Actually, you address here a responsibility of ours: passing on our culture/hobby/bug to the next generation.
I hope that I will this spring again - as I have for many years - attend a trpg convention where gamers bring their children: toddlers to teens. There the teens will sit at the tables and play the same rpg, alongside or without their parents. We will play Midgard, which has a large enough community in my country, and which does not pose a language barrier to new players.
I don't see how the less accessible Ars can contribute here. Perhaps a future Magic Shoe can?
On the convention, the issue is rather some transparency about who 'storyguides' what. So that parents can attend other tables knowing their children will have a good time, and not bring home questions about weird uncles and their hobbies: like sex, drugs, and trap music ... :mrgreen:
Funny you should mention that - but how much practice you have with a system matters greatly.
For various reasons I had to write a Pathfinder character yesterday. Took me a good part of the day.
Now admittedly I was fiddling about for how to make something work, and it does include the ... call it 30 mins ... I took out to create an Ars Magica magus that popped into my mind.
Now, I'm aware that's not entirely normal, and that on average, PF characters can be written much faster than Ars Magica characters, but still.
Few people can argue more than roleplayers - and those usually about rules, both in my experience.
But looking back, we've had practically no such discussions at the table. In mails, before play, sometimes, sure. But at the table? I don't recall any.
I suspect this is correct.
My current troupes include... 3 people I think, under the age of 30, out of 6 people, 8 if you count the saga that starts up later this month.
And they certainly would go online to shop for books - I remember one of them mentioning that the local game store "... actually has books in one corner! I never go there except for minis."
I've got a player who's constantly pushing to do everything (including Ars) in Fate, but neither of us has yet come up with any suggestions for how to use Fate to handle the richness of Ars' magic system(s) or the nature (and magnitude!) of character progression. Characters don't have enough moving parts for the former and the latter seems grossly incompatible with Fate's character development rules, which amount to simply reshuffling your abilities 90% of the time and only rarely (if ever) actually seeing your abilities increase. (Although, to be fair, I haven't really been trying to solve either problem myself, as I have a strong anti-Fate bias.)
Hear, hear! Ars is designed for rather different kinds of adventures/stories/play experiences than most other RPGs, whether "traditional" or "narrativist", which can make it hard to work out what to do with the system unless you've seen it in action. More adventures would almost certainly help with this, provided that there are sufficient newbies to buy and play them. (I'm assuming the old hands can probably manage just as well without them, so they're unlikely to buy any.)
My group tends to run at least 50% in their 20s, but, then, I live in a university town.
I'm also aware of a local gaming organization that hosts occasional "RPG weekends" and skews even younger, but I'm not involved much with them. At the one RPG weekend I've attended, there were maybe 2 dozen people there, almost all 18-25. I was feeling a bit out of place as the only one over 30 (I was 42 or 43 at the time)...
It is a tricky balance to do story telling in a game. That generally means rule lite because the story should provide the structure. Less rules means there is more of a mystery and gives a story guide some leeway. Ars magic system is rule heavy. Players can figure out what magnitude a hermetic spell is pretty quickly. They know their magic resistance and if something hurts them they can figure what the power level is fast. You can hide the dice results but that can not work long as eventually a ignored roll for the benefit of the narrative will be broken down by a savvy player.
Ars Magic is better than Champions for getting story elements in but because of the guidelines/rules it can never truly be a pure story telling system and have the magic. It would be to totally different game.
You can run more story driven games in Ars but they will have less magic and more people. I think the Gumshoe rules will be great for adding another element to the SG arsenal.
I think we should officially impose a ban on Ars Magica for anyobe under the age of 30. If theya ren't allowed to do it it will seem that more interesting.
I think these days in Denmark, if you mention roleplaying the majority of people will think you dress up in costumes and whack each other with latex weapons way out in the woods. Because that is the portrayal in the media, and the general public don't know any better. Now, when I was a lad we called that 'live-roleplaying' and what I played was just roleplay. But suddenly I have to call it 'table-roleplay' to explain that I don't dress up and do that other thing.
I find Ars Magica as crunchy as you want it to be. And I want a lot, having bee into the game since 2nd ed was new. But I appreaciate that newcomers may need a gradual introduction. Bascially I think the most vital rules are simple, and by and by you can add to the complexity. The setting and the way you play is more important for people to grasp, I dont mind explaining a dozen times how you invent new spells.
And I have no clue as to who a 6th ed target audience would be. If it's not Mythic Europe and with an Order of Hermes it's not ArM to me. Also I'd be loath to see changes to the core mechanics of Technique+Form - the magic system is a major selling point to me. If a 6th ed sees too many changes a lot of the 5th ed crowd won't follow. But if nothing much is changed, then why do it?
A significant number of tabletop RPG players are under 30. More than you probably think, actually. Many teenagers. The idea that video games replace tabletop games is like saying cheese replaces chocolate. Most people can find a way to enjoy both in their lives, albeit in varying amounts.
My 12 year old son started playing RPGs with Cubicle 7's Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space because he's a Doctor Who fan. He played Marvel Heroic Roleplaying because he's a Marvel Comics fan (and I wrote the game, so I tested it out on him a lot). He didn't really get into D&D 5th when I ran it for him and my wife because he's just not a D&D fan at the moment. Young players are attracted to many different kinds of stories and settings, and fantasy is not the panacea of gaming it once was.
For the record, I proposed Magic Shoe because I found that, as I proofread adventures coming in from David for ArM5, many of them seemed highly investigative in nature. I loved the idea of the Quaesitors and I wanted to see if we could expand the Mythic Europe brand outside of ArM core. The result was a mad notion to combine it with GUMSHOE and see what happened. So far, the results have been really good, and that's not just with experienced fans of ArM. Total newbies are getting into it, playing magi and ordering the Primus of a rotten covenant around. It's nowhere near as finely grained as ArM, and indeed the playtests might give some of the ArM writer pool fits with how loose we've stuck with the background and setting at times, but it feels authentic. It feels like Mythic Europe.
The magic system for Magic Shoe is the ArM forms + techniques system adapted for GUMSHOE's rules. It has more handwaving, is less detailed, but remains more crunchy than anything else in the GUMSHOE line with the possible exception of Mutant City Blues' super powers system. It allows for formulaic and spontaneous casting, magic items, fatigue, and investigative spell use. It could be a great primer for the ArM5 system for those who're intimidated by ArM5 as it stands. We'll see.
As someone over 30, 40, really, playing PbP or via Hangouts/Skype is very attractive. Being at home, subject to some distractions, is much preferable than going someplace else. Not that I don't like to get out, but it's easier to say to an SO, that I'm playing tonight and cloister myself in the office than it is to actually be out of the house for the same period of time. Not only that, I can play in my house pants.
No, I like them fine. I'm no fan of commando!
But, several of my fellow Hangout players read this forum, and I don't want it to be misunderstood that I'm going about in only my underpants.
Underpants-check, Housepants-check, shirt-check, yup, I'm ready to play.
There's a joke about underpants, having something against underpants, and Hangouts that's not quite synching together for me, but I can sense it in the depths of the thread.
[Sorry for all D&D references, it's just what I know the most about.]
So, being new to the boards here and a bit late to the party I did want to toss in a perspective as this general line of discussion concerning 3.x-4e-5e has been gping on at my table and other fprums I frequent. And it ocurres to me that TSR and then WotC might have saved themselves some trouble and customers if instead of solid line breaks between editions they had instead fostered a more organic sense of growth.
In a small way this happened with the different versions that spun in the orbit of 1e D&D. After all there are plenty of gamers who swore by the BECMI sets and others the three AD&D HC books. But they still coexisted and even fed each other materials and customers. While the shift from 1e to 2e was clearly demarcated by marketing there was still quite a bit more porosity between the two games than between later editions.
So I just have wondeted lately what it would take to have branches like in open source operating systems. Only rather than open source just maintaoned by the game company. Why couldn't 4e, so markedly different, have been launched or maintained as a fork of D&D.
Sorry for all the outside references. But it occured to me that the Gumshoe-Ars fork might really be the best way to move a license forward while still maintaining continuity. In fact aside from occasional updates to the core rulebooks shouldn't it be feasible to provide even 3 or 4 forks that receive semi'regular sourcebooks and updates.
This is actually something that's moving in interesting directions in the computer game space.
The notion of a #2 or a #3 or whatever is rapidly losing traction. With the advent of online, digital connectivity and suchlike it is much better to reinvigorate the old product than it is to make a whole new one.
I'd love to see an online version of a rules-set for a game that is always 100% up-to-date with regards to errata, any clarifications needed, etc. Things like the Pathfinder SRD are just awesome; the main trick is working out how best to monetise such things.
I don't know enough about the business side of print media and games to be able to answer that.
That Other Game (not TORG ) split its audience twice, going from 3rd to 4th and 4th to 5th. The impression I had was that 4th was quite successful, but not as successful as Hasbro wanted. 4ed loss of audience was less about "renting rules" than about 4th being pretty much an entirely different game from what had come before.
But I'm far from an industry insider.
The "renting rules" bit was a bit annoying, both because I like books and because the web site was (at least when I looked at it) an amateurish insult, but the idea for that format made a lot of sense for the 4ed "hey, we're a tabletop mmorpg" model: Rules are like WoW updates. Things get tweaked all the time, so hardcopy doesn't really cut it.
) split its audience twice, going from 3rd to 4th and 4th to 5th. The impression I had was that 4th was quite successful, but not as successful as Hasbro wanted. 4ed loss of audience was less about "renting rules" than about 4th being pretty much an entirely different game from what had come before.