Pulse (Some adventure then a "break" of some years)
Other (please specify)
0voters
Just wondering how you handle the saga speed in your Ars Magica saga. Personally i go with the 2 seasons per session for now but maybe i'll need to do some "pulse time" (a series of adventures then pass a couple of years) because of a story hook coming from the children’s of a companion.
Sometimes i wonder if i should go slower or faster than 2 seasons per session (my player seem to enjoy it as it allow to keep a smooth track of activities). And i was really wondering at what length time pass in your saga.
If possible i'm also interested in the reasons of your choice especially concerning the character advancement and, more precisely, the evolution of your story concerning the speed.
We sort of pulse. An adventure usually takes 2 or 3 sessions and then it is possible that nothing happens for a year of so. Sometimes we play just 2 days in one session, while another time we play 3 seasons in one game. It is all in hands of the SG.
I put Other , because when i have played , the SG would have several sessions covering days or weeks of time.
We would get two seasons per year for study or gaining non-adventure experience.
After say 6 or 8 sessions , 02 to 03 years would have passed.
Sometimes we also take several years between games. In fact the above is the general guideline, but it is not set in stone at all. if we have a war in the area, for example, we can get up to 6 adventures in a single year, as the magi try to divert the enemy armies around etc etc. In more quiet periods, there can be up to 5 years between adventures if we want to set up the next stage with way more powerful magi.
Also, in the 5-6 periods breaks that we have sometimes, we can have easily one or 2 adventures, but they are grog and companion adventures, not magi level games. For us it adds to the overall feeling of the covenant being the thing that matters, instead of only being an excuse for the power creep of the magi.
Most of the time t is the needs of the characters that dictate the adventuere speed. I am the alpha SG, so I describe what is happening from year to year. When one or more of the players think that what I am describing (a mundane conflict, the library lacking in what the magus wants to study, a gradual deterioration of the relations of the magi and the mundanes, or a weird pattern in a vis source, for example) would matter for one of his characters, we have an adventure. I also force adventures when I have an evil plot (TM) in mind, but most of the time it is the characters (and players) that determine it. As I describe what ishappe3ning, the players also tell me how the characters treact to the events, if they react at all.
We tend to go for many sessions in an adventure, and then a season or two in research and then back into adventure... Which is sort of a pulse, but with a shorter period, so I'll go with other.
In a 3.5 RL year game we've covered a little over 10 years ingame.
To be honest, I'm not looking forward to the next tribunal in three years.
We tend to have at least a story per year, and usually more. Some of these stories are very short however, and we've passed 14 years now in what I think has been 2 years real time (can't really recall anymore...)
Pulse would be the rate, but it could be a very slow pulse. The Nurockrah Saga, in it's death throes now, ran several sessions a season for nearly 3 years. Then we had a break of 5 years. Then some more day-to-day stuff, then a break of 7 years. In the 17 years it's been running (1990 to present), we've covered 32 years of game time.
Foxcourt was a pulse style game - we ran our adventures during the game's spring-summer seasons, and used the fall-winter seasons as the break. Being a PbP, it ran much slower - we had only covered 5 seasons of game time before the saga came apart due to RL concerns.
Our dormant Selvaggio saga spanned 4 actual years and took the saga from 1198 to 1203 (I think). It was pretty incident packed.
We've just switched to a Rye-based saga and that's fair zipping along. We've been playing for a few months and have already done a couple of years, again with a couple of sessions per story.
We started in late in 2005...
We are almost thirty years in..
We have had times with one adventure in a year..(once or twice). Mostly it was one adventure per season. Some adventures have gone multiple sessions (6-8 hrs). Lately its been up to three or four adventures per season...
(Most magi having a shot each season)
Mostly though its been about two seasons per session...
Thanks for all your answers, it's kind of a confort to me to know that i wasn't too much "off the track" with my two seasons per game. My principal obstacle in this saga (wich is my first) is really to measure the advancement speed of the magus (in power level, it's often more than the 30xp per year example in the book) and the evolution of the medieval society.
Our saga take place in the Loch Legan tribunal (and i've put my hand on Lion of the North, the third Ed. tribunal book) and it's sometime tiresome to keep track of everything going around in the society, in the Order of Hermes, in the nobility etc. My guess is that i'll just roll with the punch when my player will ask questions...
