While all the concerns raised surely have merit, I think there is another more critical obstacle. During the years when I was most active as a roleplayer, I played a lot of different kinds of games with a lot of different people and groups. Even among people who had read up on Ars Magica and wanted to play Ars Magica, it was a difficult game to get started with. We enjoyed a lot of successful, but not very long-lived campaigns in systems like Expert Drakar och Demoner, Call of Cthulhu, Changeling, etc. The short-lived sagas in ArM OTOH, never felt successful.
Ars Magica is a game which you either overdo or don't do at all. While there are many reasons therefor, many of which have been addressed, I still think that the main obstacle, which you cannot circumvent, is the fact that ArM is designed for the long game. Magi advance over decades, not so much over stories, and if you do not have time to develop the saga over decades, the main point is lost.
Basing the game on a real world setting, with real religion, gender stereotypes, predestination, etc., there are solutions for these issues. The troupe can decide to ignore it, and blend Mythic Europe with mainstream fantasy to the point where it does not matter. The Divine Realm can be ignored completely. There is an abundance of stories to tell even if it does not exist.
Thus, the main strength of Ars Magica is also its downfall. Making the only game which truly emphasises the long game, you are stuck with a very narrow fan base who has the time and patience to play that long game.
If the real world setting is a "patch" for the long term nature of the game then it is a fix which is worse than the root problem- after all if I am going to invest the effort into a long term game why should I settle for a plagiarized reality for the setting? Putting effort into backgrounds or background options for more univesal systems is what sells a game, not something to skimp on.
It's incorrect from the Dominion's point of view, and yes, the game presents as an objective truth that God is the most powerful force in mythic europe. But it doesn't present God's explanation of the world as an objective truth necessarily underpinning all of reality. If memory serves, there are arguments within the order itself whether the Divine realm was the first realm, from which was born the magic one, from which was born the faerie one, or whether in fact the Magic Realm was first, from which was born the Faerie one, from which was born the Divine one. You can have a chronicle about whether God is Right or not, in mythic europe, and the fact that his angels never clarify the contradictions between the multiple cults of the Dominion tends to point out that perhaps God is less preoccupied by presenting a coherent world view than he is preoccupied by being worshipped.
Except for the fact that it takes its history from the bible as opposed to other sources like modern archeology Greek Myth, Egyptian records, etc. Egyptian civilization has been around since before the "beginning of the world" by biblical and ars magica reckoning, but they gloss over the inconvenient fact while making the garden of eden an in setting historical fact.
I see the long-term nature as such an inherent part of the game that, if it is a problem, it is insoluble. So many rules build up under that nature, including lab rules, covenant rules and time-consuming chargen, that in a short saga, the game is just clunky and unmanageable.
The long-term nature is one of the things I really love, but also the main reason why I have not got to play it more than I have.
The real world setting is an orthogonal matter. Personally, I prefer the historical setting, because it gives us more of a common understanding of background lore than any fantasy setting. And I really do not enjoy reading up on game worlds. However, I do not see any problem in glossing over the problematic parts of Mythic Europe. We can take it as a starting point, with no predestination. We can gloss over social classes, gender, and everything else, if bland fantasy is the troupe preference. For the most part, if the setting is a problem, it is soluble.
Our game world is not real history, but popular history as we know it. Therefore, I do not need a degree in history. History just gives us a common pre-figuration (in Paul Ricœur's terminology) for the narrative.
If a 6ed were to be written, it might be worthwhile aiming for a core ruleset aimed at short-term stories. Then the covenant ruleset, geared towards the long game, could be an add-on. I think that would be a necessary move to attract more players. If the core could be made playable for one-shot stories, I think a lot more players could be recruited. I am not sure it is possible, but I like the thought.
I have a hard time reading it that way considering the primordial myths such as Gaia, Ouranous, Cronos, Ymir, etc. are canon primeval magic spirits. When you have a magic titan that embodies time, the abyss, the earth, the sky, etc. you have to wonder whether they are really byproducts of god's creation, considering the amount of work God's church spent on denying the existence of those entities.
Using the definitions from writing, the Mystic Europe setting of AM is just as much fantasy as Middle Earth. Since it has things like its own physics laws which are different and at odds with our reality, it is actually pushing more into the realm of high fantasy. Additionally it is easy to play a game that seems completely outside of history. As Loke said, it is primarily a starting point for common understanding from which a game can follow or wildly diverge.
The thing I feel that is the largest contributor to AMs obscurity is that the system is designed to be played by a group of DM/GM/SG/etc. Even without troupe style play, the game really needs everyone to take part in activities that are normally only done by the person running the game in other systems. Building all the secondary and side characters, designing and building the covenant, the in depth spell and enchantment design, they all favor a player base that is the type who run games.
It is not the complexity of the system since there are extremely complex systems that are very popular. GURPS and Hero are both point buy systems that are best served by a calculating program when designing a character. Rolemaster should be called "Table Master". Traveller can be extremely complex, even ignoring the GURPS and Hero versions. There are much more complex games (Phoenix Command, C&S, FATAL) but they lack the popularity to enter the discussion.
Even if a new edition (5th revised or 6th) came out offering improved rules for short or single shot games, it would still run into the issue that the target player base are the type who run games. Changing that would require so much reworking of the system that it would make Ars not Ars anymore.
Some problems arise from the misconception that the supplements are supposed to be used together in their completeness. Ars Magica goes to great lengths to tell the myths and stories of each region of Europe and the Mediterranean on its own terms. These myths are not consistent, and hence the game cannot be expected to be consistent either.
The advantage of this is that the troupe can pick a region and tell a story with that regional flavour. That works well without looking to distant myths. Of course, those trying to tell a truly pan-European saga will run into inconsistencies and an effort may be needed to establish a working interpretation of the cosmology.
I find this discussion highly academic. Yes, philosophising over the setting, one finds all sort of issue. But, you can play a very long saga without running into detrimental issues, and when you do, maybe it is time to play something different.
When I raised that idea, I had the hope that single shot rules could be made to avoid the need for troupe style thinking and multiple characters. I mean, who would want to create a horde of secondary characters for a one-shot?
This may take gross simplification, but still an interesting thought.
Yes, that is what I meant as well. Taking out the need for troupe style thinking and character design for single shot games works. But if you remove it completely from the system it takes one of the major things that makes Ars unique away. If you did not then you would end up with a system that caters to two different types of players, one for one-shot games and the other for sagas. While it might increase the player base slightly, it would not be a major jump.
Absolutely. I believe these to be consequences though, rather than causes.
ArM being too obscure to attract new players, means few buyers, and therefore the publisher cease to invest.
ArM was hard to recruit for even 25 years ago, when the product line had a real presence in the marketplace.
These days, it is hard to find anything other than DnD where I find myself.
Ars Magica isn't even in Atlas' Featured Game page. They have at least five other systems that have recent products (Planegea, Magical Kitties, Unknown Armies, Feng Shui, Over the Edge), in addition to a host of board games, card games, and non-system books. The lack of Ars content is not due to a lack of Atlas activity.
Agreed. The fact that you can have the SG ask what do you do, and if no-one suggests something that spawns an adventure, you can go next season, etc. A year can pass in 20 or so game minutes, assuming people know what they are doing in down time.
The incremental nature of advancement. They are all core parts of Ars Majica.
Again, I agree, however, let's return to the core question. Why is Ars Majica so obscure? If a rule set or world setting needs to be tweaked to be accessable for a subset of players, it reduces the fan base. It needs someone to be a super-fan, do the tweak and then convince his friends who finds the game either too complex, the setting offensive, whatever, that the tweaks fix their concerns with the game.
My presumption did not depend on tweaking. Rather, it depends on ignorance.
ArM rarely defines gender, gender roles, discrimination, relations between social classes, religious oppression, etc., and when it does, it makes sure to emphasise the loop holes. When we make a problem out these things, it is because we as players have a preconception about what the medieval world was like. The tweaks required is not a tweaking of ArM, but tweaks of our conception of medieval Europe. All it takes is to see Medieval Europe as the romantic place where we would have wanted to live, and pretend that we have read a little less history than we have.
If supplements like the Church or the Dominion causes offense, ignore those supplements. Again, no tweaks required.
And this hits on the central problem, not the question of short term rules, but the fact that when an area of potential improvement is identified there is a response of "that would make Ars not Ars anymore" and so the attempt is never made. We are an obscure game that it is hard to find players for because we are collectively snobs who don't want to expand the market for the game.
Is Ars Magica really that obscure? I mean when compared to other table-top RPGs that aren't Dungeons&Dragons (or Pathfinder)?
Comparing to D&D is a bit unfair since it currently probably is played more than all other RPGs together.
But compared to games like Call of Cthulu, Shadowrun, Runequest, Traveller, Paranoia, and other reasonably well-known RPGs - is Ars Magica all that obscure?
