Wishlist: Ars Magica 6

[Jonathan.Link]

@JESawyer

@Jonathan.Link

Apples and oranges comparisons aren't helpful, though. They are comparing different things that are measured differently.

They are very helpful when pointing out how different those two things feel in practice. That's why people brought it up. Using a smaller die or using two smaller dice are both attempts to reduce the practical effect of the die roll relative to the bonus. Increasing the bonus is just another way to do this.

An apples and oranges comparison is not useful at all, because it is, by definition an attempt to compare two things that are either incomparable, or ought not be compared. In this case, you're trying to compare the result of the die roll upon the final result in cases where Hermetic magic is used against cases where Abilities are used. In a game designed to be primarily about magi and magic, it seems to be about right for me: that magic is superior.

@JESawyer

Rolling against abilities feels dramatically more chaotic than rolling against Arts, even when doing non-casting rolls as in certamen. Advancing abilities feels extremely stagnant compared to Arts. Even if Arts and abilities both used the exact same scale for advancement, casting totals would still easily progress faster due to the triangular progression (even assuming 0 aura/0 Stamina, etc.).

This is a design element central to the game, my sense is that it is working as intended.

@JESawyer

If you adjust the totals even a little bit, you're going to make the die roll nearly irrelevant to the resulting action, especially in opposed rolls (combat).

If you adjust the totals a little bit you're going to make the die roll proportionally less relevant and it's easy to predict how much -- but that's what several people are asking for.

That's what a few people are asking for, it looks like 5. And you use examples that I'm certain do occur, but in aggregate will even out. The range argument is confusing. Why not just make it a heads/tails check. That's a very limited range. Will we feel better about that? There is supposed to be some randomness involved here; I'm not going to have fun in a game when I'm facing off against a far superior opponent and the die roll has less of an impact on the outcome. If you adjust the probabilities, and make those situations more predictable, then you have to adjust a lot of other things in a domino effect. You force more parity into the setting, because you're reducing randomness. Again, if you want to go that route, just eliminate the die roll and add +6 to everything to account for it. The range is just fine. As you decrease the range, you can actually make the Characteristic+Ability total less meaningful, too. If you go all the way down to a heads and tails situation, then the total is meaningless. Sometimes my characters do something because while they don't have a prayer of doing it normally are hoping that the fates align, which is represented by an exploding die. Sometimes the fates align for the other guy and I botch.
I do think that combat botching needs some reworking, I mean if you botch on defense the only ways you survive are with a massive soak or the other guy botches his offense.

@JESawyer

As far as AM5 combat goes, there are a lot of spells and tactics that yank hard on the arithmetic of combat. E.g. Wizard's Sidestep is L10 and adds +9 to Defense after the first (automatic) miss. For sword-swingers, the Exertion option allows you to effectively double the impact of your relevant Combat Ability for attack or defense for the cost of 1 Fatigue. So it's not like we're talking about values that stay in a sane and controlled range using the RAW. Of course, the spell attack resolution of AM5 combat and the mechanics of core certamen already show what larger totals do to die relevance. If it's acceptable for spell attack resolution to allow a core-compliant maga to add exaggerated gestures, exaggerated voice, x number of Life Boosts, pawns of vis x2, and Confidence to their combined Arts totals, Stamina and d10, I don't think putting abilities on the same scale as Arts would make mundane combat resolution rolls irrelevant.

In many cases, with respect to combat magic, if there isn't magic resistance involved, I'll grant that the die roll is meaningless, except as an exercise to check for botch. But, again, this is a game about magi. Magi have always, and should always be the focus of the setting. But if there is Magic Resistance involved, it does begin to play a larger roll. Yes, you can lifeboost, or expend fatigue in combat, but these things that you described are limited resources that if you use them too soon will result in some bad (or at least less good) outcomes.

@JESawyer

But stepping back for a moment, I think the important larger questions I would like to ask are:

1. Does it feel enjoyable to advance companions over the course of their lives?

Yes. Even the ones who are poor, which advance much more slowly than others. When a score changes from 4 to 5, it's a big deal for him.

@JESawyer

2. Does the amount of XP/seasons/time you invest in abilities feel like it has an appropriate amount of impact when it's time to use those abilities for resolutions, whether in stand-alone Ease Factor checks or opposed checks?

If you aren't satisfied with the progress of your character something else is going on, and it's happened to me several times, it's because I didn't design the character properly, or because he ended up going in a different direction than I had planned. Both those cases can be adjusted by discussion with the troupe. It might very well be a situation where your troupe is just rolling too many dice. I'll look at characters all the time and see, oh, they can easily notice this, and just let them notice. I only introduce dice when I want to heighten tension. If it's a non-stress die, I'm not asking for it to be rolled. If it is a stress die, it might only be to check for a botch; which is looking for that 1 in 100 outcome. If a character is supposed to be good at something, I will let them be good. If it's an opposed roll, both characters are at the mercy of the dice. Ars Magica combat is deadly enough that I don't need to improve the certainty of casualties on either side of the combat.

@JESawyer

For me, the answer to both of those questions is no, but there are other potential solutions.

I'm open to hearing things, but by and large this seems more of an exercise to bring parity between magi and non-magi. And that begs the question of why? Everyone coming into Ars should be well aware that Hermetic Magi are the shiznit.

[Heaven_s_Thunder_Ham (Heaven's Thunder Hammer)]

I think also taking a good look at this review, which even though I don't agree with many of the points, would be a good idea for 6th edition. To my knowledge it is the only in depth critical review of the system to date.

The review contains many pictures that if one wants to see, read the original thread at TGDMB. I've had to break it up into two parts, and it is long. This isn't reddit, so I'm not going to TL;DR. Read it and weep brothers.

tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55733

INTRO
The Intro chapter is 5 pages, of which four are text and one is a full-page that is attempting to look like a full color medieval wood block print. Mostly it just looks bad, but apparently there are pig-dudes or something. I think it is in reference to the half-page opening fiction. The half-page opening fiction is from the POV of a shit covered peasant who has no idea what is going on while fairies are attacking his village to burn it to the ground. Most of the people are hiding in the church, and a witch shows up with her companions to fight them off. Her companions pretty much stand around with their dicks in their hands while she Dragon Balls it up and wins. Now this is the sort of random fantasy fanfic that shows up in every fantasy setting, but in Ars Magica this is actually relevant.

First of all, the whole thing where Wizards Rule, Fighters Drool is hard coded and accepted by the system. Rather than pretend that it is a valid life choice to not have phenomenal cosmic power, in Ars Magica the players are asked to take turns playing incredibly powerful Wizards. Thus, Ars Magica came up with a solution to the linear warriors / quadratic wizards problem of fantasy heartbreakers back in 1989, and the fact that no major game since then has duplicated that is very strange to me. You'd think that someone in the balance obsessed days of late 3.5 or early 4e D&D would have gone that way, but no one did. There really are only three solutions to the Wizards/Warriors problem (nerf Wizards until they can't have nice things, let Fighters turn into god damn super heroes, or take turns playing an overpowered Wizard), and Ars Magica implemented one of them at the beginning of the Bush Senior presidency and mysteriously no one else has followed.

And it's actually cramming a bit more into there. In Ars Magica, not only do players take turns playing ridonkulously powerful Magi, but they also take turns playing shit covered peasants who don't know what's going on. These expendable NPCs are turned into PCs on a rotating basis across the players, which gives them more personalities and also allows players to take suicidal actions from time to time without running the game off the rails – at the cost of every player having to spend a certain amount of time in the trenches playing mooks. Also, Christian churches are anti-magic zones and thus places you could hide from fairies or witches – and fairies are total dicks in this setting. So all in all, surprisingly information dense for a half page fanfic piece in italics.

We start out the introduction proper with a “Welcome to Ars Magica” section that begins ranting about dragons, angels, fairies, demons, and the Order of Hermes. This represents a major change in focus, if not in content, from earlier editions. Ars Magica has always been set in “Mythic Europe,” which is basically the early 13th century of Europe but magic is real. In the early editions, this was portrayed as “mythic EUROPE,” where the wizards were secret and the world was basically recognizable so long as you didn't stray too far into into the woods. 5th edition instead is basically “MYTHIC europe,” where armies of faireis come and burn things to the ground and angels run around doing shit, and setting books rant about how crystal sphere theory is literally true and there isn't any universal gravitation. It's still “early 13th century Europe, but magic is real,” but now the magic is “unquestionably real” and takes the place of normal physics and everything is fucking crazy on a stick. This is one of the things that can happen when promoted fanboys are allowed to run off with an established setting. When David Chart got his hands on Ars Magica, it was already 15 years old, so he'd presumably been playing this game since he was a teenager and had crawled so far up his own asshole that ranting about magic physics had basically become the game to him.

The segment also boasts that Ars Magica is “widely regarded” as having the best magic rules “of any roleplaying game.” Which is just... wow. That was actually probably never true, unless you have a very restrictive personal definition of the word “widely.” There was probably a period in the early 90s when you could get a sizable minority of gamers to nominate Ars Magica as having the best magic rules, but with competition from Earthdawn, Mage, Shadowrun, Fantasy Hero, GURPS Technomancy, and all the rest, that certainly wasn't true for long. The rules of Ars Magica looked like a late 80s fantasy heartbreaker because that is what they were. By 2004, when this edition came out, boasting that Ars Magica is widely thought of at all is rather stretching the point, and it probably wouldn't make many peoples' top 3 from a rules perspective.

There's a Basic Ideas subsection, where the author tries to bring up the main points of Ars Magica. I don't think it does a terribly good job, where it seems to think you need to be eased in to the idea that the characters aren't assumed to be wandering adventurers, but thinks that the only information you need about the grog concept is that they are “supporting cast” and that a player might play more than one. Considering that players are more likely to come to Ars Magica through Vampire than D&D these days, and had been for a decade when this edition came out, that's kind of weird to me.

Now we get into the “Structure of the Book” section where the author narrates the table of contents in case you missed it the first time. That's where we learn that Chapter 2: Order of Hermes describes the Order of Hermes. So, thanks for that. Moving on, we then get into “Dice Rolls,” where the game explains how to roll its fucking dice on page 6. This is good. Page 6 is a totally reasonable place to put that information. It's 2004 and people are still putting information where it might do some good. Much better than how SR5 kept that information secret until page 44, and infinitely better than how Scion didn't mention that dice are even rolled until page 171. Honestly, I shouldn't even have to call this out as good book design, but considering how decadent and insane book design got a few years later, apparently I do.

The dice mechanics themselves are basically about what you might see in Cyberpunk 2020 or any other flat RNG game made in 1989. You roll a d10 and add bonuses, with fumbles and criticals checked for on magic numbers. The only part where this seems at all weird is that even though rolling high is good, you roll for fumbles when the d10 comes up “10” and roll for criticals when the d10 comes up “1.” That's the kind of deliberately backwards sort of thing that various heartbreakers led off with in the late 80s to try to change shit up, but it honestly doesn't make a lot of difference. They also continue their trend of being senselessly contrary by calling the difficulty number the “ease factor.” Higher ease factor numbers mean that it's less easy, so you have to roll higher to succeed. Look, it was the eighties, alright? People were just breaking out the the THAC0 mold, and having some pointless double negatives in action resolution equations was simply normal. Not that this in any way excuses the failure to clean this shit up in two thousand and fucking four, but apparently David Chart is still living the dream where Ars Magica was still edgy and new after the people who first played it had had kids that were now old enough to play it themselves. The chance to confirm a critical is much higher than your chance to confirm a fumble, so people score surprising success on about one roll in 15, and get molested by dick wolves less than one time in 30. The thing that makes it dickish is that when you roll to confirm a fumble, the Storyguide decides at that point what your chances of confirming actually are, choosing from 10% to 65% depending on how much they want you to get fucked by those dick wolves. Supposedly, the average chances is supposed to be 10%, but since players don't usually have to roll dice at all in good conditions, in my experience the Storyguide will usually ask you to roll about 3 “botch dice,” putting your fumble confirmation chance at 27%.

There's a chart that shows you what ease factors correspond to what difficulty of task, and these are a bit tautological but more helpful than in many games. Of course, we're still saying things like “Talented or skilled characters succeed about 70% of the time,” rather than telling us what sorts of tasks are in the game that talented or skilled characters are expected to succeed on about that often. The percentages listed on the chart are wrong, by the way, since they are based on the idea of characters rolling a 1-10 die. But actually it's a 2-9 die with two special numbers on it. So when it says you have a 70% chance of success, it actually means you have an 80% chance of success because only 10 and 2 produce results less than 3. It's very weird to me that the fifth edition of the game is written by someone who doesn't know what the chances of an Ars Magica die rolling a 3 or higher are. That seems like pretty crucial information that a game designer ought to know.

The final page of the introduction is a glossary which defines some extremely random words. Like, it doesn't have important game terms like Ease Factor or Botch, but does name check the 8th century wizard Bonisagus. It's sort of a window into the author's mind – trivial details of the backstory from five hundred years before the game get space in the glossary and important game terms that mean the exact opposite of their natural English definitions do not.

Chapter 2: The Order of Hermes

Yep. Here we go.

So the Order of Hermes is an ancient and secret organization of supernatural creatures who have might powers and a pretentious code of conduct. They are divided into 13 groups descended from a single bad-ass progenitor who are each in charge of creating new members within them and which have various political infighting against each other. But on the small scale, individuals from the different branches join together and share their different mystic insights and solve problems together like they were groups of player characters or something. Also, one of the 13 groups is named “Tremere” and they are dicks.

If that sounds exactly like Vampire: the Masquerade to you, then um, yeah. It does. That is because the first draft of Vampire: the Masquerade was literally Ars Magica updated to the near future, and the whole Vampire thing was a last minute palette swap because Rein•hagen successfully noticed that Vampires were hot at the time and you could probably get your dick wet a lot more with goth chicks if you made a game about Vampires than if you made a game about Wizards.

This chapter is 8 pages of what is in essence useless prattle. See, Ars Magica is at this point 15 years old and was in its fifth edition. Over the years, the game line had been in the hands of Lion Rampant, White Wolf (yes, that White Wolf), Wizard of the Coast (yes, that Wizards of the Coast), and finally Atlas Games. So first of all, there is a huge amount of back story in this game, and secondly a huge amount of it is produced by one company and considered non-canon by the adherents of the game as presented by another company. So it's perhaps unsurprising in that light that what the author thinks is so important that it should come before the character generation rules is a Nicene Creed dictating which major events happened and by process of elimination which did not. Very importantly, in this version house Tremere is not overrun by Vampires. But they also want you to be very clear that the stuff in the Mysteries book from 4th edition did happen, and that is why several houses are mystery cults.

And you know what? You don't actually care. Even if you were intent on playing the game, the fact that a bunch of guys from house slytherin got face stabbed when it was revealed that they were death eaters three hundred years ago is only modestly interesting. Certainly not as interesting as explaining what is going on now or how you can start playing. There's a weird drawing of a person on each house, which I guess is supposed to be a medieval drawing of the Founder (Founder is capitalized because reasons) of that house, and not anything you even might care about like the house symbols.

All 13 houses have their own heraldic shields that are not in this chapter and you do not care.

The Order of Hermes has seven traditions, which are set up as sort of a weird oath thing that is probably based on the Hippocratic Oath. Note that this is very similar in concept and presentation to the bit at the beginning of 1st edition Vampire: the Masquerade, but Ars Magica obviously has squatter's rights on it. While the Hermetic Oath came before the Camarilla Traditions, the latter “fits” much better. Apparently Bonisagus wrote in an exception for Wizards War into the no fighting clauses over two hundred years before there was a Wizards' War. It all just seems unlikely. It doesn't read like something that was declared at the beginning and then passed down through the centuries, it looks like something that was written after the dynamics of the game had been settled on to create some rules for the player characters – which of course it was. The Camarilla Traditions flow much more naturally in the setting, presumably because the Dotmeister was writing them in from the beginning. I genuinely don't know why the oath hasn't been rewritten to have more irrelevencies and addenda in it, this is the fifth fucking edition. When I had to do the Hippocratic Oath, we had asterisks on almost the whole thing and the thing I literally swore to do was to uphold those parts of the Hippocratic Oath expected of a modern doctor.

Cutting for the stone!

The real meat of the chapter is only a page and a half at the end, where it talks about the relationship between the order and society. This is where it talks about what your place is in the world and what you might want to care about. It's been a while since I read the old Ars Magica materials, but I really don't remember it being like this at all:

Ars Magica, 5th edition wrote:
Relations between the Order and the Church are officially non-existent. The Order is well aware that the Church, with God’s backing, could wipe them out with no problem. The Church is well aware that Hermetic magi are very powerful, and that at least some are good Christians.

Wat.

Last I checked, Mages were hiding and had a sort-of masquerade going. This book presents it instead as them being quite public but having rules forbidding them from dealing directly with mundane people from outside their covenants. We've also gone from the Divine being a mysterious and ineffable force to God being the all powerful creator of the universe who “backs the Church, the Jews, and the Muslims.” It's just... weird. How you're supposed to have a world that looks anything like medieval Europe with non-hidden Wizard Towers and an interventionist God who specifically likes both Christians and Muslims is beyond me. This game is physically set during the Fifth Crusade, and the forces of Pope Honorius III are massing to attack Cairo because the Church believes that God doesn't like Muslims. If the Church doesn't believe that... just... what the fuck is supposed to be happening?

This is basically the problem with announcing the world isn't materialist in nature. Our world is pretty aggressively mundane and has extremely mundane causes for all its historical events – even those events that were caused by people who believed in magic (which was almost all of the people for most of history). Massive holy wars happened because when popes and kings prayed to gods for advice they heard nothing but the whispers in their own minds. If there's an actual literal God who is on actual sides and people can know what side that is? None of that shit is going to happen.

Anyway, the basic idea is that you have what is basically a monastery – a small self contained communal economy outside of town that is led by literate people and engages in limited trade with the lords and cities. Your monastery is called a “covenant” and the leaders of that monastery are fucking Wizards rather than priests. The big difference in presentation here from the old material is that your covenant isn't secretly led by Wizards, Europe just has four estates (the Nobility, the Church, the Cities, and the Fucking Wizards). This is so ridiculous that I can't even really engage with it.

And last before I leave the chapter, I guess I'm going to have to talk about Dominion. Cities, we are told on page 15, often have Dominion Auras. “What the fuck is that?” a new reader might ask. Well, that's an excellent question, so you should probably go to the index and find out what the heck that is about. It tells you to look... on page 15. Because the Index is assembled by a computer indexing program and is practically useless. The actual place to look for this information is page 183, where it talks about “Dominion Auras” and “Divine Auras” interchangeably on different parts of the page, but where you really really want to look is page 188 where it actually tells you that yes, the reason why the text talked about Dominion Auras but the table talked about Divine Auras and had no space for Dominion Auras was that those words mean the same thing.

Chapter 3: Character

About 25% of the time, yes.

The “Character” chapter is 19 pages, but the next chapter and the one after that are about aspects of a character (Virtues and Flaws for chapter 4, Abilities for Chapter 5, and if those sound like Masquerade character sheet values. they sure do, don't they?). Anyway, there are three kinds of characters in Ars Magica: Magi, Companions, and grogs. The Magi are better than you. Like a mid-level D&D Wizard. The Companions are badass compared to a normal person, but they aren't Wizards so they barely count. They are like BMX Bandit to the Magus' Angel Summoner. And finally, grogs are basically just dudes. They might have combat skills or they might be ostlers or blacksmiths or something. Their purpose is to fill in necessary jobs in your covenant like barrel maker or sentry.

Players have two or more characters and switch between them as needed, taking turns taking out the big guns and being onscreen with the weavers and potash makers that the magi of other players have to deal with to get a proper window and curtains in their lab.

This is, to everyone who didn't work on this project, the central conceit of Ars Magica. This “troupe play” thing is the reason that everyone who wants to discuss RPG design theory needs to study Ars Magica, and it stands everything about the standard Gygaxian model on its head. Just for starters, class balance isn't an issue. Wrap your brain around that. It's not some Oberoni argument that class imbalance is acceptable with a good MC, or a Captain Hobo argument that narrative imbalance is acceptable if characters have similar numbers, it's that it is literally just not even an issue that one of the classes makes you Goku and another makes your Krillin. It has completely different problems from the MC and PC model that almost every RPG since Blackmoore has embraced. Difficult game design problems that fantasy gaming has wrestled with for forty years like Fighter/Wizard balance and character replacement simply aren't issues in the first place with this system. But of course, it has numerous other problems which I guess we'll talk about in chapter sixteen, because the author thinks this entire radical re-imagining of the fundamental structure of an RPG is scarcely worth discussing and simply gives us a page citation to page 219. Spoiler alert: troupe play ultimately gets about a page and a half of discussion because the author has no idea what is important or interesting about Ars Magica to people outside his incredibly insular group.

Anyway, Companions are sidekicks. The game doesn't pretend that Gourry is somehow the equal of Lina Inverse, he's a sidekick. The thing which makes this a bit interesting here is that you do not design or play your own Magus' sidekick. When you are playing the Wizard, you are the big damn hero, and someone else is playing your sidekick. And when you are playing a sidekick, someone else is playing the big damn hero Wizard that you are sidekicking for. And just looking at that, you can probably see how many problems that solves and creates. But since the book doesn't see fit to talk about how much broader a definition “splitting the party” has in this game until the end of the book, we'll just let that stew in your mind a bit.

Your attributes are your base modifiers, which means that most attributes are supposed to be “0” for normal people, and the normal range goes from -3 to +3. Attributes have a big affect on minor untrained actions because the RNG runs is only 8 numbers long without crits and fumbles, but the difficulty ease chart goes out to the 20s, meaning that attributes are essentially meaningless in determining whether you can perform high end actions. The eight attributes are Size, Intelligence, Perception, Strength, Stamina, Presence, Communication, Dexterity, and Quickness. The astute reader will note that this is in fact nine attributes, which is because go fuck yourself. Actually, it's because the Size Attribute is extra specially really we mean it almost always zero and not always counted as an attribute. Some of those stats probably seem a bit redundant to you, and yeah they kind of are. It's not the worst attribute scheme in the world, even if they did mysteriously divide Charisma into two stats in a game which is still in essence D&D when it comes to actual character actions. Abilities are fixed on character generation like you were playing AD&D because Ars Magica is still a fantasy heartbreaker from the 80s.

You also have “abilities.” These are skills, in exactly the same that Masquerade calls skills “abilities.” These are added to your stat modifier to modify relevant die rolls like 3rd edition D&D, and this could honestly be called out as a piece of Ars Magica DNA in 3rd edition D&D. The 3e skill system looks more like Earthdawn, as we've mentioned before, but the fact that Tweet had worked on a Stat Modifier + Skill Modifier against a target number system before is rather indicative. In any case, they don't really mention it in this chapter, but while attributes are kinda-mostly capped at +3, abilities get very big and high end actions are pretty much “do you have the appropriate ability [Y/N]?”

There are also personality traits. These are adjectives with numbers that range from +3 to -3, and are mostly used as roleplaying prompts for grogs. Players are encouraged to have grogs behave randomly until they have grown in to a role and have established themselves as a character with a real personality. This system has always been a bit half assed, and while it's a better system for moving characters up in the world from “groom #2” to “Jake the Stableboy” than most, it's still not actually great. For one thing, the personality trait lists are lacking (as in: they do not exist in this book), and the numbers aren't really big enough to have characters behave noticeably different from coin flips in most instances. Even a +3 Loyalty grog will take a “large bribe” half the time, which narratively pretty much means that no one is particularly loyal or honest or whatever to any noteworthy extent.

There's a reputation system, which is overly complex and not actually that helpful. I understand how hard it is to make a reputation system that does what you want it to, but this isn't it. Frankly, just replacing these moving parts with magical teaparty or single score fame numbers would probably be better. You also have Confidence Points, which are a non-refreshing metagame currency attached to the character, which is bad design for a game where players play different characters.

And that's the pieces of a character defined in this chapter. So we now go to... sample characters? This is kind of odd, there are seven and a half pages of high density sample characters. These characters have things that haven't been defined yet. And I don't mean how they have virtues and flaws even though the list of those and their descriptions are in the virtues and flaws chapter. Nor do I mean how they have abilities (and specializations) that won't get described until the abilities chapter. I mean like they list fatigue levels, warping scores, decrepitude, Arts values, and combat maneuvers that haven't even been introduced as things that can go on a character sheet. These sample characters might as well be written in Klingon to anyone going through this book page by page for the first time. And honestly, only one and a half pages of this go into pre-made grogs even though those are 90% of the characters you need pregens for. Usability for new or casual players simply isn't high on this book's priority list. You're probably going to need dozens of grogs in a game of Ars Magica, and there are only six samples – and all of them are fighters. If you need scribes or chandlers or swineherds or whatever, which you do, you're on your own.

Only after we get those dubiously useful sample characters are we treated to the actual character generation rules, which are called “Detailed Character Generation.” These are actually pretty awful. There are 11 steps, and step 7 is to spend 240 XP and then spend 120 spell level points. Step 6 involves spending XPs based on your character age. Then after all that fiddly accounting, step 11 is that you have whatever equipment you can convince the Storyguide that you have. Really, they make you spend hundreds of XP at weird exchange rates, and at the end of the whole deal they don't even bother with a price list. Because what we really want to do is do massive accounting involving literally hundreds of points, but god forbid that a game where we collectively play a medieval commune should put a price on chickens and horses.

Ars Magica wrote:
For each season that your magus spends working on a lab project, the character loses 10 points from the yearly 30 experience points, to a minimum of 0 if three or four seasons are spent on lab work. Thus it is most cost effective to have the magus engage in a full year of lab work at a time.

There are a lot of asides like that. Ars Magica is filled with weird little accounting bullshit like that. Where doing your accounting one way gives you slightly more or less XP or whatever the fuck. And the author of this edition is an old Ars Magica hand who has exhaustively discussed these weird hiccups in the system with other people. So... he tells you about them. I mean, he's writing a new fucking edition, so he could just fix this shit, but instead he just sagely informs the new player that things are in fact fucked up because it was designed in the 80s and some of the numbers are simply weird. I mean, what can you do? Other than write a new edition, oh wait!

I don't even know what all this accounting is for. The characters aren't balanced, they aren't even supposed to be balanced. It's just obscurantism for the sake of it.

OSSR: Ars Magica
Chapter 4: Virtues and Flaws

Some flaws are worse than others.

Virtues and Flaws are conceptually similar to Merits and Flaws from Masquerade. Because the Merits and Flaws of Masquerade are quite obviously just the Ars Magica ones converted to the new system. 5th edition has simplified things such that now Virtues and Flaws only come in 0 point, 1 point, and 3 point flavors – the 2 point and 4 Virtues and Flaws have been dumped altogether. The categories are familiar to any Vampire player, but of course you should remember that Ars Magica did it first.

Physicals are called “general,” mentals are called “personality,” and supernaturals are split into “supernatural” and “hermetic,” but you know the drill.

Even though the Magi and Companions are better than the grogs, they still need to take an equal number of points of Virtues and Flaws. I don't understand the reasoning there. Frankly, I don't understand why Flaws are worth points and Virtues cost points. I mean, I understand why Champions did that, and I understand that Ars Magica copied that concept because it was the 80s, but in the 21st century I don't understand why it is still like that.

See, like every collection of Flaws (or disadvantages or drawbacks or negative qualities or whatever your system calls them), there are ones where the character is just objectively worse, and there are ones that just generate stories. For the character or the player, not all Flaws are bad and not all Virtues are good. And the book acknowledges this! And then just shrugs. Some Flaws are good, what can you do? It's not like you're writing a new edition or anything.

Secondly, the game as a whole isn't even intended to balanced on any axis, so why bother asking the Flaws and Virtues to balance out? If you want to play a wealthy baron werewolf with flexible formulaic magic, why not? What is the game protecting us from by forbidding a character from taking that fourth major Virtue or sixth minor flaw? And why are we being asked to “pay” for great wealth in the first place when the game will let us have whatever starting equipment we want just by sucking the Storyguide's flacid cock?

This whole false balance of Virtues and Flaws paying for each other is a sham. And the author knows it's a sham, because he's been playing this game for a decade and a half and knows damn well that the 1980s game design concept of character flaws balancing superpowers never really worked out. And then instead of actually doing anything about, he just draws attention to this fact and walks off.

26 pages, and the only thing we've learned is that one in ten doesn't seem to mind.

Chapter 5: Abilities

Skill lists aren't much different one game to another, only the amusing capering changes.

This 6 page chapter is just the skill list. It probably should have gone into the character generation chapter instead of the sample characters. Organization of this section leaves much to be desired. First of all, some skills can only be taken by educated people, and those have an asterisk on them. But some skills are fucking magic powers that you have to have some sort of magic blood to learn, and those don't have a note on the skill heading – they just have a parenthetical “(Supernatural)” at the end instead of being General or Academic or whatever.

But what really comes down to it is that the descriptions of the skills don't really tell you what the skills do. Basically what a skill does is add to die rolls and rapidly eclipse attributes as your primary source of bonus. But in addition to that, there are also various effects of having skills at specific levels, and those effects are hidden elsewhere in the book. So for example, you need to have a Dead Language (Latin) value of +5 or higher in order to write books. That information is not in the description of the Dead Language skill, it's in paragraph two of the Magus Apprenticeship description in the lifepaths portion of the character generation table. That paragraph also tells you that you need a +3 in Magical Theory to set up your own lab, a fact that is likewise not mentioned in the Magical Theory skill description.

The author's idea of where to put information are... heterodox.

Chapter 6: Covenants

I thought we were an autonomous collective.

This chapter dedicates 7 pages to talking about covenants. The covenant is your autonomous collective, and all the characters that you play are doing various stuff in the covenant while you are not playing them. They are like monasteries or bishoprics. But before I get too far into that, and how this chapter should be much much longer, I want to rant about Manuel I Charitopoulos, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. At the time this game is set, he was in exile in Nicea, because Roman Catholics had sacked Constantinople sixteen years earlier. But the important thing is that, well, he existed. And the entire Eastern Orthodox faith existed. And had existed for over a century and a half since the split of the pentarchy. Reading this book, you would not know that. They talk about “the Church” and Catholicism interchangeably as if there is only one flavor of Christian. But some of these covenants are specifically in Eastern Europe, which has a different set of bishops in it. Eastern Orthodoxy does not get mentioned even once in this entire book, and that is very strange to me.

That is one unhappy looking ecumenical patriarch.

Basically, the Covenant is you playing Dwarf Fortress table top. So you'd probably think this chapter would have a lot of stuff about medieval economies and how many people needed to be tending fields or blowing glass or whatever to provide certain levels of economic development and in turn allow for the support of various specialists. And you'd be wrong. The first hint that you would be wrong is probably the fact that the whole chapter only gets seven pages. But even within that context we squander most of the page space on a tortured seasonal metaphor for covenants.

See, you can play in a covenant that is either a new colony, an up-and-coming established colony, a thriving city, or a decadent settlement in decline. And these are metaphorically spring, summer, autumn, or winter covenants. And that's most of the chapter. No coopers, no grain yields, not even a discussion of how the people working the lands of you fourth estaters fit into the feudal structure. Do you have to lend grogs to local barons? Do you have a charter like a city? I don't know.

What it gives you instead are “build points” and virtues and flaws for your covenant (called “hooks and boons” even though they are exactly the same as virtues and flaws). The build points... well they don't deliver anything remotely similar to a balanced product and I don't think they are supposed to. After all, you can just choose to play a more powerful covenant and start with more build points.

Basically there's a pretty great lead-in, where it promises a game of low fantasy Dwarf Fortress and then it just tells you to figure it out your own damn self.

OSSR: Ars Magica
Chapter 7: Hermetic Magic

This would be better.

This is the magic chapter, and it's 19 pages. That might not seem like a lot for a game as magic-centric as this one, but the next chapter and the chapter after it are also about magic – so really this magic section lasts 88 pages. It's just divided into separate chapters to make that seem less insane.

One of the central conceits of the game is that magi have an aura that unnerves people. If you have “The Gift,” you can learn magic and cast spells and be awesome, but people intrinsically dislike you. This is presented as one of the big reasons that Wizards hide away in their towers and let mundanes do the talking for them. This chapter spends over a page giving examples of various people reacting poorly to Wizard groups because they are unnerved by the presence of their Gift. And we're also given the raw brutal mechanics for this massive edifice of game setting: it's a -3 penalty to social rolls if you aren't trying to scare people. I think I mentioned this earlier with the whole attributes/abilities thing, but while a -3 penalty is a pretty big deal when you are untrained and trying to do bullshit tasks, it doesn't mean shit if you actually have trained in the relevant skills. If you want to be a magus face, you can just do that. You don't need a “Gentle Gift” or any of that shit, you just need to train Etiquette and Charm and move the fuck on with your life. A non-wizard companion is still going to be better at that sort of thing, but only by 3 pips. And a Wizard can also know mind spells that make a much bigger difference than 3 pips. But we'll get there when we get there. Suffice to say: the mechanics for Wizards being scary and distrusted by mundane people just aren't there. However, my experience is that socially you're probably fucked in Ars Magica because there's so much fluff about you being screwed in social circumstances that the Storyguide is probably going to mind caulk in something draconian.

There's also a little bit of history in this chapter and I think this might seriously be the fourth time in the book that it has told you about how Bonisagus created a teachable unified magic system five hundred years ago and that's why everyone in the hermetic order can share spells. This piece of history is such a boner stroker for the author that he repeats himself like he was writing the Book of Mormon.

Anyway, the meat of the chapter is probably the thing about the Hermetic Arts, which is to say the magic system of Ars Magica that the author is so enamored with. It's... kind of an incoherent mishmash of ideas, actually. The basic idea is that you have verbs and you have nouns and you have skills in both, and you mix the verb with the noun to do [verb] to [noun]. Which would probably be a lot easier to parse if any of the verbs or nouns were unambiguous about what they did. There are five verbs and ten nouns, so there are fifty categories of magic but only fifteen magic skills. People specialize in a couple of verbs and a couple of nouns and then they are specialists in noun * verb of the fifty spell lists. This has the presumably intentional effect of causing characters to learn spells from different lists most of the time.

OK, here's the part where things go off the rails: you're supposed to be able to make up new spells on the fly. With fifty categories of magic and incredible amounts of overlap between them, you can imagine that getting two people to agree exactly which category a newly discussed spell belongs in. If you want to change the weather, would you consider that verb to be “create,” “destroy,” or “control?” Would you consider the noun to be “air,” “water,” “heat,” or “power?” This is not an out-there or obscure concept for a spell, and you can make a lot of different cases for it. The spell lists of pre-made spells are basically no help either, because there are weather controlling spells in several different categories. Destroy Air, Destroy Water, and Control Air all have example spells that make it stop raining, with different specifics and difficulties and there's no reason to believe that those are even close to the only verb/noun combinations that could plausibly be used to stop water from falling out of the sky.

OK, it doesn't actually say this in the magic chapter, but things actually get even more fucked once you get to the spells chapter, so I guess I should probably talk about this here: spells aren't restricted to having just one verb or noun. They can have more. And when that happens, one of two things happens: either the spell difficulty goes up a little bit (and you still use the same verb/noun combination), or you use the lowest of the relevant verbs and nouns you use. So if you're a water wizard who is totally badass at water magic and you want to do something that your Storyguide thinks is kinda plant flavored, you either cast it anyway or get totally cockblocked depending on whether the MC decides that the plant aspect is one kind of modifier or the other. The sample characters have high arts values of 10 or 12 and low arts values of 0, and the entire RNG is only 9 numbers long, so if the Storyguide asks for the wrong combination of verbs and nouns (even implicitly through being a dick about corequisites), you go from auto-success to auto-failure.

The nouns have... problems. For starters, four of them are Air, Earth, Water, and Fire. Now, in four element theory everything is made out of the four elements. And I don't mean that everything is arbitrarily categorized into one of the four elements, I mean that literally everything is made out of literally all of the four elements. Even the air around you has earth, water, and fire in it. So to begin with we are on a fairly shaking foundation – there are four nouns which each are supposed to describe everything in the universe (or at least, facets of them). Next we get to plants and animals (other than humans), which have two categories for them, which is fine I guess, in that while technically every plant and animal has solids and liquids in them, it is often uncontroversial whether something is alive or not. And then there's “Corpus” which affects humans and also human bodies and also magic creatures that look human. That one's obviously problematic and the author fucking admits this by saying:

Ars Magica, 5th edition wrote:
Since natural philosophy asserts that these things have no more in common than their appearance, and Corpus does not affect human statues, Hermetic theorists are puzzled by the range of this Form.

Yeah, that's right. You're supposed to create spells spontaneously at the gaming table based on a magic category whose range is unknown to the people in-world and doesn't make internal sense!

But things get worse. The last three nouns are things that don't exist. Yes. Really. The easiest to adjudicate one is “Mentem” which governs the Mind. Now, minds aren't real things, they are cognitive constructs we use to try to understand the emergent properties of our own physical brains. Still, you can kinda-mostly work out what an effect on a mind might do. Dualism doesn't make any sense when examined closely and isn't true, but it makes narrative sense for the most part. But then we get to “Imagem,” which affects the “sensible species” hypothesized to exist by Thomas Aquinas. So it governs the things that come off of a torch that allow you to see it. But not the light, because light is separate. So, the things that fly off physical objects that you can see that aren't light. Which is not something that is real and also not something that makes any fucking sense. It's not like “the mind” where you can kind of understand it in your gut even if you can't understand it with your brain. You just can't fucking understand it at all, because it's completely counterfactual and isn't internally consistent. And finally there's “Vim,” which affects raw magic power that is completely epistemically closed. It's the magic of doing the things that the magic of doing those things can do. So good luck coming to an agreement on that.

The verbs are also fucked. Probably more fucked. There are five of them, and one of them gathers information, and one of them creates temporary stuff. Those are... kind of clear. Obviously the information one gets kind of screwy when we start talking about imaginary nouns, but as long as we're detecting gold and badgers it's fairly self explanatory. The other three... are unparseable. They are “Perdo” which “destroys” things; “Rego” which “controls” things; and “Muto” which “transforms” things. Obviously, if you've looked at the spell lists of like any game system ever, you've noticed what in Shadowrun is called “Manipulation Bloat” (D&D of course has something similar with Transmutation), which is the thing where pretty much any effect you could possibly imagine could be defined as things changing from what they were to something else. I mean, that's basically what an “effect” is. Rego is charge of having things be controlled by you, which you might think would exclude acquiring new traits or losing traits they currently have and you'd be wrong because the Rego examples very definitely include things like changing a dead stick into a fruit bearing tree. And Perdo does all kinds of shit where things just stop having the traits they had and now have different ones. Since every conceivable change is both a destruction of the old trait set and a creation of a new one, Perdo can do pretty much anything if you word it right.

But the real money for your crazy arguments is Muto. Muto is about “transforming” things, and it is about giving things traits they “cannot naturally have.” Now the examples shit on that immediately and ramble on about various traits that things obviously could naturally acquire under certain circumstances. And the spell examples are a whole other bundle of crazy. But really the bottom line is that the restriction on what Muto can do is supposed to be that the change must be at least a certain amount drastic. Not at most, it has to be at least. So even if you could agree on what the limits of Muto were, they wouldn't actually matter, because the effects allowed at whatever the limits are and anything bigger than that. So with Muto Auram (transform air), you could turn any amount of air into absolutely anything as long as you could convince your Storyguide that it was different enough from air. That's not me making fun of a loophole in imprecise language or something, the actual spell list includes making stones or oil rain out of the sky by transforming air into other stuff.

Magic is given a series of limits, which are appropriately magical sounding but don't solve many problems. You can't use magic to overcome miracles, which basically just gives the MC the right to shit on you whenever he wants. You can't use magic to permanently change “essential natures,” except of course obviously for Muto which only does that, so um... whatever. Then there are lesser limits like how Creo can't create permanent things unless you spend magic gems, but again since Muto exists and you can permanently transform the fucking air into whatever you want, it doesn't make any practical difference. You aren't allowed to reverse aging, but you're allowed to turn into a creature that doesn't age if you care, and so on and so on.

The actual spells themselves have difficulties that are very high and have huge modifiers. The Fast Casting modifier itself is -10 to your roll, which is bigger than the entire range of the die roll. Your base bonuses are one verb score plus one noun score, and the range between a good noun or verb and a bad one is also larger than the RNG even for starting characters and variance only goes up from there. If you take extra time to cast, you can add more skills to the roll, all of which are probably pretty comparable to the entire RNG. So... basically everyone is a D&D Truenamer, with absolutely everything that implies.

Magic resistance and penetration are calculated in extremely complicated ways, and involve a lot of things being added, subtracted, and divided by things. I won't say that magic always works or never works, because subtly different scenarios can involve your opponent's magic resistance going up or down by sixty. Yes, the RNG is still only 9 numbers long. Frankly, I don't understand why a die is rolled to save against magic under any circumstances. The formula so rarely outputs a number that you have any hope of succeeding that you also have any chance of failing that it may as well just be completely deterministic.

The chapter has a bit on magic combat and you don't particularly care, and then it has some writeups of a handful of mystery cults from an obscure 4th edition book that the author absolutely felt needed to be brought into the core book. Or possibly the author decided that they absolutely needed to be rewritten with the angry pen of a new edition, I would have to compare the writeups directly and I can't bring myself to care.

Anyway, that's just one chapter, but we ended up talking a lot about the spells chapter that comes the chapter after next, so next post will probably be three chapters.

OSSR: Ars Magica
Chapter 8: Laboratory

Pretty much this.

In between the chapter where it talked about to cast spells and the chapter that explains what spells actually do, there is a 17 page chapter on what Wizards do with their downtime. Because this book is not very well organized.

The laboratory rules are fiddly and use a lot of math. They are more complicated than they need to be. They do, however, get the job done. Players do weird little accounting tricks, bicker about leaving problems to fester because they have cauldrons on to boil, and generally get in character as petty and insane academics. You can really see that this part was put together by a group of people who just got out of college and was likely partially written while still in college. It is evocative, and despite the protestations of the author that the magic system “is so” totally sweet (it is not), it is this academic logistics and dragons material that is the primary selling point of the game.

There are a lot of places that the laboratory rules could be cleaned up. Presentation could certainly be improved. Why is there no master time chart? Why doesn't it ever mention whether you're supposed to be working on the sabbath or not? Why don't the times divide evenly into each other? What the fuck?

See: if you miss more than 10 days of lab work in a season, your lab work is fucked. There are an average of 13 Sabbath Days in a season, so observant Christians, Muslims, and Jews would spend at least 13 days not doing any lab work (plus major holy days, obviously). Does that mean they are proper fucked all the time? If not, does that mean that Ahteists and Pagans can go be weekend warriors and still come back and stir the cauldron without any problems? This question is very important, and you'd think that a 5th edition would discuss these sorts of issues, but it doesn't.

What you get instead are discussions about which materials or mundane objects give which quirky bonuses to what categories of magic effects. And discussions about familiars, and apprentices, and weird charts of strange experimental results. Point of fact: you can opt for “extra risk” on your experiment of 1, 2, or 3 points. If you don't do that, experimenting has a 1% chance of giving you a “discovery.” If you experiment with 1 or 3 points of extra “risk” the chance goes up to 10%. If you experminet with exactly 2 points of extra risk, the chance goes up to 11%. Because the RNG is extremely screwy and this chart has good results sandwiched between bad results and thus modifiers to the die roll aren't always good or bad.

Is this bad? I'm not sure. It's certainly old, and it could really honestly be cleaned up a whole lot on a whole bunch of axes. But it is what the game is – poking through the completely batshit rules of magic looking for loopholes that let you acquire mighty arcane powers. This fiddly logistics and dragons insanity and the troupe play character rotation are the two main reasons you'd play Ars Magica. Hell, they are basically the only reasons you'd play Ars Magica instead of some other game that didn't look like a fantasy heartbreaker from the late 80s.

And honestly, shit like this is fun (obviously, not all people enjoy logistics and dragons, but for those who do, this is fun). People have repeatedly recommended the Covenants book on this thread, and well they should. Because it's fun in the same way as this crazy lab stuff but includes more characters. The Covenants book should have been more detailed still, and at least half the information in the Covenants book is shit that should have been in the basic book, but it's what people come to Ars Magica for and it's a big reason why if you want to design games you should read Ars Magica.

Chapter 9: Spells

Needs moar cowbell.

We already touched on the spells back in chapter 7, so we'll go through this quick. Well, quicker than the 52 pages of this chapter might indicate at first. A lot of the information in this chapter ties directly into the rules for actually casting these things which came two pages ago, so there's a lot of page flipping if you want to understand what the fucking hell the book is talking about. The first five and a half pages are discussions of rules for learning, designing, and casting spells that really should be put together with the rest of those, and the remaining 46 and a half pages are spent giving examples and guidelines for each of the fifty spell categories recognized by this game. The extra half page is because there is a half page of box text that goes with the spell guidelines that is ectopic in the spell rules section of this chapter because the typesetter doesn't know what he is doing.

So basically we have two things to talk about: the spell design rules and the spell guidelines. The spell design rules are crazy, and the spell guidelines and examples are contradictory word salad.

I should really talk some more about the madness spiral that is “requisites.” See, the game understands that the categories don't make sense and there's nothing you could possibly want to do that is unambiguously one thing and not others. So rather than even attempt something simple like “it's whatever the best fit category is and shut the fuck up” they acknowledge that all spells have parts that are other things. So if you want to turn a dude into a toad, that's Muto Corpus. But, the fact that they are wearing a leather jacket means that it's also Animal. And the fact that they have linen pants on means that it's also Herbam. And the fact that they have brass buttons means that's it's also Terram. And so on and so on. So here's what the Storyguide does: they decide whether a requisite is “needed,” “enhancing,” or “cosmetic”. If it's the first one, the spell just fucking fails, because you use the lowest of all those art values (which is almost always zero). If it's the second one, the spell's difficulty ease magnitude goes up by one “or more” and that probably doesn't make any difference. And if it's the third one, the spell casting difficulty ease doesn't change at all and that definitely doesn't make any difference. Keep in mind that it's almost literally impossible to imagine an effect that doesn't have some level of impact on one of the other categories (for fuck's sake, one of the other categories is “things having to do with magic” which by definition all spells have). So spell design is pretty much 100% Mother-May-I, even if you can get rough agreement at your table as to what the spell categories actually do.

Don't write game mechanics like this.

And I guess I should talk about the spell parameters. The base effects add to the spell difficulty ease level if they are more powerful, but far larger impacts on the spell difficulty ease level come from the spell's parameters. Like range and targeting restrictions and shit. This means that the amount of magical power you need to cast a spell has actually very little to do with how powerful the effect of that spell actually is. This is like a parody of the “accounting for power” that people sometimes accuse GURPS or HERO of being. Oh, and the difficulty of casting a spell is called its “spell level” because it's a fantasy heartbreaker from the 80s. Basically, every additional Magnitude adds +5 to the spell difficulty ease, and remember that adding even 2 levels decreases your chances of succeeding on casting by twenty one percent, if and only if it happens to already by on the RNG, which it probably isn't because the RNG only has 9 numbers in it. It's actually really difficult to figure out what the fuck they are talking about here if you don't already know, because there's supposed to be a chart telling you what the magnitude shifts are for selecting any particular parameters, but it's not actually in the book. The descriptions of the parameters are there, and they are in the order of lowest magnitude to highest in each category, but some of them are the same as the one before them so just counting entries will give you the wrong answer. The ones which are in the list and a zero magnitude increase from the one before it are mostly described as being such somewhere in the text in natural English. But holy fucking shit this section is hard to use for new players.

This parameters deal is a huge thing for spontaneous magic. If you have time to draw a circle around a group, the spell level could be 10 lower. So even though spontaneous magic starts at a penalty compared to pre-written spells, you should be able to pull off some pretty boss shit by min/maxxing parameters to the situation at hand. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned the spontaneous magic rules are a kaleidoscope of madness and despair in that you are never going to get anyone to agree with your interpretations of what spell effects are supposed to do in an on-the-fly sort of way, which means that spontaneous casting is generally just asking for a table argument unless one of the people at the table (usually the Storyguide or the guy who owns the most books) has already bullied all the other people into doing what they want them to do.

Consensus!

The sample spells and guidelines are basically insane. Remember our discussion of Muto and our discussion of requisites? Well, according to the guidelines, Muto + Aquam spells (transforming liquids into shit) requires requisites if you want to change them into non-liquids. And Muto + Terram spells (transforming the dirt into shit) does too. But Muto + Auram spells (transforming thin air into shit) does not. Why not? I don't know, it's just not in the chart. It's base level 15 to Creo Animal a mammal, but it's only base level 10 to Muto Auram thin air into a god damn Manticore. Meanwhile, the spells themselves are written at different times to wildly different assumptions and quite often basically the same effect will appear in two different spells 20 levels apart. Remember always: the entire RNG only has 9 numbers on it, so 20 levels of spell is more than the entire RNG twice over. Extra bonus points for the fact that it's seriously -6 magnitude to only change “one property” of dirt, so if you want to change the property of the dirt from “is not the Pope” to “is the Pope” I guess you can try to figure out what the fuck that is about. More seriously, the game really wants you to care about intrinsic qualities in an Aristotelian sense, but clearly the author has no idea what that means and Aristotle never thought you could just cast a spell to line edit this shit and there's never been a logical framework developed for how the fuck this shit is supposed to work.

[Heaven_s_Thunder_Ham (Heaven's Thunder Hammer)]

Chapter Ten: Long Term Events

Some things take a long time.

This is an 8 page chapter which really ties in to the whole lab work thing from two chapters ago and probably should have been merged. But as previously mentioned, this book is not well organized.

So this chapter covers the experience rules, which were obliquely hinted at back in the Character chapter, and they are a fairly standard 1980s fantasy heartbreaker hash. Things cost triangular amounts of XP, and XP is doled out in small amounts over time. Characters hyperspecialize because there are a lot of skills and there's no way in fuck you can be even passably good at a broad swath of them and you switch characters a lot. Things aren't remotely realistic in the sense that it follows the D&D model of people having more XP when they are older so that middle aged men who happen to specialize in that direction are better at athletics than unexperienced louts in their mid twenties. It's pretty math heavy. It doesn't give balanced results. I honestly just don't even know what this system is for. It's the kind of thing people wrote in 1989 and I don't know why it's still here. This is, to my mind, the bad part of logistics and dragons. It's not immersive, it's not interesting, it's not a fun part of the game, it's just clunky and old and bad.

We also get a rundown on what they mean by “seasons,” which as mentioned a bit during the Laboratory chapter are the basic unit of work time. Seasons don't actually correspond to anything. There are four seasons in a year, but they don't have defined beginnings and endings. They aren't even sequential. Most grogs spend two seasons “worth of time” at their job and two seasons “worth of time” doing personal enrichment shit. But they don't do one and then the other, they are interspersed with each other, sometimes even within the same day. Which really comes down to the whole “missing days of lab work” thing that's supposed to be a central facet of the entire magus experience. How do you know if you missed a day of work in “this season” when you can mix-n-match your time any way you like into any of three other seasons whenever you want? Why aren't we tracking time in units that actually add up to things? Why is this all so bullshit?

A big thing on advancement is the “quality of exposure.” Each season you get XPs that can only be spent on shit you used that season, and you get a number of XPs based on the most qualitiest exposure you got that during that season. But then, seasons are made of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, so I guess you assign adventures to whatever season would otherwise have the worst exposure in it. This means that having teachers and pimpass books and shit around at key times makes a huge difference in how fast your character advances, and other times makes no difference at all. Also, characters naturally hyperspecialize, because you put your craftsdwarfs to crafting and your potash makers to potash making and they end up with seasons where they only get XP to spend on things they are already good at.

Over time, characters get old and turn into Warhammer style chaos mutants. This is called Aging and Warping respectively. Aging is exactly what it sounds like, and while the system is needlessly complicated with double negation (living in poor conditions subtracts a negative number from your aging roll), it mostly does the job. Note that we're still in the “athletic characters continue to gain athletics skill as they age and only start rolling to see if they start degenerating at age 35, so the best runners are in their mid-forties” but it's an RPG and shit like that happens. With all this stuff about aging and seasons passing and shit, it would be nice if the game could somehow emergently make young people good at tasks of strength and sexiness while old people were good at tasks of experience and guile, but it doesn't. You aren't even more likely to degenerate in physical attributes than mental ones. It's entirely likely to meet a dude in his mid fifties who's stronger than he's ever been but just talks like Hodor now. Warping is a thing that happens where you accumulate chaos mutations if you try to live in an area with an aura rating greater than 5. Note that this includes Divine auras, so the Pope, Caliph, and all the high end holy men of Christianity and Islam are degenerate chaos mutants in this setting. So... that's odd.

OSSR: Ars Magica
Chapter 11: Obstacles

This is the chapter with combat in it.

Ars Magica 5th Edition wrote:
Combat is generally not the most important part of Ars Magica stories, but when it occurs it is both dramatic and deadly.

They're leading with that, so I'm leading with that too. This chapter is 11 pages long and is almost entirely about combat. It's not called the combat chapter because that would make the combat rules too easy to find. Except for a quarter page at the end of the chapter that is mysteriously about travel, everything in this chapter is about stabbing people with swords or recovering from having been stabbed with swords or getting swords to stab people with. But it's not called the combat chapter and that way pretentious Ars Magica fans can claim with a straight face that Ars Magica doesn't even have a combat chapter.

Ars Magica has a bad combat system, and people who want a good combat system or even just a combat system that isn't bad can always go play Dungeons & Dragons. In the previous edition, wearing armor literally made you take more damage in combat because the increase in damage from enemies having lower ease factors to hit you were larger than the reduction in damage from the armor. And people just sort of acknowledged that the combat rules were crap and didn't care because the game was about logistics and dragons and magic duels, not fights with swords and crossbows. 5th edition did fix that, and armor no longer makes you more likely to get hit, so the combat rules are objectively less bad now. But they are still pretty bad. Even the fix is kind of a joke – armor still increases your burden by as much or more than it increases your protection, it's just that your burden now only affects physical activities other than calculating attack and defense if the burden comes from armor. So armor now gives a weird unnamed type of penalty that works exactly like a named penalty except with a magic exemption for the defense score that it would otherwise be shitting on.

Combat uses an attack roll and a defense roll, and then damage and damage soak are fixed numbers. So while it manages to fulfill the basic requirement to not be completely shitty like nWoD combat of having two rolls, they are both part of the same operation (“Do I hit?”), and could be profitably changed into a single-roll system with two dice and some mathemagic and we'd all be happier. So I think despite having two rolls it is near nWoD levels of terribility. At least people can potentially miss, but combat skills are so large compared to the RNG that things are really really deterministic. The Bestiary is really short and bizarrely almost completely filled with various flavors of wolf, and we'll get there when we get there, but the high defenses in this book are literally 19 points higher than the low defenses, and the RNG still only has 9 numbers on it. So finding an opponent you can ever hit that you can also ever miss is a pretty rare thing.

Initiative is a divide by zero error. You roll initiative at the beginning of combat and keep the same value round to round. But your value when you roll it is modified up or down by what weapon you are armed with. Note that depending on your intentions to punch or kick someone several rounds in the future your initiative is supposed to be modified by a different amount, despite the fact that you haven't declared that you are going to do that and honestly what the actual fuck? You're modifying numbers based on decisions that haven't been made that are contingent on information you don't yet have. How is this bullshit still going on in a fifth edition of this game?

We finally get an equipment list, but equipment doesn't have prices because go fuck yourself. There's a spot on the chart for how much things cost, but there aren't any numbers given for anything. Also the charts are formatted badly. The protection values for partial suits of armor and for full suits of armor are both just labeled “prot.” and you just have to figure out your own damn self that the bigger number is the full suit.

The injury rules have some diseases and poisons in them. They are not medically accurate and also not accurate to what people believed at the time. I don't really understand what this is supposed to be for. If we're taking four humor theory seriously, then “Quartan Fever” (which is to say: Malaria) is caused by an excess of black bile, not an excess of yellow bile. If we're not taking humor theory seriously, then it's caused by a mosquito transmitting a blood parasite into you (note: Malaria spread a lot farther north in the 13th century than it does now, but I think the Norwegian covenants should still be pretty much safe from Quartan Fever even if the German ones are not). Again and again the author's pretentiousness exceeds his knowledge. We end up with something that doesn't work like the real world, doesn't work like historical documents described the world, and doesn't have complete game mechanical descriptions of how it works in the game.

OSSR: Ars Magica
Chapter 12: Realms

There are other realms of existence, and weird shit is breaking in all over.

The chapter on the Realms is 9 pages, which isn't actually very much considering that they are basically putting up four alternate dimensions full of supernatural creatures. As I mentioned earlier, the book introduces the terms of “Divine” and “Dominion” by page 15, but it doesn't tell you that these terms mean the same thing until page 188 – so if this edition was your first exposure to Ars Magica you probably went about 173 pages believing that there were five kinds of auras and that the fifth one was generated by mundanes living in civilization.

Basically, there are four alternate dimensions that leak into the mundane world to varying degrees in varying places and the amount of leakage explicitly varies over time. There are ten levels of leakage and only one of the dimensions can be leaking in at a specific time and place. There is no coherent model of why one dimension or another holds sway in any particular time and place, nor is there a good set of guidelines for how big each aura should be. Exactly how big an aura is makes a huge difference because auras penalize other magic sources by their rating times a number. Remember still that the RNG is really small, so the fact that increasing or decreasing the rating of a Divine Aura (also called a Dominion Aura) by 1 changes the target number to cast a magic spell by three or an infernal spell by five is a fucking big deal.

There are multiple pieces of explicitly contradictory fluff to explain the difference between the realm flavors. These not only contradict each other, none of them actually explain the game mechanical effects. If the “magic realm” is the closest to the “divine realm” and always moving towards it, why does the divine realm apply big penalties to using magic and the infernal realm apply only small penalties? Why is this all so bullshit?

There are Divine, Faerie, Infernal, and Magic realms, and there are talking dogs from all four of those places. Remember that when we get to the Bestiary. I don't understand why the Magic realm even exists, because everything in it is supposed to be “just like a mundane thing, but better.” When it comes time to actually describe a magic creature other than a dog in the Bestiary, they decide to go with “Dragon” which seems like they are shitting on even that concept. I mean, Dragons are one of the very few namechecked creatures in this entire fucking book that don't look like a mundane animal or person, so what the actual fuck? The other realms are similarly described in useless and contradictory terms, and I hate this chapter.

It's like a man in a suit. But you know... better.

I've ranted about this a bit before, but this book has its head planted firmly in its ass where it comes to Christian / Muslim relations. According to this chapter, despite the fact that God is a real thing who demonstrably backs the Christians and the Muslims, and the fact that there are real Angels who know and understand this and give marching orders to the leaders of both faiths, that the Church does not believe that Muslims worship the same god as they do. You know, despite the fact that all of the ones who have divine powers can simply verify that they have completely fungible faith power and also their own god and all of his angels simply confirm it for them whenever asked. I think the author was chickening out on making actual 13th century Christian crusader morality “right” for fear that would be offensive, but the result is that it makes all the Christians and Muslims be faithless douches who refuse to listen to the divine pronouncements of their own God – and that's way more offensive.

Chapter 13: Bestiary

Steve Jobs explained the Ars Magica Bestiary in 2004.

There are only 8 pages in the Bestiary section and not a lot of ground is covered. We've already mentioned some of the ways this chapter is strange and unhelpful in the previous chapters. There are four magical realms, and each realm gets its own micro-bestiary. Since there are only 8 pages to divide, that isn't a lot of space for each one. Each realm gets a sample magic dog, a thing you can talk to, and a thing that is bad ass. For the Divine Realm, you only get two creatures because the Angel counts as both the thing you can talk to and the bad ass. The bad ass Fairie and badass Infernal are actually leader types and don't fight.

There are only 11 creatures total, and four of them are various flavors of magic wolf. None of them are mundane creatures and none of them is a standard challenge for a soldier grog or anything that might be useful as a baseline for much of anything. The ghost and the demon don't even have combat stats and I don't think you're supposed to take on the dragon or the angel. Basically, this bestiary is even less useful than the one at the end of Scion, which is a fucking achievement. Even extremely basic questions like “are my soldier grogs better than guard dogs” remain unanswered.

What numbers there are are all over the place. As mentioned in the combat chapter, the high defenses are +18 and the low defenses are -1, and you're still rolling those d10s with no 1s or 10s on them for an RNG. So even with this tiny and almost useless sample, the one thing I can get from it is that you couldn't make balanced combat challenges if you tried. Which they don't try, because there are no challenge ratings or anything like it in this book. That sort of oversight made sense back in 1989 when “ah, fuck it” was the order of the day in all games – but in 2004 that kind of half assedry had gone out of style.

OSSR: Ars Magica
Chapter 14: Mythic Europe

Click here to see the hidden message (It might contain spoilers)

This section is twelve pages and talks to you about the default setting, which is supposed to be “13th century Europe, with magic.” Of course, if that's all there was, you wouldn't need twelve pages or even twelve sentences. I just got that idea over in one sentence, and the book does too. It's a pretty self explanatory concept. Indeed, it's generally assumed that Ars Magica was originally set in “actual Europe, but with magic” because that was easy. They didn't have to do any real world building, and they didn't. But there's another reason to use the actual world, which is that it has a shit tonne of source material for it. Like, all the source material. Ever. There's a reason that the two most lastingly influential games of 1989 were both set in “Earth, but with magic” (Shadowrun being set in the 21st century, and Ars Magica being set in the 13th). All the places are places people care about, all the cities are places people have heard of, any part of the map you want to visit has as much source material on it as you care to read. You can get people invested into the setting quickly, and the burden on the authors of the game to produce all the world material people need is considerably lessened.

So what the author's job here should have been is to get across to the reader how the world of Ars Magica is different from real history. After all, our Earth didn't have covenants supporting members of the Order of Hermes in their arcane research nor did it have gateways to fairielands opening up in the woods. So you might think you were in for a condensed secret history of how the King of Hungary is a vampire and the Albigensian Crusade was called because Pope Innocent III really hated Occitanian witches. And this is really the book's opportunity to connect the magic rules they've been talking about and historical reality that you can look up on wikipedia.

This opportunity is missed.

What this book presents instead is mostly the author's opinion stated over and over again that you should research historical details for your campaign as long as it is fun, and then make up details when it wouldn't be fun to look this shit up. Which is great advice for playing the game, but really honestly seems like the way the author went about writing the game, which is less cool. When the author says “If historical accuracy is spoiling your fun, you need less of it.” it feels like he's justifying his own slacking off when it comes to getting things accurate in their own work. When he tells you to follow your bliss and focus on medieval historical details that interest you and ignore shit you don't like, that's great advice for a game and terrible advice for the game. This is pretty good DM advice, and atrocious shared world author advice, and I think it got used for both things.

Five pages of this thing are dedicated to ranting about the Church. The fact that the Church has in fact schismed during this period and there are two fucking Churches does not get mentioned. The fact that at this moment in time there are entire cities given to the heresy of the Cathars and Christians are killing Christians over doctrinal differences by the tens of thousands. And yet, rather than discuss these issues at all, we get 332 words squandered on telling us “Christian” doctrine:

Ars Magica, 5th Edition wrote:
There is one God, eternal and unchanging, who created the world from nothing and sustains it from moment to moment. This God is three persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Son became a human being as Jesus Christ, an event called the “Incarnation,” which is considered the most important event in history. Jesus Christ died on the cross, the Crucifixion, and by his death paid the penalty for all the sins committed by human beings. On the third day, he rose from the dead, in the Resurrection, and forty days later he ascended to heaven.

In the beginning, God created two humans, Adam and Eve, and placed them in the Garden of Eden. There, they were tempted by Satan and sinned, and this Original Sin tainted all of their descendants. Where once all of nature had served humankind, now it turned against them. Human beings in Original Sin can do nothing truly good, because their motives are always tainted. Baptism washes away that stain, and fits a person to receive God’s grace, which grants the ability to do good.

Good acts are those which accord with God’s will, and tend to His glory, while evil acts are those which do not. The seven deadly sins are the basic roots of almost all sins committed by human beings, and the Church warns against them in particular. They are Avarice, Envy, Greed, Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Wrath. On the other side, there are the three theological virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love.

All humans have an immortal soul, created at some point before birth. (In 1220, theologians still disagree about when.) After death, the soul is judged by God. Those who die perfect, having done penance for all their sins, pass directly into heaven. Those who die penitent, but not yet perfect, pass to purgatory, where they do penance after death for all those sins remaining. Those who die impenitent are condemned to hell for eternity.

I'm not making that up. It's in there. There is no context for it. That is a complete subsection all to itself, precisely as it appears in the book. It doesn't make sense, and it's very nearly actual dogma for some flavors of Christians. That isn't even the end of this shit, in that the next subsection is a rant about the sacraments. I feel like I'm reading something by Dave Sim. We don't get any discussion of how the secret history is different from real history, but we do get a description of the beliefs of Christians. Because obviously there's no way we could just look that shit up. There's some rants about using Christian trappings as things to care about in games, but honestly what the fuck is going on?

The author really seems to think that the trinity is obscure information. Either that or he's proselytizing.

The other estates get less ink. The Nobility get two pages, and the Cities and Towns get a page and a half. These sections get subsections on “mythic options” but they are almost unbelievably bullshit. Just a notice that a lord or town could have links to faeries or other supernaturals. Not which ones do in the default setting or what the actual fuck – just a note to the Storyguide that the magic can be played up or down, you know, whatever. So much ink is spilled on reminding the Storyguide that the setting can be changed, that they never quite get around to saying what the setting actually is.

The last little bit is a rant about peasants. This is the only part where they really commit to anything setting-wise, and it's completely batshit insane. Apparently, all the peasants have supernatural shit in their lives, and it is completely normal for regular farms to have magic trees and people talk to the wolves in the forest and villages make formal treaties with the forest beasts like they were living in fucking Equestria. This is MYTHIC europe, not Mythic Europe. Things in the author's description are gonzo on a level that most D&D campaigns don't reach. Galt in Golarion is more recognizable as historical France than the 5th edition presentation of Ars Magica France is. It's quite an accomplishment.

At least there's a map. But since the map is just a map of Europe in 1220, you can just google that shit.

Or start a game of Crusader Kings 2 in 1220.

Chapter 15: Stories

We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways.

This chapter is only 5 pages long. It starts on page 211, and by 215 it's over. It doesn't even fill that last page, there's just two ectopic pieces of box text and some white space.

While the chapter is incredibly spare, it covers a fair amount of ground. We don't see it wander off on half page tangents about Christian dogma like the last chapter! This chapter actually raises a bunch of good points. Political conflicts are good problems for powerful characters because they can't usually be solved with a simple spell or a well placed dagger. How “soap opera” inherently scales to character power or lack thereof. And so on. But these issues aren't so much addressed as merely raised. This looks like the collected notes to write a chapter about telling stories in Ars Magica rather than an actual chapter that had been completed.

Ars Magica 5th edition wrote:
• Other Covenants. Magi are expected to give hospitality to visiting magi, even if they turn up uninvited. Getting to know your neighbors is a good idea, provided you can avoid upsetting them.

Seriously, that's the whole idea: just those two sentences in a bullet point. The implied expansion into a paragraph or subsection never happened.

There's not a lot to condemn or make fun of here because there just isn't a lot here. The truth is that Ars Magica does have a lot of stories to tell. It has a large ensemble cast who span a large collection of different power levels and the most detailed setting it is possible for a fantasy game to have. Europe at the time is a land filled with wars internal and external. There are wars against the Egyptians and Estonians without and wars against the Cathars and between the nobles of Champagne within. The main characters are witches and the friends and allies of witches who live in countries that officially have a zero tolerance policy on witches. There's setting, characters, conflict, and goals – stories can happen.

The chapter's missions should have been to provide challenge guidelines or something that a person couldn't replicate by sitting in the bathtub and thinking about possible story hooks for Ars Magica until you got out. Instead, it gives some fortune cookie wisdom and some bullet point ideas. It's not bad, but it doesn't really go into much detail. If this chapter was as-is in a 70 page rules-lite game, I wouldn't have a problem with it. As is, it looks like this a chapter outline rather than an actual chapter.

Chapter 16: Sagas

Let's hope we have a slightly better saga.

This chapter is the one we were directed to for more information about “Troupe Play,” which I remind you is the central innovation of this game and pretty much the only reason we still talk about it rather than forgetting about it like it was Powers & Perils or something. This entire chapter is only 7 pages, so... not likely.

Ars Magica 5th Edition wrote:
Perhaps the most obvious question concerns how much history you want to use, and how close to historical events you want to stay. Some troupes like to keep mundane history the same as real history, and have the Order of Hermes acting entirely behind the scenes. Others prefer to have the magi change things, so that political events look very different from our history. Still others prefer to change things around entirely.

Basically, the author spends so much time in these last few chapters reminding you that you can change the setting that he forgets to write a setting. This book is a hard bound Page 42 Fallacy. These “maybe you want to do it differently?” suggestions take up five and a half pages of this chapter, leaving only a page and a half to describe the central game structure. Because the author has no idea what is important and what is not. Telling people that they could make up some rules to do The Magic Goes Away if they wanted to do that instead of playing Ars Magica is not important, while telling people how to play the actual fucking game is. Fuck.

The actual advice on running a troupe game is actually placed into the narrative of giving you options. You know, like the entire rest of the chapter is wasted on doing. However, this time they are actually suggesting a solid baseline from which to deviate, which makes such discussion modestly helpful. Hell, I'll just go ahead and quote a bit from their discussion of pooled characters:

Ars Magica 5th edition wrote:
This has a number of advantages. First, the number of magi in a group tends to be small, which makes them easier to challenge. Second, the covenant staff get to appear on stage, without condemning anyone to playing bit parts all the time. Third, when playing a grog you can cut loose and enjoy yourself. If you overact and ham up your main character, you are likely to end up annoying the other players. On the other hand, a grog who is hammed up can be restricted to small doses, making him entertaining rather than annoying.

That's true. And it's insightful. We don't really get to the downsides of this setup, because the author thinks he has to sell you on troupe play as a thing to switch to while playing Ars Magica rather than just laying down the fucking law and saying this is how it's done. And since there is only a page and a half on this subject, there really isn't room to get in to issues of characters who have less screen time being inherently less fleshed out or player/character alienation or any of that stuff.

And that's the end of the book's chapters. There are two appendices, one of which is given to ranting at 4th edition players about what to expect. This doesn't even bother to call out major changes like “armor based burden doesn't penalize your defense anymore so wearing armor is good rather than bad” but instead calls out incoherent gibberish like how they reworded the trait definitions of Muto so that it makes no sense in a different way. The second appendix is a collection of all the math formulas that were put into bold font earlier in the book. These are totally without context and obviously collected by a computer. It's just so fucking useless that I have no idea why that's even here.

Then there's the index, which is also automatically generated by a computer and essentially useless. Then the book is over. I'll post my final thoughts tomorrow some time.

PostPosted: Fri Nov 21, 2014 11:17 am Post subject: Reply with quote Add User to Ignore List
OSSR: Ars Magica
Final Thoughts

Ars Magica was created by a couple of fresh faced college kids from the Midwest and got more notice than it otherwise would have because as early adopters of computers it had higher production values than most indie games of the period. The game itself was a product of its time and every major innovation of the game was driven by intense laziness. Writing a spell list is a lot of work, so they just wrote up a couple of spells of each type and told you to make up your own spells. Writing a setting is a lot of work, so they just told you to use real world history books and put magic into it sideways or anyhow it would fit. Balancing character classes is really hard, so they told the players to take turns playing weak and powerful characters and just let things be unbalanced on a per session basis. That's a lot of lazy to go around.

But the fact is that modern RPGs have gotten too long. For fuck's sake, D&D 5e is like a thousand pages and is still basically a ruleslite with no set difficulties for performing basic actions. These systems that made Ars Magica easy to write also made the game more accessible. And that's a good thing. People who want to design a game need to read Ars Magica. They need to ask themselves “Do I need to actually put this into the game, or can I just pass the buck and walk away from it like Tweet and the Dotmeister did back in 1989?” Because a design is perfect not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away.

The fifth edition carries with it that spirit of laziness. It abdicates on its responsibilities to add much of anything to Ars Magica. Secret histories? Challenge guidelines? Skill use guidelines? A usable set of antagonists? A reassignment of magic categories to make any fucking sense at all? We'll just write down a big old giant “Nope” for all of those. Instead we get reminders that we can change the rules and setting as much as we want because it's our game like this was a fucking 2nd edition AD&D book. The real additions are mostly confined to the author name dropping some medieval philosophy that the author does not understand, because the scholarship is quite terrible in this book – or various tirades about how stuff from 3rd edition isn't canon anymore but some of the stuff from 4th edition is. Yeah, the book can't be fucked to formalize the in-canon relationship between Wizard towers and the feudal system, but it can be fucked to tell us that there is no longer a canon connection between the magus House Tremere and the vampire Clan Tremere. That's some seriously weird priorities.

Ars Magica is an important game, but it's a product of its time. And that time is 1989. I honestly think everyone who wants to design games should look at Ars Magica, but I can't really point to a single reason to look at the 5th edition instead of the 2nd. There's a lot more god-bothering in 5th edition, but I don't think it improves anything. Ars Magica had a lot of promise back in the late 80s and early 90s, but 5th edition is clearly just a keeper of the old ways ranting about epicycles.

Troupe Play

By far the most out-there idea of Ars Magica is that of Troupe Play. If you wrote an edition of Ars Magica and spent less than 20% of the book talking about its ramifications, you were probably doing it wrong. At its core, in troupe play there are more characters than there are players, and players take turns playing powerful and weak characters. You can also take turns with MC duty, but that is neither necessary nor sufficient for troupe play (some people take turns as the DM in otherwise traditional D&D games and this is not troupe play, and some Ars Magica groups keep the same Storyguide while having the other players take turns playing different types of characters and this is troupe play). Troupe play completely stands a lot of RPGing on its head, causing and eliminating a lot of problems. It's deeply weird to me that this hasn't been adopted by more games. About the only attempt to copy this that I can recall was a weird and half-assed attempt to do it in Dark Sun. But like everything in early 90s 2nd edition AD&D, it was extremely poorly put together, so I'm not really surprised that never went anywhere. But I can't think of another major attempt to do anything with this concept, and that's very strange to me.

Troupe play creates a larger cast of characters. By definition, that means that characters get less time in the spotlight. This is good for one-joke characters, and bad for self-insert characters. A character who only ever says “Hodor” or “I Am Groot” would be fucking intolerable in a standard RPG that ran for multiple sessions, but in one-shots or as an occasional guest appearance can be funny, endearing, and memorable. A lot of fictional characters that are not OK for normal RPG campaigns are great when they only have dialog every couple of episodes. But while you get a good deal of entertainment value out of mute characters or characters that never leave sight of water that either would be terrible if they were in every adventure or just literally can't go on all the adventures, all these guest appearances do demonstrably cut into the screen time of “main characters.”

To give media examples of this: consider Justice League Unlimited and The Wheel of Time. In JLU, we get episodes about The Huntress and The Question and those are great, and we get adventures about The Flash switching bodies with Luthor and those are great too. There's a balance between little adventures for the little heroes and big adventures for the big heroes and it's just generally really good from beginning to end. You need to watch that show. On the flip side, through most of The Wheel of Time the plot only really moved forward at all with the adventures of Rand and Matt. And yet, we'd go sometimes a hundred fucking pages of various annoying female caricatures tugging their braids and threatening to box the ears of uppity dudes. It was painful, and I never finished the series. Of course, neither did Robert Jordan, zing.

Troupe play can handle wild character power differences, one note characters, and characters who have absolute restrictions on what kind of adventures they can go on without even batting an eye. It's not that those sorts of problems have workarounds, those aren't problems in the first place. Instead it has problems with characters struggling to have enough screen time for character growth, and balance problems with excessive specialization.

The Legacy

Ars Magica's legacy is felt hugely in gaming, but for kind of weird things. Ars Magica gave rise to Vampire the Masquerade, which for several years was the biggest game in the world. Masquerade was of course basically a new edition of Ars Magica and written by one of the original authors. The same lazy flippant disregard for mechanics was there from the beginning, and most of the story dials. Masquerade didn't use troupe play because it was heavily focused on the melodrama of an individual character, but we still see the sort of lazy world building and short magic lists that made Ars Magica easy to write – and to read.

The Dominions series is basically Ars Magica, but it takes only the concepts rather than the mechanics. And while we have gods spreading dominion auras that go up to 10 (the way it worked in the early Ars Magica editions, rather than having all dominion auras belonging to the one true God who supported Christians, Muslims, and Jews equally because fuck the Romuva), and you find special magic sites that give yearly vis as well as one-time events where you find vis stores – it's not even really an RPG.

The weirdest one for me is the modern day Ars Magica fans. They claim things that aren't true about it, like all the time. Last time we talked about Ars Magica, a bunch of people posted rants about how clear the magic system is. And that's just fucking insane. Ars Magica's magic system is lazy and incoherent, that's what it is. That is what it has always been. And yet, you see people who claim that it's “obvious” what Muto can and cannot do, even though the extant of Muto is based on a double negative of a reference to a medieval understanding of an ancient Greek philosopher that the author of the book does not himself understand and has only a couple of a examples which flagrantly violate the examples on several levels. It's difficult for me to imagine how you could make a magic system that was less clear than that. Even on this thread, consider how Mean Liar attempted to defend the Ars Magica assertion that people living in and around the Holy See would aquire warping scores and eventually turn into supernatural creatures by pointing out that this did not happen to people who already had True Faith – and then later in the same thread attempted to defend the Ars Magica assertion that The Church somehow didn't believe that God also backed Islam by claiming that only people with the True Faith got to be in on the God plan. That's some pretty serious denial-in-depth right there.

[Heaven_s_Thunder_Ham (Heaven's Thunder Hammer)]

Now, for my personal review of Frank Trollman's review.

1.) The guy gets mad in every review, no bones about it.

2.) The review is in the lens of a critical RPG theorist who likes to hate RPGs, but desperately wants to actually like them, but finds most of them with all sorts of problems.

3.) He has not in fact, actually played, or run Ars Magica 5th edition, and seems to have had some sort of bad experience with a shitty GM in the 90s with 3rd edition, for a session or two. And in Franks PoV, Shitty GMing can always be corrected by a better written book. I'm not sure this is actually true.

4.) For me, a good chunk of his criticism just doesn't show up in play. A lot of his objections are to fluff not just mechanics.

5.) His point about virtues and flaws having to balance out, in a game that is explicitly unbalanced seems like a good point to me.

6.) I really don't know enough actual church history on magic, sorcery and witchcraft to really make an informed criticism of this point:

Daniel wrote:
The Church being aware of the Order, but basically pretending it does not exist? Perfect status quo for most Ars Magica campaigns.

I can't accept that. I can accept that that might have been a perfectly decent set of assumptions to write a fantasy heartbreaker's fantasy world to, but you still actually have to write that fucking world. Ars Magica 5th edition did not fucking do that.

As Mean Liar said, the best resource for the 13th century is wikipedia. As long as Ars Magica was set in “exactly our world but there's secretly magicians,” that was fine. Elegant even. But in 5th edition they dump that apple cart over, and don't replace it with anything.

If you want to tell me that the 13th century Catholic Fucking Church knows about a group named “the Order of Hermes” that has hundreds of people who have actual magic powers that very explicitly are not miracles from God, and that there isn't already a full scale shooting and stabbing war on, I'm going to have to know why. Spending a single paragraph of shrugging text about how sorcery is kinda illegal but not consistently enforced or interpreted doesn't fucking cut it. We are talking about 1220 when the Catholic Church has declared open war on Muslims, Heretics, and the Romuva for being religiously wrong, and the Order of Fucking Hermes has the name of a fucking PAGAN GOD IN ITS FUCKING NAME. If the Catholic Church knows about that and is not “at war already” you need to do some pretty damn big world building to explain that. Because anything that looked even a little bit like the Catholic Church in history books and wikipedia would flip its shit if there were confirmed non-saintly spellcasters who self identified as the “Order of PAGAN GOD”.

Ars Magica 5th edition tossed away the entire point of lazy world building. Ars Magica classically had only the slightest amount of world building text in their rules because you were allowed and expected to use real world source material. In 5th edition they write just enough world text to completely toss all the real world source material into the circular file, and what they replace it with is so sketchy that it might as well not exist. It's just Generic Fantasy World #516 and it's written about so minimalistically as to be wholly unusable.

[Jonathan.Link]

He has some points. However his overuse of vulgarity suggests that he, himself wouldn't be able to write a game system. He comes off more a chronic complainer, rather than a critic. It seems a bit personal, as if 5the edition authors have offended him.

[Berengar]

@Heaven's Thunder Hammer

6.) I really don't know enough actual church history on magic, sorcery and witchcraft to really make an informed criticism of this point:

Daniel wrote:
The Church being aware of the Order, but basically pretending it does not exist? Perfect status quo for most Ars Magica campaigns.

I can't accept that. I can accept that that might have been a perfectly decent set of assumptions to write a fantasy heartbreaker's fantasy world to, but you still actually have to write that fucking world. Ars Magica 5th edition did not fucking do that.

As Mean Liar said, the best resource for the 13th century is wikipedia. As long as Ars Magica was set in “exactly our world but there's secretly magicians,” that was fine. Elegant even. But in 5th edition they dump that apple cart over, and don't replace it with anything.

If you want to tell me that the 13th century Catholic Fucking Church knows about a group named “the Order of Hermes” that has hundreds of people who have actual magic powers that very explicitly are not miracles from God, and that there isn't already a full scale shooting and stabbing war on, I'm going to have to know why. Spending a single paragraph of shrugging text about how sorcery is kinda illegal but not consistently enforced or interpreted doesn't fucking cut it. We are talking about 1220 when the Catholic Church has declared open war on Muslims, Heretics, and the Romuva for being religiously wrong, and the Order of Fucking Hermes has the name of a fucking PAGAN GOD IN ITS FUCKING NAME. If the Catholic Church knows about that and is not “at war already” you need to do some pretty damn big world building to explain that. Because anything that looked even a little bit like the Catholic Church in history books and wikipedia would flip its shit if there were confirmed non-saintly spellcasters who self identified as the “Order of PAGAN GOD”.

Ars Magica 5th edition tossed away the entire point of lazy world building. Ars Magica classically had only the slightest amount of world building text in their rules because you were allowed and expected to use real world source material. In 5th edition they write just enough world text to completely toss all the real world source material into the circular file, and what they replace it with is so sketchy that it might as well not exist. It's just Generic Fantasy World #516 and it's written about so minimalistically as to be wholly unusable.

We had that topic last in November: Evading Crusades . I don't think we need to take it up again here for "13th century Catholic Fucking Church" Daniel.

Cheers

[Heaven_s_Thunder_Ham (Heaven's Thunder Hammer)]

@Jonathan.Link

He has some points. However his overuse of vulgarity suggests that he, himself wouldn't be able to write a game system. He comes off more a chronic complainer, rather than a critic. It seems a bit personal, as if 5the edition authors have offended him.

You don't understand, ALL RPG writers offend him. Look at for further rants.

tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53716

In actual fact, he is nicer to Ars Magica than many other systems he's reviewed.. NWOD being his particular object of hate.

[Ovarwa]

Hi,

After eliding his confrontational tone, I agree that a lot of what he says is true. I also think he doesn't understand all the rules, and this shows up in his examples; a more careful perusal might have gotten in the way of his epic rant. I also don't believe that AM5 is intended to be a full and modern redesign; describing the authors/editors as keepers of the old ways is a shrugworthy indictment. So is calling AM a fantasy heartbreaker: How many fantasy games published since the original D&D aren't? (There are a few, of course: Polaris, Nobilis, V:tM, maybe GURPS...) I also find it strange that he considers AM5 to be the most mythic of all AM editions, since this edition spends the most effort trying to embed the Order in a low fantasy "realistic" medieval Europe.

• The organization of the core book is wanting. Even now, I often find myself looking in the wrong place.

• The "solution" to the Dominion is wretched. The rules do not model the period and actually run contrary to all expectations. I've talked about this before, but maybe I should have ranted. /2 After all, for all the attempts at political correctness, every now and then I find the treatment of the Divine to be mildly offensive, and I imagine that some readers more deeply invested (and less politically correct) will be truly offended. Frank's calling the designers/editors of AM5 cowardly is way out of line, yet I think the game would have benefited from a different treatment.

• The current state of relations between the Order and Church/Nobility is utterly unbelievable. This isn't something that AM5 made up.

• I don't agree with him about the blurred confusion of Forms and Techniques. AM5 has gone a long way to improve this, though not completely. But spell guidelines are quite messy. The level of player skill needed to convince a GM/troupe of a spell's level has improved only a little since AM2, although the kind of arguments have changed. Worse, a succession of AM supplements have presented spells that break Hermetic Limits, that use interesting and inconsistent interpretations of spell guidelines, and that finally don't do much better than the old-fashioned AM2 (and D&D even now) method of meditating over existing spells, reaching out with your feelings and letting The Force provide a suitable spell level.

• AM5 is written for fans, by fans. It is not a great introduction to roleplaying. It is not even that great an introduction to AM.

• The core book does cover covenants poorly, but this is consistent with the way concepts and resources useful for getting a campaign launched are wanting. This issue isn't new, and we've even discussed it in these forums. I don't remember an edition that made it easy to create a stable of NPCs, equip them, build the covenant (AM5 is far better than AM2 core at this, for example), create monsters that are suitably challenging, and stat your pet cat. (Speaking of fantasy heartbreakers, one game that did all this surprisingly well was Palladium Fantasy 1ed, despite authorial rants that broke the 4th wall, English Grammar from Beyond, rules both baroque and broken, an assortment of silly tables and an adventure not suitable for starting players.)

• FWIW, I like the 4 AM5 wolves very much.

• Balancing Flaws and Virtues matters, as does a certain amount of "fairness" within a character type, because not everyone plays every session with one magus and a coterie of grogs. Since all the way back, the game gently encouraged a certain amount of tension among PC magi, so balance matters a bit there. Even in a classic "four players with one grog each, one with a companion and one with a magus" situation, if one grog is designed better than the others, there will be 3 players feeling useless.

• When all is said and done, the author's chosen name, Trollman, represents truth in advertising. Because he makes quite a few good points, his hook is better baited than most, but he's still a nasty troll. Fun to read though.

Anyway,

Ken

[Jonathan.Link]

@Heaven's Thunder Hammer

@Jonathan.Link

He has some points. However his overuse of vulgarity suggests that he, himself wouldn't be able to write a game system. He comes off more a chronic complainer, rather than a critic. It seems a bit personal, as if 5the edition authors have offended him.

You don't understand, ALL RPG writers offend him. Look at for further rants.

tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53716

In actual fact, he is nicer to Ars Magica than many other systems he's reviewed.. NWOD being his particular object of hate.

I think I do understand and it is why I called him a chronic complainer. If every RPG offends him and he can't get past any of their inherent problems then the problem is with him, not every RPG. Putting it another way, he knows how all the other products fail to live up to (his) expectations but hasn't produced a system that addresses his issues and published it. He never will.

[Heaven_s_Thunder_Ham (Heaven's Thunder Hammer)]

@One Shot

We had that topic last in November: Evading Crusades . I don't think we need to take it up again here for "13th century Catholic Fucking Church" Daniel.

Cheers

I missed that thread One Shot, thanks for showing me.

@Jonathan.Link

I think I do understand and it is why I called him a chronic complainer. If every RPG offends him and he can't get past any of their inherent problems then the problem is with him, not every RPG. Putting it another way, he knows how all the other products fail to live up to (his) expectations but hasn't produced a system that addresses his issues and published it. He never will.

One tgdmb, he says that he is a doctor and has better uses of his time than to make an RPG himself, if I am recalling correctly.

@Ovarwa

• When all is said and done, the author's chosen name, Trollman, represents truth in advertising. Because he makes quite a few good points, his hook is better baited than most, but he's still a nasty troll. Fun to read though.

I think his name really is Frank Trollman - it's a Norwegian last name. I think you can find that name on some Shadowrun supplements that he wrote for in 3rd Edition.

And for what it's worth, I'm a big fan of the ars magica 5th edition line. Yes, there are issues here and there, but overall the choice of supplement design has been really creative and very interesting. And now, 5th Edition is 10 or 11 years old. I expect a 6th ed to come out in about 2-3 years, hopefully with a lot of fan feedback input in.

[Marko_Markoko]

That was fun to read, and he made some very valid points. But I think he gets why we are all hooked on this game. I am hooked. But some of his harshest criticisms are things I have thought (and some said) all along.

[David_Chart]

@Heaven's Thunder Hammer

Now, for my personal review of Frank Trollman's review.

Oh, it was him. That explains a lot. (I believe that it is his real name, in a truly beautiful example of nominative determinism.)

(Boys and girls, this is a good example of how getting a reputation for ranting lunacy can make people reject what you say wholesale, even if there might be good points in there, because it is almost certainly not worth the stress of getting them out.)

@Heaven's Thunder Hammer

6.) I really don't know enough actual church history on magic, sorcery and witchcraft to really make an informed criticism of this point:

Daniel wrote:
The Church being aware of the Order, but basically pretending it does not exist? Perfect status quo for most Ars Magica campaigns.

I can't accept that. I can accept that that might have been a perfectly decent set of assumptions to write a fantasy heartbreaker's fantasy world to, but you still actually have to write that fucking world. Ars Magica 5th edition did not fucking do that.

As Mean Liar said, the best resource for the 13th century is wikipedia. As long as Ars Magica was set in “exactly our world but there's secretly magicians,” that was fine. Elegant even. But in 5th edition they dump that apple cart over, and don't replace it with anything.

If you want to tell me that the 13th century Catholic Fucking Church knows about a group named “the Order of Hermes” that has hundreds of people who have actual magic powers that very explicitly are not miracles from God, and that there isn't already a full scale shooting and stabbing war on, I'm going to have to know why. Spending a single paragraph of shrugging text about how sorcery is kinda illegal but not consistently enforced or interpreted doesn't fucking cut it. We are talking about 1220 when the Catholic Church has declared open war on Muslims, Heretics, and the Romuva for being religiously wrong, and the Order of Fucking Hermes has the name of a fucking PAGAN GOD IN ITS FUCKING NAME. If the Catholic Church knows about that and is not “at war already” you need to do some pretty damn big world building to explain that. Because anything that looked even a little bit like the Catholic Church in history books and wikipedia would flip its shit if there were confirmed non-saintly spellcasters who self identified as the “Order of PAGAN GOD”.

Ars Magica 5th edition tossed away the entire point of lazy world building. Ars Magica classically had only the slightest amount of world building text in their rules because you were allowed and expected to use real world source material. In 5th edition they write just enough world text to completely toss all the real world source material into the circular file, and what they replace it with is so sketchy that it might as well not exist. It's just Generic Fantasy World #516 and it's written about so minimalistically as to be wholly unusable.

It's based on an extremely simplistic view of the medieval Latin church, and projects 15th century and later attitudes to magic back a few centuries. I think a bit too much of his picture of the middle ages is based on Wikipedia. (Also, he appears to be a bit amnesiac about the state of Wikipedia in 2004.)

[Heaven_s_Thunder_Ham (Heaven's Thunder Hammer)]

@David Chart

@Heaven's Thunder Hammer

Now, for my personal review of Frank Trollman's review.

Oh, it was him. That explains a lot. (I believe that it is his real name, in a truly beautiful example of nominative determinism.)

(Boys and girls, this is a good example of how getting a reputation for ranting lunacy can make people reject what you say wholesale, even if there might be good points in there, because it is almost certainly not worth the stress of getting them out.)

It's based on an extremely simplistic view of the medieval Latin church, and projects 15th century and later attitudes to magic back a few centuries. I think a bit too much of his picture of the middle ages is based on Wikipedia. (Also, he appears to be a bit amnesiac about the state of Wikipedia in 2004.)

Thanks for chiming in David - Frank unfortunately makes far too many personal attacks for my taste, yet, he does this in any RPG he reviews. As I've said before, he reserves particular hate for NWoD, Exalted 2E and Shadowrun 5E. By his standards, this was actually a nice article about Ars 5E.

That said, it does seem the corebook doesn't fully address lay people's perceptions of what the medieval church thought of "Magic" and the different forms of it. From what I've read, for example, astrology was frowned upon but not persecuted to nearly the same extent as people who threatened curses or communing with dark spirits.

[virgileso]

@Heaven's Thunder Hammer

@Jonathan.Link

I think I do understand and it is why I called him a chronic complainer. If every RPG offends him and he can't get past any of their inherent problems then the problem is with him, not every RPG. Putting it another way, he knows how all the other products fail to live up to (his) expectations but hasn't produced a system that addresses his issues and published it. He never will.

One tgdmb, he says that he is a doctor and has better uses of his time than to make an RPG himself, if I am recalling correctly.

As Thunder Hammer also said; several of us from that forum have met the man in person. His last name really is Trollman, and works as a medical doctor in Prague (last I heard). He does have some history of work in the industry, specifically in Shadowrun 4th edition and some stuff with L5R. He has written at least one entire RPG on that forum, After Sundown; but he doesn't have the desire/time to get involved in publishing, since the whole thing is just a hobby to him.

When it comes to complaints, I don't see it as him being unable to get past the problems, but readers being unable to get past his complaints or think that's all there is. Enjoying a game and describing its flaws are not mutually exclusive states; as he certainly has played and enjoyed games of Rifts & D&D while also having written small books on what's wrong with them. Subjective things like "I had fun during that session" don't really say much about the game's rules but that group, so he usually opts out of that. One thing I have seen is that while he's knowingly abrasive, using honey when bringing up flaws with a system has predominantly not actually done any better (whether by him or others); all that happens is either the usual dissenters passive-aggressively dismiss the complaint, or the complaint goes completely unremarked upon and ultimately ignored.

[Berengar]

@virgileso

One thing I have seen is that while he's knowingly abrasive, using honey when bringing up flaws with a system has predominantly not actually done any better (whether by him or others); all that happens is either the usual dissenters passive-aggressively dismiss the complaint, or the complaint goes completely unremarked upon and ultimately ignored.

It's neither abrasiveness nor 'honey' which makes one's arguments be respected, but precision and sobriety. Just pointing to "13th century Catholic Fucking Church" and screaming doesn't help a bit.

Cheers

[Marko_Markoko]

Many may find him abrasive. But I msut admit that I found his caustic style entertaint and quite amusing. The church rant goes off the end, agreed. And he did have sympathy for the crunch that hooks us all in.
But he has a valid criticism about the layout of the core rules. Things I didn't notice because I already knew the game.

And I really do think it is time to push for a new edition...

[Ovarwa]

@One Shot

@virgileso

One thing I have seen is that while he's knowingly abrasive, using honey when bringing up flaws with a system has predominantly not actually done any better (whether by him or others); all that happens is either the usual dissenters passive-aggressively dismiss the complaint, or the complaint goes completely unremarked upon and ultimately ignored.

It's neither abrasiveness nor 'honey' which makes one's arguments be respected, but precision and sobriety. Just pointing to "13th century Catholic Fucking Church" and screaming doesn't help a bit.

Cheers

But fun to read. /2 Catholic Fucking Church, Nikolai Fucking Tesla, all good.

[Heaven_s_Thunder_Ham (Heaven's Thunder Hammer)]

Getting back to the Wishlist... Another thing I'd really like to see:

1.)A better indication of how to use, or not use the Troupe Play Style.

2.) Advice for new SGs on how to ease into the game. The start up time to set up an ars magica game is definitely on the higher end compared to many other games out there. How to pick a covenant (group participation vs SG giving out some options), which type of PCs to make first (hint, not a magus).

3.) A different way of "balancing" virtues and flaws. Maybe just suggest a personality flaw, a story flaw, maybe a general or hermetic flaw, and then take some number of virtues, depending on how high powered the SG wants to make the game.

[Ovarwa]

So,

Speaking of AM6, I'll talk about AM1. I have no real knowledge regarding what I am about to say, but [strike]what else is new[/strike] I feel comrortable speculating.

Calling AM a fantasy heartbreaker is fair; pretty much all fantasy rpgs start off that way. But D&D is not the most interesting source material for me; my guess is that someone read "The Name of the Rose," all the rage back in the 80s, and just ran with it.

TNotR is centered around a closed community of scholars, so AM did this too. TNotR is centered around a library that is the community's most precious resource, so AM did this too. TNotR gleefully combines anachronism and extensive historical reseach, so AM did this too. The monks in TNotR are isolated from and try to isolate themselves from the real world, so magi are also supposed to do that. TNotR even has Quaesitori showing up at the covenant...

We often hear descriptions of AM involving "It's like D&D, but it's based on real Europe and wizards rule."

For years (decades? shudder I'm gonna die), I've also seen it as "It's The Name of the Rose, starring wizards instead monks."

But TNotR is no longer the rage. The medieval tropes of the 80s are no longer ours. The tropes about what knowledge is, where it is found and how it is obtained have changed. Even our wizards have changed (ask a 10 year old to name a wizard in 1985 and you'd get Merlin or maybe Gandalf; today it'll be Gandalf or someone from Harry Potter.)

So maybe it would serve us to refresh things a bit, to keep "wizards in mythic medieval Europe," but update that shag carpet from the 80s.

Anyway,

Ken

[Ben_McFarland]

@Ovarwa

Calling AM a fantasy heartbreaker is fair; pretty much all fantasy rpgs start off that way. But D&D is not the most interesting source material for me; my guess is that someone read "The Name of the Rose," all the rage back in the 80s, and just ran with it.

Having actually talked with Lisa Stevens about the matter in Sub Rosa #8, I can tell you the answer is "no." As she put it, MRH was running Harn with Runequest, Jonathan Tweet was running Call of Cthulhu, and they had been both running Pendragon. They wanted to make a game where magic was done right. They hated the Vancian system.

If I were to ask for anything, it would be more guidance on long-term play, and for troupe style play. I think collecting creature creation into the core book would be essential, too. Streamlining that process to match character, grog, even the covenant process, just to reinforce it.

As ArM5 has continued, there have been more and more story seeds in every book. I think Ars would greatly benefit from more adventures, an anthology of adventures, starting off with Spring and going into Winter, but they need to be modular, in that they need to allow for the power variations which can very easily occur between troupes, and that's a tough nut to crack. This may take a form that's more like a highly detailed arc of seeds and situations, like Antagonists, but along those lines. More books like Antagonists would be a big help for Ars, giving people more foundation for how to create troupe sagas.

-Ben.