OSSR: Ars Magica 5th edition

[mean_liar]

There's a piece of canonical law (possibly?) originating in the 10th century but is starkly skeptical, stating that witchcraft is bullshit, and that the real crime is believing in witchcraft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Episcopi

[Koumei]

Yes, they did ban superstition, which on the face of it is a bit of a problem for them.

[mean_liar]

Now in the actual period there was debate within the Church about whether accusations of witchcraft should be investigated or whether the accuser should simply be burned as a heretic. The bible is not ambiguous on the point that sorcerers should be put to death and are going straight to Hell after they die - but there was considerable debate as to whether sorcerers actually existed.

If, as the core book suggests, the Church is fully aware that there are real sorcerers and that many of them are good Christians, historicity of Church doctrine on this subject is out the window and it's up to the game books to write a new one. If the entire Church book doesn't discuss Leviticus (which it does not), it has fucking failed and the official setting doesn't fucking exist.

Not true. There were three kinds of magic - superstitious crap that wasn't actually magic, good magic that was really popular with peasants and the scholarly set that was good probably more for its ubiquity than anything because you couldn't condemn everyone unless they were Cathars, and bad magic that called on demons. A lot of ink gets spilled condemning magic, written by scholars who were doing magic but, you know, the good kind (no demons though so it's a-OK). Pope Alexander IV tells his inquisitors in the mid-thirteenth century to not bother with prosecuting divination or sorcery unless there's a clear tie to praying at altars, offering sacrifices, consulting demons, or using the Blood and Body of Christ for nefarious purposes... which is really just piling on at that point, since if you're doing one of those and found out or set up you have serious problems before they even get to the "and he does sorcery" bit.

Frankly, making shit up was exactly what the secular and ecclesiastical authorities were doing at the time, so I don't see why expending a lot of words on the subject helps matters.

[Username17]

The bottom line is that at the time (remember that neither the Malleus not Aquinas had been written yet), it was fashionable in the Church to declare that sorcery simply didn't exist and that no magic powers existed other than God's. But, 5th edition Ars Magica throws all that out by claiming simply that the Church is well aware that the Order of Hermes exists and that they are personally powerful.

The main theological debate of the time was between people who didn't believe that there were any sorcerers with any real powers, and the people who believed that there were real sorcerers who needed to be killed. 5th edition Ars Magica postulates that that debate is settled and that the Church absolutely knows that sorcerers with real magic powers that don't come from God are a real thing. That implies that the entire ecclesiastical debate on the subject looks nothing like the historical one and the Inquisition should have already declared war on the Order of Hermes.

There's just no attempt to work the historical political situation in at all. Church courts mostly didn't believe that witches were real in this period, but the book unambiguously states that Church courts in this setting do believe that witches are real, and then doesn't say a single fucking thing about what happens next, even though it has extremely massive implications for the player characters and their position in society.

The more I look at this Church law thing, the more fucked this all is. In 1st and 2nd edition, Ars Magica presented a minimalist setting that you could use real history books to play in. 5th edition's setting is unusable garbage. It contradicts just enough of real world history that you can't use the history books and replaces it with so little that you can't use that either. 5th edition ruined this game. Everything I liked about it is ashes in this edition and everything I didn't like is still here. I would absolutely not reccommend the 5th edition to anyone.

-Username17

[Daniel]

Early Ars Magica is a long list of smart, Original (and yes lazy) ideas often poorly implemented. What 5th edition Ars does right is repairing those ideas where possible. And yes in a lot of places structural repair is not possible. Not without drastically changing the rules to the point that the established fanbase would rebel.
The good news is that for the first time a bunch of setting fluff actually matches the rules text. Prior to 5th there was little reason in the rules for a wizard to travel around with a platoon of soldiers, have a spokesperson, have a shield grog, or use Parma Magica. But the fluff said that was the way wizards adventured.
The rules governing the Divine also follow the flavour text for the first time. The Divine realm is clearly the strongest in the game, without being a reliable source of power for anybody except a handful of excentrics with little political pull.
These improvements and the fact that the game takes place in colourful gonzo MYTHIC europe instead of shitcovered mythic EUROPE, really help actual gameplay.
All the shit Frank brings up? 95% true, but rarely an issue during actual game play.
Why is that? Simple. All rpg rule sets are flawed. The trick is to have most flaws hidden away in places where they only affect spherical cow situations. It took Ars Magica 5 editions to get there, but it has sort of succeeded.
The Church being aware of the Order, but basically pretending it does not exist? Perfect status quo for most Ars Magica campaigns.

[Username17]

The Church being aware of the Order, but basically pretending it does not exist? Perfect status quo for most Ars Magica campaigns.

I can't accept that. I can accept that that might have been a perfectly decent set of assumptions to write a fantasy heartbreaker's fantasy world to, but you still actually have to write that fucking world. Ars Magica 5th edition did not fucking do that.

As Mean Liar said, the best resource for the 13th century is wikipedia. As long as Ars Magica was set in “exactly our world but there's secretly magicians,” that was fine. Elegant even. But in 5th edition they dump that apple cart over, and don't replace it with anything.

If you want to tell me that the 13th century Catholic Fucking Church knows about a group named “the Order of Hermes” that has hundreds of people who have actual magic powers that very explicitly are not miracles from God, and that there isn't already a full scale shooting and stabbing war on, I'm going to have to know why. Spending a single paragraph of shrugging text about how sorcery is kinda illegal but not consistently enforced or interpreted doesn't fucking cut it. We are talking about 1220 when the Catholic Church has declared open war on Muslims, Heretics, and the Romuva for being religiously wrong, and the Order of Fucking Hermes has the name of a fucking PAGAN GOD IN ITS FUCKING NAME. If the Catholic Church knows about that and is not “at war already” you need to do some pretty damn big world building to explain that. Because anything that looked even a little bit like the Catholic Church in history books and wikipedia would flip its shit if there were confirmed non-saintly spellcasters who self identified as the “Order of PAGAN GOD”.

Ars Magica 5th edition tossed away the entire point of lazy world building. Ars Magica classically had only the slightest amount of world building text in their rules because you were allowed and expected to use real world source material. In 5th edition they write just enough world text to completely toss all the real world source material into the circular file, and what they replace it with is so sketchy that it might as well not exist. It's just Generic Fantasy World #516 and it's written about so minimalistically as to be wholly unusable.

Fuck this book. Ars Magica 5th edition just makes me mad now. I've gone to the bottom of this rabbit hole and it turns out to be a latrine.

[virgil]

Maybe they leave magi alone the same way that they leave Jews alone? They're a tiny demographic that lives apart from everyone, actively avoid interfering with the Church's power structure, can truthfully claim to have members fight heretics (Diedne's destruction, Flambeau's antics, several demon-hunters, etc), etc. At least magi seem to largely declare themselves as Christian to the Church, and it's not like there have been crusades sent against astrologers.

[Windjammer]

The weirdest one for me is the modern day Ars Magica fans. They claim things that aren't true about it, like all the time. Last time we talked about Ars Magica, a bunch of people posted rants about how clear the magic system is. And that's just fucking insane. Ars Magica's magic system is lazy and incoherent, that's what it is. That is what it has always been. And yet, you see people who claim that it's “obvious” what Muto can and cannot do, even though the extant of Muto is based on a double negative of a reference to a medieval understanding of an ancient Greek philosopher that the author of the book does not himself understand and has only a couple of a examples which flagrantly violate the examples on several levels. It's difficult for me to imagine how you could make a magic system that was less clear than that.

(Well, didn't 3.5's Tome of Magic come close. )

Question: do you, or anyone else on this board, know of a RPG product written by people with a proper college education in the humanities and/or one of the hard sciences (where applicable)? Ignore philosophy for a moment, let's ask it for all subjects.

I'm wondering because it's quite a worn trope that RPG authors are failed existences who try to make their lifes work and ends meet when professionally and economically and educationally they're either in "also ran"* or write RPG material as a non-serious aside to things they actually know about and earn a decent living from.

I'm really interested. I know of only one exception - it's one of the guys who wrote the Rome supplements (core plus adventure) for V:tR, he's got a history PhD from Cambridge, and then there's a guy (the same one?) who wrote a Gurps (or some other generalist system) supplement on Republican Rome. I'm not a specialist of the area, but I've read reviews by people who were and could see that the author knows the literature and doesn't get basic things woefully wrong.
Contrast that with some d20 supplements on "magic medieval society" that (as far as I know) use a sophomore understanding of medieval history. Obviously sophomore is not as low as Wikipedia level - which is where most clowns in RPG writing operate today - but it's also not quite what you'd want given the subject of the book.
So, any examples?

*Most famous case is Mearls. As he once wrote on his blog, back in the day, he got the shaft in 2000 when the dot com bubble burst, then moved back into his parents' basement, and began writing supplements for all d20 companies out there. From there he worked himself up, one writing gig at a time. He's still using his uni alumni email (Dartmouth I believe), but as far as I understand he never made it beyond undergraduate. I also don't know what kind of subject he studied if he went into late 90s e-business. But it explains his propensity for spin.

[Daniel]

Dear Frank,

Breath goes in, breath goes out. Try to reach a zen like state of calm. Relax.

What you personally accept, or not about any given rpg is irrelevant to its success. Me, I thought that the rules of Shadowrun prior to 4th edition were very much needlessly complicated. Game was still a hit.

Ars Magica pretends to be a rpg about fantasy wizards in a version of the 13th century that functions like the people back then thought it did. Supporting good suspension of disbelieve to people who get excited about that idea matters more than actually succeeding at that idea. At least it does when it comes to getting people to buy the product.
What has stopped Ars Magica from becoming bigger than it currently is, has been the large amount of bookkeeping required, not the fact that it ignores that more than half the population of Europe had icky parasites living inside their colons, or that realistically there would be a war between Christianity and the Order.
Actually that last point is not realistic at all. If the other guys clearly have massive supernatural powers and your own club claims to have them as well, but those only show up occasionally, usually to accomplish stuff you think is rather insignificant, than you will not want to pick that fight.

[Mistborn]

Dear Frank,

Breath goes in, breath goes out. Try to reach a zen like state of calm. Relax.

You must be new here.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Catholics allied with Hindus against the Muslims, claiming that the Hindus were a weird sort of Christian (I think Krishna helped with that or something) and that the Muslims were pagan. Real history is full of bizarre examples of people compromising their religious ideals to attain ostensibly religious goals that have purely economic motivations.

[Username17]

Ars Magica pretends to be a rpg about fantasy wizards in a version of the 13th century that functions like the people back then thought it did. Supporting good suspension of disbelieve to people who get excited about that idea matters more than actually succeeding at that idea. At least it does when it comes to getting people to buy the product.

Holy crap. You didn't seriously just make an appeal to popularity with regards to Ars Magica 5th Edition did you?

Ars Magica is an obscure niche product. 1st edition Ars Magica was extremely influential, but 5th edition just is what it is - an obscure niche product that no one fucking cares about. If you argue that popularity, profitability, and influence justifies any sort of changes regardless of artistic merit, wouldn't the reverse also be true? That the fact that Ars Magica has been reduced to an obscure niche game that has very little influence or even recognition in the modern age represents a fundamental failure regardless of artistic merit?

You only get to hide behind "success justifies everything" if you have in fact succeeded. Ars Magica 1 was grossly successful and popular for a game its size. It hit way above its weight class, and for nearly half a decade the most popular RPG in the world was based on it. Ars Magica 5 is nothing like that on any level.

Real history is full of bizarre examples of people compromising their religious ideals to attain ostensibly religious goals that have purely economic motivations.

I'm not saying you couldn't make a game where there was a big church that was based on the Catholic Church but totally bros with a bunch of sorcerers. You could do that. It's... you have to actually do that. If you only have a single paragraph to explain that relations are "complicated" you haven't actually done any fucking world building at all and you don't have a fucking setting.

And this is the bottom line: the reason why every time Ars Magica 5 came up we were treated to a bunch of bizarre fallacies and people ranting off half cocked about pre-Newtonian physics that they didn't understand in the slightest is that that is what Ars magica 5th edition is. It is by and for Dunning Kruger sufferers. There's no real setting, there's no real game physics, and people who have no idea what they are talking about are encouraged to spout off crazy shit that is way above their competence level.

I'm really interested. I know of only one exception - it's one of the guys who wrote the Rome supplements (core plus adventure) for V:tR, he's got a history PhD from Cambridge, and then there's a guy (the same one?) who wrote a Gurps (or some other generalist system) supplement on Republican Rome. I'm not a specialist of the area, but I've read reviews by people who were and could see that the author knows the literature and doesn't get basic things woefully wrong.

I've mentioned Requiem For Rome before. And yeah, it stands head and shoulders above other nWoD products (not that that is a terribly high bar).

I don't much like Stafford's games, but he is a practicing Shaman and and at least some of his rants are not made from a position of ignorance.

John Holmes was a professor of Neurology, which is highly irrelevant to anything that the BECMI books were talking about, but does give Basic D&D a kind of coherence that was missing from AD&D.

Tekumel is certainly insane, but Barker was a real linguist and professor of South Asian Studies, so there's some pretty legit linguistics and anthropology in there even though the game mechanics and story hooks aren't great.

-Username17

[zugschef]

Why did this thing win the Origins Award in the category best rpg? Was the competitions that bad?

[Daniel]

Ars Magica pretends to be a rpg about fantasy wizards in a version of the 13th century that functions like the people back then thought it did. Supporting good suspension of disbelieve to people who get excited about that idea matters more than actually succeeding at that idea. At least it does when it comes to getting people to buy the product.

Holy crap. You didn't seriously just make an appeal to popularity with regards to Ars Magica 5th Edition did you?

Ars Magica is an obscure niche product. 1st edition Ars Magica was extremely influential, but 5th edition just is what it is - an obscure niche product that no one fucking cares about. If you argue that popularity, profitability, and influence justifies any sort of changes regardless of artistic merit, wouldn't the reverse also be true? That the fact that Ars Magica has been reduced to an obscure niche game that has very little influence or even recognition in the modern age represents a fundamental failure regardless of artistic merit?

You only get to hide behind "success justifies everything" if you have in fact succeeded. Ars Magica 1 was grossly successful and popular for a game its size. It hit way above its weight class, and for nearly half a decade the most popular RPG in the world was based on it. Ars Magica 5 is nothing like that on any level.

-Username17

Tssk, tssk. No Frank I would never claim such things. That would be silly.

Early Ars Magica, was a modest novelty hit, because some of the books looked really nice and it had some truly new ideas. By the time of the first supplements for 3rd edition at the latest, it had become clear to everybody involved that most of those ideas were to niche to be generally adopted. The game is (and Always was) a promising looking dead end in the same way that Pendragon is.
Vampire used the one idea that was broadly applicable to great effect. Vampire succeeded because of Anne Rice, goth chicks and that lovely rose on marble cover. That it takes place in the 'real' world is part of its success, but if Ars had never existed they could have gotten that idea from Rice or Stoker instead.
Vampire was a massive hit because there was a whole decent sized subculture out there that was naturally inclined to play rpg's but not D&D like games. Ars Magica could never become all that big because of all the bookkeeping involved.

To be nice for a moment.
Ironically, the thing that plagued both early Masquerade and early Magica is that there was no Frank Trollman to help work on them. Tweet and Reinhagen were great rpg idea men, but their actual rules work was just not good. Tweet improved in that regard, Reinhagen never did. Both games however succeeded despite shit rules. Rules that were so shit that even I noticed back then. That is saying something, because untill I read the criticisms on this board I was working under the impression (based on reading them and a couple of afternoons playing) that D&D 5e had well written rules.

And to let reality sink in.
Ofcourse your career as a game designer seems to be plagued by the reverse of what made Tweet and Reinhagen a success. You are good at writing rules. You are good at the math behind them. But beyond some apparently well received c-list work for Shadowrun and being the local hero of this tiny messageboard you seem to have never amounted to anything in rpg land. You seem to chronically get your estimates of what is important in a rpg wrong.

[Daniel]

Why did this thing win the Origins Award in the category best rpg? Was the competitions that bad?

2 reasons.
Frank is wrong and it is a better version of this game* than the previous 4.
I suspect the Origins Awards have radically different tastes than the locals on this board.


*despite that triumph, it's still a niche product of which the novelty has worn of, with flawed rules in a couple of prominent places.

[erik]

So to summarize Daniel and filter out the troll feces, you think ArsM 5th is the bestest because they cleaned up some problematic rules and you don't care if the setting has some unexplained foibles that are pretty important.

For the people using the rules first and setting as an afterthought that's quite valid assuming that's true.

The problems of spell creation highlight that it isn't half as watertight as Daniel would wish you to believe. Building spells from nouns and verbs is a neat idea but even after 5 editions they still haven't managed to lock it down and make it balanced.

I don't necessarily even care that the RNG can be smaller than applicable bonuses, that's fine if we're simulating that you're so badass that you can't fail at a given task (or it is so hard that you cannot possibly succeed). So long as those numbers and expectations synch up well.

The one time I played Ars Magica we mostly had it pitched as making our own coven and grogs and the fact that it was in 13th century Europe was maybe mentioned but mostly we didn't care. Sort of how D&D was set in non-descript medieval Europe for much of our adventures. So I can get that Daniel doesn't understand the importance of having a setting make some sort of sense or give guidance to the MC in charge of answering expected questions like "why doesn't the Church kill us all?" or "What is our relationship with the Church?" As a teenager making a fire-manipulating wizard with a wolfman underling I didn't care about those questions either.

[Daniel]

Erik

I cop to trolling a guy named Trollman with an ego the size of a blue whale, how could I not?

But to be honest, while I like Ars Magica, I don't think it is the bestest. Playing requires running an administration. The basic dice mechanics are counterintuitive. It is as specialized as Pendragon. And the magic rules are fun but deeply flawed and I would never claim they are watertight, you are confusing me with someone else on that point.
But it is a nice game and Frank is being unfair to it and its current designers.

[virgil]

I like to think I'm not someone who drank the Ars kool-aid, unless you think playing the game at all does that. While trying to get answers from the Ars forum regarding the lack of world-building, I came up with a few ideas. The goal is for the Order to not be deemed heretics and the Church to treat them as a neutral force to be ignored for the most part.

I like the idea of a couple pages dedicated to things like Paderborn Proclamation, Lombard Archives, and the Crusade of Worms. Throw in a couple bits of Peripheral Code and some spells that are considered really popular amongst the Jerbiton, and maybe that can cover it?

[Username17]

Why did this thing win the Origins Award in the category best rpg? Was the competitions that bad?

Industry awards as a whole are extremely bullshit. Very famously, Do The Right Thing didn't even get nominated, which resulted in Driving Miss Daisy getting an Oscar on a protest vote. But even within that dubious category where arbitrarily selected people from an industry give awards to people within their own industry and conflict of interest be damned - roleplaying material is more bullshit still.

Origins awards and Ennies and such are laughably corrupt. They are awarded by shadowy cabals who allow and require bribes to consider materials for awards in all categories. There's no oversight, no requirement or claim to specialized knowledge, no nothing. Major players in the industry like Fantasy Flight Games don't even bother to participate in a lot of these and simply don't submit materials to the judges.

Winning an Origins Award isn't quite as bullshit as when James Wyatt gave himself five out of five James Wyatts on the James Wyatt scale of how much of a James Wyatt he is (by writing the D&D for Dummies book and listing books he had personally written in the top ten adventures). But it's damn close. It's basically polling some completely arbitrary people about what their favorite brand was that came out with a new edition that year. Notable winners from the past have included 4th edition D&D (a game so bad it toppled WotC from the #1 spot), and New World of Darkness (a game so bad it sent the entire company into bankruptcy twice).

Such that winning an Origins Award in 2004 means anything at all, it is that Ars Magica as a brand was still meaningful and influential in 2004. 5th edition had nothing to do with that meaning and influence, and indeed has pretty much driven the game into the ground. You can't readily find 5th edition Ars Magica DNA in any games made today.

Ofcourse your career as a game designer seems to be plagued by the reverse of what made Tweet and Reinhagen a success. You are good at writing rules. You are good at the math behind them. But beyond some apparently well received c-list work for Shadowrun and being the local hero of this tiny messageboard you seem to have never amounted to anything in rpg land. You seem to chronically get your estimates of what is important in a rpg wrong.

Um... I'm a doctor. I quit "professional" game design to go save human lives and make giant stacks of cash money. I make a thousand pounds every eight days. People who can afford Tweet or Rein•Hagen can't afford me. Because amounting to something in RPG land is not particularly valued by society in the way that working at an Accident & Emergency Ward is.

Trying to taunt me for being a failure isn't really going to work. I write things for free distribution these days because even the act of accepting money in exchange for my RPG writing isn't worth my time compared to just working more at my real job. The only times I ever sell any of my writing is for the simple ego boost of reminding myself that I still could. Any writing project that pays less than 10 cents a word is me taking a pay cut. I do that from time to time on tiny projects, but certainly not because I need the money or the "success" in RPG land.

-Username17

[Red Archon]

Frank, you didn't address the real accusation, though:

You seem to chronically get your estimates of what is important in a rpg wrong.

Obviously, the first stop is semantics: "importance" is a word that could mean a bunch of things, but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess the guy meant either a) commercial success, b) praise, c) endurance, d) influence or e) how much he likes a thing.

Curiously, what he specifically registered to defend is AM5, which is important only if "important" stands for e). Go figure.

EDIT: This whole thing was terribly worded, but fuck it, I'll reiterate some other time.

[Lich-Loved]

I see that Ars Magica is doing what it is intended to do: draw people with varying knowedge of obscurities and slightly differing definitions of words like "importance" into endless, circular debates.

Game on, Ars, game on...

[Whipstitch]

Calling people big meanies and saying they haven't done any better lately isn't a very compelling message, especially if you preface it by conceding the flaws people complain about are for the most part real. Because honestly, the "What have you done for me lately?" accusation can apply to the vast majority of rpg writers, particularly ones who are merely stewarding pre-established brands.

After all, as Daniel already acknowledged the bulk of RPG success comes from identifying pre-existing cultural totems and co-opting them. Shadowrun, Vampire and D&D did not invent sci fi nerds, goths or Tolkien fanfic writers, they merely created games that appealed to the sensibilities of those groups. And you know what? That's fine--Picasso said great artists steal and I'm not about to gainsay him. If someone wants to sing Rein-Hagen's praises or claim that the Idea Men are actually the most important part of your design team I wouldn't have a problem with that. But here's the thing: the 5th edition guys aren't the Idea Men, they're some dudes riding Rein-Hagen's coattails en route to charging me cash money for a book that didn't improve on the previous one. So fuck those guys. I don't need them.

[...You Lost Me]

We all know what's going on. Daniel doesn't actually have an argument, he can see that the criticism is correct but he can't give in to the evil frank trollman that dared to criticized ArM5. So he has turned to fallacies and weird, nonsensical insults in order to save some face and feel like he successfully defended his favorite edition. The guy is two steps away from stormbringer or GC, and we can all forget about his tears and go about our merry lives.

[silva]

And to let reality sink in.
Ofcourse your career as a game designer seems to be plagued by the reverse of what made Tweet and Reinhagen a success. You are good at writing rules. You are good at the math behind them. But beyond some apparently well received c-list work for Shadowrun and being the local hero of this tiny messageboard you seem to have never amounted to anything in rpg land. You seem to chronically get your estimates of what is important in a rpg wrong.

Bingo.

What amuses me is how someone can still hold the opinion that rules and math are so important to the hobby after seeing how the best selling and most popular games are precisely the ones with the arguably worst rules. See D&D, Vampire, Shadowrun and Rifts.

[Prak]

If you mean important to success- they are, but not of the utmost importance. NWoD and 4th had famously shitty rules, and it cost their companies. 3rd had decent rules with problems and was successful, OWoD had crap rules that were mind-caulkable, especially if you only ever looked at one line.

The more important thing is that a game be fun, but rules make a game fun. People who have fun playing games need there to be rules. People who have fun without rules aren't playing a game, as a game is defined by having rules, those people are having fun circlejerking.