DC wrote:So, I suspect that the things that keep Ars Magica minority are the crunchy magic system, detailed downtime activities, and pseudo-historical medieval setting. You can't actually discard any of those and still have Ars Magica.
This is
definitely not true. Pseudo-Earth with magic in it was the biggest RPG
in the world from 1996 until 2000. Since then, Harry Potter happened, and there is absolutely no way you can keep a straight face when explaining that secret societies of wizard academics learning magic and fighting evil wizards is any
less popular today.
The problem with the magic in Ars Magica is not that it's crunchy, it's that it's incoherent. Imagem is based on manipulation of ancient theoretical things that don't exist and don't make sense. There's no way to fucking parse that, because we don't live in a world that is described by the philosophical framework that called for sensible species to be a thing. And very importantly, since that system was eventually discarded for not describing the world and not being internally consistent, there's no way to know what a world that did have those things in it would look or behave like.
The pseudo-medieval setting is not a problem. The level of crunch is not a problem. The fact that they are trying to make pseudo-medieval philosophical theories "true" is a huge fucking problem. Medieval history you can just look up. There are kids' books that discuss the period and fat historical tomes and everything in between. You can open up a google search and answer a question about battles and royal decrees in
seconds. But you know what there isn't any of? Descriptions of what the hell things would look like if the world used Aristotelian falling. Because that shit is counterfactual and doesn't make sense. I mean sure, you can get the Galileo story of how he disproved Aristotelian falling by dropping two spheres, but how the world could actually wok if that experiment had come out some other wayis anyone's guess.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but there are actually an infinite number of ways that Galileo's experiment could have gone to confirm Aristotelianism. If that shit was "true," heavier things would fall faster than light things by some amount. But he didn't record that number, because it doesn't exist. So just saying "Aristotelianism was right instead of wrong"
isn't enough. You'd have to define a whole new set of constants.
Saying "It's the real historical world except that there's some real magic" takes like one sentence plus however long it takes to explain your magic system and secret orders of wizards. Saying "It's superficially like real world history except that the heavens are a bunch of crystal spheres and human arteries are full of air and thousands of pages of counterfactual medieval natural philosophy theories are true instead of false" is just
madness. It's worse than being too complicated, it's unparseable.
HTH wrote:So Frank, in perfect world, what direction do you think Ars Magica 6E should go?
All of the medieval philosophy shit has to go. The setting should present a clear vision, and that clear vision is "It's 1220 in Europe, and you play the Wizards, warriors, and peasants in a secret magic barony." The system needs to be less bullshit. Rolling a truncated d10 and adding 34 is
bullshit, and needs to stop. The system doesn't need to go into weird experimentalist storygame shit, it just needs to look like something that was designed in the 21st century - or at least the late 90s. If it goes with dice pools, those need to be fixed difficult dicepools. If it goes with a curved RNG, it should be something explicable like 3d6 or 2d10. If it goes with a flat RNG, it should be a d20 or d100 plus bonuses against a target number. Bottom line, you need a combat system that is at least almost as good as D&D3. You have the advantage that you are
not expect Grogs to meaningfully "level up," so you could actually cut corners like with 4e's Minions without that making the game collapse.
Absolutely the divine needs to be hands off and ineffable. An activist God makes hash of the literally three crusades going on during this period, and telling the audience that you know what God wants is deeply offensive to absolutely everyone who doesn't perfectly agree with you and not a small number of people who do. A game like this needs to walk on eggshells when it comes to real world religion, not rub peoples' faces in your personal vision of the creator.
Relations between Wizard Covenants and the three estates need to be provided. Based on the period, my suggestion would be that the Bishops should be mostly hostile, the Townsfolk mostly fearful, and the Nobility to be mostly covetous. But you need to lay down something for the players to sink their teeth into.
But the biggest thing is that you're making a game about logistics and dragons. Having the logistics rules for the Wizards is fine and necessary, but you need to extend that to the other characters. Doesn't have to be huge. Like a page listing medieval jobs, two pages on towns and markets, three or four pages of medieval goods and prices, and a couple pages about grain yields and wealth generation. Counting the support for Coopers and Chandlers in the Abilities chapter, you could probably provide things for the Grogs to be doing out of combat in like 10 or 11 pages.
-Username17
