OSSR: Ars Magica 5th edition
Moderator: Moderators
After Sundown doesn't really have any existing structures in place to build into tabletop Dwarf Fortress, does it? You could add them in, of course, but I think your game might just end up as "Chamomile's Dicepool Dwarf Fortress Game" rather than "Chamomile's Dwarf Fortress After Sundown Conversion". A better place to start looking for systems to cannibalize might be ACKS or something like that.
Out beyond the hull, mucoid strings of non-baryonic matter streamed past like Christ's blood in the firmament.
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Username17
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Ars Magica's covenant design design system is pretty much only concerned with what goes in your lab: magic gems, artifacts, research materials. If that sounds like the stuff that goes in a Dominions 4 Lab to you, then you win a gold star. The magic in the Dominions series is heavily influenced by Ars Magica (possibly more so than the equally obvious influence from Earthdawn) - everything you do in the lab in Ars Magica is a thing you do in Dominions. The various power gems are called vis in Ars Magica, but they are pretty explicitly the same thing in the Dominions series. Magic rituals (including the creation of supernatural creatures), personal empowerment, and artifact forging all cost gems, or you can go out to find magic sites to try to get more magic gems, or just chillax and research. So Dominions pretty much rips off the Ars Magica lab system wholesale.
What's missing from this equation is any mundane economy. Which is odd because usually only one of the players is going to be playing a magus at a time, meaning that everyone else is stuck roleplaying various potters and shepherds and stuff. But what they can actually do is straight magical teaparty. The olive oil stores and number of halberds available to the covenant aren't even tracked. There isn't even a nebulous "gold value" or something, so when a character goes out to breed goats or plant millet, nothing mechanically occurs. Which, of course, is rather a shame considering the game's subject matter. The grogs and companions are looking for a system at least as effective as Pendragon's Winter Phase shenanigans, and they don't get it.
As for After Sundown... well it doesn't have a seasonal progress minigame at all. The intention was for a modern era game where people can go to the grocery store or the hardware store if they need eggs or nails for something. Wealth is just an abstracted resource, because you're living in an advanced economy and pieces of paper with famous people and buildings on them are almost completely fungible with any goods or services the mundane economy would care to create.
Using the AS engine as a starting point is probably not a bad idea. The dicepools interact simply with extended tests in a way that you can probably use. You're going to probably want to monkey with the timeframes chart a bit, and also come up with a fixed time/variable yield system for planting and animal husbandry. And you're going to want to track a lot more resources in a game where food security is no longer the default assumption.
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What's missing from this equation is any mundane economy. Which is odd because usually only one of the players is going to be playing a magus at a time, meaning that everyone else is stuck roleplaying various potters and shepherds and stuff. But what they can actually do is straight magical teaparty. The olive oil stores and number of halberds available to the covenant aren't even tracked. There isn't even a nebulous "gold value" or something, so when a character goes out to breed goats or plant millet, nothing mechanically occurs. Which, of course, is rather a shame considering the game's subject matter. The grogs and companions are looking for a system at least as effective as Pendragon's Winter Phase shenanigans, and they don't get it.
As for After Sundown... well it doesn't have a seasonal progress minigame at all. The intention was for a modern era game where people can go to the grocery store or the hardware store if they need eggs or nails for something. Wealth is just an abstracted resource, because you're living in an advanced economy and pieces of paper with famous people and buildings on them are almost completely fungible with any goods or services the mundane economy would care to create.
Using the AS engine as a starting point is probably not a bad idea. The dicepools interact simply with extended tests in a way that you can probably use. You're going to probably want to monkey with the timeframes chart a bit, and also come up with a fixed time/variable yield system for planting and animal husbandry. And you're going to want to track a lot more resources in a game where food security is no longer the default assumption.
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momothefiddler
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I thought the economy/lab building stuff was basically down time? As in, you all "do stuff" throughout a season, possibly coming across as individual episodes that cover random crap, and then at the end of the season everyone says "Oh yeah and I was working on _______", meaning no matter which characters actually got played, it's still the Wizards (all of them) that get to declare what they're spending gems on.
Then again, I have no way of knowing if the campaign I played was indicative of Ars Magica games at that time (it was early 2000s, an edition where House Tremere was infested with demons, not vampries), or indeed if that has fuck-all to do with modern AM.
Then again, I have no way of knowing if the campaign I played was indicative of Ars Magica games at that time (it was early 2000s, an edition where House Tremere was infested with demons, not vampries), or indeed if that has fuck-all to do with modern AM.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
Blood and Honor by John Wick has an interesting approach to the players/characters/narrative relationship, by basically having the players responsible for telling the story of their character, rather than having the players responsible for playing their character and generating a story.Lago PARANOIA wrote:... It's a solution, but I'm not surprised that more people haven't thought of it. It requires people to completely rethink how they view their narrative relationship to TTRPGs as they're played.
The game itself goes off the rails when you play it as if you were playing your character - it's far too easy to succeed at tasks when you use your narrative control to give yourself VICTORY and PRAISE and all that - but if you use that narrative control to instead tell an interesting story about the character's action, complicating their life, extending past themes, that sort of thing, the game works well for a while.
...
The Covenants book does let you play Dwarf Fortress with your covenant.
That's a decent summation, but with ArM there's always this paradoxical question of detail and implementation. Like, the game wants a loose casting system but also a consistent (meta)philosophical underpinning the everything. They want stories and MTP for their covenant but also occasionally want to know how much extra wheat they've harvested. Players want fiddly rules for tricking out their labs, or for their covenants, or major infrastructure projects (how much easier do our lives get for making that waterwheel that turns on the ReAq effect making the stream blast forward with supreme pressure), and so you get into angels dancing on the heads of pins at the far reaches, and the book has a tough time getting all of this to work together cleanly since you can't really hit both design goals simultaneously.Koumei wrote:I thought the economy/lab building stuff was basically down time? As in, you all "do stuff" throughout a season, possibly coming across as individual episodes that cover random crap, and then at the end of the season everyone says "Oh yeah and I was working on _______", meaning no matter which characters actually got played, it's still the Wizards (all of them) that get to declare what they're spending gems on.
This gets into the arcane accounting of XP that Frank was poo-pooing. Some of it is dumb (in the abstract, I suppose), but one item in particular is how losing a month out of a season is no big deal, but more than that and you can't do a season's work. A lot of intra-Covenant politicking is about which magi has to deal with the shitstorm of the month, because at a tipping point (one month's distraction, plus or minus) your experiments and research are impacted and you can't make functional progress on your project for that entire season... and in general, the path to power in ArM is being left alone in your lab, and NOT going out and risking your life. XP is nice, but building awesome shit takes full, multiple seasons of time.
...
I think the so far as the Flaws are concerned, the Minor Story Flaws are called out explicitly as actually being boons that are classified as Flaws simply because they come packaged with story hooks and they want characters to have them... which is also why they limit access to the Story Flaws, because they want to limit characters to only a few Story hooks to encourage spotlight sharing.
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OSSR: Ars Magica
Chapter 7: Hermetic Magic
This would be better.
This is the magic chapter, and it's 19 pages. That might not seem like a lot for a game as magic-centric as this one, but the next chapter and the chapter after it are also about magic – so really this magic section lasts 88 pages. It's just divided into separate chapters to make that seem less insane.
One of the central conceits of the game is that magi have an aura that unnerves people. If you have “The Gift,” you can learn magic and cast spells and be awesome, but people intrinsically dislike you. This is presented as one of the big reasons that Wizards hide away in their towers and let mundanes do the talking for them. This chapter spends over a page giving examples of various people reacting poorly to Wizard groups because they are unnerved by the presence of their Gift. And we're also given the raw brutal mechanics for this massive edifice of game setting: it's a -3 penalty to social rolls if you aren't trying to scare people. I think I mentioned this earlier with the whole attributes/abilities thing, but while a -3 penalty is a pretty big deal when you are untrained and trying to do bullshit tasks, it doesn't mean shit if you actually have trained in the relevant skills. If you want to be a magus face, you can just do that. You don't need a “Gentle Gift” or any of that shit, you just need to train Etiquette and Charm and move the fuck on with your life. A non-wizard companion is still going to be better at that sort of thing, but only by 3 pips. And a Wizard can also know mind spells that make a much bigger difference than 3 pips. But we'll get there when we get there. Suffice to say: the mechanics for Wizards being scary and distrusted by mundane people just aren't there. However, my experience is that socially you're probably fucked in Ars Magica because there's so much fluff about you being screwed in social circumstances that the Storyguide is probably going to mind caulk in something draconian.
There's also a little bit of history in this chapter and I think this might seriously be the fourth time in the book that it has told you about how Bonisagus created a teachable unified magic system five hundred years ago and that's why everyone in the hermetic order can share spells. This piece of history is such a boner stroker for the author that he repeats himself like he was writing the Book of Mormon.
Anyway, the meat of the chapter is probably the thing about the Hermetic Arts, which is to say the magic system of Ars Magica that the author is so enamored with. It's... kind of an incoherent mishmash of ideas, actually. The basic idea is that you have verbs and you have nouns and you have skills in both, and you mix the verb with the noun to do [verb] to [noun]. Which would probably be a lot easier to parse if any of the verbs or nouns were unambiguous about what they did. There are five verbs and ten nouns, so there are fifty categories of magic but only fifteen magic skills. People specialize in a couple of verbs and a couple of nouns and then they are specialists in noun * verb of the fifty spell lists. This has the presumably intentional effect of causing characters to learn spells from different lists most of the time.
OK, here's the part where things go off the rails: you're supposed to be able to make up new spells on the fly. With fifty categories of magic and incredible amounts of overlap between them, you can imagine that getting two people to agree exactly which category a newly discussed spell belongs in. If you want to change the weather, would you consider that verb to be “create,” “destroy,” or “control?” Would you consider the noun to be “air,” “water,” “heat,” or “power?” This is not an out-there or obscure concept for a spell, and you can make a lot of different cases for it. The spell lists of pre-made spells are basically no help either, because there are weather controlling spells in several different categories. Destroy Air, Destroy Water, and Control Air all have example spells that make it stop raining, with different specifics and difficulties and there's no reason to believe that those are even close to the only verb/noun combinations that could plausibly be used to stop water from falling out of the sky.
OK, it doesn't actually say this in the magic chapter, but things actually get even more fucked once you get to the spells chapter, so I guess I should probably talk about this here: spells aren't restricted to having just one verb or noun. They can have more. And when that happens, one of two things happens: either the spell difficulty goes up a little bit (and you still use the same verb/noun combination), or you use the lowest of the relevant verbs and nouns you use. So if you're a water wizard who is totally badass at water magic and you want to do something that your Storyguide thinks is kinda plant flavored, you either cast it anyway or get totally cockblocked depending on whether the MC decides that the plant aspect is one kind of modifier or the other. The sample characters have high arts values of 10 or 12 and low arts values of 0, and the entire RNG is only 9 numbers long, so if the Storyguide asks for the wrong combination of verbs and nouns (even implicitly through being a dick about corequisites), you go from auto-success to auto-failure.
The nouns have... problems. For starters, four of them are Air, Earth, Water, and Fire. Now, in four element theory everything is made out of the four elements. And I don't mean that everything is arbitrarily categorized into one of the four elements, I mean that literally everything is made out of literally all of the four elements. Even the air around you has earth, water, and fire in it. So to begin with we are on a fairly shaking foundation – there are four nouns which each are supposed to describe everything in the universe (or at least, facets of them). Next we get to plants and animals (other than humans), which have two categories for them, which is fine I guess, in that while technically every plant and animal has solids and liquids in them, it is often uncontroversial whether something is alive or not. And then there's “Corpus” which affects humans and also human bodies and also magic creatures that look human. That one's obviously problematic and the author fucking admits this by saying:
But things get worse. The last three nouns are things that don't exist. Yes. Really. The easiest to adjudicate one is “Mentem” which governs the Mind. Now, minds aren't real things, they are cognitive constructs we use to try to understand the emergent properties of our own physical brains. Still, you can kinda-mostly work out what an effect on a mind might do. Dualism doesn't make any sense when examined closely and isn't true, but it makes narrative sense for the most part. But then we get to “Imagem,” which affects the “sensible species” hypothesized to exist by Thomas Aquinas. So it governs the things that come off of a torch that allow you to see it. But not the light, because light is separate. So, the things that fly off physical objects that you can see that aren't light. Which is not something that is real and also not something that makes any fucking sense. It's not like “the mind” where you can kind of understand it in your gut even if you can't understand it with your brain. You just can't fucking understand it at all, because it's completely counterfactual and isn't internally consistent. And finally there's “Vim,” which affects raw magic power that is completely epistemically closed. It's the magic of doing the things that the magic of doing those things can do. So good luck coming to an agreement on that.
The verbs are also fucked. Probably more fucked. There are five of them, and one of them gathers information, and one of them creates temporary stuff. Those are... kind of clear. Obviously the information one gets kind of screwy when we start talking about imaginary nouns, but as long as we're detecting gold and badgers it's fairly self explanatory. The other three... are unparseable. They are “Perdo” which “destroys” things; “Rego” which “controls” things; and “Muto” which “transforms” things. Obviously, if you've looked at the spell lists of like any game system ever, you've noticed what in Shadowrun is called “Manipulation Bloat” (D&D of course has something similar with Transmutation), which is the thing where pretty much any effect you could possibly imagine could be defined as things changing from what they were to something else. I mean, that's basically what an “effect” is. Rego is charge of having things be controlled by you, which you might think would exclude acquiring new traits or losing traits they currently have and you'd be wrong because the Rego examples very definitely include things like changing a dead stick into a fruit bearing tree. And Perdo does all kinds of shit where things just stop having the traits they had and now have different ones. Since every conceivable change is both a destruction of the old trait set and a creation of a new one, Perdo can do pretty much anything if you word it right.
But the real money for your crazy arguments is Muto. Muto is about “transforming” things, and it is about giving things traits they “cannot naturally have.” Now the examples shit on that immediately and ramble on about various traits that things obviously could naturally acquire under certain circumstances. And the spell examples are a whole other bundle of crazy. But really the bottom line is that the restriction on what Muto can do is supposed to be that the change must be at least a certain amount drastic. Not at most, it has to be at least. So even if you could agree on what the limits of Muto were, they wouldn't actually matter, because the effects allowed at whatever the limits are and anything bigger than that. So with Muto Auram (transform air), you could turn any amount of air into absolutely anything as long as you could convince your Storyguide that it was different enough from air. That's not me making fun of a loophole in imprecise language or something, the actual spell list includes making stones or oil rain out of the sky by transforming air into other stuff.
Magic is given a series of limits, which are appropriately magical sounding but don't solve many problems. You can't use magic to overcome miracles, which basically just gives the MC the right to shit on you whenever he wants. You can't use magic to permanently change “essential natures,” except of course obviously for Muto which only does that, so um... whatever. Then there are lesser limits like how Creo can't create permanent things unless you spend magic gems, but again since Muto exists and you can permanently transform the fucking air into whatever you want, it doesn't make any practical difference. You aren't allowed to reverse aging, but you're allowed to turn into a creature that doesn't age if you care, and so on and so on.
The actual spells themselves have difficulties that are very high and have huge modifiers. The Fast Casting modifier itself is -10 to your roll, which is bigger than the entire range of the die roll. Your base bonuses are one verb score plus one noun score, and the range between a good noun or verb and a bad one is also larger than the RNG even for starting characters and variance only goes up from there. If you take extra time to cast, you can add more skills to the roll, all of which are probably pretty comparable to the entire RNG. So... basically everyone is a D&D Truenamer, with absolutely everything that implies.
Magic resistance and penetration are calculated in extremely complicated ways, and involve a lot of things being added, subtracted, and divided by things. I won't say that magic always works or never works, because subtly different scenarios can involve your opponent's magic resistance going up or down by sixty. Yes, the RNG is still only 9 numbers long. Frankly, I don't understand why a die is rolled to save against magic under any circumstances. The formula so rarely outputs a number that you have any hope of succeeding that you also have any chance of failing that it may as well just be completely deterministic.
The chapter has a bit on magic combat and you don't particularly care, and then it has some writeups of a handful of mystery cults from an obscure 4th edition book that the author absolutely felt needed to be brought into the core book. Or possibly the author decided that they absolutely needed to be rewritten with the angry pen of a new edition, I would have to compare the writeups directly and I can't bring myself to care.
Anyway, that's just one chapter, but we ended up talking a lot about the spells chapter that comes the chapter after next, so next post will probably be three chapters.
Chapter 7: Hermetic Magic
This would be better.
This is the magic chapter, and it's 19 pages. That might not seem like a lot for a game as magic-centric as this one, but the next chapter and the chapter after it are also about magic – so really this magic section lasts 88 pages. It's just divided into separate chapters to make that seem less insane.
One of the central conceits of the game is that magi have an aura that unnerves people. If you have “The Gift,” you can learn magic and cast spells and be awesome, but people intrinsically dislike you. This is presented as one of the big reasons that Wizards hide away in their towers and let mundanes do the talking for them. This chapter spends over a page giving examples of various people reacting poorly to Wizard groups because they are unnerved by the presence of their Gift. And we're also given the raw brutal mechanics for this massive edifice of game setting: it's a -3 penalty to social rolls if you aren't trying to scare people. I think I mentioned this earlier with the whole attributes/abilities thing, but while a -3 penalty is a pretty big deal when you are untrained and trying to do bullshit tasks, it doesn't mean shit if you actually have trained in the relevant skills. If you want to be a magus face, you can just do that. You don't need a “Gentle Gift” or any of that shit, you just need to train Etiquette and Charm and move the fuck on with your life. A non-wizard companion is still going to be better at that sort of thing, but only by 3 pips. And a Wizard can also know mind spells that make a much bigger difference than 3 pips. But we'll get there when we get there. Suffice to say: the mechanics for Wizards being scary and distrusted by mundane people just aren't there. However, my experience is that socially you're probably fucked in Ars Magica because there's so much fluff about you being screwed in social circumstances that the Storyguide is probably going to mind caulk in something draconian.
There's also a little bit of history in this chapter and I think this might seriously be the fourth time in the book that it has told you about how Bonisagus created a teachable unified magic system five hundred years ago and that's why everyone in the hermetic order can share spells. This piece of history is such a boner stroker for the author that he repeats himself like he was writing the Book of Mormon.
Anyway, the meat of the chapter is probably the thing about the Hermetic Arts, which is to say the magic system of Ars Magica that the author is so enamored with. It's... kind of an incoherent mishmash of ideas, actually. The basic idea is that you have verbs and you have nouns and you have skills in both, and you mix the verb with the noun to do [verb] to [noun]. Which would probably be a lot easier to parse if any of the verbs or nouns were unambiguous about what they did. There are five verbs and ten nouns, so there are fifty categories of magic but only fifteen magic skills. People specialize in a couple of verbs and a couple of nouns and then they are specialists in noun * verb of the fifty spell lists. This has the presumably intentional effect of causing characters to learn spells from different lists most of the time.
OK, here's the part where things go off the rails: you're supposed to be able to make up new spells on the fly. With fifty categories of magic and incredible amounts of overlap between them, you can imagine that getting two people to agree exactly which category a newly discussed spell belongs in. If you want to change the weather, would you consider that verb to be “create,” “destroy,” or “control?” Would you consider the noun to be “air,” “water,” “heat,” or “power?” This is not an out-there or obscure concept for a spell, and you can make a lot of different cases for it. The spell lists of pre-made spells are basically no help either, because there are weather controlling spells in several different categories. Destroy Air, Destroy Water, and Control Air all have example spells that make it stop raining, with different specifics and difficulties and there's no reason to believe that those are even close to the only verb/noun combinations that could plausibly be used to stop water from falling out of the sky.
OK, it doesn't actually say this in the magic chapter, but things actually get even more fucked once you get to the spells chapter, so I guess I should probably talk about this here: spells aren't restricted to having just one verb or noun. They can have more. And when that happens, one of two things happens: either the spell difficulty goes up a little bit (and you still use the same verb/noun combination), or you use the lowest of the relevant verbs and nouns you use. So if you're a water wizard who is totally badass at water magic and you want to do something that your Storyguide thinks is kinda plant flavored, you either cast it anyway or get totally cockblocked depending on whether the MC decides that the plant aspect is one kind of modifier or the other. The sample characters have high arts values of 10 or 12 and low arts values of 0, and the entire RNG is only 9 numbers long, so if the Storyguide asks for the wrong combination of verbs and nouns (even implicitly through being a dick about corequisites), you go from auto-success to auto-failure.
The nouns have... problems. For starters, four of them are Air, Earth, Water, and Fire. Now, in four element theory everything is made out of the four elements. And I don't mean that everything is arbitrarily categorized into one of the four elements, I mean that literally everything is made out of literally all of the four elements. Even the air around you has earth, water, and fire in it. So to begin with we are on a fairly shaking foundation – there are four nouns which each are supposed to describe everything in the universe (or at least, facets of them). Next we get to plants and animals (other than humans), which have two categories for them, which is fine I guess, in that while technically every plant and animal has solids and liquids in them, it is often uncontroversial whether something is alive or not. And then there's “Corpus” which affects humans and also human bodies and also magic creatures that look human. That one's obviously problematic and the author fucking admits this by saying:
Yeah, that's right. You're supposed to create spells spontaneously at the gaming table based on a magic category whose range is unknown to the people in-world and doesn't make internal sense!Ars Magica, 5th edition wrote:Since natural philosophy asserts that these things have no more in common than their appearance, and Corpus does not affect human statues, Hermetic theorists are puzzled by the range of this Form.
But things get worse. The last three nouns are things that don't exist. Yes. Really. The easiest to adjudicate one is “Mentem” which governs the Mind. Now, minds aren't real things, they are cognitive constructs we use to try to understand the emergent properties of our own physical brains. Still, you can kinda-mostly work out what an effect on a mind might do. Dualism doesn't make any sense when examined closely and isn't true, but it makes narrative sense for the most part. But then we get to “Imagem,” which affects the “sensible species” hypothesized to exist by Thomas Aquinas. So it governs the things that come off of a torch that allow you to see it. But not the light, because light is separate. So, the things that fly off physical objects that you can see that aren't light. Which is not something that is real and also not something that makes any fucking sense. It's not like “the mind” where you can kind of understand it in your gut even if you can't understand it with your brain. You just can't fucking understand it at all, because it's completely counterfactual and isn't internally consistent. And finally there's “Vim,” which affects raw magic power that is completely epistemically closed. It's the magic of doing the things that the magic of doing those things can do. So good luck coming to an agreement on that.
The verbs are also fucked. Probably more fucked. There are five of them, and one of them gathers information, and one of them creates temporary stuff. Those are... kind of clear. Obviously the information one gets kind of screwy when we start talking about imaginary nouns, but as long as we're detecting gold and badgers it's fairly self explanatory. The other three... are unparseable. They are “Perdo” which “destroys” things; “Rego” which “controls” things; and “Muto” which “transforms” things. Obviously, if you've looked at the spell lists of like any game system ever, you've noticed what in Shadowrun is called “Manipulation Bloat” (D&D of course has something similar with Transmutation), which is the thing where pretty much any effect you could possibly imagine could be defined as things changing from what they were to something else. I mean, that's basically what an “effect” is. Rego is charge of having things be controlled by you, which you might think would exclude acquiring new traits or losing traits they currently have and you'd be wrong because the Rego examples very definitely include things like changing a dead stick into a fruit bearing tree. And Perdo does all kinds of shit where things just stop having the traits they had and now have different ones. Since every conceivable change is both a destruction of the old trait set and a creation of a new one, Perdo can do pretty much anything if you word it right.
But the real money for your crazy arguments is Muto. Muto is about “transforming” things, and it is about giving things traits they “cannot naturally have.” Now the examples shit on that immediately and ramble on about various traits that things obviously could naturally acquire under certain circumstances. And the spell examples are a whole other bundle of crazy. But really the bottom line is that the restriction on what Muto can do is supposed to be that the change must be at least a certain amount drastic. Not at most, it has to be at least. So even if you could agree on what the limits of Muto were, they wouldn't actually matter, because the effects allowed at whatever the limits are and anything bigger than that. So with Muto Auram (transform air), you could turn any amount of air into absolutely anything as long as you could convince your Storyguide that it was different enough from air. That's not me making fun of a loophole in imprecise language or something, the actual spell list includes making stones or oil rain out of the sky by transforming air into other stuff.
Magic is given a series of limits, which are appropriately magical sounding but don't solve many problems. You can't use magic to overcome miracles, which basically just gives the MC the right to shit on you whenever he wants. You can't use magic to permanently change “essential natures,” except of course obviously for Muto which only does that, so um... whatever. Then there are lesser limits like how Creo can't create permanent things unless you spend magic gems, but again since Muto exists and you can permanently transform the fucking air into whatever you want, it doesn't make any practical difference. You aren't allowed to reverse aging, but you're allowed to turn into a creature that doesn't age if you care, and so on and so on.
The actual spells themselves have difficulties that are very high and have huge modifiers. The Fast Casting modifier itself is -10 to your roll, which is bigger than the entire range of the die roll. Your base bonuses are one verb score plus one noun score, and the range between a good noun or verb and a bad one is also larger than the RNG even for starting characters and variance only goes up from there. If you take extra time to cast, you can add more skills to the roll, all of which are probably pretty comparable to the entire RNG. So... basically everyone is a D&D Truenamer, with absolutely everything that implies.
Magic resistance and penetration are calculated in extremely complicated ways, and involve a lot of things being added, subtracted, and divided by things. I won't say that magic always works or never works, because subtly different scenarios can involve your opponent's magic resistance going up or down by sixty. Yes, the RNG is still only 9 numbers long. Frankly, I don't understand why a die is rolled to save against magic under any circumstances. The formula so rarely outputs a number that you have any hope of succeeding that you also have any chance of failing that it may as well just be completely deterministic.
The chapter has a bit on magic combat and you don't particularly care, and then it has some writeups of a handful of mystery cults from an obscure 4th edition book that the author absolutely felt needed to be brought into the core book. Or possibly the author decided that they absolutely needed to be rewritten with the angry pen of a new edition, I would have to compare the writeups directly and I can't bring myself to care.
Anyway, that's just one chapter, but we ended up talking a lot about the spells chapter that comes the chapter after next, so next post will probably be three chapters.
Last edited by Username17 on Mon Nov 17, 2014 5:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
You're misreading this section. If you have the Gift, the default reaction of mundanes is to treat you like shit. You get a -3 penalty for them to treat you neutrally. The Blatant Gift makes the default reaction active hostility, with a -6 penalty to be treated merely like someone who shits on tables. The tight RNG gets called out a lot; this is a place it really matters. That penalty isn't the biggest deal, it's the setting of the default reactions that is. That also goes for third-party interactions, where the Gifted isn't present: they're just assumed to be equivalent to cheats or rapists or whatever as a baseline reaction.FrankTrollman wrote:One of the central conceits of the game is that magi have an aura that unnerves people. If you have “The Gift,” you can learn magic and cast spells and be awesome, but people intrinsically dislike you. This is presented as one of the big reasons that Wizards hide away in their towers and let mundanes do the talking for them. This chapter spends over a page giving examples of various people reacting poorly to Wizard groups because they are unnerved by the presence of their Gift. And we're also given the raw brutal mechanics for this massive edifice of game setting: it's a -3 penalty to social rolls if you aren't trying to scare people.
Not only that, but Abilities are expensive. You can't simply "just" get a high Ettiquette, that's a serious expenditure of XP that most players would rather have anywhere else.
The short version is that the Gift actually is a big deal when dealing with mundanes, or something that your character has spent a lot of XP and/or time in overcoming through being able to silently and without gestures cast mitigating mind magics. It's not insurmountable, but it is a thing. Eventually all magi in the game have some compensation mechanism for it.
...
Muto is never permanent. Max duration on Muto effects is a year. You expressly can't permanently change something with Muto.
And yes you can change anything to anything else, but then you're basically doing some kind of Muto Auram + whatever other Form you're using, and the added prereq means the baseline level goes up by an additional 5. That's cool and useful, as air is always present, but that means you're boosting Muto and two Forms to pull something off that you can do easier (and with less expended XP) with just Creo and one Form.
...
I like the fact that there are lots of ways to skin cats with the magic. Not getting wet in a storm might be Creo Ignam to burn it away, or Rego Auram to blow it away, or Perdo Aquam to destroy it as it hits you, or Creo Terram (Rego + Perdo Imaginem) to create an invisible umbrella that follows you around or whatever. The strength of the magic system is precisely in the aspect of finagling what you want out of your specialized Arts choices.
This stinks when you have a shitty mother-may-I GM, but ArM isn't really supposed to be an omniscient must-suck-his-cock GM but rather we-all-have-to-be-cool-with-this discussion with the whole group.
That's also why the spontaneous spells are icky in practice.
...
Something Frank didn't hit on in the Abilities section was the preponderance of interaction Abilities. Bargain, Carouse, Charm, Etiquette, Folk Ken, Guile, Intrigue, Leadership, and (maybe) Teaching all cover interpersonal interactions. Most starting characters have around 8-10 Abilities, with only one or two being 4+ as they're frightfully expensive.
My own personal houserule is to condense these down into:
Intrigue (covering Folk Ken, Guile, and Intrigue)
Leadership (covering Leadership and Teaching)
Charm (covering Bargain, Carouse, Charm, and Etiquette)
...otherwise you end up with characters whose only learned skills are that they know where the soup spoon goes AND can make friends easily regardless of situation.
Last edited by mean_liar on Mon Nov 17, 2014 5:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I can't say I'm too upset about the nouns, though it seems like they should be pared down to between five and nine depending on how specific you want to get. At the low end, there's the four elements and spirit, which between them cover everything about everything that physically and metaphysically exists. You could sensibly give living things up to three catagories(plant, nonhuman animal, human) while having a mind catagory, and I don't object to your description of Vim. It's fine to have a catagory of magic all about messing with other magic. Imagem, however...
I went to look up an explanation for what Thomas Aquinas means by "sensible species" and while it looks narratively coherent the things it can do have way too much conceptual overlap with mind. Basically they're what allows you to percieve things, since we are in dualist land and eyes don't work by interacting with light. So it governs illusions and stuff and probably wouldn't fool cameras if the setting has those and the true form is reflected in mirrors. Which totally sounds like something you should be able to do with Mind.
I went to look up an explanation for what Thomas Aquinas means by "sensible species" and while it looks narratively coherent the things it can do have way too much conceptual overlap with mind. Basically they're what allows you to percieve things, since we are in dualist land and eyes don't work by interacting with light. So it governs illusions and stuff and probably wouldn't fool cameras if the setting has those and the true form is reflected in mirrors. Which totally sounds like something you should be able to do with Mind.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
The species thing is sadly fiddly and gets its own full writeup in Houses of Hermes: Societates. Basically species are being emitted by things, and organs work by interacting with the species:
Eyes do work by interacting with light. As for illusions, there are ways of screwing with people by junking what they sense (Imaginem), junking their organs (Corpus), or junking their minds (Mentem). You can afflict people with various flavors of agnosia, or create a phantasm, or muck their eyes up or what-have-you.HoH:Societates wrote:An object exists, and sheds species.
The species travel through a medium.
The species strike an organ of perception.
The organ signals the brain.
The mind interprets the signal, giving it meaning.
The signal is remembered.
Yeah, I did notice that there were many instances of "Hmm, I want to research a new spell, and also raise my (magic skill). If I do it in that order, it's 3 seasons. Or I could raise the skill, which then makes it high enough that researching the spell only takes one season, so it's two seasons altogether." And then we found some savant kid, and basically took turns using him as a research assistant (being abducted by crazy old people and living in their towers with them could certainly have worse results, and actually being Gifted in the world of Ars Magica/being a medieval peasant is arguably worse in and of itself).mean_liar wrote: This gets into the arcane accounting of XP that Frank was poo-pooing. Some of it is dumb (in the abstract, I suppose), but one item in particular is how losing a month out of a season is no big deal, but more than that and you can't do a season's work. A lot of intra-Covenant politicking is about which magi has to deal with the shitstorm of the month, because at a tipping point (one month's distraction, plus or minus) your experiments and research are impacted and you can't make functional progress on your project for that entire season... and in general, the path to power in ArM is being left alone in your lab, and NOT going out and risking your life. XP is nice, but building awesome shit takes full, multiple seasons of time.
There was a lot of accounting involved. And back then, no magic could ever do anything permanent. You have to sustain it for a year at a time, spending a Vim each time to do it. Similarly, you could get potions that stave off the effects of age, but require stronger doses (with bigger skill requirements) each time, and the moment you stop taking them, all the missed time catches up so you suddenly die and decompose on the spot.
When the DM was explaining the schools of magic:
"Creo Corpus creates dead bodies."
"So does Creo Ignus or Perdo Auram."
"Yes but they have the material component of a living body."
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
I figure the accounting exercises required for Great Power are more bug than feature, but they do mimic some academia pissing contests, and it all forms an inescapable part of ArM which does create stories. You basically want to steal grad students lab aides from each other so that they can run your experiments for you, and federal grants vis is a vital component to pretty much all magic item creation but there's only a limited pool of it in the department covenant.
Yeah, we ended up going on a dungeon crawl with the full part of mages, to beat a lich* up to steal his Vim supply. You know, exactly what the game really isn't supposed to be.
*Not exactly, but if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, shoot it.
*Not exactly, but if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, shoot it.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
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OSSR: Ars Magica
Chapter 8: Laboratory
Pretty much this.
In between the chapter where it talked about to cast spells and the chapter that explains what spells actually do, there is a 17 page chapter on what Wizards do with their downtime. Because this book is not very well organized.
The laboratory rules are fiddly and use a lot of math. They are more complicated than they need to be. They do, however, get the job done. Players do weird little accounting tricks, bicker about leaving problems to fester because they have cauldrons on to boil, and generally get in character as petty and insane academics. You can really see that this part was put together by a group of people who just got out of college and was likely partially written while still in college. It is evocative, and despite the protestations of the author that the magic system “is so” totally sweet (it is not), it is this academic logistics and dragons material that is the primary selling point of the game.
There are a lot of places that the laboratory rules could be cleaned up. Presentation could certainly be improved. Why is there no master time chart? Why doesn't it ever mention whether you're supposed to be working on the sabbath or not? Why don't the times divide evenly into each other? What the fuck?
See: if you miss more than 10 days of lab work in a season, your lab work is fucked. There are an average of 13 Sabbath Days in a season, so observant Christians, Muslims, and Jews would spend at least 13 days not doing any lab work (plus major holy days, obviously). Does that mean they are proper fucked all the time? If not, does that mean that Ahteists and Pagans can go be weekend warriors and still come back and stir the cauldron without any problems? This question is very important, and you'd think that a 5th edition would discuss these sorts of issues, but it doesn't.
What you get instead are discussions about which materials or mundane objects give which quirky bonuses to what categories of magic effects. And discussions about familiars, and apprentices, and weird charts of strange experimental results. Point of fact: you can opt for “extra risk” on your experiment of 1, 2, or 3 points. If you don't do that, experimenting has a 1% chance of giving you a “discovery.” If you experiment with 1 or 3 points of extra “risk” the chance goes up to 10%. If you experminet with exactly 2 points of extra risk, the chance goes up to 11%. Because the RNG is extremely screwy and this chart has good results sandwiched between bad results and thus modifiers to the die roll aren't always good or bad.
Is this bad? I'm not sure. It's certainly old, and it could really honestly be cleaned up a whole lot on a whole bunch of axes. But it is what the game is – poking through the completely batshit rules of magic looking for loopholes that let you acquire mighty arcane powers. This fiddly logistics and dragons insanity and the troupe play character rotation are the two main reasons you'd play Ars Magica. Hell, they are basically the only reasons you'd play Ars Magica instead of some other game that didn't look like a fantasy heartbreaker from the late 80s.
And honestly, shit like this is fun (obviously, not all people enjoy logistics and dragons, but for those who do, this is fun). People have repeatedly recommended the Covenants book on this thread, and well they should. Because it's fun in the same way as this crazy lab stuff but includes more characters. The Covenants book should have been more detailed still, and at least half the information in the Covenants book is shit that should have been in the basic book, but it's what people come to Ars Magica for and it's a big reason why if you want to design games you should read Ars Magica.
Chapter 9: Spells
Needs moar cowbell.
We already touched on the spells back in chapter 7, so we'll go through this quick. Well, quicker than the 52 pages of this chapter might indicate at first. A lot of the information in this chapter ties directly into the rules for actually casting these things which came two pages ago, so there's a lot of page flipping if you want to understand what the fucking hell the book is talking about. The first five and a half pages are discussions of rules for learning, designing, and casting spells that really should be put together with the rest of those, and the remaining 46 and a half pages are spent giving examples and guidelines for each of the fifty spell categories recognized by this game. The extra half page is because there is a half page of box text that goes with the spell guidelines that is ectopic in the spell rules section of this chapter because the typesetter doesn't know what he is doing.
So basically we have two things to talk about: the spell design rules and the spell guidelines. The spell design rules are crazy, and the spell guidelines and examples are contradictory word salad.
I should really talk some more about the madness spiral that is “requisites.” See, the game understands that the categories don't make sense and there's nothing you could possibly want to do that is unambiguously one thing and not others. So rather than even attempt something simple like “it's whatever the best fit category is and shut the fuck up” they acknowledge that all spells have parts that are other things. So if you want to turn a dude into a toad, that's Muto Corpus. But, the fact that they are wearing a leather jacket means that it's also Animal. And the fact that they have linen pants on means that it's also Herbam. And the fact that they have brass buttons means that's it's also Terram. And so on and so on. So here's what the Storyguide does: they decide whether a requisite is “needed,” “enhancing,” or “cosmetic”. If it's the first one, the spell just fucking fails, because you use the lowest of all those art values (which is almost always zero). If it's the second one, the spell's difficulty ease magnitude goes up by one “or more” and that probably doesn't make any difference. And if it's the third one, the spell casting difficulty ease doesn't change at all and that definitely doesn't make any difference. Keep in mind that it's almost literally impossible to imagine an effect that doesn't have some level of impact on one of the other categories (for fuck's sake, one of the other categories is “things having to do with magic” which by definition all spells have). So spell design is pretty much 100% Mother-May-I, even if you can get rough agreement at your table as to what the spell categories actually do.
Don't write game mechanics like this.
And I guess I should talk about the spell parameters. The base effects add to the spell difficulty ease level if they are more powerful, but far larger impacts on the spell difficulty ease level come from the spell's parameters. Like range and targeting restrictions and shit. This means that the amount of magical power you need to cast a spell has actually very little to do with how powerful the effect of that spell actually is. This is like a parody of the “accounting for power” that people sometimes accuse GURPS or HERO of being. Oh, and the difficulty of casting a spell is called its “spell level” because it's a fantasy heartbreaker from the 80s. Basically, every additional Magnitude adds +5 to the spell difficulty ease, and remember that adding even 2 levels decreases your chances of succeeding on casting by twenty one percent, if and only if it happens to already by on the RNG, which it probably isn't because the RNG only has 9 numbers in it. It's actually really difficult to figure out what the fuck they are talking about here if you don't already know, because there's supposed to be a chart telling you what the magnitude shifts are for selecting any particular parameters, but it's not actually in the book. The descriptions of the parameters are there, and they are in the order of lowest magnitude to highest in each category, but some of them are the same as the one before them so just counting entries will give you the wrong answer. The ones which are in the list and a zero magnitude increase from the one before it are mostly described as being such somewhere in the text in natural English. But holy fucking shit this section is hard to use for new players.
This parameters deal is a huge thing for spontaneous magic. If you have time to draw a circle around a group, the spell level could be 10 lower. So even though spontaneous magic starts at a penalty compared to pre-written spells, you should be able to pull off some pretty boss shit by min/maxxing parameters to the situation at hand. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned the spontaneous magic rules are a kaleidoscope of madness and despair in that you are never going to get anyone to agree with your interpretations of what spell effects are supposed to do in an on-the-fly sort of way, which means that spontaneous casting is generally just asking for a table argument unless one of the people at the table (usually the Storyguide or the guy who owns the most books) has already bullied all the other people into doing what they want them to do.
Consensus!
The sample spells and guidelines are basically insane. Remember our discussion of Muto and our discussion of requisites? Well, according to the guidelines, Muto + Aquam spells (transforming liquids into shit) requires requisites if you want to change them into non-liquids. And Muto + Terram spells (transforming the dirt into shit) does too. But Muto + Auram spells (transforming thin air into shit) does not. Why not? I don't know, it's just not in the chart. It's base level 15 to Creo Animal a mammal, but it's only base level 10 to Muto Auram thin air into a god damn Manticore. Meanwhile, the spells themselves are written at different times to wildly different assumptions and quite often basically the same effect will appear in two different spells 20 levels apart. Remember always: the entire RNG only has 9 numbers on it, so 20 levels of spell is more than the entire RNG twice over. Extra bonus points for the fact that it's seriously -6 magnitude to only change “one property” of dirt, so if you want to change the property of the dirt from “is not the Pope” to “is the Pope” I guess you can try to figure out what the fuck that is about. More seriously, the game really wants you to care about intrinsic qualities in an Aristotelian sense, but clearly the author has no idea what that means and Aristotle never thought you could just cast a spell to line edit this shit and there's never been a logical framework developed for how the fuck this shit is supposed to work.
Chapter Ten: Long Term Events
Some things take a long time.
This is an 8 page chapter which really ties in to the whole lab work thing from two chapters ago and probably should have been merged. But as previously mentioned, this book is not well organized.
So this chapter covers the experience rules, which were obliquely hinted at back in the Character chapter, and they are a fairly standard 1980s fantasy heartbreaker hash. Things cost triangular amounts of XP, and XP is doled out in small amounts over time. Characters hyperspecialize because there are a lot of skills and there's no way in fuck you can be even passably good at a broad swath of them and you switch characters a lot. Things aren't remotely realistic in the sense that it follows the D&D model of people having more XP when they are older so that middle aged men who happen to specialize in that direction are better at athletics than unexperienced louts in their mid twenties. It's pretty math heavy. It doesn't give balanced results. I honestly just don't even know what this system is for. It's the kind of thing people wrote in 1989 and I don't know why it's still here. This is, to my mind, the bad part of logistics and dragons. It's not immersive, it's not interesting, it's not a fun part of the game, it's just clunky and old and bad.
We also get a rundown on what they mean by “seasons,” which as mentioned a bit during the Laboratory chapter are the basic unit of work time. Seasons don't actually correspond to anything. There are four seasons in a year, but they don't have defined beginnings and endings. They aren't even sequential. Most grogs spend two seasons “worth of time” at their job and two seasons “worth of time” doing personal enrichment shit. But they don't do one and then the other, they are interspersed with each other, sometimes even within the same day. Which really comes down to the whole “missing days of lab work” thing that's supposed to be a central facet of the entire magus experience. How do you know if you missed a day of work in “this season” when you can mix-n-match your time any way you like into any of three other seasons whenever you want? Why aren't we tracking time in units that actually add up to things? Why is this all so bullshit?
A big thing on advancement is the “quality of exposure.” Each season you get XPs that can only be spent on shit you used that season, and you get a number of XPs based on the most qualitiest exposure you got that during that season. But then, seasons are made of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, so I guess you assign adventures to whatever season would otherwise have the worst exposure in it. This means that having teachers and pimpass books and shit around at key times makes a huge difference in how fast your character advances, and other times makes no difference at all. Also, characters naturally hyperspecialize, because you put your craftsdwarfs to crafting and your potash makers to potash making and they end up with seasons where they only get XP to spend on things they are already good at.
Over time, characters get old and turn into Warhammer style chaos mutants. This is called Aging and Warping respectively. Aging is exactly what it sounds like, and while the system is needlessly complicated with double negation (living in poor conditions subtracts a negative number from your aging roll), it mostly does the job. Note that we're still in the “athletic characters continue to gain athletics skill as they age and only start rolling to see if they start degenerating at age 35, so the best runners are in their mid-forties” but it's an RPG and shit like that happens. With all this stuff about aging and seasons passing and shit, it would be nice if the game could somehow emergently make young people good at tasks of strength and sexiness while old people were good at tasks of experience and guile, but it doesn't. You aren't even more likely to degenerate in physical attributes than mental ones. It's entirely likely to meet a dude in his mid fifties who's stronger than he's ever been but just talks like Hodor now. Warping is a thing that happens where you accumulate chaos mutations if you try to live in an area with an aura rating greater than 5. Note that this includes Divine auras, so the Pope, Caliph, and all the high end holy men of Christianity and Islam are degenerate chaos mutants in this setting. So... that's odd.
Next up: Obstacles.
Chapter 8: Laboratory
Pretty much this.
In between the chapter where it talked about to cast spells and the chapter that explains what spells actually do, there is a 17 page chapter on what Wizards do with their downtime. Because this book is not very well organized.
The laboratory rules are fiddly and use a lot of math. They are more complicated than they need to be. They do, however, get the job done. Players do weird little accounting tricks, bicker about leaving problems to fester because they have cauldrons on to boil, and generally get in character as petty and insane academics. You can really see that this part was put together by a group of people who just got out of college and was likely partially written while still in college. It is evocative, and despite the protestations of the author that the magic system “is so” totally sweet (it is not), it is this academic logistics and dragons material that is the primary selling point of the game.
There are a lot of places that the laboratory rules could be cleaned up. Presentation could certainly be improved. Why is there no master time chart? Why doesn't it ever mention whether you're supposed to be working on the sabbath or not? Why don't the times divide evenly into each other? What the fuck?
See: if you miss more than 10 days of lab work in a season, your lab work is fucked. There are an average of 13 Sabbath Days in a season, so observant Christians, Muslims, and Jews would spend at least 13 days not doing any lab work (plus major holy days, obviously). Does that mean they are proper fucked all the time? If not, does that mean that Ahteists and Pagans can go be weekend warriors and still come back and stir the cauldron without any problems? This question is very important, and you'd think that a 5th edition would discuss these sorts of issues, but it doesn't.
What you get instead are discussions about which materials or mundane objects give which quirky bonuses to what categories of magic effects. And discussions about familiars, and apprentices, and weird charts of strange experimental results. Point of fact: you can opt for “extra risk” on your experiment of 1, 2, or 3 points. If you don't do that, experimenting has a 1% chance of giving you a “discovery.” If you experiment with 1 or 3 points of extra “risk” the chance goes up to 10%. If you experminet with exactly 2 points of extra risk, the chance goes up to 11%. Because the RNG is extremely screwy and this chart has good results sandwiched between bad results and thus modifiers to the die roll aren't always good or bad.
Is this bad? I'm not sure. It's certainly old, and it could really honestly be cleaned up a whole lot on a whole bunch of axes. But it is what the game is – poking through the completely batshit rules of magic looking for loopholes that let you acquire mighty arcane powers. This fiddly logistics and dragons insanity and the troupe play character rotation are the two main reasons you'd play Ars Magica. Hell, they are basically the only reasons you'd play Ars Magica instead of some other game that didn't look like a fantasy heartbreaker from the late 80s.
And honestly, shit like this is fun (obviously, not all people enjoy logistics and dragons, but for those who do, this is fun). People have repeatedly recommended the Covenants book on this thread, and well they should. Because it's fun in the same way as this crazy lab stuff but includes more characters. The Covenants book should have been more detailed still, and at least half the information in the Covenants book is shit that should have been in the basic book, but it's what people come to Ars Magica for and it's a big reason why if you want to design games you should read Ars Magica.
Chapter 9: Spells
Needs moar cowbell.
We already touched on the spells back in chapter 7, so we'll go through this quick. Well, quicker than the 52 pages of this chapter might indicate at first. A lot of the information in this chapter ties directly into the rules for actually casting these things which came two pages ago, so there's a lot of page flipping if you want to understand what the fucking hell the book is talking about. The first five and a half pages are discussions of rules for learning, designing, and casting spells that really should be put together with the rest of those, and the remaining 46 and a half pages are spent giving examples and guidelines for each of the fifty spell categories recognized by this game. The extra half page is because there is a half page of box text that goes with the spell guidelines that is ectopic in the spell rules section of this chapter because the typesetter doesn't know what he is doing.
So basically we have two things to talk about: the spell design rules and the spell guidelines. The spell design rules are crazy, and the spell guidelines and examples are contradictory word salad.
I should really talk some more about the madness spiral that is “requisites.” See, the game understands that the categories don't make sense and there's nothing you could possibly want to do that is unambiguously one thing and not others. So rather than even attempt something simple like “it's whatever the best fit category is and shut the fuck up” they acknowledge that all spells have parts that are other things. So if you want to turn a dude into a toad, that's Muto Corpus. But, the fact that they are wearing a leather jacket means that it's also Animal. And the fact that they have linen pants on means that it's also Herbam. And the fact that they have brass buttons means that's it's also Terram. And so on and so on. So here's what the Storyguide does: they decide whether a requisite is “needed,” “enhancing,” or “cosmetic”. If it's the first one, the spell just fucking fails, because you use the lowest of all those art values (which is almost always zero). If it's the second one, the spell's difficulty ease magnitude goes up by one “or more” and that probably doesn't make any difference. And if it's the third one, the spell casting difficulty ease doesn't change at all and that definitely doesn't make any difference. Keep in mind that it's almost literally impossible to imagine an effect that doesn't have some level of impact on one of the other categories (for fuck's sake, one of the other categories is “things having to do with magic” which by definition all spells have). So spell design is pretty much 100% Mother-May-I, even if you can get rough agreement at your table as to what the spell categories actually do.
Don't write game mechanics like this.
And I guess I should talk about the spell parameters. The base effects add to the spell difficulty ease level if they are more powerful, but far larger impacts on the spell difficulty ease level come from the spell's parameters. Like range and targeting restrictions and shit. This means that the amount of magical power you need to cast a spell has actually very little to do with how powerful the effect of that spell actually is. This is like a parody of the “accounting for power” that people sometimes accuse GURPS or HERO of being. Oh, and the difficulty of casting a spell is called its “spell level” because it's a fantasy heartbreaker from the 80s. Basically, every additional Magnitude adds +5 to the spell difficulty ease, and remember that adding even 2 levels decreases your chances of succeeding on casting by twenty one percent, if and only if it happens to already by on the RNG, which it probably isn't because the RNG only has 9 numbers in it. It's actually really difficult to figure out what the fuck they are talking about here if you don't already know, because there's supposed to be a chart telling you what the magnitude shifts are for selecting any particular parameters, but it's not actually in the book. The descriptions of the parameters are there, and they are in the order of lowest magnitude to highest in each category, but some of them are the same as the one before them so just counting entries will give you the wrong answer. The ones which are in the list and a zero magnitude increase from the one before it are mostly described as being such somewhere in the text in natural English. But holy fucking shit this section is hard to use for new players.
This parameters deal is a huge thing for spontaneous magic. If you have time to draw a circle around a group, the spell level could be 10 lower. So even though spontaneous magic starts at a penalty compared to pre-written spells, you should be able to pull off some pretty boss shit by min/maxxing parameters to the situation at hand. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned the spontaneous magic rules are a kaleidoscope of madness and despair in that you are never going to get anyone to agree with your interpretations of what spell effects are supposed to do in an on-the-fly sort of way, which means that spontaneous casting is generally just asking for a table argument unless one of the people at the table (usually the Storyguide or the guy who owns the most books) has already bullied all the other people into doing what they want them to do.
Consensus!
The sample spells and guidelines are basically insane. Remember our discussion of Muto and our discussion of requisites? Well, according to the guidelines, Muto + Aquam spells (transforming liquids into shit) requires requisites if you want to change them into non-liquids. And Muto + Terram spells (transforming the dirt into shit) does too. But Muto + Auram spells (transforming thin air into shit) does not. Why not? I don't know, it's just not in the chart. It's base level 15 to Creo Animal a mammal, but it's only base level 10 to Muto Auram thin air into a god damn Manticore. Meanwhile, the spells themselves are written at different times to wildly different assumptions and quite often basically the same effect will appear in two different spells 20 levels apart. Remember always: the entire RNG only has 9 numbers on it, so 20 levels of spell is more than the entire RNG twice over. Extra bonus points for the fact that it's seriously -6 magnitude to only change “one property” of dirt, so if you want to change the property of the dirt from “is not the Pope” to “is the Pope” I guess you can try to figure out what the fuck that is about. More seriously, the game really wants you to care about intrinsic qualities in an Aristotelian sense, but clearly the author has no idea what that means and Aristotle never thought you could just cast a spell to line edit this shit and there's never been a logical framework developed for how the fuck this shit is supposed to work.
Chapter Ten: Long Term Events
Some things take a long time.
This is an 8 page chapter which really ties in to the whole lab work thing from two chapters ago and probably should have been merged. But as previously mentioned, this book is not well organized.
So this chapter covers the experience rules, which were obliquely hinted at back in the Character chapter, and they are a fairly standard 1980s fantasy heartbreaker hash. Things cost triangular amounts of XP, and XP is doled out in small amounts over time. Characters hyperspecialize because there are a lot of skills and there's no way in fuck you can be even passably good at a broad swath of them and you switch characters a lot. Things aren't remotely realistic in the sense that it follows the D&D model of people having more XP when they are older so that middle aged men who happen to specialize in that direction are better at athletics than unexperienced louts in their mid twenties. It's pretty math heavy. It doesn't give balanced results. I honestly just don't even know what this system is for. It's the kind of thing people wrote in 1989 and I don't know why it's still here. This is, to my mind, the bad part of logistics and dragons. It's not immersive, it's not interesting, it's not a fun part of the game, it's just clunky and old and bad.
We also get a rundown on what they mean by “seasons,” which as mentioned a bit during the Laboratory chapter are the basic unit of work time. Seasons don't actually correspond to anything. There are four seasons in a year, but they don't have defined beginnings and endings. They aren't even sequential. Most grogs spend two seasons “worth of time” at their job and two seasons “worth of time” doing personal enrichment shit. But they don't do one and then the other, they are interspersed with each other, sometimes even within the same day. Which really comes down to the whole “missing days of lab work” thing that's supposed to be a central facet of the entire magus experience. How do you know if you missed a day of work in “this season” when you can mix-n-match your time any way you like into any of three other seasons whenever you want? Why aren't we tracking time in units that actually add up to things? Why is this all so bullshit?
A big thing on advancement is the “quality of exposure.” Each season you get XPs that can only be spent on shit you used that season, and you get a number of XPs based on the most qualitiest exposure you got that during that season. But then, seasons are made of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, so I guess you assign adventures to whatever season would otherwise have the worst exposure in it. This means that having teachers and pimpass books and shit around at key times makes a huge difference in how fast your character advances, and other times makes no difference at all. Also, characters naturally hyperspecialize, because you put your craftsdwarfs to crafting and your potash makers to potash making and they end up with seasons where they only get XP to spend on things they are already good at.
Over time, characters get old and turn into Warhammer style chaos mutants. This is called Aging and Warping respectively. Aging is exactly what it sounds like, and while the system is needlessly complicated with double negation (living in poor conditions subtracts a negative number from your aging roll), it mostly does the job. Note that we're still in the “athletic characters continue to gain athletics skill as they age and only start rolling to see if they start degenerating at age 35, so the best runners are in their mid-forties” but it's an RPG and shit like that happens. With all this stuff about aging and seasons passing and shit, it would be nice if the game could somehow emergently make young people good at tasks of strength and sexiness while old people were good at tasks of experience and guile, but it doesn't. You aren't even more likely to degenerate in physical attributes than mental ones. It's entirely likely to meet a dude in his mid fifties who's stronger than he's ever been but just talks like Hodor now. Warping is a thing that happens where you accumulate chaos mutations if you try to live in an area with an aura rating greater than 5. Note that this includes Divine auras, so the Pope, Caliph, and all the high end holy men of Christianity and Islam are degenerate chaos mutants in this setting. So... that's odd.
Next up: Obstacles.
Warping is Realm specific - Magic Warping is different from Divine Warping is different from Faerie Warping is different from Infernal Warping. Not only that, but being attuned to a Realm means that you don't Warp from exposure to an ongoing environmental Aura, so Magi don't turn into chaos mutants unless they're continually under the effect of powerful magics for a year. Typically magi dodge that by having items which bear the effect of the magic rather than themselves.
Each Realm has different effects. Divine Warping, for example, tends to make you more pious by giving you Personality Flaws associated with religion (such as Pious, or Fear of the Divine or Infernal, Compulsion to pray). Magic, Infernal, and Faerie Auras do tend to make you grow an extra tit in some fashion or another (though the Fae ones tend to be unnaturally glowing eyes and what-not).
What's interesting with respect to Divine Auras is that if you have True Faith (basically The Gift, but for Divine power instead of Magic; each Realm has an associated link like The Gift that allows mortals to access the Realm's powers, and yes demons hand out The Infernal Gift as presents) you aren't affected by Divine Auras, so that if the Pope does slowly turn into a psychological cripple obsessed with prayer due to living in the Vatican it's because he doesn't actually have a direct connection with the Divine.
Each Realm has different effects. Divine Warping, for example, tends to make you more pious by giving you Personality Flaws associated with religion (such as Pious, or Fear of the Divine or Infernal, Compulsion to pray). Magic, Infernal, and Faerie Auras do tend to make you grow an extra tit in some fashion or another (though the Fae ones tend to be unnaturally glowing eyes and what-not).
What's interesting with respect to Divine Auras is that if you have True Faith (basically The Gift, but for Divine power instead of Magic; each Realm has an associated link like The Gift that allows mortals to access the Realm's powers, and yes demons hand out The Infernal Gift as presents) you aren't affected by Divine Auras, so that if the Pope does slowly turn into a psychological cripple obsessed with prayer due to living in the Vatican it's because he doesn't actually have a direct connection with the Divine.
Last edited by mean_liar on Tue Nov 18, 2014 8:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Username17
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OSSR: Ars Magica
Chapter 11: Obstacles
This is the chapter with combat in it.
Ars Magica has a bad combat system, and people who want a good combat system or even just a combat system that isn't bad can always go play Dungeons & Dragons. In the previous edition, wearing armor literally made you take more damage in combat because the increase in damage from enemies having lower ease factors to hit you were larger than the reduction in damage from the armor. And people just sort of acknowledged that the combat rules were crap and didn't care because the game was about logistics and dragons and magic duels, not fights with swords and crossbows. 5th edition did fix that, and armor no longer makes you more likely to get hit, so the combat rules are objectively less bad now. But they are still pretty bad. Even the fix is kind of a joke – armor still increases your burden by as much or more than it increases your protection, it's just that your burden now only affects physical activities other than calculating attack and defense if the burden comes from armor. So armor now gives a weird unnamed type of penalty that works exactly like a named penalty except with a magic exemption for the defense score that it would otherwise be shitting on.
Combat uses an attack roll and a defense roll, and then damage and damage soak are fixed numbers. So while it manages to fulfill the basic requirement to not be completely shitty like nWoD combat of having two rolls, they are both part of the same operation (“Do I hit?”), and could be profitably changed into a single-roll system with two dice and some mathemagic and we'd all be happier. So I think despite having two rolls it is near nWoD levels of terribility. At least people can potentially miss, but combat skills are so large compared to the RNG that things are really really deterministic. The Bestiary is really short and bizarrely almost completely filled with various flavors of wolf, and we'll get there when we get there, but the high defenses in this book are literally 19 points higher than the low defenses, and the RNG still only has 9 numbers on it. So finding an opponent you can ever hit that you can also ever miss is a pretty rare thing.
Initiative is a divide by zero error. You roll initiative at the beginning of combat and keep the same value round to round. But your value when you roll it is modified up or down by what weapon you are armed with. Note that depending on your intentions to punch or kick someone several rounds in the future your initiative is supposed to be modified by a different amount, despite the fact that you haven't declared that you are going to do that and honestly what the actual fuck? You're modifying numbers based on decisions that haven't been made that are contingent on information you don't yet have. How is this bullshit still going on in a fifth edition of this game?
We finally get an equipment list, but equipment doesn't have prices because go fuck yourself. There's a spot on the chart for how much things cost, but there aren't any numbers given for anything. Also the charts are formatted badly. The protection values for partial suits of armor and for full suits of armor are both just labeled “prot.” and you just have to figure out your own damn self that the bigger number is the full suit.
The injury rules have some diseases and poisons in them. They are not medically accurate and also not accurate to what people believed at the time. I don't really understand what this is supposed to be for. If we're taking four humor theory seriously, then “Quartan Fever” (which is to say: Malaria) is caused by an excess of black bile, not an excess of yellow bile. If we're not taking humor theory seriously, then it's caused by a mosquito transmitting a blood parasite into you (note: Malaria spread a lot farther north in the 13th century than it does now, but I think the Norwegian covenants should still be pretty much safe from Quartan Fever even if the German ones are not). Again and again the author's pretentiousness exceeds his knowledge. We end up with something that doesn't work like the real world, doesn't work like historical documents described the world, and doesn't have complete game mechanical descriptions of how it works in the game.
I want to do the Realms and the Bestiary together, so that'll be it for this post.
Chapter 11: Obstacles
This is the chapter with combat in it.
They're leading with that, so I'm leading with that too. This chapter is 11 pages long and is almost entirely about combat. It's not called the combat chapter because that would make the combat rules too easy to find. Except for a quarter page at the end of the chapter that is mysteriously about travel, everything in this chapter is about stabbing people with swords or recovering from having been stabbed with swords or getting swords to stab people with. But it's not called the combat chapter and that way pretentious Ars Magica fans can claim with a straight face that Ars Magica doesn't even have a combat chapter.Ars Magica 5th Edition wrote:Combat is generally not the most important part of Ars Magica stories, but when it occurs it is both dramatic and deadly.
Ars Magica has a bad combat system, and people who want a good combat system or even just a combat system that isn't bad can always go play Dungeons & Dragons. In the previous edition, wearing armor literally made you take more damage in combat because the increase in damage from enemies having lower ease factors to hit you were larger than the reduction in damage from the armor. And people just sort of acknowledged that the combat rules were crap and didn't care because the game was about logistics and dragons and magic duels, not fights with swords and crossbows. 5th edition did fix that, and armor no longer makes you more likely to get hit, so the combat rules are objectively less bad now. But they are still pretty bad. Even the fix is kind of a joke – armor still increases your burden by as much or more than it increases your protection, it's just that your burden now only affects physical activities other than calculating attack and defense if the burden comes from armor. So armor now gives a weird unnamed type of penalty that works exactly like a named penalty except with a magic exemption for the defense score that it would otherwise be shitting on.
Combat uses an attack roll and a defense roll, and then damage and damage soak are fixed numbers. So while it manages to fulfill the basic requirement to not be completely shitty like nWoD combat of having two rolls, they are both part of the same operation (“Do I hit?”), and could be profitably changed into a single-roll system with two dice and some mathemagic and we'd all be happier. So I think despite having two rolls it is near nWoD levels of terribility. At least people can potentially miss, but combat skills are so large compared to the RNG that things are really really deterministic. The Bestiary is really short and bizarrely almost completely filled with various flavors of wolf, and we'll get there when we get there, but the high defenses in this book are literally 19 points higher than the low defenses, and the RNG still only has 9 numbers on it. So finding an opponent you can ever hit that you can also ever miss is a pretty rare thing.
Initiative is a divide by zero error. You roll initiative at the beginning of combat and keep the same value round to round. But your value when you roll it is modified up or down by what weapon you are armed with. Note that depending on your intentions to punch or kick someone several rounds in the future your initiative is supposed to be modified by a different amount, despite the fact that you haven't declared that you are going to do that and honestly what the actual fuck? You're modifying numbers based on decisions that haven't been made that are contingent on information you don't yet have. How is this bullshit still going on in a fifth edition of this game?
We finally get an equipment list, but equipment doesn't have prices because go fuck yourself. There's a spot on the chart for how much things cost, but there aren't any numbers given for anything. Also the charts are formatted badly. The protection values for partial suits of armor and for full suits of armor are both just labeled “prot.” and you just have to figure out your own damn self that the bigger number is the full suit.
The injury rules have some diseases and poisons in them. They are not medically accurate and also not accurate to what people believed at the time. I don't really understand what this is supposed to be for. If we're taking four humor theory seriously, then “Quartan Fever” (which is to say: Malaria) is caused by an excess of black bile, not an excess of yellow bile. If we're not taking humor theory seriously, then it's caused by a mosquito transmitting a blood parasite into you (note: Malaria spread a lot farther north in the 13th century than it does now, but I think the Norwegian covenants should still be pretty much safe from Quartan Fever even if the German ones are not). Again and again the author's pretentiousness exceeds his knowledge. We end up with something that doesn't work like the real world, doesn't work like historical documents described the world, and doesn't have complete game mechanical descriptions of how it works in the game.
I want to do the Realms and the Bestiary together, so that'll be it for this post.
What is the difference between black and yellow bile? No this isn't the starting line for a bad joke, I'm genuinely curious. Assuming four-humours is literally referring to having four types of goo inside your body that need to be balanced ("He has too much phlegm, that's why it leaks out his face, and that is the cause and not a symptom". "Ah, you need to bleed a bit to recover from this disease"), I understand what the other two are.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
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angelfromanotherpin
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The issue with Quartan Fever is that malaria is generalized at the time as the Ague, and basically means "fever"... and that the recurrence of the fever is its defining characteristic, but the recurrence rate determined the flavor of Ague/malaria.
Once-every-four days fever (72h dormancy) is indeed quartan fever (Plasmodium malariae) and that in turn is indeed a choleric disorder (yellow bile).
Frank, I believe you're thinking of Tertian Fever (Plasmodium malariae, et al?; also malaria), recurring every three days, (48h dormancy), which was classified as a disorder of melancholy (and hence black bile).
Both are malaria, both were considered to be the Ague ("the fever"), both were considered to be caused by bad air ("mal aria").
P vivax (also a flavor of Ague, also malaria) was considered a sanguine disorder.
This is also a lesson on playing Ars Magica and the necessity of the internet to parse some of this crap (if questioned on it, anyhow), and how when someone thinks they know something they don't then everything goes wibbly wobbly. In game, this is "you're sick and displaying (description of humor imbalance)", but if you're called on it then IT'S STRAIGHT TO THE INTERNET to figure it out.
While that doesn't matter for diseases (and other downtime discussion), not really, it can matter for pissing matches about essential forms and spontaneous magic.
Once-every-four days fever (72h dormancy) is indeed quartan fever (Plasmodium malariae) and that in turn is indeed a choleric disorder (yellow bile).
Frank, I believe you're thinking of Tertian Fever (Plasmodium malariae, et al?; also malaria), recurring every three days, (48h dormancy), which was classified as a disorder of melancholy (and hence black bile).
Both are malaria, both were considered to be the Ague ("the fever"), both were considered to be caused by bad air ("mal aria").
P vivax (also a flavor of Ague, also malaria) was considered a sanguine disorder.
This is also a lesson on playing Ars Magica and the necessity of the internet to parse some of this crap (if questioned on it, anyhow), and how when someone thinks they know something they don't then everything goes wibbly wobbly. In game, this is "you're sick and displaying (description of humor imbalance)", but if you're called on it then IT'S STRAIGHT TO THE INTERNET to figure it out.
While that doesn't matter for diseases (and other downtime discussion), not really, it can matter for pissing matches about essential forms and spontaneous magic.
Last edited by mean_liar on Wed Nov 19, 2014 7:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Username17
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Oh definitely. The game name drops shit constantly instead of explaining how shit is supposed to work. On a lot of stuff this basically doesn't matter, as you said. But if some poor fucker put points into Imagem, then everything they ever do or try to do with their magic is colored through the lenses of how people at your table think the author misinterpreted 13th century natural philosophers discussing the more out-there ideas of Thomas Aquinas. And that's terrible.mean_liar wrote:This is also a lesson on playing Ars Magica and the necessity of the internet to parse some of this crap (if questioned on it, anyhow), and how when someone thinks they know something they don't then everything goes wibbly wobbly. In game, this is "you're sick and displaying (description of humor imbalance)", but if you're called on it then IT'S STRAIGHT TO THE INTERNET to figure it out.
While that doesn't matter for diseases (and other downtime discussion), not really, it can matter for pissing matches about essential forms and spontaneous magic.
I'm pretty sure I'm not.mean liar wrote: Frank, I believe you're thinking of Tertian Fever (Plasmodium malariae, et al?; also malaria), recurring every three days, (48h dormancy), which was classified as a disorder of melancholy (and hence black bile).
-Username17Medieval Christianity in Practice; Fourteenth Century Instructions for Bedside Pastoral Care wrote:On fever; how are they generated? Superfluous food is discharged by nausea and vomiting and then the person is cured. Aristotle in Secret of Secrets says that once or twice a month and especially in the summer one should practice vomiting, since vomiting cleanses the body and purges the stomach of the worst and most putrid humors. If such humors are sparse in the stomach it fortifies the digestive heat. But if the superfluous food remains inside then it either corrupts the sanguine humor and thus continuous fever (febris continua) is caused, or the melancholy and thus quartan fever (febris quartana) is caused,
Doubling back a bit, you're right on quarten/melancholic, tertian/choleric.
Which is kind of sad and informative (regarding the game, and myself personally I suppose
), because I poked through the internet a shitload on this because I thought your presentation was wrong, and after reading the first raft of crap I was pretty sure you were wrong... and now on re-reading, no, it seems you're right.
And not only that, but the mistake was propagated in Art and Academe, and in greater detail.
[take a drink]
Which is kind of sad and informative (regarding the game, and myself personally I suppose
), because I poked through the internet a shitload on this because I thought your presentation was wrong, and after reading the first raft of crap I was pretty sure you were wrong... and now on re-reading, no, it seems you're right.And not only that, but the mistake was propagated in Art and Academe, and in greater detail.
[take a drink]
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Night Goat
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That's disappointing. A setting where the religious leaders are mutating into daemons sounds a lot more interesting than anything we've seen from this game so far.mean_liar wrote:Warping is Realm specific - Magic Warping is different from Divine Warping is different from Faerie Warping is different from Infernal Warping. Not only that, but being attuned to a Realm means that you don't Warp from exposure to an ongoing environmental Aura, so Magi don't turn into chaos mutants unless they're continually under the effect of powerful magics for a year. Typically magi dodge that by having items which bear the effect of the magic rather than themselves.
Each Realm has different effects. Divine Warping, for example, tends to make you more pious by giving you Personality Flaws associated with religion (such as Pious, or Fear of the Divine or Infernal, Compulsion to pray). Magic, Infernal, and Faerie Auras do tend to make you grow an extra tit in some fashion or another (though the Fae ones tend to be unnaturally glowing eyes and what-not).
What's interesting with respect to Divine Auras is that if you have True Faith (basically The Gift, but for Divine power instead of Magic; each Realm has an associated link like The Gift that allows mortals to access the Realm's powers, and yes demons hand out The Infernal Gift as presents) you aren't affected by Divine Auras, so that if the Pope does slowly turn into a psychological cripple obsessed with prayer due to living in the Vatican it's because he doesn't actually have a direct connection with the Divine.
So rather than drastically reducing armor burden values (the usual ArM4 house rule) they just said that rule doesn't apply to combat. Same general effect I guess but it smacks of refusing to admit that a mistake had been made.
Really high defence scores were essentially puzzle monsters. IIRC the system in ArM4 generated both hits and misses for human-on-human combat & I expect ArM5 is the same, it doesn't sound like they changed all that much.
It does sound like they actually put in some rules around warping which is a definite improvement.
Really high defence scores were essentially puzzle monsters. IIRC the system in ArM4 generated both hits and misses for human-on-human combat & I expect ArM5 is the same, it doesn't sound like they changed all that much.
It does sound like they actually put in some rules around warping which is a definite improvement.