Ars Magica

[Mask_De_H]

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.

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.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

I'd like to point out that with my group (for a game of 2 years) Aristotelian vs Newtonian physics never even became a thing because I mainly just ignored anything like that in Ars Magica in the first place and used common sense. None of my players read the rule book to the point where they would even notice I wasn't explicitly following the rules.

If I ever come across a big chunk of change, I'd buy the Ars Magica IP and try and make a better game, it's really not that hard to. The game needs mechanical simplification in many places, reworking combat, and a reworked setting that is logically consistent with simple and much improved, believable explanations on why magi haven't changed the world.

The main appeal of the game is to play wizards in a fantasy version of medieval europe with a dose of logistics thrown in. And as said by others, many other games can do that quite well already. Ars Magica needs to give a credible reason why it should be chosen over other games.

[Daniel]

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.

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 a talk about the expectations people have for a given rpg campaign school of making things work. Rules are important, but they are a tool, not the first and last resort.

[virgil]

Daniel, I complained about objective flaws in the rules. I was neither talking nor caring about how you run your game. You come in trying to explain that it's supposed to be like that, and I should go play GURPS if all I wanted was wizards in medieval Europe. That is not the rhetoric of someone who feels their arbitrarily enforced personal biases of half-remembered medieval history is just a personal campaign preference.

[...You Lost Me]

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.

I don't think that's what Daniel is doing. They are sitting in the safe shell of personal preference, but then pretending personal preference is applicable to a game as a whole in order to get a word in. It's a win-win situation if you don't call Daniel out for being dishonest, because they can feel good about the response and retreat to "personal preference" as soon as you reveal an obvious flaw in their argument/

An analogy might be something like "House painting companies should bring ladders because houses can be tall" to which Daniel would respond "BUT MY HOUSE IS SHORT". The argument is obviously nonsense, and it can be safely ignored.

[virgil]

An analogy might be something like "House painting companies should bring ladders because houses can be tall" to which Daniel would respond "BUT MY HOUSE IS SHORT". The argument is obviously nonsense, and it can be safely ignored.

I'm going to try to remember this analogy for future use. As a mnemonic, Daniel is going to be known as "short house" in my mind from here on.

[Username17]

If I ever come across a big chunk of change, I'd buy the Ars Magica IP and try and make a better game, it's really not that hard to. The game needs mechanical simplification in many places, reworking combat, and a reworked setting that is logically consistent with simple and much improved, believable explanations on why magi haven't changed the world.

Here's the thing: what does the Ars Magica IP actually get you? Many of the games from the eighties actually own basically nothing. You can't own game mechanics; and you can't own stat, skill, or spell names if they are normal words. You could rewrite the entire Ars Magica book in your own words and sell it for money as long as you changed what proper names aren't historical. And you know what? The Order of Hermes is historical!

The Ars Magica IP, and I mean the whole thing, entitles you to use... some of the house and covenant names. Not even all of them, because some of them have historical names you could use anyway and some of the names were permanently transfered to White Wolf. Everything else you might want to put into an Ars Magica edition is something you could put into your own heartbreaker. You can even have a House Flambeau if you want because that is a normal word.

-Username17

[Prak]

Honestly, the solution for Daniel is to just play natural philosophers and rattle off his 12 facts in character when applicable, and no one giving any shits about it.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

If I ever come across a big chunk of change, I'd buy the Ars Magica IP and try and make a better game, it's really not that hard to. The game needs mechanical simplification in many places, reworking combat, and a reworked setting that is logically consistent with simple and much improved, believable explanations on why magi haven't changed the world.

Here's the thing: what does the Ars Magica IP actually get you? Many of the games from the eighties actually own basically nothing. You can't own game mechanics; and you can't own stat, skill, or spell names if they are normal words. You could rewrite the entire Ars Magica book in your own words and sell it for money as long as you changed what proper names aren't historical. And you know what? The Order of Hermes is historical!

The Ars Magica IP, and I mean the whole thing, entitles you to use... some of the house and covenant names. Not even all of them, because some of them have historical names you could use anyway and some of the names were permanently transfered to White Wolf. Everything else you might want to put into an Ars Magica edition is something you could put into your own heartbreaker. You can even have a House Flambeau if you want because that is a normal word.

-Username17

Frank......... Good point actually, I don't really have a rebuttal at all, I guess the spell names are trademarks/copyrighted? But as you say, the mechanics aren't. Most of the house names are stupid anyway, though I'm not sure my own would sound any better.

From the 5th ed Core book:

Copyright 2011 Trident, Inc. d/b/a Atlas Games. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this work by any means without written permission from the publisher, except short excerpts for the purpose of reviews, is expressly prohibited.

Ars Magica, Mythic Europe, Covenants, and Charting New Realms of Imagination are trademarks of Trident, Inc. Order of Hermes, Tremere, and Doissetep are trademarks of White Wolf, Inc. and are used with permission.

Some of the supplements trademark other names related to the game:

Ars Magica, Mythic Europe, The Mysteries, Houses of Hermes: Mystery Cults, Covenants,
Guardians of the Forests, Houses of Hermes: True Lineages, Realms of Power: The Divine,
The Broken Covenant of Calebais, and Charting New Realms of Imagination are trademarks of
Trident, Inc.

That's the titles of the supplements, and I do believe the word "Covenant" as a name for a group of wizards produces more confusion than anything else. Of the few people I've played with who actually knew the word thought it was an archaic legal term for agreements/contracts and is in a religious context as well.

If I win the lottery , or for whatever reason, can't work a regular job every again and can afford to make elf game rules and am ok making $200 if I'm lucky, I'll do it. The most I might do realistically is post my house rules on the board here and on atlas's game site and let people rip them up.

[Username17]

That's the titles of the supplements

Yes. Intellectual property kicks in for two things for Ars Magica: Copyright and Trademarks. Copyright is for exact text. You can write rules and setting that are similar or even exactly the same as Ars Magica's, but you have to write it. If you copypasta the exact text from an Ars Magica book, that's plagiarism academically but it's also legally a Copyright violation. Trademarks are for identifiable product identity. You can write a book that covers the same topic as a specific Ars Magica book by Atlas Games, but if you don't make it clear that it is in fact a different book by a different company you are violating their trademark.

So you could have your fourth estates called "Covenants" (not that you'd particularly want to, but you could), and you could write a book about them for your game. And that book could provide all the same information as the book "Covenants" by Atlas Games and even have a similar order of provided information. It just has to be readily identifiable that it is not this book:



Which should be easy enough to do. That's a very specific and quite bad looking cover.

-Username17

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

Frank - thanks for the pointers. Really, I think the biggest value of purchasing the Ars Magica IP would be for the name "Ars Magica" itself. Given that the line has been losing a small amount of money for long enough that Atlas Games is no longer going to publish books for the game, I'm not sure that the name is in fact, worth much at all. I've been on many an other RPG board where people have heard the name, but have never bothered to look up the game.

In some ways, I might be better off (were I to do so), just riffing on the title and making an RPG called "The Art of Magic".

[angelfromanotherpin]

Really, I think the biggest value of purchasing the Ars Magica IP would be for the name "Ars Magica" itself.

Fun fact, Ars Magica is just a Latin phrase. You can totally use it as long as you don't use Atlas' specific font/logo/whatever.

[phlapjackage]

Fun fact, Ars Magica is just a Latin phrase. You can totally use it as long as you don't use Atlas' specific font/logo/whatever.

I don't think that's how Trademarks work. "Apple" is just an English word, but you can't use it just because you changed the font.

I think the big deal is using the same name as an existing product in the same industry. You could totally make an "Ars Magica" food processor or whatever, but if you make an RPG you would need to buy/lease the rights to the name from the company that owns the IP.

[Chamomile]

You might be able to get away with making an Ars Magica game that was clearly distinct from the existing Ars Magica IP, for example if you made it a vaguely Call of Cthulhu-esque game about modern day occultists digging up ancient, forbidden secrets, with no grogs, no wizard monasteries, a completely different magic system, etc. etc. But then, y'know, you'd be working on a completely different project.

[Username17]

I think the big deal is using the same name as an existing product in the same industry. You could totally make an "Ars Magica" food processor or whatever, but if you make an RPG you would need to buy/lease the rights to the name from the company that owns the IP.

Bingo. You can use the Latin phrase "Ars Magica" anywhere and in any way you want so long as it does not infringe on the trademark. And that means you can't use the term in the same context nor can you imitate the appearance of the logo. So you can't call your fantasy RPG "Ars Magica," but you could call a roller coaster "Ars Magica." You could call your fantasy RPG "Art of Magic," but you couldn't call it "ARTofMAGIC" in a font that looked like the font that Atlas Games wrote "ARS MAGICA" on their front covers in.

For example, this did not fly as it violated the trademark of Dungeons & Dragons.

This, on the other hand, was fine even though it's very obviously derivative of D&D. Different words, different font. Gygax lost both fights because that is how trademarks work.

-Username17