The Gaming Den

Look, Ars Magica is a lot of fun, but it is a very niche game. I don't think that there is all that much meaningful improvement that you can do beyond 5th edition. You can explain stuff better and remove some unneeded complexity in some places, but after that it just is what it is.

Current edition is 5th. They stopped publishing new stuff in 2016, because Atlas Games did not consider the game to be commercially viable* at that point. *If you were to put a gun to my head and force me to develop a commercially viable 6th edition... I would say, go print on demand on a site like ...

25 years ago means it may actually have been 4th edition, brand new in 1996.

Runequest and it's derivatives Are beloved classics of the genre, but that is mostly a triumph of interesting settings+a rules set that facilitates rules light play. Rolemaster It is a lot of work to make characters. These characters are very fragile and incompetent at low levels and when they do b...

Speaking as an owner of 2nd, 3rd, 4th, & 5th edition. I'm pretty sure there never was a beginner friendly edition of the game. It is a bit like early D&D in which a load of basic assumptions also were never explained. 5th edition Ars is an improvement over the earlier editions in the sense t...

Lupus, Stargazer, Ahroun. That combo gave you Gnosis 5, Rage 5, Willpower 5 I think.
That combo was supposed to be relatively rare in setting, but rather common at tables one suspects.

They've produced a 100+ different Werewolf the Apocalypse books in about a decade of time. That suggests a consistent seller, but for all I know the line was kept afloat by syphoning of Vampire sales money the entire time. Was the Savage Horror tagline ever more than a marketing slogan? And those to...

From a business standpoint if it sells, it does not matter much if 10 years from now your buyers ask themselves: "How the hell did we delude ourselves into thinking this was remotely good for a few years?".

The Fianna, Black Furies and Stargazers are New Age archetypes. Celtic spirituality, radical feminist collective and oriental spirituality. The ones that aren't, Silver Fangs, Glasswalkers, Shadow Lords, are there for traditional rpg players who would presumably also buy the game, or because they ne...

If you had Talbots becoming Lon Cheney wolfmen who could pass as strong hairy guys by wearing baggy clothes and Quists becoming giant wolf monsters with retrograde legs, and Kesslers becoming giant quadruped monsters that would be something to hang your hat on. Considering White Wolf's skill at gam...

You are using perceive wrong. Actually doing magic is via a common set of rules*. What it looks like in setting follows the personal prejudices of the spellcaster. And if a spellcaster's personal prejudices weren't dominant in the area he got screwed, unless he was very discrete. *Well it was suppos...

What the fuck? -Username17 I'm pretty certain WW never got beyond the 'this is a cool explanation why Gandalf, a magic Shaolin monk and a cyborg are using the same rules set' stage. Which is why they never even wrote an essay on the question, 'How do your player characters cause a paradigm to shift...

(First of all sorry for derailing the thread) Having 5 forms gives your illustrators options. A big deal in a style over substance operation like White Wolf. Those 5 forms also all do show up in werewolf fiction. If you want to emulate different types of werewolf fiction you'll want them. I think in...

Traditional werewolves generally make for poor protagonists in a rpg. So naturally they made lots of stuff up. The real problem for werewolf was that goths wanted to play rpg's, Green Peace volunteers did not. As for building on the stuff they did dream up. I like for example the 5 shapes and the De...

Masquerade's success was an example of a rpg going viral.
There is nothing there beyond ripping of Ann Rice, rules that looked easy and the green marble with a rose cover.
By historic happenstance that clicked with a large group of people that wanted to play something, but certainly not AD&D 2e.

I have always liked the following 3 solutions. Werewolves reincarnate. There is actually a set number of them that eternally recycles through the ages. They think they are dying out, because nowadays there are more of everybody else around and they never bothered to do a proper head count. To surviv...

Fuck your fun: it gets in the way of having a game everyone can get on the same page with, or even use parts of the rules effectively. :nonono: No Mask, I'll defend my right to have fun against you and Virgil and Frank and the rest of the micropenis brigade here on the Den. I believe in the having ...

Everything in rpg land boils down to personal preference on some level.

And no Virgil I said earlier in this thread:" This is a very important part of MY Ars Magica fun**.".

No backtracking, 'cause no tracking.

It will just turn it into yet another fantasy rpg also ran. It already is and has been for years (decades?). If you look at it as a traditional fantasy with a couple of innovative ideas. It has been an also ran basically since the day it debuted. So yes, decades. The idea that improving the game in...

Not all problems are of equal severity or frequency despite the fact that in the broadest sense they all have the same cause. -Username17 This. In over a decade of Ars Magica play I've never had to worry about the 6 rats vs. the knight problem, or the pink dot exception, or the medieval laws of nat...

Frank

You are right, however by that standard all rpg's are hopelessly flawed.

Frank You sound like that philosopher who had an airtight case that movement is impossible. He lost the debate, because the other guy got up and walked away from him. You should be right, but out in the real world, I never ran into that problem. I've ran throughout my rpg years into other problems t...

Chamomile Yes. I don't care, I don't own shares in Atlas Games. If I did, I would have told them years ago to produce a bestiary with nice pictures (those sell) and stop making new content thereafter. Move the whole thing to print on demand on Drivethrurpg. Ars Magica is niche game for connaisseurs/...

For the record. I have no clue when it comes Aristotelian, Renaissance or even Newtonian* physics. I know maybe 12 things that worked different according to the medieval laws of nature. Part of my Ars Magica fun is spouting of those 12 things whenever a good possibility to do so arises. This is a ve...

Dude, just assume the hook works like it does in any b-movie. That is what most people do.