Personally, I like it when the writers' creativity is kept in check. Because telling a writer "you can't do that" is often the best way to prevent that same writer from telling the players "you can't do that". I think David Chart has been a great line editor in this regard.
One of the strongest tensions I've seen between authors and players in rpgs is that many authors have these "cool ideas" that they'll try to impose on the game; and by doing so they disrupt the game for many players that have, so far, been playing in a certain way. When the writer gets criticized, his reaction is often along the lines "Oh, but how much cooler is it this way? And besides, you are free to ignore whatever I wrote, right?".
The first sentence is obviously false for that particular player. The second is also subtly false, or at least misleading. For if I, as a player, deviate from canon on rule X of supplement Y, then a lot of things that rely on rule X - for game balance, consistency between the game world and the rules etc. - will also be affected, and suddenly all Ars magica material I buy has much less value to me because I need to put a lot more effort into adapting it. This is not to say that I never make houserules; but every houserule I am forced to make by a game that does not match what I want reduces the value of the canon material to me.
Could you point me to where it says so in A&A or other books?
I agree that the universe complexity is great (different realms interacting, different techniques and forms, different traditions), and one of the things that makes Ars Magica great. However I believe it does not have to involve complex calculations and book browsing when spontaneously casting a spell.
As for True Names, knowing if it applies to angels is a matter of universe definition, let say a non-mathematical part of the system. It can be hard to know if it applies to a specific being if not explicitly written by the authors. However it does not have to be complex when applying it. For true names, it could be a simple flat bonus to casting total against the named creature.
Following Arm5 rules, to cast a spell to do some damage you have to
add the bonuses/maluses on the spell, forme, technique, stamina, mastery, stuff from supplement, etc. (good as it shows universe complexity, could be made easier by having character sheet taking them into account, smaller numbers to help mental calculations)
decide the spell level from the guidelines (bad, should either be taken into account in bonuses/maluses or be obvious from intended result, for instance lvl5 to do 5 damages, r/d/t is a great idea hindered by magnitude rules and character sheet)
maybe add some vis to help boost the spell (good idea, spending some points is quite clear, but do they have to be in a different scale! why not have uniform scale where +1 vis gives +1 casting level)
compute the spell penetration (taking into account the connections is good as it adds to universe complexity, but implementation is really bad as it is the third time I'm re-computing my spell results to optimize with a separate set of rules, should be simple set of bonuses for connections and maluses for resistance)
apply a various set of flaws/virtues linking your casting total and/or penetration (and target magic resistance) to fatigue, objects, environmental conditions (bad, should easily be taken into account into bonuses/maluses)
finally roll dices and apply the effect (and compute wounds from damages, armor, etc.)
Hm.
Disputed Tribunal Border (or whatever it's called) Hook: check.
Covenant back story indicates it was founded by a Tremere: check.
Heavy Tremere population throughout the covenant's history: check.
A raft of Sooper Sekrit orders for the one PC Tremere: check.
THEY (my players) are not 100% sure they are in Novgorod either.
I myself prefer background. The rules creep has a general problem: disjointed feeling. It seems that each thing needs a new, totally different set of rules, without the basic system being able to cope with it. I think this is bad, since there is this rules creep but there does not seem to be a really coherent whole. The core book is great and quite coherent, but the added mechanisms do not get a mythic feeling at all to me, but a mechanical one. Even quite a few of the supernatural system get that impression. C&G is just one of the shelf sitters in our sagas, since we extract few utility from the whole labor points thing. IN the end we have a diverse mechanic for every small corner of ME, and no coherent whole. Also, you can get info on Constantinople somewhere else, true, but it is better if you do not NEED to do that. At least IMO. So I guess I am at the antipodes of ezzelino's interest in books
On the whole, I like the mechanics I see in Grogs more than in City & Guild. The mechanics it Grogs seems to offer "this is a way you can handle guard duty/long distance travel/generating characters" within the context of the core rules. They aren't new mechanics so much as expansion and exploration of the core mechanics. Contrast with the Labor Point system from City & Guild which is a completely new and IMO entirely unneeded mechanic.
It doesn't worth a new edition but I think there should be an official correction of system bugs. Now every party need to discover and change them one by one.
I think system bugs are the things when the possibilities from game system contradicts with the description of the rulebooks.
For example magi with these rules might live even 4-500 years while ~160 years old magi appear as the oldest in the tribunal books.
Learning from books is the cheapest way to learn, learning from vis is expensive and needless. Therefore huge vis stocks grow in covenants. Hundreeds in our covenant which has grown from spring to summer. So vis isn't really an important or valuable thing as it is excepted.
Some things has no suggested price for example books and starting GMs has to find out without any experience.
The biggest magical beings can be beaten by the young magi.
Etc.
Warping tends to get you around then, especially if you use spells, rather than items.
I've noticed this as well.
2 Issues here:
Books are too cheap, if we use the prices suggested in Covenants.
1B) because Arts are based on XPs these days, you can just keep reading. And while there are a finite number of tractatus in the Order, there is no reason why that number wouldn't be very large.
Heaps of Vis. This can be dealt with in several ways
A) Introduce Vis sources slowly. Just because they exist doesn't mean the characters know where they are.
B) Rituals. Rituals cost Vis - when magi are wounded or ill, (true) magical healing drains vis. Many other rituals exist and can be highly useful.
C) Items. I've never met a Verditius with too much Vis. Non-charged items are expensive to make, but potentially very powerful. As importantly, because they cast effects without a diceroll there is no botch, so many elder magi are likely to prefer items over actual spell casting, to guard against Twilight.
Covenants, but you, would've been useful to have in the core book.
I also like A&A very much. This isn't to say that I don't disagree with parts of it. I think Aristotle is taken too seriously and in some ways removes mystery from the world, by stipulating that everything works as outlined in the book. Sometimes this makes the world less medieval and more fantastic, for example by suggesting that it's impossible to sail across the Atlantic or south of the equator, when in fact the Norse sailed to Greenland and the Arabs regularly sailed south along the coast of Africa. The same goes with gunpowder, which of course was known in Asia at the time. Making it impossible (which actually came in a Sub Rosa rather than A&A I believe) is too unhistorical for me. But these are minor issues when set against the flavor of the book.
We're all free to ignore the bits we don't like within our own games. Canon is for authors and I for one am glad to see the authors restricted to writing within the A&A guidelines. I'd hate to see firearms in a printed AM book. There are already enough anachronisms - see for example pretty much everything written about the Tremere in the new Transylvania books.
Um. Jabir, may I point out that the people who read this forum are real people too, and the authors of said Transylvania book do read this forum? I know what my reaction would have been if you'd said something like that about something I had written, and it wouldn't have been positive.
Constructive criticism, especially backed up by research, is one thing... but being blithely dismissive of someone's work isn't going to endear you to anyone.
No, it's not that there's an infinite NUMBER of tractatus. It's that there's an infinite number that can be written, technically. And that IS true. A bored magus with nothing to do for a season or two might write up a quick tractatus on a subject. There we go, yet another one added to the pile.
Yes, but how good is that Tractatus going to be? Most authors will not be +3 Com, or have Good Teacher. The quality will also be dependent upon having a skilled scribe, bookbinder and illuminator. So, a Com 0 magus will have a Q6 tractatus if he has all three professionals working at his covenant. He decides to include resonances, and moves it to a +2, so it's a Q8.
Quality of 5 to 8 should not be too uncommon. So, by all means, add it to the pile, but never forget what the book represents. The Q8 tractatus I mentioned above indicates someone spending a season writing, followed by a season each for the professionals, plus a story to acquire the items to included for resonance materials.
My desires for 6th edition (presuming that someone else steps up to the plate to do the work after David is done) run counter to most of what I've seen here. I specifically would want to go back into the same old groove and redo what has been done before. I'd look over the existing material with a light touch to correct the issues that we've seen. I'd be a bit more hesitant to mess with setting issues unless they're very unpopular (perhaps expand the philosophy of the Tytalus and add some different option to the Criamon).
I see a few issues that might be considered big (confidence points, penetration for hermetics outstripping MR for beasts, the muto vim rules could use some attention, the combat system has never been my favorite and I'd like to see the rules for altering and creating Mystery initiations tightened up a bit), but by and large I'd like to see a myriad of small alterations to what we have. Little things rewriting the verditous mystery virtues, altering vulgar alchemy, adjusting the book wring rules, choosing a different house virtue for the Tremere and so on.
I'd like to see a few hundred man hours of going through this forum to find issues that people have had and than using that list to revise the existing books with another edit after a few years of reflection and knowlege of the rest of the line and retooled rules that have seen another round of play testing mechanics that have also been thought through with some attention to what sort of results are possible using some statistics and a knowledge of what sort of numbers show up in play. Sure feel free to alternate rewrites of old books with a line of new books, but Ars 5 is so very close to what I always wanted Ars Magica to be that I'd much rather work to shine it up than to build another new edition from scratch.
That's almost certainly impractical fro a marketing standpoint but it is what I'd like.
Perhaps an offhand comment like mine wasn't the best way to express my point but I haven't had time to do an actual review. For that I take a mea culpa.
It is however a very old issue in discussions that the Tremere have never seemed very medieval. At various times they've been compared to Nazis, robots, and now apparently (thought I honestly can't see how) to 21st century America. This vastly predates the current author's work so he's not to blame but, again without taking time for a full review, the new book dials that up to 11. Just on one point, adding paper money was totally unnecessary and not at all within genre.
Some people will like this - lots of people here I expect - and some won't. That's a matter of taste. Objectively, it's not medieval in feel. I like A&A for preserving a medieval feel.
The whole order of hermes is the least medieval thing in the Mythic Europe setting. Remove the Order of Hermes and you get a fairly consistent product. Add the order of hermes (not just the tremere) and if you poke too much the background system crumbles. No biggie about that. Has been like that for ages now.
I can see two models for a new edition: a "5.5" edition that makes the rules and setting more coherent and simple, or a "6!" edition that radically breaks from ArM tradition on a few points.
The 5.5 version has the advantage that it will build-up of the game's heritage and customer-base, and is the natural development for the game. I am afraid, however, that compatibility with past editions will mean that there will be little real need to re-publish everything for 5.5th edition. Players and groups could be satisfied with just the 5.0 content. Still, for a 5.5 edition I'd suggest the following changes:
Tweak penetration and magic resistance rules, especially regarding Might and bonuses from wizard communion and/or raw vis.
Better clarify ramifications of raw vis and book availability.
Set standards for character advancement (which PCs and sagas would then of course be free to ignore) which are consistent with both Later Life and standard in-game progress.
Consolidate and standardize rules from and in supplements.
Various other more-minor changes (e.g. change the Tremere house virtue, the penalty for studying with medium (IIRC) wounds, and so on).
For a 6! edition, the changes would have to be radical enough to get players excited and to make 6!e groups want to purchase 6!e supplements instead of keeping to their old ones. Yet must keep the changes minor enough to still be Ars Magica. The breadth and quality of 5e makes this difficult. There are a number of directions one could pursue, but I'd suggest to deepen the Mythic and Historical Europe aspect of the setting, while keeping all the smaller problems of 5e in mind. I would also personally prefer simplifying the rules considerably. So my programme would be:
Rewrite the spell guidelines. I don't know how - but somehow, they need to be made simpler. I'm tempted to go the ArM3 way and make spell levels rather arbitrary... As they are, the rules are hard to apply on the fly and affecting large or lots of targets is still too easy.
Rewrite the Order of Hermes to be an Order of Hedges. That is to say - create new Houses, based on historical folklore and beliefs, and (accordingly) drive the power of Hermetic magic down. Make taking down a dragon more than an evening's entertainment, and a city-destroying spell more than a parlor trick.
Rewrite the Realms to be more "Fantastic" in feel. I would put each at a "metaphysical" level: Magic is what the inner nature of things are, it is things brought to their own perfection; Divine is the transcendant, it is things brought to beyond what they can be; Infernal is Nothingness, it is the diminishing and destruction of all things; and Faerie is "other", it is things as they are not, illusion and phantasm. Something of this nature - a large shift in how the Realms are seen - is I feel necessary for a 6!e edition to really be set apart from prior editions, so that customers would want to buy a 6e Tribunal book instead of using their old 4e one. Speaking of which...
Make each tribunal around a "Theme" or game-style, with different Tribunals conforming to different visions of how the Order looks like and functions.
That's my 2 cents. Some good ideas up-thread, though, keep them coming.
I've answered you within the other thread, but I'd point out that
Magi of Tremere are hte only ones who seems to express the medievial view of service to a leader as a calling higher than personal advancement. That is, there are no magi who do fealty quite like Tremere do fealty.
It's not paper money in the sense of banknotes, it's a system of promissory notes.
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If I were doing sixth edition, the clearest big thing I would do is set the game in the 10th century rather than the 13th.
Both the amount of work and the quality of work that had gone into the current edition is great. I would want a new edition to be both completely new yet not a fundamental break with what the game has been. I would not want to try to out do what has been done. Quite frankly, I would also not want to repeat the research that has been done. Perhaps most important, I would want current players who have a vast library of books from this edition and who are completely happy with them to feel a need to buy house and tribunal and rule books all over again.
The 10th century is an exciting time. Spain and Anatolia are still up for grabs. The matter of England has in no way been settled, and the way in which it was historically settled is not even a glimmer on the horizon. There has yet to be a crusade or inquisition. There is a Jewish kingdom in the steppes. the religions and institutions of Europe are further from their modern form, sometimes to the point of being surprising. Did I mention Vikings? Oh yes, and Diedne are finally playable.
