I enjoy character generation, monster creation, designing spells. (I'm also not very good at it..) This is why I love Ars5 - it is the game where character generation never ends.
My thoughts on Ars 6: shift the focus from the protagonists to the story. Use the covenant as the shared protagonist, with players being more willing to pick up and drop characters as they tell epic stories of the Order, maybe a few centuries long. Build rules that encourage troupe style play, collaborative storytelling and don't look much like 5 because David took that process as far as it can go. The audience for this game: people who don't play Ars 5, or want to try a different take on Ars Magica - but are not ready to go play Magic Shoe, still want Verb + Noun Magic and exciting adventures in Europe as it should have been.
Me? Not a fan of Harry Potter. But I can see how it would appeal to many others. I myself am a fan of the Hyborian age of Conan. Ran a 4th ed game like that once.
This would actually be better as a series of Sub Rosa articles. "Ars Alternita". Hand-Wavey ways to use ArM5 rules to emulate Harry Potter, Hyborian Age, Arthur, the Reniasence, Tolkien, Gygax, and/or whatever.
I like Ars Magica as it is, sure the rules can be streamlined more to make a faster game and faster to prepare.
As was written in the begining of this topic (dont remebr who it was) - A ARM5 Revised edition with streamlined rules, a complete beastary and GM tools to make quick NPCs/Magic Items/Beasts - Sure, to whom can i send my money?!? For a new 6th edition where some houses are removed and a new order exists...I would not touch that with a pair of pliers and I would stop supporting this company.
I don't think many people are talking about changing the Order or removing Houses... Though some want the game to go back far enough to still have Diedne. My feelings on that are mixed, but even that would still be pretty close to the Order of Hermes we know. (Major differences, but still quite close.)
Personally I'm not keen on a 6th edition; I am certainly not its audience.
I'm a big fan of 5th, I own pretty much every book, etc. But this is part of why I wouldn't be a 6th edition customer; I -like- the Mythic Europe that has taken shape on David Chart's watch, and I like the way that it has been built with user-customisation in mind.
So for me, I'm engaged with the setting. I like the sourcebooks. I like the way the rules work together (or don't).
The thing with ArM5 right now is it's very modular. It isn't actually rules-heavy when you compare it to Pathfinder or even DnD Next; it's got a similar number of rules, but while the dungeon-hack games have a lot of rules that carefully interlock with each other, ArM5 has a lot of rules that just hang out doing their own thing, and for the most part you can take 'em or leave 'em.
Any work on changing the rules-set is going to provide a subset of the rules that ArM5 now has in its palette (it has to, ArM5 is a huge product line), which is going to mean playing with a smaller palette...
Would I be up for an 'ArM5 Remastered' edition? Sure would!
But 6th edition? No thanks. And I'm pretty sure Atlas are very aware of the current product performance and just how easy it would be to mess up the product line by splitting their fan-base.
Which is why I think Magic Shoe is such a clever move. It is a new game, it is very sellable to a lot of the existing ArM5 audience without undermining that product, and it has the potential to hit new markets as well. And if it does, it becomes a cross-promotion vehicle back to ArM5.
The modularity, of background as well as rules, is a deliberate feature. You should be able to use everything in one saga, but you shouldn't be committed to book A because you like book B. Obviously, the implementation of this goal is not perfect, but that's the goal. (Actually, we're relaxing that a bit for adventure/location books, because otherwise we can't actually use the material we've created over the years, which also seems like a shame.)
I agree. It wasn't my idea, but I think it's a really good plan.
In a long post some moths ago, maybe a year ago, there was another long "what to do with a 6rth edition", and there they discussed terminating names that White Wolf initiated - like Treemere and such.
In the beginning, nerds pushed units across hexes.
Then came the first generation rpgs - you got to play characters rather than units (D&D), characters that developed (xp).
This got pretty scary rulesewise (rolemaster).
The next major development was storytelling (White Wolf's Vampire). Reduce the rules - focus on the story.
After that came FATE (and similar systems) that use words rather than just numbers.
If we are asking ourselves where ArsMagica stands with edition 5 - the answer is: close to rolemaster. We've got tons of rules (like for birth complications), and a meter of books about the game setting, but we've lost the beautiful simplicity of telling a story.
The question we really have to ask ourselves is who we are: Are we a bunch of sick geeks who love to spend hours statting a familiar? Or are we actually trying to act a role? I have seen so many forum rpgs falter, because new players got scared when the old hands started discussing the finer points of the secret lore of Ars Magica.
Personally, I believe that the old rulemongers will huff and puff but move on to newer simpler rules, because Ars Magica is all they have.
Make a thought experiment:
Upgrade Ars Magica using something akin to Nwod rules
Nwod Mage is a nice and and easy to understand game (although the setting sucks).
Now think one step further:
Could Ars Magica be made into Ars Magica for FATE?
You're skipping the birth of Ars Magica-- which was based on Troupe play, storytelling, and magic. It was designed by the guy who designed Vampire. It is a storygame, don't let the beautiful magic system and that combat system fool you.
I whole heartedly disagree. I played Rolemaster for a couple of years. I don't need a sheaf of charts to determine combat resolution in Ars. I don't have characters that are 8 pages long in Ars. I would never consider trying to spin up NPCs in Rolemaster, because it was crazy. I had a lot of fun, but thank God there was pregenerated material for Middle Earth.
It doesn't take me hours to stat up anything in Ars except maybe a pack of grogs, and that's because I like having a bunch of variety.
I've run Ars several times for newbies at Gencon, off the grid, and every time, the table has told me what a great time it was. The complexity in Ars is not that complex (Seriously, A + B + d10 almost every time), and it doesn't need to have all the moving parts engaged to have a good time.
I don't know enough about FATE to properly judge, but the magic system has to be pretty robust to be Ars, and those FATE dice seem fairly simple with +/ /-. You'd need to show me an equivalent magic system in FATE before I'd consider it.
In terms of audience - when I think about the many rpg players I know they are not Ars fans, indeed they are not even what I used to think of as rpg players from 10-15 years ago. They play for the social aspects of getting together at a table, not for a set of mechanics. The fan base I know likes crunch, discussion, and story themes. Many pbp games can play for years between significant events, with all players still happy.
e.g.
To somebody outside the setting the [strike]contradictions[/strike] folds within the setting with regard to magic/faith/fae/infernal and power levels are difficult to understand.
Character creation is slower than many big brand rpgs lines, and these players like to get into the action. Truthfully I can knock out a dnd or PF character in 30 minutes, for Ars its days. To be clear I like detail and crunch and dislike too many boilerplate options.
the mechanics slow down the "play". Now I think the play is actually the use of the mechanics and the discussion of spells, but that is a key point of differentiation between an Ars player and a more typical rpg player.
the study and lore needed to play is a hurdle.
creature/item/non-hermetic effect creation is a hurdle.
They are a set of time poor, immediate-fun people, who value the shared "game" experience more than worshiping a game title. I think the hook into these players (if you need to fine one?) is to allow them to play quickly, which means abstraction of some game aspects. Therefore provide explanation of several techniques to run a streamlined game vs a detailed/crunchy game. This goes beyond Ars-Lite approach. That said, catering to this style of player will be a diversion from the line since I've been playing.
So I think the audience for Ars is the community on the boards and very few others, because the others have already found games that meet their need. I certainly think that the 6e audience is wider than just the authors, but I understand the spirit of why that point was made and agree with the gist. If Ars 6e became far more like those other DnD/PF games then you will be competing against an entrenched product in a saturated and diminishing market.
TLDR: Keep Ars a niche product, tweak some the bugs, embrace other bugs as lovingly generated paradoxes, and diversify the timeline with optional books/articles, and widen the breadth of products and advenures. Keep troupe style play, a storytelling theme, and highly flexible magic.
The core aspects of Ars Magica are (IMO) the awesome magic system, and the long term nature of the game- you can play out a lifespan or multiple generations instead of one big adventure then either figuring out how to skip ahead or why so many cataclysms are hitting one after the other.
I think the core question in terms of audience is what can/should/needs to be done to expand the audience and whether it is worth the cost in core players- and how to minimize that cost.
Does anyone under 30 play table top RPGs anymore? I mean, I am sure there are a few. But it feels like it is becoming exceedingly rare. I have had to explain to so many people that by "gamer" I am not talking about X-Box. I mention how I have written for this game, I get a blank stare, and often wind up saying "it's like D&D". And at the gaming store, there are so very few nowadays it seems, the rage is always some new card game or miniatures.
Have I lost touch with my nerd roots? What RPGs are young gamers playing nowadays? Besides video game RPGs.
Maybe if Ars Magica added some more sex, drugs, and trap music...
Shadowrun is also big, a lot of them are making use of cheap publication and creating their own- that craze keeps coming up and right now it is pretty strong. I have also seen a lot of youngsters digging up old out of publication game on the internet...
ironically miniatures seems to be making a resurgence, and with it battletech...
I suspect this is an optical illusion. There are more people gaming, and this includes more people gaming tabletop RPGs. They're just few RELATIVE to the larger number of other gamers. And they buy/loiter online, so you don't see them in stores.
This is my unsupported gut feeling, nothing more
I second that. I strongly second that.
I think a big part of Ars Magica is the fiddling with character advancement/labwork. So I think to produce a product that is about "telling a story" rather than number crunching but is still Ars Magica, it is vital to extend narrativist mechanics to this aspect of the game as well. Then you would have a story-based version of Ars Magica.
The dice aren't a problem, actually. Using one FATE dice you have three degrees of success (-1, 0, +1), which is just like a Simple dice in Ars Magica (with a 3-step difficulty increment). FATE, in this regard, simply uses a difficulty scale of 1 instead of 3. The effect of this is to lower the granularity of the game, but that's it.
I see two big challenges to a FATE Ars Magica: how to relate Ars Magica's complex magic system to FATE's simpler and more narrativist rules, and how to advance characters/conduct labwork in a way that is faithful to both Ars Magica's narrative and setting and to FATE's rules and nature.
I have only had to drop one planned supplement for ArM5 due to lack of proposals from the authors.
It was that one.
It's a good idea. I'd like to see it. But neither I, nor the current Ars Magica author pool, know how to pull it off at the moment. Even if we managed it, I'm not sure that the result would still be Ars Magica, although it would certainly be a game I wanted to play.
