The Gaming Den

Virgil, Frank, Chamomile

I agree with you all that this is a problem area, but your proposed solution is worse than the problem.

I don't want to ground the game in medieval physics. I want the illusion of having grounded the game in medieval physics. Translation - you want to be able to hide behind the flimsy excuse of "medieval physics" to justify your arbitrary whims and inconsistencies that players are literally...

The illusion is maintained, by occasionally pointing out that people get sick from funny smells and that bees have kings not queens.
If you worry about the physics underpinning the use of grappling hooks, you are thinking way to hard about this.

Ars Magica is for playing Ars Magica. The first rule of Tautology Club... I assure you, the game doesn't stop being Ars Magica because bees don't pour out of cow corpses. The bees are part of the fun and the distinct flavour of Ars Magica. Just like I don't need supergood combat rules. I need comba...

Chamomile

I don't want to ground the game in medieval physics. I want the illusion of having grounded the game in medieval physics.

But is it in a barrel of its peers? Thankfully a lady plays in my current Ars Magica group, so I have an excuse for not breaking out the extended gay porn metaphors at this point. On a more serious note, the people I've played with over the years have complained my Ars Magica sensibilities can be t...

If you just want to play wizards in medieval Europe.

AD&D 2nd, Rolemaster, Runequest, Vampire the Dark Ages and GURPS all have very nice sourcebooks for doing just that. Ars Magica is for playing Ars Magica.

Virgil
My stance on this issue is a lot firmer than your stance. And longer as well, it is also much thicker.

Chamomile The problem is that some of the stuff that needs to be there to make it Ars Magica, is also stuff that is very hard on rules design, if your aiming for what this place would consider good. When I play Ars, I always stress that the laws of nature in the setting are those of Greek philosophe...

So every skill/spell check is x3 rolls...and you also have to decide what "order" you want to roll beforehand... Yes. DSA/TDE is amazingly stupid. :biggrin: In its defense, this might finally be the edition in which you can play, sir Lancelot, granny Weatherwax, Raistlin Majere, Sancho Pa...

Ars Magica has a very diverse range of combatants. You tend to have fights like: a wizard, a platoon of soldiers, an angel and a magic housecat taking on Baba Yaga and a faerie knight riding a dragon. This in a game that is most of the time not about combat. There is a limit to what you can do, unle...

The boring explanation is that this is simply an American hired gun who is getting payed to hype this weird German system over Pathfinder/D&D.

But if somebody here wants to unpack his actual arguments, well...

So there is now a kickstarter underway for the English version of DSA 5. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1216685848/the-dark-eye-rpgenglish-edition?ref=discovery But more interesting to readers here is probably the following. Enjoy. The Mechanics I’ll admit, I’m not a fan of the 20-sided die. I...

D&D 5th is both relatively rules light and a relatively generic fantasy take on D&D. If D&D 3 is AD&D 1 with coherent rules, D&D 5 is a love letter to AD&D 2. If I wake up tomorrow as the ceo of Hasbro, I'll make them bring back some of the truly freaky stuff (Spelljammer, Al...

You know, one of the things that strikes me as odd is how they explicitly say that vampires don't have sex and then they have like hardcore BDSM porn and face-vaginas. Vagina-face actually. I own the original Tzimisce clanbook and I think the art direction department was trying to imply that the te...

Easy solution We are not talking romance here. Just fucking. So just let the mailwoman visit a chantry with a couple of the most :viking: Bjornaer imaginable and throw herself at them. Couple of Presence/Communication + Carouse, Guile, Charm, Intrigue, Folk Ken (and with certain people Leadership) r...

Occluded Sun wrote:Only if you want to magically ensure the convincing. Merely disrupting the image is much easier.

According to 'M20 How Do You DO That?', disrupting the scanner is Entropy 2, or Forces 2. Pretty Useless in itself.

In further examples of:"you need to many sphere dots to accomplish something simple". Passing a low level mundane security scanner, say to get past the door into an office building of a completely mundane American style company. At least 4. Entropy, or Forces 2 and Mind 2. To make the scan...

It is using the Dragon Sorcerer archetype instead of the Wild Mage Sorcerer archetype.
Heresy! Heresy I say!

The Wild Mage is one of the 2nd edition bits in 5th that is actually fun.

So maybe players should start with Arete 3 for free and 9 dots instead of 6?

4 freebies for 1 dot arete means 7 freebies left for 1 extra sphere level. Even with 7 points in flaws for a 2nd extra sphere level... You are going to have to start out with a character specially build for the purpose of being able to cast 2 or so rotes from an official supplement. It is not that M...

That's way better than the clan book's answer (god vamp fluff sucks): Cain made the 2nd gen then directed them to sire the clan leaders (name = clan). Ventrue was the first and was an advisor to Cain and the bestest buddy to him and so on. But there's probably a dozen incompatible answers across va...

'Nice' bit in the first supplement for Mage 20. If your paradigm says that you channel spirits to work your magics, you must add Spirit 2 to the required spheres for all relevant spells. Your paradigm says you channel chi to do a certain thing. You must have prime 2 and spend a point of quintessence...

Incompetent rules design is surprisingly common in rpg land. And it goes beyond the bad math. Just try playing a 6 evenings campaign in most d20 variants with casual players and 10th level* characters.... I was going to start something like that using Slaine (d20). Sigh.. After some thought I decide...

If you look at smaller regional markets like Germany and the United Kingdom, lots of games have achieved regional mainstream success. There seems to be room for about one or two games that are mainstream successes simply because they are what's available. They don't even have to be good, just get g...