If I remember rightly, there was very little setting material in ArM1. I did write this in SR7 concerning the setting in ArM1:
And you'll also find this quote pulled from the book itself concerning the Order of Hermes:
So at this stage they were making some assumptions (there's content describing the different estates within medieval European society) but not giving any specifics.
That is a good point up top, and I see you can still understand my amusement. And I understand you are too close to be amused, but you also understand, and so on.
I can go on about having thick skin, and how I wish people would rip my work to shreds so I can bask in the attention.
:mrgreen:
But we all already know all that.
The point is, though, he didn't write it addressed to you. If he did, then the language is out of line. But it was intended for amusement, his own and those that follow him on that blog. And me, well, I have a foul mouth and a filthy sense of humor. There were a lot of "OMGL Did he just say that?" moments, which made me cring and laugh at the same time.
Now if I was you? I'd probably get p$$d, rant back with the flame only a veteran Berklister could, then I'd feel bad about what I said and recant it.
You know my pattern :mrgreen:
Now as for the actual constructive criticism. I do realize that it is hard to sift through the vitrol to see it. Many of his issues are addressed if you look at the game as a whole collective. Covenants fixes a lot of things (yet complicates others), True Lineages fills in many missing details, and stuff is scattered all over the place.
So my criticism is this. ArM5 completly disassembled everything about the game, and slowly bit by bit everything and more was added back. Scattered all over the place. It is quite difficult for new players to access the game without guidance by at least one veteran.
We have the forums for that. This game gets a lot of on line support, which is wonderful.
I sorta lost the point I thought I had. Suffice to say, though, that even though much of what he said is irrelevant at this point, there are also many things to keep in mind should there ever be a new edition.
I think Ars Magica 5 is almost too complex for play. I mean, it's great for advancing, but in play, say combat, there are a lot of fiddly bits. Fiddly bits slow things down, so combat tends to be avoided or glossed over. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but a lot of players do enjoy combat. Combat can be easily avoided when magi are overly powerful, which they can easily be.
Focusing on fiddly bits for weapons combat involves the player and the SG comparing totals, and if the attack total is greater than 0, a subsequent calculation happens to compute damage, which is then compared to soak to derive total damage, which must be looked up on a chart, because of how wounds are applied in Ars. Broken down into components, a single attack has: attack roll, addition of bonus, defense roll, addition of bonus, comparison, (if attack>defense) derived damage total based on weapon, compared to soak, (if derived damage>soak) final damage, application of final damage and determining subsequent penalties. Each successful attack has 10 actions associated with it, and one of those actions is conducted by a secondary party. Other game systems have a single roll for an attack against a static defense, and a subsequent roll for damage if the attack overcame defense. Once defense is known, the player can make both rolls and report the results at the same time, with the GM only prompting the player for his action.
Hermetic Magical combat has fiddly bits, too. Casting total, which is a total computed from at least 3 static components (te, fo, sta), 1 environmental component (aura) and a random die roll component, along with optional components such as spell mastery score. There might be other components of the total, but that's the basic total,and adding anything else adds even more complexity, which only reinforces the idea that this is fiddly... Casting total is then used to compute penetration, which we will keep simple as Casting Total - Spell level + Penetration ability + Mastery, if applicable. Penetration is then compared against MR. If there is penetration, then the effect is applied, we'll assume it's damage. Damage is rolled, soak is rolled, compared, and if damage>soak it moves to the application of damage and determining subsequent penalties. One of the odd effects, is that it becomes tiresome for the SG to track the aura strength, so it's a lot simpler to tell the players what it is so they can do the entire computation on their own, and it often happens for magic resistance, as well, which invalidates a heck of a lot of Intellego magic. But once MR is known, players can make both rolls for casting/penetration and damage at the same time and have the results ready to go when their turn comes back around.
Then you have the opponent side of the combat, which has all of the combat stuff above. Magical powers still have to check for penetration. Round 1 is done and I'm tired of it already.
So, that all leads into my wish: on screen action needs to be simplified and refined to minimize the computational needs of the players. Make off-screen as complicated as the player/troupe can tolerate, but please simplify combat.
One thing I would like to see is rules which allow for alternate religions to work differently. Maybe 'flavors' of divine the way there can be aspects to the other 3 realms, based on what the people of the area believe. If they are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, maybe even allow pagans who have actual faith to exist and register as religion instead of a variation on magic and faerie... even localized beliefs (for example, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity have different ideas about what is allowed sexually, but the rules default to medieval Catholicism. Even within Catholicism however there was a lot of room for interpretation which is not reflected in the rules. If you allow for a Cult of Eros which believes that Eros is the one true God and all other simply a reflection of his desires, what happens to a succubus entering that divine aura?)
For D&D/Pathfinder, there are almost all of those steps, except the defensive roll/addition component, and the constant modification of other character's benefits or effects makes the whole process extended*-- you're breaking them out explicitly here. I expect players running combat capable characters to have their combat totals ready for offense and defense and the attacker rolls the damage die with the attack (when necessary), so we roll/add, compare, add the weapon's damage, soak it, and the target's player handles the wound penalties (if any) while combative description continues. -- because there is combat description, right? You're not just rolling dice and saying "OK, he hits, you take a medium wound," right? That's where the opposed rolls become more tools for the storyguide, allowing them to take the results and spin them out to something cinematic. Opposed rolls also keep people involved in combat, as they participate in the defense of their character.
*The process gets worse as you level in Pathfinder/d20, and exists in 4E, and in L5R, with SR, DR, resistances, variable bonuses, spell effects, grappling rules, and let's not talk about various versions of Shadowrun's or WoD's dice pools or Deadlands and the card mechanics. Combat is almost always complicated because combat is messy.
EDIT: I'll add-- what game are you thinking of then, where the combat is much more simple?
I would also like it if writers did some research. As an example which literally just popped up, Ancient Magic lists Coptic as a dead language, even though it was spoken up into the 17th century, and the game is in the 13th...
I...
I've only worked on five books, and I have feet of research material acquired over the course of those manuscripts. South of France, North Africa...other places and things. I can only imagine what the shelves of the authors who have worked on far more books than me look like.
Some SGs do it, some don't. It's a lot of effort, and there are already a lot of moving pieces in combat. A weaker SG will just devolve into relating the effects, just as you described. Opposed rolls may have the intention of making things cinematic, but do they? If they are more work in a spot that is already crowded with a lot of other stuff going on, are they going to get used? Tough call.
New players are also always looking up totals and needing to be reminded of what gets used where. It may be a function of playing online and having character sheets up on the web, and not presented like they are in the 5th edition book's character sheet. But thinking about the example of the 5th Edition character sheet is that it's 4 pages for a magus, and 2 for everyone else. I may be out of the loop on the state of gaming generally, but I remember when everything I needed was on the first page of a character sheet. (Do I need to obligatory "Get off my lawn" old man rant?).
To be fair, I was working based off AD&D 2nd Edition and Rolemaster. As those systems became more fiddly, I became less interested in them. Rolemaster's problem was all of the darned die rolling, which I resolved by doing a list of random numbers printed out in advance. And I know those systems are dated back to the late 80s and early 90s, but that's what I played before moving to other systems, including Ars Magica. When I came back to gaming after a 20 year hiatus, I only had one system I was interested in. Three guesses and the first two don't count. 
All that said, just because Ars Magica is fiddly like all the other systems are fiddly doesn't make it a ringing endorsement of fiddly systems. I don't object to opposed rolls for determining results, but, we have a bit more than that here.
Ars has some hints at narrative game play in it, I wouldn't mind if that were developed a bit more for playing on-screen. Instead, what we have is a simulationist game in narrative dressing. I like the simulationist bits, don't get me wrong, but they are best used off screen, not on.
Isn't it possible that the transition from Coptic Egyption to Arabic Egyption happened over a period of time and that it becomes something of a challenge to model that for a game system? Additionally, this is something that is easily corrected in any saga, should it come up.
But a blanket statement that line authors need to "do some research" is impugning the author pool as a whole. You may very well find evidence that an author made a mistake, and wrote something that isn't historical fact. You may find this multiple times. As a rule, since 4th Edition, there has been a lot of research put into every book, and it's quite noticeable. Third Edition barely paid notice to history...
I played both of those systems in the 90s, for years. Rolemaster required a near encyclopedic knowledge of charts (J Lightning Criticals! You trip over an invisible deceased turtle!) but AD&D 2E was more streamlined (I still have the core rules from the CD on this machine). But those rules didnt' handle a number of things well either. The grappling rules were incomprehensible, the thieving skills were percentile, the proficiencies were simply "roll under" stat checks, and action was purely abstracted-- although I can't remember if it still had weapon speeds, I think it did. They had eliminated the weapon type versus armor type table by then, which was nice, but it was still a series of charts you rolled and compared against, which were different for each class, they were just nicely placed in the DM's screen. However, I know we were complaining in Dragon's Forum columns that it wasn't complex enough.
Personally, I don't know that I want to go that abstract in combat. It's the bit of tabletop board game mixed in with the storytelling that allows for great narration and drama, and I'd hate to give up the elements of chance within it. Moving too far towards a Lords of Gossamer & Shadow playstyle just doesn't work for me.
Maybe-- and this is a crazy idea, but maybe what would be interesting is an Ars Magica engine that says specifically how to run it with differing levels of complexity, effectively bolting it on to other games. Sure, you go with what we have now, but you also show them, "Here's how it works with this, and this, and this, and this. These are the changes you need, and the considerations you have to make."
Rolemaster required a lot of setup space for me as the SG, which I didn't care for, and I had sticky notes on the criticals charts to make access quick and easy. I was still fiddling around with a lot, but it was me, and I could handle it. The players (who can always get distracted like a dog is to a squirrel, let's face it) didn't have a lot of that to go. So, I felt I could better focus on being descriptive, and the criticals took some of the lifting off me. I used them as suggestions, more or less...
I'm not an advocate for diceless gaming. But, you should know well that magi (and even other characters, albeit to a lesser extent) can be created such that the die roll is meaningless in all cases but a 0 (it is harder for mundane combat, though not impossible). For magi, even that 0 forcing a botch check can be mitigated with Cautious Sorceror, Golden Cord from familiar and spell mastery (with work and/or talent, the risk of your magic failing at an inopportune time approaches 0). For mundane combat, on the other hand, you can botch, and if it's on defense, that defending character is probably going to die or be horribly maimed, depending on soak[sup]1[/sup]. If it's a scenario in the beginning of a session, and the idea was for that scene to build tension for the character who dies, the session is something of a failure. Yes, it can be salvaged, or the SG can pull his punch, so to speak. But both alternatives are narrative, right? Maybe, if it was a killing blow it happens later, and the character and player have some time to think about how he's going to exit? Maybe it doesn't happen right then and there, just at some point[sup]2[/sup] he's going to die; let the player determine how and where that is, within the limits set by the SG/troupe.
[sup]1[/sup]Assuming a defender's soak of 0 (which is just for reference) someone with 0 strength and a club needs to only have a dex+ability+roll of 11, and if we assume an average roll of 6, it means dex+ability =5. with a club to incapacitate someone. Of course, we're not dealing with attackers with clubs all that often, nor are we dealing with soaks of 0. I'd say a soak of 10-12 is probably reasonable, (except for magi whose defenders just bought a farm), in which case...
[sup]2[/sup] Perhaps a single botch is survivable, if combat resolves favorably. And a double botch or more starts a ticking clock on the character's long term survivability.
When I say some research I mean hat when half a minute on google shows them ill informed maybe they should have put a little more time into what we are expected to pay for. And this is simply the latest incident I have run across, usually while trying to resolve issues of dispute between various books.
And this is a wish list is it not?
"You can't put anything on the internet that isn't true."
While it is a wishlist, if you're going to impugn the entire author pool for not doing any research, using your anecdotal example of using Google to find something that shows that they are wrong is probably not the best approach. I did the half a minute Google for Coptic language and found the first link which describes Coptic (more of a script for Egyptian, and not an actual language according to the page) but it doesn't include any citations to support its conclusions, if it were a Wikipedia article, which there is one, it would have citations needed about every 3rd sentence.
So, looking at the Wikipedia article...
The citation is important here, because it leads to a page that discusses the displacement of Coptic by Arabic in Egypt, and that Copts started writing their treatise in Arabic in the 13th century, and Coptic, as a spoken language persisted among country folk through the 17th century...
So, um, there's disagreement, and at the very least, for all intents and purposes, it appears that there is some rigorous academic support for the idea that Coptic, is a dead language in the 13th century. Granted, it took more than a half minute of googling...
If they started writing in Arabic in the 13th century then in 1220, to quote the search for the Holy Grail "He's not dead yet"
But he's not getting better...
So, looking at the Wayback Machine, for December 2007, when Ancient Magic was likely being written, shows that the Wikipedia page for Coptic states by the 900's Coptic was in such decline that the particular bishop needed to write in Arabic to communicate, and the Mamluks further persecuted any use of the language. It says Coptic was a literary language in the 13C...that's not a living language. Now Wikipedia's more of a "start looking for where you need to search" source. The other sources used by the authors may have made it clearer that by the 13C, Coptic was no longer in general use. In fact, Coptic.org suggests that in the 11C, as the crusades spin up, the Copts began actively using Arabic. In the 11C to 13C, they were writing Arabic in Coptic script. When it's no longer in general use, that's a dead language.
No, a dead language is one where it is not a native language for any living population. A language which is spoken by a small tribe in south America which has been speaking it for the last 800 years is a living language, even if 95+% of the world has never heard of it.
Or would you like to go tell the Navajo that their language is dead because it is not in general use. Be sure to especially mention this to the code talkers who were so critical in WW2, because their language made an ideal code because it had not been written down and existed only as a living language.
Wouldn't this make Latin a living language, since it's heavily used as the primary communication between magi?
You're forgetting the Church. I mean, it's used everyday and twice on Sundays there... 
For those people who write, Dead Languages are for academics, while Living Languages are for accountants and such. I rarely see a need to draw a clearer distinction than that. 