What would you change in a 6th edition?

Games Discussion Ars Magica
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I took the time to read this topic before offering an opinion. Many great things have been mentioned so far that I agree with:

  • Streamline the rules in general to improve coherence. Simplify some, while preserving or even improving flexibility (combat).
  • Focus on telling stories, keeping the book-keeping and calculations to a minimum during active play. I don't think people mind more complex calculations during off-camera time (like inventing spells), but during an action sequence that is intrusive.
  • Provide a simpler way to create a character when starting play. The wall-of-complexity image is very telling here. Get people hooked up to the game before asking them to invest in hours of character creation.
  • Keep the historical setting, that is part of what makes Ars different.
  • Keep the Order of Hermes, it is also part of what makes Ars different. But get rid of some nailed down chamberpots, there are now too many of those.

About that last point, I personally found that about half of the material in the HoH books added constraints to how I saw different Houses, to the point that I no longer wanted to play them. Some because they were completely foreign to the setting (such as Criamon paths), others because they narrowed down the way magi of these Houses could be played (such as Verditius' Hubris).

I'm also dubious about the treatment the various Realms received in 5th edition. Though it had potential, the "Faeries being manifested stories" didn't echo at all with me. And the big "transcendent magical realm where you can transform" left me cold.

To me, Ars Magica should be about humanity, about how someone with greater power can use such power yet still remain fundamentally human. Whenever you start trying to exceed your fundamental humanity and become something else, you stop being the hero in the story.

Leaving philosophical musings aside, there is one element of the mechanics of the game, and that is how Fatigue is being used. I'd like to see Fatigue be used actively by the players during sequences, instead of the loss of Fatigue being a byproduct of actions. In combat, that means the player should be able to allocate an additional effort to attack in order to overwhelm an otherwise matched opponent, or to defense to fend off a stronger attacker and gain time for allies to come to his his help, or even to achieve a special result such as tripping the opponent. This could also apply with magic, to improve Penetration, to bolster his Parma Magica or to maintain concentration at a key moment. Make using fatigue mean something, giving the player a choice in when and how to use greater efforts to achieve a result.

Seasonal activities could also be reworked, depending on the level of commitment the player invest in them. Are you ready to commit greater efforts for a month, or for the whole season? You can achieve greater results. But if you need to interrupt your work something bad may happen (similar to experimentation results).

Get rid of simply scribed books on magical Arts. Books are fine for abilities, though the actual mechanics for them could change. But learning actual magic can only be done by being studying something supernatural. A magical creature, a faerie site, an enchanted object. All can provide you with new insights about magic. Magi can still create books that make studying of Arts easier, but these books are no longer a scribing projects, they are an enchantment project. You have to invest raw vis and magical resources to create them. Make each of them special.

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Mage the Awakening introduces the concept of Arcane Experience. I think it would be a great concept to apply to Ars Magica.

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I've never played Mage, nor read the rules. But such an approach would reduce the overwhelming importance of the library that 4th edition started and which was continued (amplified?) in 5th edition.

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I have played Mage the Ascension. That is what led me to Ars Magica in the first place decades ago. Never played Awakening, but I have read the rules. It is the only game I have seen that is vastly more complex than Ars Magica.

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I for one am a great fan of the Magic/faerie distinction. Being a fairly new Ars Magica player one of my concerns going in was the question: "whats the difference between magic and faerie?" because from the outside they seem like there would be great overlap. I think 5th edition very elegantly provided justification for the existence of both magic and faerie while giving each a distinct role. I like the objective/subjective distinction between the two realms.
I also really like that the magic/faerie distinction makes magic out to be in most situations the most relevant as the game is about magic.

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I am on the other camp. Faeries in 5th edition are extremely not medieval IMO. I would blur the difference to make it disappear. it will be an academic debate between merinitas and other social circles, but nothing definitive here. Some magical creatures seem to be more interested in humans than others, and some people (like the merinitas) want to draw a distinction there, but it is far from a clear cut one.

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What I mostly disliked about the 5th edition definition of faeries is that it removed the mystery of what they were. When I run sagas, I warn my players that what's in the books is the predominant theory of the Order regarding them, but that the reality of them sometimes didn't jive with that theory.

My underlying thoughts are this. Faerie represents a force/energy that is totally foreign to the world, and that manifestation though human stories is just the crack it used to force its way into our reality. Where magic is from this world, the driving force that keeps it together and living, faerie comes from outside. The divine shaped our world out of the magic, instilling humans with a spark we call the soul, while the infernal represents enthropy and a desire to feed off that spark.

Not totally incompatible with 5th canon, but less nailed down in that the driving force behind faeries isn't known.

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My preference is for there to be no true distinction between Faerie & Magic. Make Faeries a category of magicall beings, much the same as Dragons are a category, Giants & Trolls a category, wizards are a category, and so on. I don't care much for the concept that Faeries are philosophical zombies. I would prefer them to have will and motivations of their own independent of the thoughts and ideas of the rest of the world around them.

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And by comparison, I really like that faeries are spawned from stories and beliefs. I think it's a very different feel from Magical creatures, gives them a unique origin. But then, I'm a huge fan of the idea of story-magic in games, so I'm very biased. I definitely agree that Faeries were TOO well explained, and left not enough room for mystery in fifth. That's a habitual problem I have with a lot of supplements in 5th edition; too many times they spell out the world secrets, rather than offering options.

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A version of this is actually already possible in 5e - you can spend a short term fatigue level to add a bonus equal to your combat ability to either your Attack or Defense total for one round (see the Exertion section on page 173 of the main book).

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I'm aware of that. However, it is very limited and mechanistic (a flat bonus to Atk or Def), while also being limited to combat. It could be expanded and used for magic, abilities, and perhaps even seasonal activities.

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I agree that extending the idea of spending fatigue to exert could be extended to be a more general rule to a point. Certainly for spellcasting (which causes fatigue anyway) it makes sense. For some abilities, it's a bit stranger - why would expending fatigue improve my ability in, say, Area Lore, or Etiquette? That said, isn't this essentially just describing what confidence points are intended for?

Also the seasonal activities thing does sort of exist in 5e, but only for lab work - you can choose to work a non-standard schedule. For example working an extra 2 hours a day of overtime gives +3 lab total, -1 living conditions, -3 to wound recovery, you always roll an extra botch die for the remainder of the season, and you are always at at least winded fatigue (sort of a long-long term fatigue level). It's tucked away in Covenants in the lab section - wouldn't be hard to extend that to all seasonal activities.

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I did write about 20 000 words of Chinese magic up in one of the fanzines.

I don't think we can do China, because basically a lot of my China ideas moved across to the Criamon. People don't like that you need to act as if your character believes X to get power Y. They want to be able to choose what X is, or what Y is. Chinese magic doesn't work like that: its a contractual, client-style relationship between you and the giver of your knowledge. It all about service, and even the slight nudges I put in Criamon toward the idea that mystery cults include sacrificing your personal goals to the goals of the group have proven unpopular.

You literally have a path that might as well have Sun the Monkey King, Buddha Victorious in Strife as its exemplar, and people still don't like it.

And that means as a writer you can either betray your source material, and make Chinese magic about western players looking cool, which is racist, or you can fail, because Chinese magic is literally not about looking cool, it is literally about not being able to do whatever you want with your power, it's literally religious and comes with morality baked into it.

Or, you can write American pulp Chinese magic...it seems to work for a lot of people. It's not Chinese in any useful sense.

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There were negative playtest reviews of the early trade systems which used "divide by ten, divide by five, divide by twenty". That's why you got labor points.

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To be honest, most magical systems are tied into religion.
To varying degrees obviously, but the purely a-religious magic systems seen in most RPGs are a ... somewhat modern invention.

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What do you think they are, Arthur?

What's happening in Deep Arcadia is specifically and deliberately never described. It says this most clearly on page 9: "this is a book about what faeries do, not what faeries are." What they really are is never stated. Its even clearly stated that faeries may be several things which magi mistakenly attribute to a single Realm.

I'm guessing the predominant theory you mean is that they like vitality and do things for it?

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Sure, provided they aren't player characters...

I like the possibility that faeries are p zombies specifically because it places humans at the centre of the action, rather than as the poor relation species that watches while the aliens do all the cool stuff.

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One of the unique aspects of Ars Magica is that it blurs the line between PC & NPC. And in reality, all characters are p zombies. Only the actual players are real. With a Faerie, there are now 2 layers of p zombiness. No matter what you do, it is going to color how the character gets played. It makes for another layer of complexity that makes it difficult to really feel the character. More difficult for some than for others. Most people I talk to have no idea what a p zombie even is.
Another issue is that, in Ars Magica and in most other games, players take over playing NPCs for a session or two, or even permanently. Instead of explaining how the character thinks and feels, you have to explain how and why the character does not think or feel anything. They just act as if they do, like a video game character. It is a layer of complexity that creates a barrier. Same for the SG. I am used to "getting into character", understanding the subconscious motives of said character so I can react realistically to the players. All characters are already p zombies, kind of like the Sim's. But to play a p zombie that is a p zombie, that creates layers of confusion.
Side question: are humans a poor relation species to dragons and trolls? What is this "cool stuff" that humans are watching? Are not the player characters always the center of stories, no matter who they are?
Then there is metagame knowledge. Not every player is good at separating what they know from what their character knows. Indeed, almost everyone will have some level of difficulty. For example, I currently play a character involved in a romance with a faerie Triton queen. Are her feelings for me not genuine? Are these emotions she is emulating have any meaning? As for me as a player, I can play pretend and say my mage is ignorant of this metagame truth. But another player in the same situation that is only one point less experienced than me (as a metaphor), at what point do they realize that it doesn't matter? Can they separate themselves from this knowledge? How much subconsciously bleeds through?
To give credit, it is a neat idea, sure. But it is the sort of idea that is best ignored if you want to make the game inclusive as opposed to elitist.

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Is this really a bad thing? Those kind of questions are really compelling and interesting themes to explore - or they would be for me, at least. Plus, if you don't want to explore them you can just decide the answer is "yes", as it's largely the same from an external point of view. There isn't a practical difference in action between a being with genuine thoughts and feelings and a being which perfectly simulates having those thoughts and feelings.

It's no more difficult a concept than a robot NPC in a sci-fi game, and that's something the average player is perfectly comfortable with in my experience.

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I am a low-brow action and adventure sorta guy :slight_smile:, if that helps explain my PoV. LoL
But my point is that none of the characters have any genuine thoughts and feelings. They are all fictional. Only we the players, you and I, have thoughts and feelings. Characters are just a bunch of stats that spark the imagination. Sort of like a computer code. The p zombie aspect is like having a double layered code. Kind of like GTA San Andreas, where you could have guy run around and play a video game within the video game.
The robot is a false analogy. The robot knows he is a robot, as do the other characters. Actually, the robot doesn't know anything. It just mimics according to how it was programmed. But most players I know would inject some personality into the AI. Kind of like Wall E or I Robot.