Ars Magica

[Chamomile]

Chamomile

I don't want to ground the game in medieval physics. I want the illusion of having grounded the game in medieval physics.

You can't even have the second one. If you ground the game in medieval physics, grappling hooks cease functioning. But medieval people knew that grappling hooks worked. It was an unsolved problem of their philosophy at the time, and the solution was Renaissance physics. Medieval physics contradicted medieval reality and they knew it, they just didn't have any better solutions at the time.

[Daniel]

Ars Magica is for playing Ars Magica.

The first rule of Tautology Club...

I assure you, the game doesn't stop being Ars Magica because bees don't pour out of cow corpses.

The bees are part of the fun and the distinct flavour of Ars Magica.
Just like I don't need supergood combat rules. I need combat rules that explain why my wizard bothers to travel with a platoon of soldiers and that give sort of reasonable results if I use that platoon to fight a dozen of city guards, or a mantichora.

[virgil]

I don't want to ground the game in medieval physics. I want the illusion of having grounded the game in medieval physics.

Translation - you want to be able to hide behind the flimsy excuse of "medieval physics" to justify your arbitrary whims and inconsistencies that players are literally incapable of knowing ahead of time.

[Daniel]

The illusion is maintained, by occasionally pointing out that people get sick from funny smells and that bees have kings not queens.
If you worry about the physics underpinning the use of grappling hooks, you are thinking way to hard about this.

[Username17]

The medieval natural philosophy crap was where Ars Magica stopped being a cooperative story telling game and started being Dunning Kruger: the game.

-Username17

[Daniel]

I don't want to ground the game in medieval physics. I want the illusion of having grounded the game in medieval physics.

Translation - you want to be able to hide behind the flimsy excuse of "medieval physics" to justify your arbitrary whims and inconsistencies that players are literally incapable of knowing ahead of time.

Maybe.

I want a specific kind of background flavour when playing Ars Magica. If the fine print of medieval physics, enters the foreground, stuff is probably going wrong.

[Daniel]

Virgil, Frank, Chamomile

I agree with you all that this is a problem area, but your proposed solution is worse than the problem.

[Chamomile]

The illusion is maintained, by occasionally pointing out that people get sick from funny smells and that bees have kings not queens.
If you worry about the physics underpinning the use of grappling hooks, you are thinking way to hard about this.

I don't have to think about the physics underpinning the use of grappling hooks. I already know that problem. It's a thing I've learned and which I can recall instantly as soon as it comes up. There is no present-tense thinking, all the thought and effort necessary have already happened. And even if I had to relearn the problem with medieval physics and grappling hooks every single time it came up like knowledge was vancian magic or something, it's still going to come up if I want to cast a spell on a grappling hook.

[Daniel]

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

[Username17]

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

If you assume some arbitrary set of things work like how you'd expect them to given that you live and watch movies in a world with basically Newtonian physics, and you assume that some other arbitrary set of things works they way it would be predicted to based on your limited understanding of some arbitrary grab bag of ancient natural philosophies, you have no reference frame that you share with any other living person. Telling cooperative stories is impossible because you literally do not agree with the other participants on how gravity works in the setting you are trying to tell stories in.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

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

That's junking medieval Aristotelian physics in favor of Renaissance (or later) Newtonian physics, which was my suggestion. So, uh, yeah, that's exactly what I'd like to do.

[Daniel]

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 very important part of my Ars Magica fun**. You give me a new Ars Magica, with combat rules that cover all spherical cow situations the current one does not and the medieval laws of nature conceit removed and I won't play it and I won't buy it.



*a lie (but only a small one).
** no doubt pathetic

[Chamomile]

You give me a new Ars Magica, with combat rules that cover all spherical cow situations the current one does not and the medieval laws of nature conceit removed and I won't play it and I won't buy it.

Okay, great. I don't care. I said I wanted a version of Ars Magica that actually works, not one that appeals to people who specifically want a version of Ars Magica that can only work if you have a very specific lack of knowledge of how medieval philosophers actually thought the world worked. And even if I was in this for the market, Ars Magica has proven, repeatedly, that you and people like you are a tiny demographic who are not worth paying attention.

[Username17]

The problem is that any other random person with a passing familiarity with the time period will also have a dozen things they will know or think they know about the thinking of the time, and they will not be the same dozen things! You do not share a frame of reference for things work with even one other person in the entire world. There is no cooperative storytelling possible because you and the other players do not concur on such basic shit as whether and how things fall down.

The framework of "basically the real world plus a couple random crazy medieval ideas are true" is only functional if every person knows and agrees and understands the implications of every one of those medieval philosophical conceits. If you just limit it to whatever you personally know and the implications you personally have thought about, then the only person who can write additions to the story is you. That makes the world you're describing acceptable for a novel you personally intend to write but absolutely worthless as a game more than one person is expected to play and contribute to.

If you have some riff about spontaneous generation and another player wants to talk about the interaction between sensible species and intelligible species, you are not describing the same world or even really speaking the same language. There is pretty much no way for that to be a coherent RPG, because you aren't cooperatively telling the same story.

-Username17

[Daniel]

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/weirdo's, the changes the gearheads on this site are proposing will not make the game a big financial success. It will just turn it into yet another fantasy rpg also ran.

[Daniel]

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 that made a whole lot less sense instead.

[Username17]

All problems in RPGs are fundamentally ones of disagreements about what should happen in a given circumstance. Literally every problem you have and that it is possible to have while playing Ars Magica is ultimately attributable to the failure of the rules and setting to give equivalent expectations to each contributor to the story.

-Username17

[Starmaker]

Ars Magica is Plane on a Treadmill: The Game.
Or What If: The Game.
If you're arguing whether the plane takes off or the sun turns into lead and explodes first, you're not playing a cooperative storytelling game anymore.

[Daniel]

Frank

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

[Username17]

Frank

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

No.

The thing where six rats in a formation will blenderize a mounted knight to death in two combat rounds is only a problem because it doesn't fit people's understanding of what is supposed to happen. A combat system is just a series of fixed and randomized numbers for inputs and outputs, it can only be good or bad if people have expectations of what those inputs and outputs are supposed to represent and be. DnD has potential problems when a mounted knight fights six rats, but they are much less in 3e because the mounted knight expects to win fairly easily and the Nelsons in the peanut gallery only giggle for how many times they get bitten while doing it.

Ars Magica has problems because it fails to set every player's expectations to be similar. It does so on a mechanical level by not clearly defining what bonuses or target numbers are supposed to mean or be. And it does it on a setting level by repeatedly contradicting itself when describing how the world is different from historical baseline. And it does so on the level of basic narrative interaction by having absolutely no idea what it's talking about when it comes to basic science facts. And because of this failure to create similar expectations, it opens up the possibility of problems developing every time someone rolls a die or attempts to have their character interact with the world.

Not all problems are of equal severity or frequency despite the fact that in the broadest sense they all have the same cause. And different games can absolutely hit more or less of these problems and have it be a bigger or smaller deal when they do.

-Username17

[Daniel]

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 nature make no sense problem. Those never came up. Other stuff did, including stuff the game probably had good answers for.

My most recent rules fight was a GM getting angry with me, because I picked an overpowered 2nd level blasting spell in Pathfinder. Apparently the cone of the blast was to large.

You cannot design away people being stupid at the game table, but you can waste everybody's time by putting in rules that cover all sorts of eventualities that (almost) never show up in a real game. And you can make a game less replayable by nailing down stuff that maybe you shouldn't.

[virgil]

It will just turn it into yet another fantasy rpg also ran.

It already is and has been for years (decades?). The game is currently dead and there is at best rumours of what they might do with the IP down the line.

I don't need to 'defend' Ars, the fact I've been running an Ars campaign for over a year and a half speaks for itself. The idea that improving the game in even minor ways would be a dealbreaker says more about you than it does about the game. It remains Ars Magica with the changes I've made to the system, which includes Newtonian physics; and probably more accurate physics than most because of my degree and another player's passionate hobby in rocket science (which has turned out to be used). It would remain Ars Magica if I incorporated a better combat system, but I don't because I'm lazy and not because it would somehow stop being Ars Magica.

[Daniel]

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 even minor ways would be a dealbreaker says more about you than it does about the game. It remains Ars Magica with the changes I've made to the system, which includes Newtonian physics; and probably more accurate physics than most because of my degree and another player's passionate hobby in rocket science (which has turned out to be used).

This says more about both of us than it says about the game. You modified the rules and setting of a game about running an artists colony made up of wizards to make it more 'realistic'.
What it means is that I can participate in a fun Ars Magica campaign for 18 months and you can apparently do the same. But we could never do it in the same campaign, no matter how well the rules are rewritten.

[virgil]

This says more about both of us than it says about the game.

Yes, it does say something about the game. You made the claim that inconsistently applied Aristotelian physics is necessary for Ars Magica to be Ars Magica. You seem to have back-tracked this statement to be that of personal preference, where it belongs.

[Daniel]

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.