I agree with the idea that we should not be blindly follow the 'simplify, simplify, simplify' trend.
ArM has always been a niche game. It is a crunchy game and appeals to those kinds of players. We should not be pushing to try and make this game easily accessible to new gamers. So matter what form 6th takes it is never going to compete with D&D or Pathfinder.
While I love the rules I think divorcing them from the setting would be a mistake. I am very much a come for the magic system, stay for the historical setting.
The question, however, is not simply "what worked for 5th edition" but where 6th will go from there. System+setting may have been great for 5th- I certainly preferred the system to the setting, but aside from a few minor details there is not a lot of improvement that a 6th edition could make on that combination. So unless we want a 6th edition that is a reprint of the fifth edition it needs to do something different.
GURPS simplified from 3rd edition to 4th edition, and a lot of those who played 3rd thought that was a mistake. You don't get much more complex than GURPS 3rd edition, but it had a very large following, as does Ars Magica. Roleplayers in general are not dumb, and the only reason TSR maintains any kind of industry lead is momentum from being the first game everybody played back when it was the only game in town. The games selling simple are the ones that have a single setting- single module approach where you can pick up the game, make a character and play it the same evening having never looked at the rules before. These games are flooding the market, none of them have much in staying power, and trying to compete directly with them when you already have a solid product is an exercise in futility. Yes in any group there will likely be the one person who 'gets' the system that the rest turn to for making spells, etc. and in most groups the storyteller system is DOA, with one or two people being primary storytellers and others might decide they want to run a game once in a while, but having it in there encourages more involvement in creating the setting, so it's still a good point and helps with maintaining the product...
Right now the direction seems to be niche presentation and 'focused simplicity' of creating versions of AM5 that fit into other systems. I'm not personally a fan but it is an oblique way of competing with the fly by night single-shot systems, so we'll see where that goes. Honestly where it goes will probably have a lo to do with what ends up happening with an aM6, or even if there is an AM6... not the sole influence I would imagine, they will probably keep an eye on this board, and on sub Rosa, and see what people are doing, not just suggesting, before they make a decision...
Well, let me take an obvious example: why is there a division is the basic use of magic?
If you accept the basic use of magic is formulaic, then, sure, there's no division: but the thing is, in my games, most spells are either spontaneous or fastcast, and that means most of the time, the player is going "and now I divide by two".
So, you could make the numbers far smaller for Arts, and have a pure addition for sponts, with halving for fastcasting and doubling for formulaic.
Meh, fantasy settings are dime a dozen. Real world History offers so much more. You can dig into Victorian or Roman without having to wait. And which RPG offers a "Barcelona through the ages" splat book?
Yep, meh fantasy settings are a dime a dozen - so they're "make your own and don't ask others".
Good, competitive fantasy settings are far more rare and require a real author (somebody like fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agone_%28j ... C3%B4le%29). If made to order for a specific background feature like Hermetic magic, they will at the very least cost a lot of money.
Would somebody - perhaps the one who has already inappropriately volunteered for line editor (Losing Mythic Europe), he will never get it back.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize you had to be French to be a real author for a roleplaying game which is headquartered in Minnesota.
Now if it is okay with you, can we discuss the ideas without the personal pot shots?
TSR and GURPs both have huge audiences in part because they do cover multiple worlds, and allow people to have their own settings. Personally I consider the ability to write my own world to be a feature in a RPG, and if it bothers you, you do not have to play in the world I write. If AM6 is going to be something other than a reprint of AM5 it will need to be either simplified rules or multiple settings. Which do you prefer? I clearly like multiple settings. I can understand that some would like simplified rules- for me the complexity and 'arcane-ness' of the current rules is part of what resonates with me for them, and makes it a significantly different (and better) magic system than, for example GURPs syntactic magic.
Spontaneous magic is really cool; but barely useful most of the time. It also tends to require looking up effect levels. This makes the verb-noun magic invention take more of a back-seat in fast sagas.
In 6ed I'd love to see simplified guidelines for spontaneous magic, whereby the level of the spell is explicitly variable in-setting. When you spontaneously cast something it may end up a magnitude or two above or below the formulaic difficulty.
In the fiction the reason could simply be the variance in the stars; making a formulaic spell compensates for that and makes the magnitude reliable. Out of the fiction it means no more looking up spell levels in the middle of an adventure.
We actually want a high barrier to entry to people can be hopelessly confused and not be interested in playing the game? We want a game that the GM has to have fastidiously memorized and the players find system mastery such a high barrier that they can't be bothered and just let the overworked GM calculate everything for them?
Yet I also agree that there are too many simple RPGs out there that you can "pick up and play" and then the interest is gone after a few sessions since they are so mechanically boring. (Risus and FATE come to mind). I think a true point about the current Ars Magica community is that yes, in general, people who stay playing the game like the crunch.
Yet, I cannot help but think there should be a serious look at unnecessary complexity in the mechanics of the game.
Why is that rules around spells often refer to the "magnitude" or "the spell level / 5" repeatedly? Why not just have all spells use their magnitude for the level, and perhaps even drop the word "level" altogether?
Why not have Arts using a smaller scale that spells can be a direct function of? (As I said earlier - Creo 1 +Ignem 2 = Magnitude 3 Creo Ignem Effects) The die roll could be repurposed to do something else.
What mechanical purpose does it serve for the Arts to have such a fine granular difference, often increasing your arts by 1 will not make a difference 90% of the time from one adventure to the next.
Speaking only for myself, having the ability to see numbers increasing on a spreadsheet each time is an incredibly addictive feature, and part (a small part) of why I was initially hooked on ArM5 (having a great SG helped...)
This to me is not reparameterization invariant; having bigger numbers is always cooler psychologically even if we divided everything (scores and levels) such that there was no mechanical difference.
My main needs would be a reformation of Magic Resistance and combat. I'm not exceptionally fond of the way either one works. Penetration is also a bit wonky for non-Hermetics, it's a bit hard to understand how they ever dealt effectively with magic beings sometimes, except through entirely mundane means.
It often feels like magic resistance produces a massive negative pressure against things which are core hallmarks of Medieval myth, like magical weapons. It feels like a legal exercise when you're hunting for loopholes.
Another big, BIG thing would be making advancement monthly instead of seasonally. I mean, if I want to skip seasons I can just add three months together, but dividing seasonal advancement is a little more awkward (what, divide it by 2? Since you can miss a full month per season without it affecting advancement - albeit not lab work.)
Further refining the magic guidelines would be nice. What's a +1 complexity and how does it differ from a +2? How do different Arts work in practice?
There's a lot about the guidelines where I have to read the example spells extensively to see how things are meant to be done. For instance, I'd never have known that I needed a known quantity of Vis in hand to weigh an unknown quantity of Vis from the guidelines, I had to read a spell for it.
Also, some spells revolve around special effects that aren't actually relevant to the description of a spell. E.g. the famous Pilum of Fire. Supposedly it creates a lance of flame If you're targeting someone in a stone shell you can't see them and thus can't target them, but if they're in a glass sphere you can see them and thus can target them... and the pilum mysteriously passes through it? So is the spell creating a flame that you hurl, or is it creating a flame on the target person? Why would someone ever do the former, since it's inherently less useful than the latter?
Clarifications like that would be immensely helpful.
As a very minor thing, I also wish there'd have been an eye to providing more information about the setting so I can introduce non-specialists to it much more easily. I know you get that in the expansion books, but it's often hard to demand people read those extensively.
Having had players like this, it's a misery. I wouldn't exchange the complexity of Ars Magica for the world, though - it's a main part of its allure to me, aside from my aforementioned issues.
I'd like it if Ars Magica were more intuitive, not less complicated.
Yeah, I hear that complaint fairly often as well. Fixing that would probably be nice, but without sacrificing something else useful in the process preferbly.
That said, this weekend I was asked what would change if Parma Magica didn't exist? Let the Gift protect against the Ill Will engendered by the Gift, and remove MAgic Resistance/Penetration completely?
It has some effects I don't personally like, but could we live completely without penetration issues?
Great. So no I have to do divisions when I miss 10 days instead. Or even 1 day.
IMAO, the advantage you're looking for doesn't exist.
There's a reason the 1st edition had advancement in months and every edition since then has worked in seasons.
Agreed.
I personally find Ars rather intuitive. I find myself frustrated by other systems that neither the strength nor the flexibility of Ars Magica. ... and it's not even like I still have math as my main language these days ...
This one is a huge player-fallacy I see coming up time and time again.
An increase by 1 in an art is actually a big deal, provided that the dice range being used is within scope; that is, the die result actually matters even if it isn't a 1 or a 0. An increase of 2 is also important; which is where blowing vis on casting rolls comes into play.
The reason why an increase in 1 is a big deal when the dice are in scope is because a 1-point increase adjusts the failure percentage. This is where things are exciting; when comparing performance increases, it is best to look at the chance of failure compared to the old chance of failure. A 1-point change can mean as much as a 50% improvement in capability within a specific spell. This is why mastery also only adds 1 to the casting total; in a binary system like spellcasting (it succeeds or fails), 1 can be enough.
Whether or not a casting roll is in scope varies from casting to casting. A spell that the caster has no problems with becomes a challenge when the aura changes, or the realm that the target belongs to changes. This means that for an adventuring magus, a +1 to any art is always a good deal - even if it doesn't always seem like it.
Yes. As long as you are casting spells and the die roll matters, and it matters that you succeed first time (usually this means you are in a combat round) then a +1 matters. That is, it matters if you are casting at the limit of your capacities --- which could be because you need a high penetration, just don't have good Arts Scores (relative to the effect attempted), or you are standing in an inconvenient flavour of aura (or some combination of like factors).
So, for a magus actually out and adventuring in "action" settings it matters a great deal.
Where it doesn't matter so much is for inventing spells, and for magi who are mostly casting in circumstances where they can just have another go if it doesn't work the first time.
When MR: a 50-50 to penetrate means you are doing half "damage", drop a magnitude and you'll do full "damage". (with Soak, maybe +10 damage half the time is better than +5 damage every time, but that's the border case)
Lab routine can offers +11 for that season you reaaly need it. (nocturnal, addled, double-overtime)
Sponting would require 2-points changes but you don't care because success is in steps of 10.
But still, counting by 10 is much easier than counting by whatever other step would replace it.
Well, yes, but failing by 11 is still a problem. So, a +1 is still handy, if you are in the circumstance that the die roll makes a difference to success.
I'm not sure I understand what you are saying here. You either penetrate or you don't? So a +1 to penetrate is always useful, if you are in the situation that a die roll is going to make a difference to penetration.
Yes, +1 is no great advantage when inventing spells rather than casting as there are lots of different ways to get that last +1.
You have a Casting Total of 16 and are trying to cast a Mag. 2 effect (ignoring stress die effect) you need a roll of 4+ [(16+4)/2 = 10], so have a 60% chance of success.
I have a Casting Total of 17 and are trying to cast a Mag. 2 effect (ignoring stress die effect) I need a roll of 3+ [(17+3)/2 = 10], so have a 70% chance of success.
For some reason you know CrIg20 PoF and a boosted CrIg25 PoF. Would you rather:
do +15 damage all the time (even a roll of 0 penetrates)
do +20 damage half the time (you need 5+ to penetrate)
And Casting Total of 15 still has 60%, so a +1 is useful half the time.
The other point here is you cannot fail a Mag. 1 effect and cannot succeed a Mag. 3 effect (unless you explode). Using ceremonial, MMF, or dropping a magnitude by touching the target or any other mean is way more efficient than getting a +1.
So in theory is doesn't do much, but in practice... you surely know better than I do
