Not A Snark

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====== Ars Magica Retrospective ======

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For the last 20 months, I've been running an [[http://www.atlas-games.com/arm5/|Ars Magica 5th edition]] game
known as the [[http://midnight.glendale.org.uk/|Midnight Saga]]. Ars Magica is a richly detailed setting, with
one of the best set of magic rules out there, and is one of my favourite
game systems. However, it's not perfect, and there's a few things about it
which really came to annoy me. Now that the campaign is over (the players
managed to avert complete Armageddon), I've collected together a review
of some of the problems I ran into whilst running the game.

The biggest issue is probably the organisation of the rules themselves.
Even after playing it for ~100 sessions, we still had difficulty finding
basic things in the core rulebook, let alone trying to find anything in
one of the ~30 supplements. The spell guidelines are probably the worst
offender - there really needs to be an online PDF that collects together
all the spells from all the supplements, which is updated when a next
supplement comes out.

The Tribunal source books have a similar problem with covenants. When I
need to refer to a Tribunal source book, 90% of the time it's because the
players are interacting with a covenant in that Tribunal. In 3rd and 4th
edition, the source books had the covenants all collected together into
one chapter, which made finding them easily. For some reason, 5th edition
has taken to hiding the covenant descriptions throughout the Tribunal
book. It may make sense if you're reading the book cover to cover, but as
a reference during the game, it really slow things down.

From a rules perspective, one of the issues right from the start was
players coming up with perfectly sensible ideas that would radically
change the way the Order worked. Instance communication by having an
arcane connection to a blackboard for example, which would really
put the Redcaps out of business. A lot of these issues are covered in
the //Transforming Mythic Europe// book (which turned up in time for our
penultimate session), but it was necessary to ignore what should be
possible with simple spells (communication, teleportation and book
duplication being the big ones) pretty much from day one.

The [[http://midnight.glendale.org.uk/|Midnight Saga]] was somewhat more fantastic that a typical Mythic
Europe saga (God is gone, demons are overrunning the world), so another
feature of the magic system which became quite apparent was how easy it
is to kill anything with Might with the use of Perdo Vim, compared to
how hard it is to kill the same creature with Corpus, Animal or Terram
spells. It did seem to make Perdo Vim unbalanced in this regard,
especially since Corpus and Animal become useless if the target is
slightly bigger than normal, but Vim spells are unaffected by target size.

It did lead to me changing the way in which Might work (so that creatures
don't die when their Might reaches zero), justified in-game by the fact
that Hell was encroaching on the world.

The new spell system in 5th is a lot more rationalised than it was in
4th, and especially compared to 3rd (which was my first introduction to
Ars Magica), but having played all three, I think I prefer 3rd. The
strict guidelines of 4th led to some strange results and a lot of min-maxing
on spell creation. There was far less of that in 3rd edition, so even
though 3rd edition spells were much less consistent than their 5th
edition counterparts I think they worked better from a game perspective.

One thing I do like about 5th is that it does seem to be much better
supported - far more books for me to spend my money on (I don't have a
problem with this, and if I could set up a standing order to just buy
whatever is released, I would), and hence a lot more detail. The Houses
are better fleshed out, and there's a lot more to do with each House,
but it does have the downside that things are now a lot more complex.

I'm aware that we didn't use most of the features of the various Houses,
which is a shame, but it was too much detail for me to be able to fit
it all in, giving the amount of plotting going on for the basic storyline.

I also never felt that I ran a successful Tribunal meeting. These are one
aspect of Ars Magica that I've never 'got', and still haven't figured out
how to actually run one properly. The whole idea of PCs taking on running
the various NPCs doesn't work in any Saga where the NPCs actually have
their own plots which are affecting the story (i.e., pretty much any game
I run), and I haven't found an alternative that works.

We also once again failed to properly use troupe style play. Many
players aren't really interested in playing more than one character,
and most 'adventures' consisted of all the magi plus a couple of NPC grogs.
This isn't really a problem, just a different way of playing the game.

Overall, I still think Ars Magica is a great system, and it's definitely
worth giving the game a try if you haven't before (or even just reading
the rules, for an idea of how a complete magic system can work). There's
just a few niggles which required some working around or blatant ignoring
over the course of the saga.