have figured it out long ago.

I can see Insight coming in handy, especially given the MT-limited "failure mode." But rather than seeking ancient texts, relics, or whatever, the researcher seeks enlightening un-natrual phenomena, elf-lord organs ... or whatever.

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I like that. That also leads to the logical endpoint of making breakthroughs harder to spread, because they'd generally only be learnable by the strongest of mages, so even if someone managed it, if they went into final twilight and their lab notes got lost in a fire, the breakthrough closes up again. So really, the trick wouldn't even be being good enough to break through, it'd be being really really good enough to clear the way for others and invent a low-enough magnitude effect that others could learn it. One assumes there probably HAVE been a number of Major breakthroughs that no one could replicate, so they were deemed unusable and squirreled away in Durenmar.

Your 7.5 years (on average good rolls) assumes that mage is able to only explore that one breakthrough, constantly, for almost a decade, with no interruptions and other obligations, and has all the necessary resources to do so freely flowing. Which isn't impossible, but it'd mean they'd have a lot of people supporting them, so they'd probably have had to already spend a few years laying the groundwork to make that possible. A sort of implied extra ~2+ years of work, during and/or before the Hermetic Breakthrough, and navigating any resultant hooks.

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Really like how you're adapting Ancient Magic mechanics for OR — feels smoother and more rewarding than fishing for Discoveries.

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