Sorry, I don't agree to the logic. When we played EDD, we chained together encounters and enjoyed it for a long time. When we played CoC, we had a lot of fun with one-shots. (Characters made in ten minutes and a single session was gratifying in its own right.) A few story examples suffice to make these two approaches work.
What makes ArM obscure is the fact that these two basic approaches are not gratifying. The system is so geared towards a long game genre which quite simply is harder to master.
That is very true, but this could be an aspect where ArM distinguishes itself from the competition.
Some games do have something built in, like the Pendragon Mega-campaign. DnD is largely a kick down the door simulator in my view, but thanks to the sheer amount of pre-existing campaings, it is easy to pick up one or five campaign books and see how the pre-written adventures run, especially after having run one of them. So I can't say that this is why ArM is obscure, but I think it would be a nice addition to help new people. A really good "how to run a saga book" could even help people playing other systems looking for ideas (I like DnD 3.5's heroes of Horror, even if I have no intent of ever playing 3.5 again).
Not only do I not have a good answer to this, I would even say that this was something of a stumbling block for me in the start of my saga: not knowing where to set the dial on the abstraction-granularity scale. Per the book, travelling and eating out quickly adds up in costs, especially with horses.
This can be tedious, I agree. On the other hand, I still fondly remember the Dark Heresy game where we ended up asking for bus passes from our planetary contact because taking public transport around the large space station was draining our finances. I like the old WFRP grittiness, where you'd steal the boots of your defeated foes. So while players arguing over splitting coppers for the sake of it doesn't sound fun, it can also be fun RP.
Sure. And my remark is somewhat unfair in that these kids do not yet roleplay their financial choices. Well narrated, money trouble can be fun.
But how do you do this in ArM? If your covenant run at a deficit so that you cannot pay £10 lab maintenance, the magi are going to be upset. What does a shilling worth of second-hand goods matter?
It depends on what you are looking for. Ars Majica, if you have a lot of combat, player characters die. With enough dice, someone sooner or later gets the 1,1,6+ dice sequence.
ArM combat is great for a terrifying medieval combat system where even the best fighters know a lucky shot fro a peasant wielding a pitchfork can kill.
It doesn't work too well for regular monster hunts or dungeon bashes. A rare epic monster hunt in Ars Majica does work.
That's the thing, while a jug of beer at an alewife is a negligible cost, where is the limit? Party magus and two companions are going on a big tour on horseback of the Tribunal would be by the book rather costly, even if each individual expanse is not. I have no doubt that a group that has played a few sagas will know where they are happy placing the abstraction for their gaming group, this is not really obvious to a first time group. Neither is is that a small fishing boat is mostly in the negligible cost category.
Having Covenant on hand is a natural nudge towards going crazy in the bean counting, which is not interesting enough for me to want to dedicate much game time to it, having to deal with the excel tables accounting for lab-technician ManDays day to day...
Update:I will say this though, this "you have to spend 2 seasons working to maintain the lifestyle of one of your status" is a good simplification rather than trying to calculate all the income/expenditure of each mundane.
This is also the rule that I lean on. The rest is roleplay. I trust the players to play their status. If the status suggests a lavish meal and bath, they can have that. If the status suggests begging for scraps, they have that. If they need to stretch to invest in new boots or a knife, they can roleplay the doubt too.
And if they cannot do that roleplay, counting pennies is not going to be fun anyway.
Absolutely. I hate the 5ed introduction of instant deadly wounds. Open-ended incapacitating wounds from which the characters can recover or die as narratively appropriate is a lot more fun, I think.
While combat can be deadly in this system, I, for one, find it a good thing. But then again, I liked Legend of the Five Rings 4e, where combat was equally deadly, and a single strike could cripple you, and make you nearly unable to act.
(In fact, I played a shugenja, a spellcaster, that without any skill in brawl, had such a lucky roll, that he managed to hit and kiill a goblin in one attack, dealing over 40 wounds, due to damage dice exploding.)
Any semi realistic form of combat will allow instant death by a sufficiently lucky hit. That's life. What is different are the odds. games like D&D where that can't happen because high level characters are tanks covered in ablative armor called hit points is, to me, the problem, but adding a little more skill or soak to an ars magica character can greatly improve their survivability.
My group ignores that rule. Incapacitated is the last box for our groups, and then people can make their survival roll. Unimportant NPCs just die of a pole axe to the neck or just drop to the ground bleeding and unconscious. We also houseful that from -10 penalties from wounds/fatigue, people are KO'd. It makes things less lethal for PCs (from magi down to grogs) and makes combat a little faster.
What I find is a good thing, is that combat is so dangerous that the players should think twice about engaging it. That is achieved with the prospects of being bed ridden for two seasons to heal a heavy wound. There is no need to make it literally deadly.
Historically, as far as I have read, death on the battle field was not at all that common. More deaths results from infected wounds after the battle. Flight and surrender after the first couple of wounds should also be more common than fighting to death, and that is encouraged by the wound penalties, making odds drop quickly after the first bad roll.
That said, I am wary of underestimating the narrative value of a good death. This has to be balanced against the chagrin of loosing a key character. Sometimes the character is critical to a long term plot line, and their death would ruin the saga. Other times, the waste of long-term investment could ruin the saga for the player. This is most likely to be a concern for the magi of course.
@Jank 's adaptations are close to what I practice, although we have not codified a house rule. I am still working on how to make good stories out of battles.
Yes, I agree there. D&D style, where if you survive you're basically fine even if you were severely wounded, I find problematic. But ArM5 does have a canonical option called "mitigating deadly wounds." That option is explicitly there because troupes may not want to have so high a risk of losing a beloved character or villain.
Of course another key point is that combat lethality can be easily adjusted for the campaign- just remove the "dead" category unless narratively appropriate (i.e. where the payer agrees) or possibly even modify the roll to die while incapacitated, if you want something less real life. The key point that remains is that you always have the possibility of being taken out of the fight no matter who you are or how much experience you have.
Exactly. The epic hero killing 20 to the left of him, 20 to the right of him, he did not think it too many, doesn't work in the real world. There is a certain fun to that gaming experience.
If you want the epic fighter experience, who just wades in to combat knowing he's nigh unstoppable, D&D, Pathfinder, Earthdawn, etc. Avoid any system with brutal criticals or exploding damage dice such a Rolemaster or Ars majica.
True. There's so many dice in Earthdawn, one exploding is generally nasty, but not one hit kill, and even then, Earthdawn had a mostly dead system you may recover from.