What would you change in a 6th edition?

This is super interesting. I think I'm similar to the minority opinion that "constraints are interesting." I want to explore what magic might look like if it's not all just "we are super powerful and free and WHOOOO." I mean that is fun too, but it feels...well, I feel if magic were real, there would be a LOT of constraints. In getting it. In using it. In your place in society. Like, it feels impossible to me that at no point in the history of the Order of Hermes would there be multiple concerted efforts to bring magi to heel...and that opportunistic magi wouldn't orchestrate to make that happen. I dunno. I like the idea of house criamon, I just find the core philosophy absurd and uninteresting.

I appreciate and respect your approach to dealing with Chinese magic. I agree that if there's no desire to treat it with respect, it's not worth it. But it would still be so cool! Even if there's no market for it... I mean I have a stack of books I want to read on like, ancient Chinese imperial rituals and stuff (in Mandarin). I've been mulling over a blades in the dark style game about eunichs in court... so I realize I'm a bit of a niche market here.

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To be fair, most western magical systems also were highly spiritual or religious, but that didn't stop a hundred different sources from tromping all over those "principles" of magic with little to no sign of respect... though nobody would mistake "I dream of Jeanie" for Thelmic mysteries... whereas the cultural 'distance' between East and west leads some people to think highly fictionalized references are somehow authentic...

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I like a lot of these thoughts, but a few I can comment on.

having recently played some PbtA style games, I can understand your opinion. However, I think this is just a difference in styles. A lot of modern games have sliding scale, and there has been a drift towards simplicity in recent years and decades. I think its more a preference than a flaw in the system. You can add some scaling successes and failures by having magnitudes of success or failure.

I've never found a skill system that was really good. The best you can do is settle into one that suits intended gameplay.

There's a LOT to think about here, I agree. The story flaws are interesting, I love their idea, and I think that some of them are... tricky. Animal Companion is my least favorite, admittedly. Remember, you can own a horse and NOT have the flaw. Make the player explain do you why the particular animal is a story flaw. One of my players immediately wanted a mundane dog companion - and I had them explain to me why it was a story flaw. After a bit of thought, they decided it was a small obnoxious yappy dog that the maga loved very much and brought as her pet to every social situation. The dog caused fun social problems, and became a fun story point at times.
Think about a lesser son of a minor noble who was raised properly, has a kennel of foxing hounds and a mighty steed, was granted a magical artifact by his witch grandmother, and is destined to meet and marry a foreign queen in poetic glory. Heir, seventeen animal companions, True Love (NPC)... what's his story flaw? Just figure out which of those is going to be the story-driving point, and the other facts can revolve around it.

And my secret for bad history is to just be okay with being wrong. Just play the game and accept mistakes, correct them when you can - if you care. History will diverge very quickly once player characters decide to create a hurricane covering all of Thessaloniki.

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Not gonna touch the last few points but I will say I do agree on removing the need to balance Virtues and Flaws. I also like the idea of letting them be bought post game. I also like the idea of letting the characteristics be increasable in game.

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Hi,

Although I agree that vf balance does not quite work in AM, never really has, and exists here because Champions did it, I mostly disagree with the rest.

Real people are not infinitely malleable or even equally malleable over their lives, but tend to learn more easily and quickly early in life, and lose ability more easily and quickly later.

It's possible to learn a second profession, but most people do not. It's possible to learn a second language at 50, but it is far easier at 8. It's a lot more likely to go from -1 Dwarf to +3 Giant between the ages of 12 and 19 than between the ages of 32 and 39. Going from uneducated to educated is easier early.

One can acquire a Guardian Angel at any time, without even doing anything! But there really isn't something one can do to get a guardian angel, and just giving a character a Guardian Angel just because is kind of similar to telling a player that his character now has a demon who especially hates him - Free Flaw! - just because.

Of course, one can always earn a positive reputation, get knighted, earn a patron, find one's own secret source of vis. But we already have rules for that.

I'd much rather see rules that make it more obvious that early experience is different from late experience. (Variant House Rule: Subtract Age/20 (round down) from any experience point total other than Exposure, minimum 0. LRs do not help with this. But maybe reduce the penalty by one per pawn of vis spent. And maybe tweak the rule to let younger characters learn faster. And maybe apply this rule to immortal beings, but not familiars, who now tend to die with their magus.)

Anyway,

Ken

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Definitely possible to learn new languages later in life: My father picked up Japanese and Spanish after he turned 70. But it's way easier to learn during more formative years. The tricky part is that some flaws are based on situation, some are based on history, some are based on future. Skilled Parens/Educated is worth as much as Affinity in Craft: Basketweaving, is worth as much as Great Stamina, is worth as much as Knight.
And some of these situational bonuses(Knight, skilled parens) need to exist for balancing new characters, while some can't be taken by a nine-year-old you're designing for your apprentice or your companion's son.
There are probably ways to do it - Apprentices had an alright system of changing V&F. Maybe every 15 years of life the person gets a 'free' Virtue to show his growth, to offset the 'free' flaws he got living there (like now being one-handed). Something like that.

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I really like the apprentice book. It is full of great content.
The "child of [social status] makes a good stand in for the virtue/flaw they might have when they grow up.

Definitely possible. My grandparents learned English in mid-life, but my grandfather was never comfortable with it, and my grandmother never lost her accent. I had much less difficulty. :slight_smile:

And then there's something like Giant, or Faerie Upbringing (yeah, a Flaw), which is rather hard to come by later in life.

AM's characteristics are inherited from D&D (though of course 'improved'), so I won't talk about whether they are the right ones for the game because of course they aren't. Also inherited is the idea that these cannot be improved naturally, which is true... to some extent. I can do strength training, for example, but no amount of this will raise me from -1 to +5. I can learn to communicate better, but all sorts of issues will keep me from becoming a great communicator.

On the other hand, I could become Wealthy. This kind of thing is a story event, and characters don't necessarily deserve to become wealthy.

As for the value of VFs, sure, which is part of why the notion of balance doesn't quite work. On the other hand (I have many of these), without some sort of economy, players will just take what they want, and the game becomes "Mother, May I" as players seek GM or troupe approval. That happens pretty often anyway, of course.

Anyway,

Ken

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after a good talk with my wife about spells today I have another thing I would like to see in a 6th edition of Ars Magica.

  1. Broader more useful spells and
  2. A way to generate partial penetration of magic resistance.

for issue 1. both my wife and I often feel that there are too many spells and they are not broad enough in their effects. It would be really nice to see spells like the ones that inflict minor, medium and major injuries as well as the one that kills all rolled into one spell and then have the magnitude of the effect be dependent on how well the magus is able to cast the spell in a situation, i.e. have the exact outcome depend on the casting roll. I often find myself thinking "Should I bother to learn this spell since it already is very similar to one that I know." and also in my group we often have trouble remembering what spells each magus can cast. It also feels very gamey and unsatisfying to have spells be all or nothing effects. In my opinion it would be much more natural to have magic be a question of the size of the effect more often.
2. Parma magica has the same problem as spells in that it is very binary, either a spell has the full effect or none of it. I would appreciate if spells could penetrate partially effectively having a lower effect size if they dont penetrate entirely. I would not mind if totally blocking a spell was quite unlikely but reducing a spells effect to the tolerable remained as easy as it currently is.

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Isn't that just spontaneous magic? Especially if you have Diedne magic for the extra oomph.

it does resemble spontaneous magic. But what I am suggesting is that spells be grouped or have outcome tables like:

death spell PeCo:
determine casting total and compare to the table below:
15: spell inflicts Light Wound (as The wound that weeps)
20: spell inflicts a Medium Wound.
25: spell inflicts a Heavy Wound.
30: spell inflicts an Incapacitating Wound
40: spell kills the target (as Clenching grasp of the crushed heart)

in the current game this would be five different spells of varying degrees of severity. I am suggesting that in a future edition of the game they be treated as the same spell cast with different degrees of force. By my suggesting it would works as follows: If I manage to cast this spell with a casting total of 45 (for an effect of "death" with +5 levels of penetration) then the targets magic resistance should be subtracted from the entire casting total to determine the effect. So that If this spell is cast on a target with a magic resistance of 15 then the final casting total becomes 30 or enough to still inflict an Incapacitating Wound through the targets parma.

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So a CrIg magus only needs 1 spell from lighting a candle to burning paris down using different levels of force?
We either restrict extremely the amount of spells magi can have or we will have magi that are A LOT more powerful than now, since their flexible spells will make them even more versatile. And they are already superheroes under the current rules....

It feels a bit like the way Supernatural abilities already tend to work - you have one ability, which you can use for different levels of effect, and your residual total adds to your penetration.

Spells are intentionally fairly specific in design - it's the trade-off between power and flexibility.

  1. Spells provide power
  2. Spontaneous Magic provides flexibility

But with this, you only have to work on arts, meaning there are fewer dials to turn. Yes, it simplifies the system, but at the cost of making it less interesting.
I'm aware that the current trends in game design is 'simplify simplify simplify!', but it is not a trend I support.

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Xavi - isn't that how Flambeau got his start, by modifying a candle lighting spell until he could do pilum of fire and then extrapolating from there?

This would effectively give everyone massive levels of "Flexible magic" and make the Gruagachan's special of "move 2 magnitudes" look mild by comparison though.

I wholeheartedly agree!

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death spell PeCo:
determine casting total and compare to the table below:
15: spell inflicts Light Wound (as The wound that weeps )
20: spell inflicts a Medium Wound.
25: spell inflicts a Heavy Wound.
30: spell inflicts an Incapacitating Wound
40: spell kills the target (as Clenching grasp of the crushed heart )

This is already sort of done with the Major Hermetic Virtue Flexible Formulaic Magic. I can see where you're going Ephemism, in that each spell is a bit TOO specific. Allowing spells to be "flexible" would make the game go faster and require PC's to learn less spells.

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I realize that just bunching lots of effects together in a single spell in the current system would make magi significantly more powerful. That is not what I want. Rather I would like system where spells are harder to learn and more meaningful to have learnt. Currently I have the luxury of not being a game designer who has to actually come up with a fully functional system but I do have ideas that about how the broadened spells could work.

The numbers necessary to cast a spell have to be less favorable, either by making DC's go up or bonuses go down.
I would like it to work in a way the preserves Flexible Formulaic Magic, for example by having spells be flexible only in the intensity of the core effect. That is no change to Duration, Range, Target or Magnitude should be possible through the (proposed) new spells.
I also envision a much greater role for spell mastery as spells are more individually powerful investing resources into mastering individual spells will become more useful and the system, in my view, should be designed around that, with spell mastery being a key feature with more options for customization.
By making spells harder to learn but more flexible in what they can do it means that inventing a new spell should not feel like a wasted season quite so often and also make it easier for players and storyguides alike to get a grasp on what their fellows a capable off.

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I think all the changes proposed in this thread are either

  • so minor it wouldn't warrant a new edition (people can just add/subtract/houserule it at home) or
  • so major it would need a full new game in the same setting, but under a different name.

I wonder if this is also the conclusion of the current designers at Atlas in light of the fact that we haven't seen any real progress since Dies Irae.

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The reason why we havent seen any real progress since Dies Irae is because the Ars Magica 5th edition is officially ended. The end of 5th edition along with a blog post by Atlas games (link) discussing their current (as of 2015) thoughts about a 6th edition is the reason for the existence of this forum topic.

I agree with your observation however. In light of how popular the current edition is, it is not surprising that people would suggest only minor changes. Following up the 5th edition is going to be a challenge for the exact reason that it was so popular. If you change only little things then why even make a new edition? and if you change everything then people will hate it simply because it is so different.

This puts Atlas games and the people suggesting changes here in the unfortunate position of having to suggest major changes in order to justify a 6th edition but whenever a major change is suggested someone will invariably love the thing that is suggested to change and hate the idea of the change.

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