Speculation About David's Other Threads

My speculation and hope is for a rules omnibus. An Ars Magica Cyclopedia. That would be awesome!

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My speculation is for a revised and expanded 5E core rule book. I'm tagging David's latest quote.

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I expect it's a collection of new documents: expanded errata, a set of examples, a rules compilation, etc.

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Maybe a new batch of PDFs with all those errata fixed. New printings would also be awesome, but understandably harder to sell.

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I am not so sure about that. Most gamers in the modern day have never heard of Ars Magica. There are people in my gaming circles that were not even yet born when ArM5 was first published! There is a massive untapped market out there.

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I sure hope so!!

42 posts were split to a new topic: Religion in Ars Magica

ReCo is definitely the best way of treading water, though ReAq is my second choice.

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The world-building and tropes associated with it are not the main problems for Ars Magica. Not even close.

I'd say that the main reasons for Ars Magic being pretty obscure today are:
Lack of marketing.
A complex rulesystem with a lot of math.
A rulesystem that all players need to understand, not just the Gamemaster/Storyguide.
The typical (though not only) way of playing Ars Magica requires lots of preparation - multiple characters per player need to be created. A covenant need to be created, as well as its surroundings. Relations with nearby NPCs need to be decided. Etc. A new player can easily get overwhelmed before the game has even started - not to mention how a new Storyguide can feel.

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I very much agree with this assessment. The game is very front loaded, making the first mage(s) takes many hours. And there are significantly more things/rules/spells to read than for other games.

I also think that there could be more of a handrail for first time story tellers, as it is easy to get overwhelmed. As a first time story teller I really struggled for the first few weeks to set up the world sandbox for the players, and this is after playing in two sagas in the past. I can only imagine the shock for a gaming group to all take the plunge with no prior experience of the game.

I don't mind the maths, as a good digital character sheet just handles everything as an easy blackbox, but I inherited those from the previous Story teller...

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I can't see him caring about 5e errata if 6e were in the works.

Maybe a KS to reprint some of the books or a super deluxe edition might make sense...

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Has Mr. Chart or others explored publishing materials that could move the timeline up to the dawn of the Renaissance?

I've been reading Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire and have been thinking about how Mythic Europe might look in 1420 or 1520. I'd be interested in a supplement that talks through the considerations that might be needed to advance the Mythic Europe timeline two to three centuries.

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There is Mark Shirley's excellent article AD 1470: After the Plague in sub rosa #16 p.106ff.

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Not Ars so much. Andrew had been musing on it for years, I believe, before he got the band back together for Magonomia.

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In the days of yore, there was a mailing list, where the Secret Masters of Ars Magica would hold grand flame wars. Ah, but their spirit lingers on...

To the point (of the thread, not the side-topics): David seems to be orchestrating a new edit of ArM5, publishing something like the "Fifth Edition Core Rule Book (Revised Edition)": incorporating errata, re-editing to highlight hard-to-find rules, and a slight expansion to incorporate rules from further down the line that need to be subsumed into core.

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Concur with Jetpack. Any Grand Master willing to split this thread and move the religion debate into a new one so this one can get back on topic?

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I have that power. But I don't know how :grimacing:

I have both power and knowledge, so it is done. :grin:

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I also think this might be what's going on, and it definitely is something I would jump on board with.

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Although honestly it seems to me that a lot of the problems in 5th ed are there because whole sections were lifted from earlier editions without considering how they would work with what were some relatively minor rules changes. Then on top of the inconsistencies accumulated during the various supplements where rules consistency was not vetted well. Simply correcting all of these issues may well be the 6th edition, as it may well wind up representing more actual change that the transition from 4th to 5th entailed.

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