Accountants? It was my understanding that there would be no math.
Nevermind, this is Ars Magica.
I'm not derailing this thread further. I'll simply say that claiming the authors don't research their material is ludicrous. These books aren't meant to be historical references, but they are most certainly researched.
Hi,
I definitely agree with main point about combat, although I'd say "streamline" rather than "simplify."
Re Pathfinder/D&D: On any given "attack," either the aggressor rolls (normal attacks) or the defender rolls (to save against an effect). Right there, we halve the number of rolls. SR muddies this a bit, but the PCs tend not to have it, since it is usually a disadvantage for them. Most modifiers are static, and most of the ones that are not map clearly onto player options. To a far greater extent than AM, D&D (especially pf) is a game of tactical resource management, so each of these options involves a real decision. Rules mastery is definitely required to use all those options, but combat is simpler than (and better than) AM.
I don't think AM can simplify all that much without becoming something else. The biggest bottleneck happens when someone sponts. Does everyone agree with the Arts? The guideline? TRD? (I don't remember that guideline... oh, it's in Book X; hmm... is that really minor rather than major? Yeah, and do you really know anything about Y? I have Lore: something vaguely related to Y, and.... (rolls d10)... I have a total of 11, so I think that's reasonable. Ok, but...) It isn't the only such bottleneck.
Anyway,
Ken
It's odd to me that anyone sees the game as unresearched. I can see people disagreeing with various conclusions of that research; that happens with 'real' research all the time. I can also see people wishing that different aspects of a topic were presented. But AM is one of the few rpgs out there whose supplements have bibliographies.....
Even if the players didn't have to deal with math (and in the case of economics they actually don't, the whole thing with tracking money is optional) there'd still be people keeping track of income and spending in the game world itself. 
Anyway, things I'd like to see in Ars Magica 6...
Oh, I know. I'd like the core book to provide a little more information on non-Hermetic powers. I mean, certainly don't put a supplement book's worth in, but like, do a version of what you did with creature Powers with affiliated powers, like "yeah, just assign some skills and levels here, and here's a rough guideline of how strong people outside the Order of Hermes ought to be." Again, do it like the creatures, keeping it very general and vague, but with some kind of structure there to build from. I've had to start over entire AM5 sagas when we got new splatbooks because the world I ran worked under the assumption that Supernatural Virtues and the MR of True Faith were the only powers non-Order humans were capable of obtaining, meaning my brain kind of did a little confusion dance when I saw that anybody outside the Order could, in fact, utilize Method+Power combinations (and thereby be more sophisticated than having one or two inflexible abilities).
For d20/PF, an attacker rolls one to five times, depending on level, spells, feats, and class abilities, then rolls damage-- occasionally combining these rolls, but not always, depending on the nature of the foe... that's without getting into combat maneuvers, casters, or the druid hordes.
Really, AD&D 2E is probably one of the most streamlined (and abstracted) combat systems I've played, but I can't recall how complex Savage Worlds is (not terribly complex, iirc), and I haven't played 5E since second playtest. I'm not familiar enough with FATE, Burning Wheel, or Cortex to say. I know 13th Age is a variant on d20, but haven't delved into the differences aside from the Escalation die.
I think the comparison of rolls is pretty fast once you're playing for a few sessions, because combat oriented characters' players get used to the process. The spontaneous casting does increase time, but we've reduced that using cards with the guidelines printed on them. A deck of the guidelines combined with headshots of the magi out of the books (maybe with their strongest arts, season, and personality traits on the back) would be a no-brainer purchase for me as a player and storyguide.
Someone should clip the language discussion and make of it a new thread.
not it
A Living Language is one that could be a Native Language, the Mother's Tongue, the baby's first words. Coptic does qualify in period as being just that.
Hi,
Considering the complexity of creating a character in AM, a game with this kind of rule will largely involve character creation; Paranoia or even WFRP works better for that kind of game. Magi are going to really, really avoid combat. Heck, so are warriors. Realistic? Maybe.... but if your average hero is going to be dead or hopelessly crippled after a few combats, we're going to be gaming in the grunge. A code of non-interference with anything is very self-enforcing. For this kind of combat, we can stay within the Atlas stable and use OTE rules for character creation....
Anyway,
Ken
In an admission of criticism and to offer a defense. The authors suck, and we deserve to be allowed to suck.
:mrgreen:
Sort of but not really.
I spent hundreds of hours and many months just to create a little part in a little book. I spent years working on one that was like pulling teeth. Between the two I made maybe a month's rent. So we don't do it for money. We do it out of Love and Pride. I wanted the thing I made to be cool, something I could point at and be proud of, use it to woo women.
And I know my work has flaws. Glaring flaws I didn't spot until it went to print. Too much dependency on wikipedia for my research. But I am still proud of it. It was cool. I've used it to get dates.
Yes I did. :mrgreen:
Ars Magica is the most unique of all RPGs in that it is written by fans for fans, and any fan can potentially write something shared by a community. Ars Magica is unique in that it was spawned at the dawn of the internet age and has ever been entwined with it. It has a vast online community born of the Berklist and continued by these Forums. New players are continually embraced by this community, which is the true gateway to learning this game.
Perhaps this is the future of the game as well?
It's been a while, but my thinking when writing this bit of Ancient Magic was that the story is tracking down archeological sources, and then taking them back to a lab and studying them. I treated Coptic as a dead language just like Latin, meaning I figured it's hard to find sources. It's not that there aren't any sources, or the story would fall flat. Like Indiana Jones, the characters who want to proceed need to piece together pieces of a puzzle scattered across the Middle East, all the while dodging [strike]Naz[/strike]Mongols. With this rather overblown framework, dinging me for not doing enough research to recognize that Coptic was still spoken by a small group seems kind of silly. 
To me the more annoying part is that 1) there is no actual language as 'coptic' but where it does occur it essentially refers to later Egyptian, as In grew out of earlier Egyptian, where you list it as having a common root. Ethiopia has a long storied and mythical history, and a different language structure. Of course you could talk about the upper kingdom and lower kingdom Egyptian, but that would ruin the premise of the piece, which was that languages divide and don't merge, where upper and lower Egyptian merged into ancient Egyptian which then began its evolution towards 'coptic' or modern egyptian which then gave way to Arabic.
Of course upper and lower Egyptian were spoken in a period which realistically predates Genesis, so that would throw other monkey wrenches into the works as well...
Actually the bibliographies seem to have gone away recently. I for one miss them.
On the larger point, I absolutely agree that AM5 is as well researched as one could possibly expect a game to be, minor mistakes or disagreements on historical interpretation notwithstanding.
I think you're missing a bit. A single botch on defense, as the game is written now, is frequently death, especially against anyone who is skilled and has a decent weapon. And there's no distinction in the game between what happens with a single botch and a double botch on defense. I'm saying that a single botch, if combat resolves favorably isn't a death sentence for the character. And a double botch, or more, is a signal that the player needs to get the character's house in order and plan a good exit... As it is now, a botch is very likely a death sentence. You botch a defense roll against a skilled swordsman, with a score of 6, a specialty of long sword, dex 2, who makes an average roll of 6 is: Ability 6 + Dex 2 + Spec 1 + Wpn 4 +Die 6=19. Add damage to that of +6 is 25. In Chainmail, note, I'm keeping stamina 0 for the defender, as well as strength 0 for the attacker. And magic can, make this better or worse, depending upon which side it's applied. I've soaks approaching 30, which is nigh untouchable even with a defense botch...
That one's not one of mine, but I'd like to point out that without a paid peer review system ,you should expect an error rate of about 2%, and in older books, be aware of a knowledge decay rate of a few percent.
Errors are both regrettable and inevitable.
In Ars it didn't emerge out of earlier Egyptian, because both the Copts and Muslims living in Egypt think the hieroglyphs are in Coptic: they don't believe there was an earlier, Ancient language, because the world's only so many years old, and God put extra monuments here because he's cool like that. (OKASHA EL-DALY, Egyptology: The Missing Millennium)
My bad! I'm not a huge fan of botches.
I am a big fan of consequences of failure.
Its trivial to design a character who can avoid failure, except or until there is a botch, in a certain, specific area. So there is a bit of a dichotomy of always succeeding, at some task, until the RNG finally deems your character deserving of a botch. And when the botch comes, you have to face the consequences of a critical failure, well outside the scope of what the character would normally experience.
I think it would be better to make a single botch just cut your mods in half and keep the roll a 0, while a double botch or more gives you a full 0. I think that fits the fluff of botches better, like how the example botches for climbing a cliff had one botch die be falling early on and thus most likely only receiving a light or medium wound. Only in the case of defense though, if you botch an attack, it shouldn't hit no matter how much better you are than your opponent.
A big part of me would be totally good with a new core book with new art (like that sexy sexy spanish translation that's out there) but also all the scattered guidelines, the covenant traits, and the foe-building bits from the realms books, but less about the specific bits of the Order and Mythic Europe in the 13C...
then, I'd love to see Ars do a combined HoH book, a combined Realms book-- less the monster building sections, but probably still including the crafted enemies with errata.
And then you do some alternate settings. Renaissance, Schism, Black Death, Roman Empire's fall, Huns, Classic Bronze Age, Islamic Wave, Bellisarius. Maybe Mythic India, Cahokia, the Swahili Coast. Something completely fantasy and not Europe-- Arcadia, Midgard (Norse, not Pathfinder), Hybrasil, Olympus. Give people books of settings and adventures in those settings and just let the current ruleset roll tide roll with a few setting-specific modifications, where necessary. You kickstart each option to make the books pay their development way, and leave them POD/pdf unless one seems to be doing better than expected in the KS. Over time, you've got a massive well of material to draw people into the system at a setting they love, and they stay for the core of the game.
I'd still want something like the deck of spell guidelines/NPCs, maybe a Storyguide's handbook of troupe play/extended sagas, Antagonist-like books for each new setting, too.