Ars Magica

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Korgan0
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Ars Magica

Post by Korgan0 »

So, I managed to get my grubby mitts on a copy of Ars Magica 5e, and I was wondering what y'all thought about it.

I'm impressed that they managed to construct such an open-ended magic system that doesn't immediately fall down, but it's strange that spontaneous magic is so heavily penalized given that PC's have access to so few spells. Also, it pretty much requires that the GM be at least conversant in Aristotelian metaphysics, which is asking a great deal of most GM's.

While the structure of troupe roleplaying based around a covenant seems to work fairly well, the entire thing looks like it demands a hell of a lot of bookeeping, with covenant stats and a pool of grogs and multiple PC's per player and so on, but at the very least it seems like it functions.
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Post by sabs »

Ars Magica is a roleplaying game for HIstory Nerds.
I happen to be one ;) so it's great fun. And I have a blast coming up with campaign ideas by doing history research on specific places, and trying to work real life events into a situation. But really, yes Ars Magica is for people who have at least a passing knowledge od Aristotellian metaphysics. Because, in Ars Magica, that shit is real.

The big problem with Ars Magica is really that Grogs are too good, compared to Companions. And that not all magic is equivalent. But really, it's supposed to be a game where you play adventures once or twice a game year, and the rest of the time is spent in Wizards being Science nerds.

It can be quite fun, but every season your wizard spends not contemplating his navel, is a season he's not getting more powerful.
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Post by Koumei »

I had great fun for the one campaign I played. I played a nine foot tall Norse guy who naturally specialised in gesture-free illusions. As you do when you're a nine foot tall Norse guy.

That said, we tended to have one short adventure per season in-game. So we'd go and do something, harvest any materials from that, then do a few little scenes of stuff happening here and there as we skip through three months, then everyone gets their "working on a major project" check, so we managed to gain resources fairly quickly, to be spent in upping our power and learning new spells and whatever.
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Post by Longes »

I've tried to join an Ars Magica game once, but rules are just too incomprehencible for me, with all their fake latin and grognards. I prefer Mage the Awakening.
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Post by JigokuBosatsu »

We had good fun with Arse Magicka back in the day. Companions and grogs were definitely better to actually spend time with, with the occasional scene of the wizards having a council meeting that turns into the last act of Reservoir Dogs.
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Post by virgil »

I just got ahold of Ars 5 myself, and am considering throwing it into the queue of games to run (M&M mini-campaign, one-shot Eclipse Phase, Mage in Black mini-campaign, then Arse). I know that open-ended systems like the spontaneous magic can have their problems, so I'm tempted to compile as many of the extant spells to use as guidelines for what nouns/verbs are required for an effect; and I can only hope the published material is consistent.
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Post by Laertes »

Naturally, I quite enjoy Ars Magica.

Spontaneous magic is heavily penalised in order to keep the game flowing. Casting spontaneously is much slower in terms of turn-speed than casting formulaic magic, but is far more flexible. Therefore, the penalty exists to give you an incentive to develop your spells beforehand and work with them whenever possible. This is nice because it naturally leads to every character having a semi-limited palette of per-turn choices, but a palette which they themselves chose and can expand during downtime.

Ars Magica also has probably the best XP system and the best downtime system out there. If you like XP - and I'm of the opinion that many games shouldn't have it - it's a good system to borrow from.
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Post by virgil »

As I graze the internet about the game, I keep running into people having issues with the Pink Dot Problem, and I'm trying to decide how to think of it. On the one hand, I don't see a problem with a magus turning the fire green and then walking through it as an introduction. On the other hand, I can see where people would chafe at the idea of older mages being unable to slap each other (because of the longetivity ritual), let alone be able to readily make themselves immune to attacks by throwing crappy buffs on mundane stuff before it hits them.
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Post by fectin »

Do pink dots provide any unique advantages, or are they all mechanically =< actual protection spells?
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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Post by Username17 »

Ars Magica has a bunch of interesting innovations. In particular, it has essentially solved the linear warriors/quadratic wizards problem in a satisfactory manner. That's impressive and laudable.

That being said, the spontaneous magic system is fucking unusable and you shouldn't try to use it. We've had this discussion before, and I pulled an example out of my ass to show how resolving random spontaneous effects you might want to do is actually really hard.

Laertes and two other Ars Magica fans popped up to claim it wasn't that hard. Not only did all three of them come to different conclusions on exactly how it worked, but all three of them used wildly different reasoning and all three of them were wrong. Laertes in particular based his reasoning on misremembering ancient Greek natural philosophy. I am not even kidding. He was wrong about how to resolve a trivial effect I made up off the top of my head because he misapplied a misremembered piece of fucking Aristotle that isn't even in any official Ars Magica book. That is a thing that can happen if you try to use the spontaneous magic rules. It is unplayable garbage.

Keep away from the spontaneous magic fail, and it's a simple but workable system with a couple of big neat ideas.

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Post by John Magnum »

How does Ars handle the LWQW stuff?
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Post by virgil »

FrankTrollman wrote:That being said, the spontaneous magic system is fucking unusable and you shouldn't try to use it. We've had this discussion before, and I pulled an example out of my ass to show how resolving random spontaneous effects you might want to do is actually really hard.
While I don't think your complaints were directed at me, I wasn't claiming that spontaneous magic was good or anything.

The kludge I was considering was for spontaneous magic to be meta-access to every hermetic spell w/toggles on the range-target-duration parts. Answering the question of whether you can grow a horn or clean your dishes would be based on extant spells and the more obvious cases; my players tend not to be terribly esoteric in their ideas, so it'll likely be sufficient for my campaign.
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Post by Laertes »

As I graze the internet about the game, I keep running into people having issues with the Pink Dot Problem, and I'm trying to decide how to think of it. On the one hand, I don't see a problem with a magus turning the fire green and then walking through it as an introduction. On the other hand, I can see where people would chafe at the idea of older mages being unable to slap each other (because of the longetivity ritual), let alone be able to readily make themselves immune to attacks by throwing crappy buffs on mundane stuff before it hits them.
The Pink Dot is made out to be more of an issue than it actually is. It's a theoretical exploit whereby a magician can make himself utterly immune to a mundane person's attack provided the magician has enough time and warning to get a spell off. Considering how the combat system works - in particular, considering how the bodyguarding rules work - this isn't exactly game breaking, especially when you consider that spells which can one-shot mundane combatants are cheap and easily available.

In longer games which reach higher levels, the issue is almost the other way around: magical defences are too weak rather than too strong, which means that like most rocket-launcher-tag games, it becomes all about an overwhelming alpha strike from ambush. That can be fun and tactical and everything, but it can grate against the fluff a little. Mind you, games breaking down at very high levels is nothing new.
That being said, the spontaneous magic system is fucking unusable and you shouldn't try to use it. We've had this discussion before, and I pulled an example out of my ass to show how resolving random spontaneous effects you might want to do is actually really hard.
While Frank is right that I fucked my Aristotelean cosmology up, he is exaggerating when he says that the spontaneous magic system is unusable. It is usable and it gets used. If you browse over to the board's In The Trenches section you can read through a forum game I'm running where we had a fight involving people running around using spontaneous magic to prevent a mind-controlling wolf from tearing their convoy apart, and that worked without requiring pages of arguments about powers.

What Frank means to say is that the spontaneous magic system is not immediately transparent to people who've never played it, and this is a valid criticism. In many respects Ars Magica isn't a particularly newbie friendly game and simply reading through a books a few times won't give you instant clarity on how it works in play.
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Post by fectin »

High level anything is all about overwhelming alpha strike. In reality too.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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Post by Username17 »

John Magnum wrote:How does Ars handle the LWQW stuff?
There is a "troupe" that constitutes the protagonist faction, and each player plays a character or more from the troupe each session. So you take turns playing Wizards (who are better), Fighters (who are less better), and groups of schmoes (who are leastest).

So Wizards rule, Fighters drool, and that's OK because of the turn taking mechanic.

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Post by Laertes »

How does Ars handle the LWQW stuff?
What Frank said, but also: you will often have an adventure which is fighters-and-rogues-only, with whatever equipment the magicians deigned to make them. This can often be comedic gold and just as often can be really interesting drama because it lets you explore the life of the "little people" under your wizards' feet.
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Post by ...You Lost Me »

Any links to previous Ars Magica threads where I can read about the game?
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Post by Nihnoz »

If your wizard is a lab rat you might not go on many adventures with him but it hardly matters because wizards still have insane narrative power.
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Post by Korgan0 »

There's a game going on right now in In The Trenches, which you can check out.

Frank was wrong about spontaneous magic, in the last thread, and he's still wrong now. He's not even wrong in an interesting way, to make this worse. I believe the example he cited was something like a human growing horns through some keratin whatsoever, and whether it would be Creo Corpus (since you're creating part of a body), Rego (since you're modifying skin cells), Muto (since you're altering a body) or Perdo (since having horns sucks ass).

However, there's a very clear answer. It's not Creo whether you're creating them separately or not, since you can only Creo things in a given Form that are part of the essential natures of things covered by that form, and in the medieval-aristotelian cosmology that Ars Magica operates in it's not within a human's essential nature to have horns. In any case, creating horns out of nothing and stitching them on is very different to just giving a human horns. It's not Rego, since, again, it's not within a human's essential nature to have horns. Rego tends to map onto the Aristotelian categories of Action, Posture, and natural changes in quality, none of which map onto spontaneous generation of horns on a human skull. I understand that in the real world these things totally happen, but Ars Magica doesn't take place in the real world. It takes place in Mythic Europe, a world with very differenet physical laws and internal organization to ours. People straight-up don't spontaneously develop horns without demon possession, and that's the domain of divine fuckery and Vim magic. It's not Perdo, unless you wanted to give them a disease that resulted in them growing horns, which would be a very different thing, and to be honest, something that I'm not sure is even possible since I'm not up on medieval epidemiology. It's obviously, then, Muto Corpus. Specifically, under the guidelines on page 132 of Ars Magica 5e, It's a level 2 base effect to change someone in order to give them a minor ability, which goring would, presumably, fall under. To make it a touch-range spell of Sun duration would then make it a level 5 spell, the same level as Eyes of the Cat.

Cleaning dishes could be accomplished through several different means. Perdp Herbam with Animal and Terram requisites (range touch, duration momentary, target individual or group) could be used to straight-up remove whatever matter is on the dishes themselves, although they wouldn't smell very nice. and might not be polished properly. Creo Terram (I'm assuming ceramic dishware here) would polish the dishes and make them shiny and strong, but not remove any matter on them. Rego Herbam with Animal and Terram requisites would, for a duration, prevent any grime from getting on the plates, expelling any on them at that moment, but there is the problem that all that gunk has to go somewhere, and any food you try to put on them while the spell is active will be similarly repelled, if it wasn't for momentary or concentration duration. Again, using clearly defined fundamental principles, it's trivial to extrapolate spell effects.

As Laertes said, to really grasp how Ars Magica's magic system works requires an understanding of a cosmology and set of natural laws that works really very differently to the one we live in, and requires a lot of very different thinking. With that proviso, however, it really works very well, and in my limited experience, whenever an edge case has come up, the fact that the basic principles of the cosmology are well-defined, and the fact that you can quite literally draw on several hundred years of scholarship, means that said cases can usually be resolved.
Nihnoz wrote:If your wizard is a lab rat you might not go on many adventures with him but it hardly matters because wizards still have insane narrative power.
I'm currently playing a labrat, and while you might not often be the one going out to treat with the Fae or whatever, you'll probably be the one making the spells and magic items that empower the others to do so. Moreover, the fact that lab totals are based on your standard Arts means that you'll probably know a few suitably powerful spells, so with the right Arcane Connections and spells you can still have a pretty substantial effect depending on the circumstances. More generally, I'd say that Ars Magica is the kind of game where if you're just heading into the dragon's lair without preparation or study, exactly the kind of things wherein labrats excel, you're severely missing out on the tools available to Hermetic Magi. That, or you're a Flambeau.
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Post by Prak »

Korgan0 wrote:However, there's a very clear answer. It's not Creo whether you're creating them separately or not, since you can only Creo things in a given Form that are part of the essential natures of things covered by that form, and in the medieval-aristotelian cosmology that Ars Magica operates in it's not within a human's essential nature to have horns. In any case, creating horns out of nothing and stitching them on is very different to just giving a human horns. It's not Rego, since, again, it's not within a human's essential nature to have horns. Rego tends to map onto the Aristotelian categories of Action, Posture, and natural changes in quality, none of which map onto spontaneous generation of horns on a human skull. I understand that in the real world these things totally happen, but Ars Magica doesn't take place in the real world. It takes place in Mythic Europe, a world with very differenet physical laws and internal organization to ours. People straight-up don't spontaneously develop horns without demon possession, and that's the domain of divine fuckery and Vim magic. It's not Perdo, unless you wanted to give them a disease that resulted in them growing horns, which would be a very different thing, and to be honest, something that I'm not sure is even possible since I'm not up on medieval epidemiology. It's obviously, then, Muto Corpus. Specifically, under the guidelines on page 132 of Ars Magica 5e, It's a level 2 base effect to change someone in order to give them a minor ability, which goring would, presumably, fall under. To make it a touch-range spell of Sun duration would then make it a level 5 spell, the same level as Eyes of the Cat.
More telling was my latest example of my great love for the comic Transmetropolitan, in my creation of the spell "Blow it out your arse." I specified that the spell caused instant decomposition of a target's intestines, which were then violently expelled via the anus. While decomposition is within the natural order of the human body, Rego is clearly more about control the movement of the body, and should not be able to cause harm short of picking someone up and dropping them, or perhaps pulling limbs in opposite directions. Harm is specifically the purview of Perdo, so if you want to harm someone, it's perdo corpus, and if you want to pick someone up and pull their arms in different directions, it's probably ReCo with a Perdo requisite. That's honestly pretty cut and dry. Rego is control of movements, Perdo is harm, Creo is wholecloth creation and Muto is alteration.
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Post by momothefiddler »

Korgan0 wrote:As Laertes said, to really grasp how Ars Magica's magic system works requires an understanding of a cosmology and set of natural laws that works really very differently to the one we live in, and requires a lot of very different thinking.
And this is exactly the problem.

I'm also in that game, and the requirement to learn an entirely new cosmology (and forget several centuries of scientific discoveries) is a huge issue. I'm pretty comfortable with it now, but that's because I read through all the spells and guidelines several times and then spent a while making hypothetical spells and throwing them at Laertes for critique. Which I found fun, but I'm not sure any of the other people I've played with would have. And after all that, I'm not entirely certain how much of my knowledge is what works in Ars Magica 5 and how much is what works in Laertes' Ars Magica 5.

For instance, Laertes has mentioned multiple times that there are multiple ways to do the same thing. That's really great! But I'm still not sure that's the intention - reading the overview of the Arts gives a very strong sense of discrete magisteria. On the other hand, the spell list seems happy to give you a bunch of different Art combinations with the result "that dude takes damage", so maybe I'm reading too much into the initial descriptions.

The spell effects do seem pretty easy to eyeball based on the guidelines, though some things are puzzling (why is making a leather cloak a base of 15 while a linen shirt is base 3?) and others have needed rulings (Terram including all solids sometimes vaguely got dropped, for instance). But in general, it's been pretty smooth. I haven't cast any Spontaneous spells yet, but I've worked with Leetkeis on some and they seem to work out ok at doing everything he wants within the appropriate levels.
Korgan0 wrote: the fact that the basic principles of the cosmology are well-defined, and the fact that you can quite literally draw on several hundred years of scholarship, means that said cases can usually be resolved.
My understanding is that "essential nature" is indistinguishable from "what the speaker thinks the subject should ideally be", which is hardly what I'd call well-defined. However, I admit an incomplete knowledge of the cosmology.
However, without anything real to measure against, I'm almost certain that several years of scholarship do not make anything easier. Either they all agreed, in which case the centuries of scholarship are a bit of a light read, or they disagreed without any way to tell who was right (because none were), and it's just an inconsistent mess ready for anyone to cherry-pick the result they want.

All that said, don't take this to mean it's impossible to enjoy Ars Magica. I'm loving the hell out of the game we're in so far. Laertes is a fantastic MC and the rule system is definitely not awful. But "not awful" is a large range and I'm not sure where in that it is yet.
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Post by Prak »

Ars Magica would be very much helped by a two to three page "This is what you need to know to play this game!" section, but then I'm a proponent of those for all games. When you're substantially changing the physics of the game world from what your players are used to, it's practically necessary to have something like that, right up front, not tucked in and around in implied and esoteric stuff.
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Post by virgil »

Korgan0 wrote:As Laertes said, to really grasp how Ars Magica's magic system works requires an understanding of a cosmology and set of natural laws that works really very differently to the one we live in, and requires a lot of very different thinking.
I soundly reject the quality of any system that essentially requires a degree in medieval cosmology in order to play. Unless you have an actual degree, you do not have valid authority to call out someone's interpretation of the setting's metaphysics. Making arguments based on what's written in the book is the closest authority you've got, and you're still going to have vague-ness. Ergo, the explicitly stated kludge that is extrapolating from extant spells and the book's own text.
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momo wrote:My understanding is that "essential nature" is indistinguishable from "what the speaker thinks the subject should ideally be", which is hardly what I'd call well-defined. However, I admit an incomplete knowledge of the cosmology.
In reality, people argued about what was and was not essential natures for like a millennium and a half, and it turns out that it's all bullshit and essential nature theory has been disproven and abandoned. Then on top of that, the game throws an additional monkey wrench into the proceedings by proclaiming that things you spent points on are part of your essential nature.

So while there is a very small section of possible traits that are now easy to resolve (on account of being written on your character sheet next to a plus or minus sign), that also means that the in-game definition very definitely doesn't line up with any real world scholarship on the matter. So you have literally millions of dissenting opinions from the time period about how it works, and all of them are wrong. And then you have actual reality that is observable and tested in the real world, and that's wrong too. And the game mechanics, while presumably correct, are woefully incomplete and just leave a giant arrow pointing to all those dissenting and incorrect opinions and ask you to work something out on your own.

And then your storyguide just fucking makes something up based on a hodgepodge of his understandings and misunderstandings of real-world science, ancient natural philosophy, medieval theology, and game mechanics. And not one fucking person resolves things the same way, because it's not internally consistent or complete. You literally cannot get all the storyguides to agree on why or how things fucking fall.
mono wrote:And after all that, I'm not entirely certain how much of my knowledge is what works in Ars Magica 5 and how much is what works in Laertes' Ars Magica 5.
There are a few common themes, but basically the latter. As we saw with the horns example, no two of the people who came in to mansplain how simple Ars Magica was to resolve actually came to the same conclusion on how it resolved. The spontaneous magic rules really are a hot mess and while with a lot of pre-casting discussion you can kind of mostly get onto the same wavelength as your storyguide, this won't help a whole lot with another storyguide if you play at a different table.

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Post by Prak »

Frank, spontaneous generation was disproven centuries ago, but I would bet you that in Laertes' game, I could spontaneously create wasps and flies by putting a cow carcass in a shed, because, like with Runequest, Ars Magicka uses an ancient belief system as it's physics engine, not real life.

edit:
momo wrote:And after all that, I'm not entirely certain how much of my knowledge is what works in Ars Magica 5 and how much is what works in Laertes' Ars Magica 5.
Totally this, though.
Last edited by Prak on Wed Jul 23, 2014 7:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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