grin Maybe those characters don't belong in your game, sort of the way a physicist doesn't usually belong in a game about pro-wrestlers, even though both kinds of character exist in-period.
The problem is that a good set of AM rules needs to support your High Fantasy as well as more gritty worlds, which seems to be the preference on these forums.
Is this directed towards me? The first part seems like it's directed more towards the high fantasy people. I'd answer the second part (if it is directed towards me) by saying that part of being rulers is maintaining your rule in a world where power is constantly contested through violent and ideological means.
This system could be used to emulate non-feudal systems, you just wouldn't have a large number of peasant freeholders and communes paying tribute labor. Just because it wasn't feudal doesn't mean that there wasn't taxation. You could have towns and cities paying in coin and goods rather than labor in Iberia, for example.
In fact, tribute labor in Iberia WAS demanded from conquered religious minorities and, more rarely, from resident freemen particularly those living in poor barrios. Vecinos (townsmen/landowners) were largely free from labor tribute, but had to pay a variety of direct and indirect taxes, including a much resented head tax. Hidalgos were free from the the head tax, but usually had to pay most of the other taxes unless they had some sort of particular immunity. The main difference between Iberia and feudal Europe is that most of the tax income ended up in the hands of municipal, religious, and crown officials and institutions, rather than a rural class of semi-independent aristocrats. There was a cognate for such a class, the grandes, but they depended more on tribute from towns and influence at court than the feudal grandees who relied much more on peasant labor and direct force. Wealthy Iberians also used a variety of methods to secure and exploit labor, including a complex system of short term land rental, sharecropping, and a wage labor system dependent on several different types of coinage that appreciated and depreciated at different rates.
Ars Magica is a game that's supposed to reflect a fantastic version of history. Regardless of how feudal you think the Order actually is, which is largely a matter of interpretation, shouldn't there be an option to run covenants in a way that feels more historically accurate?
I have some details to add to my first suggestion: You could divide different resources into Labor, Assets, and Goods. Labor represents having access to workers, and should be divided into Skilled (Craft) and Unskilled labor. Assets represent means of production and profit like land, mines, salt marshes, ships, herds of livestock, trade contracts, etc. Goods would be units of actual physical goods, like Food, Common Goods (commonly produced by households,) Expensive Goods, Luxuries, etc.
You have an excellent grasp of economics in iberia during the middle ages.
Impressed!
For Covenant/Ressource management, I used an abstract concept. It is simply a bonus/malus related to mystical ressources and mundane ressources.
If a PC need a special item belonging to one of those categories, he rolls a skill test, modified by the adequate bonus/malus and an modifier linked to the rarity/scarcity of the item. If he succeed, he manage to get it. Margin of success determine how quickly he has it.
The skill and characteristic is variable and left to the troupe to decide. It can be social skill to bargain, possibly threat (Intimidation), theft, connection and favour (Etiquette) or even Area Lore (for resources which can be foraged or hunted).
If it is a really expensive item, the resource of the covenant might be temporarily depleted, lowering the base bonus/malus for a season or a year.
This keeps the book-keeping to a minimum. Sure, it does not take in consideration savings to build up in view of a big expense. I guess you need to compromise somewhere between low book-keeping and many options.
It should not be too difficult to combine the current covenant creation rule with this. Specific improvement or flaw affect one or both resources, with a malus/bonus. Tally all those once the covenant is finished and you will see if you are always scrambling for resources or if you can indulge your wildest fantasy.
This system could probably be expanded to include access to knowledge and training and other ressources - depending how detailed and how much book keeping you want to have.
Thanks, Marko!
Bringing skill rolls into the mechanic sounds interesting, Ezechiel
Hi,
I strongly recommend that there be absolutely no die rolls for downtime.
Even having rolls for spell experimentation during downtime should be reconsidered. Spell experimentation rule: Add any number up to ten to your Lab Total; your risk factor is 1/5 of that rounded up plus 1 for every point you exceed your Magic Theory. You have no idea what you really happened until you cast the spell under stress. That is, experimentation is resolved during play, with the risk factor adding botch dice; the spell is not mastered (even for FM types) and does not gain benefits like Cautious Magic and Gold Cord until the experimental phase is over. The benefit of predictable Lab Totals and not destroying your lab is balanced by the possibility of turning your enemies into griffons instead of goldfish. This probably needs a more complete writeup to really work.
Anyway,
Ken
I really like your ideas, Banga. If you ever decide to plan things further, you need to post it here so I can use your system 
No, it wasn't really directed toward you, except that my response was a reminder to keep in mind that magi are supposed to be nominally in charge, and a magus being in charge is definitely a Good Thing[sup]TM[/sup]. Maintaining that power, relative to their peers or those who would seek to take their lands away from them is part and parcel of the stories common to Ars. In matters requiring violent means, magi can respond back with overwhelming violence, although the consequences of such action can cause troubles for them within the Order, by triggering the "interfering with mundanes and thereby bringing ruin upon my sodales" clause. Which, also allows for stories where the overwhelming force the covenant employs needs to be defended by a jury of their peers, so to speak. And now we're using Ars Magica as a commentary on the various stand your ground and castle doctrine legal issues being discussed in the US. 
But, yes, it's a game about consequences...
But you didn't really answer my question about how you would tell stories about magi who aren't ruling or nominally in charge of their lands. How do they make their money, if their money is associated with land? Or perhaps the covenant owns a business which generates a lot of money, but don't do any of the work related to producing the income from the business... They are essentially in charge, providing the capital, but they do no real work related to that income. Without money, how do they manage the upkeep on their labs and support their covenfolk? Mind you, it is possible to create stories about Covenants without income, but it is implicit that Covenants be able to generate income. Magi can't easily progress in their Arts and Abilities without labs and libraries and time to study and the covenfolk doing work to support them. If magi need to earn a living, or earn their keep, so to speak, then they will advance much more slowly (two seasons a year "working" to support themselves, and two seasons for advancement). But this, too, fails because income in Ars is generally presumed to be of subsistence level, to maintain your station, unless you go into the City & Guild rules about improving your station. Bottom line, magi need a lot of money to run a covenant... How do they get money in Mythic Europe if they don't rule something, somehow?
I've heard CrTe Rituals are quite vis-efficient to the silver (or gold, or whatever you calculate to give yourself the best financial return for selling it) if you can convince your Tribunal that you're totally not just creating all that money or anything.
Sure, but that's not what I was getting at. Vis to silver conversion done like this does create a lot of other problems, and in some tribunals this is heavily regulated (Covenants, in the description of the spell The Riches That are Rightfully Mine(d)). Additionally, I'd say any ritual that creates a massive amount of some commodity would create the same inflationary issues and would quickly create a much more generalized Tribunal ruling that addresses the creation of commodities. I've never been in a covenant where vis was so plentiful and silver so scarce that these rituals became attractive. Not only that, they are rituals and have a rather significant risk of botching, in the event of a 0 on the casting roll.
The system in Lords of Men was written four times (by me).
The original version is similar to the system in The Republic of Darokin gazetter, or the Machiavelli computer game, for my fellow ancients. That I didn't even offer for testing because it required you to track every cargo.
The system was then written with an annual return percentage which went up and down based on story success, and then that failed testing because the math was too hard.
It was reworked as 10%, 5% and 1% as being the only possible annual outcomes, and it again failed testing because the math was too hard.
When a substantial group of people say that "drop the last digit", "drop the last digit and halve" and "drop the last two digits" are too difficult, then there's no way to construct a system based on success rates,
Labor points happened because the math under them is simple addition.
You may think it was a deep botch, but that's because you fail to appreciate the design constrains on the system, and any covenant design rules that people make for 6 (and I didn't do the covenant money rules) will need to meet the same constrains, You need to make it simple enough that people who refuse to divide by ten are happy to use it, and that means you get simple addition and subtraction.
No multiplication. No division. No complaining about the customers.
This leads to narrative, rather than mathematical, solutions.
Hi,
If people really aren't happy with divide by 10 and truncate, then you almost hit it on the head: Specifically, I am not aware of this design constraint. How do these people use spontaneous magic?
My biggest problem with LP is that they don't always mean the same thing. (I also have spent much less time looking at the system in LoM than in C&G and A&A.) My second biggest problem is that I have difficulty converting between that economy and the various other economies in the game.
Anyway,
Ken
Timothy - interesting information on the system in LoM & C&G. I agree - were I to use a system for players, I would have to use simple addition - my players are not numerically literate enough to appreciate yearly % changes.
I'm sorry. I'm not sure whether I completely understand what you're asking or why you're making the question that I think you're making. My suggestion doesn't have anything to do with magi actually supporting themselves, but instead modeling their exploitation of others more concretely by abstracting resource production and consumption into broad categories (Food, Household Goods, Luxuries, etc) instead of one universally equivalent resource (the Mythic Pound.)
If I were to model the situation of a mage actually working for a living, I'd do it the same way I'd model anybody else; they spend w seasons working, producing x Labor points, which are used to make Assets produce other resources. Again, I fail to see how handling the particular situation of mages working for a living is relevant to my suggestion or anything in the discussion.
So instead of tracking 1 resource in 10 different places, as it moves into and out of accounts in the covenant record, you want to track at least three different things to determine what? What do you actually gain from this endeavor over and above the mythic pound? As I understand it, the mythic pound doesn't even have to represent a physical pound of silver, it represents what a physical pound of silver can purchase. So, let's say you produce 50 mythic pounds worth of food, and you trade it to get 50 pounds worth of lab supplies, how is that better or even different than saying that this year's surplus grain allowed us to by 50 pounds worth of lab supplies, magi get ready to upgrade your labs...
I misunderstood what you were going for.
This is a really really nice concept. Harnmaster does it pretty well for the feudal manor (the 4-page article on EH4 better than Harnmanor). It would take a bit of research to make sure things are "right", and some serious testing to make sure that strange dynamics don't creep up, but it's really a system I'd love to have. Particularly because in many ways, it could be designed to be almost system-independent, so it could be used equally well when playing Runequest or Harnmaster or Ars Magica. I'd be happy to participate in hammering it out.
Because, if I understood correctly, you can't convert 50 MP(Mythic Pounds) of food into 50MP of lab supplies.
You can convert 50MP of food into 20MP of silver, or 50MP of silver into 40MP of food or into 30MP of lab supplies. For every 100MP of Merchant Network assets you have, however, you can convert each year 50MP of food into 40MP of silver, and/or 50MP of silver into 50MP of food or lab supplies. For every 200MP of Land assets you have, you can also "convert" each year 40MP of food (as seed and as food for your labor) and 30 MP of labor into 100MP of food (plus or minus modifiers due to weather). Etc.
It's essentially a system that can be abstracted into equations like those of chemical reactions:
X units of Resource A + Y units of Resouce B + W units of Asset C -> Z units of Resource B + W units of Asset C
Thanks, ezzelino! I've never heard of Harnmaster, but I'll check it out.
The point of the system, Jonathan Link, is to make the mechanics of the game reflect historical (Mythic) reality and to make covenant management a little more interesting.
As long as everyone is on board with that. My experience is that few people are interested in detailed covenant management of silver, let alone splitting it into more than one thing.
After running many, many saga as DM, there are roughly three situations a covenant can be regarding income/wealth:
1) Struggling
It can be a newly started covenant or a decrepit one trying to comeback.
It is survival mode. Assume that they have nothing, so each time they want to acquire something, it requires an adventure.
No need for accounting since there is basically no steady income and every meaningful expense is handled through a story/short scenario.
After a while and a great deal of adventures, the PCs will âupgradeâ their covenant and find some steady source of income, which bring us toâŚ
The way I was handling this situation, after each adventure I would estimate that they had enough resource to survive X seasons. PCs decided when/how they would go for some money making adventure or what task would they undertake to upgrade a lab or the infrastructure of a covenant.
2) Money is tight
The covenant has a steady source of income, but not enough to have a comfortable life. To maintain the covenant income steady, a certain number of season per year need a magus to organize/run the covenant or go on some minor adventure to insure the steady income.
Big expenses can be solved through either an adventure like in âtightâ situation, or abstracted through âyou need to spend X magus seasonâ to save enough for this or that (so if it is worth 4 seasons, 2 magi can pitch 2 seasons each or 4 magi pitching one season, etc).
In my current Saga, that the status my playerâs covenant stands: there is a need that every season a magus has to manage the covenant business side. Their source of income is a kind Mercere network distribution of goods for both mundane and hermetic business.
3) Well-off
The covenant is well established. Magi donât need to worry about their income. Reasonable expenses are covered easily. For very costly project like upgrading to high level laboratory, a magi might have to work a few seasons to build up the resources (handled through a few skill check to shorten that time).
The only time when wealth really matter is when they are away from their covenant and they need to pay a relatively large amount of money. There is no accounting, but depending on characters background and skills, I will require a test of some sort to check that they can afford the expense right now. It is not about if they have the resource, but more that they have it at their disposal at the right time.
To summarise...
There are only two real currencies for a magus: time and virtus. And with little effort, you can convert time into virtus.
After that, every income source is handled mostly by description, without numeric value. I use those sources of income as potential story seeds, but I do not need to know to the penny whatâs the return over invested capital, the asset turnover and their marginal contribution.
What you need to do is make it clear to the players that if we hand wave the penny counting, with more abstract value, there is no turning back, ei, if they loot a big treasure, donât ask how many gold coin there is. There will be enough to erect a new tower for two labs and sanctum. Or there will be enough for the next 12 seasons.
You cannot have a coin-based system and abstract-base value at the same time. You need to pick one. If you try to have both, then you need to have a conversion factor between coins and abstract value, and the abstract value then disappear, you are left with an accounting sheet.
Converting coin into abstract value
The challenge of an abstract system is how to you estimate the value of having a well-maintained library ? Or to have a company of 50 well-equipped, well-trained warriors ? That would be the challenge of writing a covenant book with only abstract concept.
Because I have a long experience, I guestimate how much I wanted my players to struggle to get that (translate into challenging adventure and seasons spent outside lab) and what advantage it would give them in the future. It usually translates in modifiers to skill tests.
Recently, they manage to get hold of a full library of many mundane, yet valuable texts. I did not go into describing which books were in. I just listed a set of bonus to skill test they will have would they use certain ability with the library at hand. And their book collection has a name âThe Afanasiev collectionâ (it is a modern setting), so they can advertise it and possibly share it or rent access to it.
I found using FATE concepts of Aspect very useful to handle all that without going into the minutiae of book keeping. I believe this could be a good alternative for those not enjoying excel sheet and accounting book.
Finally, the only thing which I did not abstract was virtus book keeping, because it is a cornerstone of lab activity, it cannot be abstracted without impacting the whole magic system. However, I did simplify it by reducing to 5 types of virtus only (Vitae (Animal, Herbam, Corpus), Lapis (Terram, Aquam), Invisible (Mentem, Imaginem), Potentia (Ignem, Auram), Vim) - but that is for another discussion. This is small book keeping at the end, and every magi needs to keep track of his vis store anyway.