I love Ars Magica and, in general, I think the various supplements for 5th edition are excellent... as evidenced by the fact that I own so many of them. One thing that I am having increasing difficulty with is all the virtue, flaws and extra rules scattered throughout all those supplements... especially the ones I don't own.
On the first point, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to make characters when I have to flip through virtues and flaws in the core book, Grogs, The Church, the three RoP books and A&A to see if there is a virtue or flaw to fit mine and my players concepts or inspire an interesting character. On the second, I will admit freely that I am, for example, not interested in buying Sundered Eagle... it doesn't interest me and doesn't add to my saga... but I am very interested in the Folk Magic virtue. Sadly, I can't bring myself do drop money on an entire book to get one virtue. Likewise, I have no interest in the HoH series... purely a personal choice... but I would very much like the extended animal rules from HoH: Mystery Cults. Again, however, I don't want to buy the whole book for the sake of a couple of pages.
What I am longing to see is a book like the old Wizard's Grim which collects a bunch of odd rules, virtues and flaws from the various supplements into a single book. That I would cheerfully buy. Obviously, I'm posting this is the hopes that other people are also interested in the same and that maybe, if "enough" people are interested, Altas Games would consider such a product.
I hate to say it, but I believe they have explicitly said they will not write a book like this. I do know if you hunt around you can find fan made compilations, I just can't remember at all where I got mine from.
That document includes the names and identifies which book the particular Virtue or Flaw is defined, but it does not include the complete text description.
That being said, I'd pay[1] for a document that had all the virtues and flaws in one spot with the full descriptions and mechanics detailed.
[1] I'd pay Atlas Games, not some schmo off the street.
It also is about two years old and therefore missing a pretty large chunk of material including the Church, Cradle and the Crescent, Apprentices, and , most importantly, Grogs.
Mr. Dahl, is this database available in a format that the average not particularly computer savvy layman can access? Could you just export it as a big fat tab delimited table so anyone could use it? the ability to sort and search is lost a bit in pdf only.
Definitely makes it easier but they're so far behind that it's starting to cramp my use of the product.
I would love a Virtue/Flaws super-book. Generally, I HATE any regurgitated product but it would be really helpful for character generation (passing around the table and such).
IMO, it doesn't even need to be a "book." I would pay (extra) for a PDF that is routinely refreshed when new Virtues and Flaws are added in a different book. I would think that something like this would be relatively easy to do, and doesn't the PDF distribution via e23 already handle an update notification process when the PDF has been updated? I seem to recall receiving an email about an updated PDF of one of the Ars books I purchased as a PDF.
So, charge me $10, and update it for the life of 5th edition and I'm good with it. It would be extremely useful.
I'd like to see such a thing expanded slightly to be a 'Characters' updating PDF. Not just virtues/flaws, but also abilities and characteristics, including reprinting the rules for character advancement. I'd suggest making mystery virtues their own category as well, with lots of 'you will find more detail in this book...' throughout to make referencing easier (and to possibly help sales).
Such a tome/PDF would be useful to be able to give to someone when they're making a (non-magus) character. A 'big book of magic' with consolidated TeFo guidelines and the various spells and items printed in various books would also be cool - and handy to give to a player when they need to lab-work.
Of course, these two things provide a sizeable chunk of what you need to play the game - so it'd be tricky to make them cheap/free without potentially impacting the profitability of the core rulebook. Assuming the core rulebook is still in itself making money enough to be impacted by such a product.
2c - I'd also seriously consider subscribing to an always updated document, even if it was on a book by book bases as a model attached to the pdf distribution for errata updates. On first thought can see a few issues with it in terms of currency of information, translation, cost of production, small audience, and piracy that it is likely prohibitive. DnD tried something like this with an online subscription to the ruleset, and for the most part I think it was not used by the population.
Medical resource / textbook companies use a model which is subscription based, granting access to the most current updated content (both browser based and pdfs). Once that subscription lapses then the user typically has nothing, or has access to a version of the online documents for a period of years. These resources are bloody expensive to use, which would make little sense for a non-professional activity.
That said, ArM already distributes many of the books as Pdf so the willingness to trust that the customers are not blatant content pirates is there. And perhaps the community is small enough to support an experiment. Watermarked/ID'ed Pdfs are plausible with digital distribution - which discourages unauthorised distribution.
Actually sounds like a great kickstarter project if a favourable model could be designed.
That sounds like a great thing to have as a player, but I am having trouble figuring out how it would work for Atlas. If such an option were available, wouldn't that cut into sales of the supplements? For example, I quit buying supplements for D&D, because WotC twisted my arm into paying for D&D Insider (to get the character generator), and I can get all the powers and items and whatnot online. So why buy the original book?
Disclaimer: I don't speak for Atlas, and I don't even run a business. I just tend to look at the industry from a business angle.
There is usually significantly more in the book than Virtues and Flaws.
I may have done some things in reverse, and I may be an atypical consumer of Ars, otherwise. I purchased the main rule book first, then I purchased MetaCreator (bundle with all the supplements) then I purchased Houses of Hermes books and so on. There's a lot more than Virtues and Flaws in all Ars books.
One can hope. I don't know if the economics of the book make sense, it probably doesn't. It does require labor to bring all the virtues and flaws together, proof the text, edit the text, copy-edit the PDF, apply some artwork such as page borders and the like. Still, they would be generating revenue on an ancillary product, and personally I don't ask that it looks pretty. If it is in a PDF it is easily searchable and it is all in one place. That alone is worth something to me. It may be worth more than $10, I threw that out as a starting point for discussion. Maybe Atlas can't make it work for $10 dollars for any number of reasons. I don't know.
