OSSR: Ars Magica 5th edition

[Dean]

Dont even respond. That's transparent trolling.

[Prak]

Damnit, you're right.

[Whipstitch]

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.

First off, you're wrong. There are in fact many, many games out there with much worse rules than the games you just listed. D&D in particular went through a phase where they introduced shittier new rules--4th edition--and promptly lost market share to a reasonable facsimile of the old rules. Rules aren't everything, but they do clearly count for something.

But really, that's beside the point, because even if you didn't make that stupid overreach, I'd still say you're being an ass. I say this because you're implying we're too dumb to notice that games require good fluff in order to make bothering with crunch palatable, which is frankly a laughable and arrogant assertion. It is trivially obvious that roleplaying games are at least as much about the roles you get play as the mechanics they contain, or else people'd just keep playing euchre or chess instead. If you're going to be so arrogant as to demand we prove we understand something so basic then frankly I see no reason why I shouldn't return the favor and treat you with more scorn than I already do.

[Night Goat]

So, what do you do in this game? If relations between the Church and the Order of Hermes are just peachy, where does the conflict come from?

[Daniel]

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

Good for you and I say this without irony or sarcasm.
Than why the sour grapes attitude towards those losers/folks who do make a living in the 'industry'?
The question is sincere, but me referring to professional rpg design as 'the industry', that is intended as sarcasm.

[Daniel]

Red Archon

I'm a game consumer I have no stake beyond that in the hobby, but I don't believe my personal tastes should be the standard. People who believe that are either very naive, or nutcases.

My standard of success is the simple 2 axis system of: How many people get exited by the idea of playing this game, crossed with how many of those are happy about the experience after they played the game. Taking into account those factors a game designer can't help.

[fbmf]

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

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
Be advised that we take a very dim view of trolls and trolling, so quit that shit.
[/The Great Fence Builder Speaks]

[Daniel]

Whipstitch

Speaking from practical experience, having played short campaigns of 2nd, 3rd (1x each) and 5th (2X). 5th fixes stuff that caused us trouble in actual play during our earlier campaigns.
To be honest we never noticed the issues with the magic system beyond Herbam being maybe a bit underpowered.
Parma Magica not working, our a platoon of grogs being useless in an actual battle and the church feeling like a meaningless relic in a game supposedly set during the high middle ages. Somehow we did run into those problems. Can't even claim that it was because we were fifteen at the time, we were in our twenties back then.


So yes the 5th edition designers deserve at least a little credit for polishing the rules set.

[Daniel]

fbmf
You are right. So I will quit that shit.

[Mistborn]

Than why the sour grapes attitude towards those losers/folks who do make a living in the 'industry'?
The question is sincere, but me referring to professional rpg design as 'the industry', that is intended as sarcasm.

Because most of the people involved in making RPGs these days are smarmgarglers. You may have not noticed this before but that's probaly because you are also a smarmgargler.

[Daniel]

Nigh Goat

It's the 13th century. The Mongols, the bubonic plague, the crusades, local factions within the church without common sense, local noblemen also lacking common sense etc..
Than there are rivals within the Order of Hermes, rival magical orders, the Fae, magical monsters, the Devil and his minions etc..
And those are the external threats. A bunch of wizards working on their own projects will cause plenty of adventures, because they want to visit the Garden of Eden (need a piece of fruit), or they want to re-introduce indoor plumbing, or they want their covenant to look like crac des chevaliers only bigger etc..

[Daniel]

Lord Mistborn

You seem to have coined that expression in 2010. And you are no doubt very proud of this accomplishment and maybe a little disappointed that it never quite caught outside of this messageboard. Did you ever come up with a clearcut definition, or is this a case of: "if you don't know what it means you are one.".

[Whipstitch]

It just means that he thinks you're smarmy, which is understandable given your persona here is essentially that of a concern troll--you did after all introduce yourself to the community by telling someone to calm down because they're being indecorous and then promptly questioned whether their credentials should allow them to have an opinion at all. Denners would generally prefer that you just call us stupid shitstains up front rather than appropriate polite language without actually bothering to be polite.

[Username17]

Whipstitch

Speaking from practical experience, having played short campaigns of 2nd, 3rd (1x each) and 5th (2X). 5th fixes stuff that caused us trouble in actual play during our earlier campaigns.
To be honest we never noticed the issues with the magic system beyond Herbam being maybe a bit underpowered.
Parma Magica not working, our a platoon of grogs being useless in an actual battle and the church feeling like a meaningless relic in a game supposedly set during the high middle ages. Somehow we did run into those problems. Can't even claim that it was because we were fifteen at the time, we were in our twenties back then.


So yes the 5th edition designers deserve at least a little credit for polishing the rules set.

You gave the game away with the Church comment. In earlier Ars Magica the setting was just to use history books as is. You
can't have had an honest problem with the Church in the game not living up to your idea of the church's historical importance. It's not even possible, because the game asks you to use your own historical understanding. No matter how anachronistic or not the Church was in your game, by definition your group can'take have felt it was a problem.

Bottom line: you are lying. Troll harder.

-Username17

[virgil]

I've linked the Ars forum before, so this is just a general/minor existential rant. It's damn hard to get constructive help on that board, and you can see examples by just looking at the threads I've started (same handle as here). I can't tell if I'm just a social retard or if there's something wrong with the culture, or if it's some terrible confluence of both.

A game whose fundamental draw is Logistics and Dragons shouldn't be this vague and Rule Zero-y.

[mean_liar]

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?

Probably that covers it. I don't feel like this is a knotty problem, only one that needs addressing. Personally, I don't buy Frank's characterization of how the historical Church considered sorcery and believe that the historical Church would be fine with a secret order of ostensibly Christian wizards with a hokey name, but he's still right that it needs a call-out in the books in the setting section, and that isn't there.

The game needs to have the bolded stuff answered. Considering that it's core to the setting, it shouldn't be devolved to a player task... but it is. Your solution is only as good as the extent of your local group buying into it, but on a first pass it looks good to me.

Honestly though, every damn game has this same flaw. In DnD, there's always the discussion of what the setting actually looks like, because most published settings have no interest in the rules that supposedly undergird them. At this point in my gaming career, the first one or two sessions of every new campaign is everyone in the group going through a modified, informal/stripped-down version of The Microscope in order to collaboratively establish the campaign setting's ground rules, and invariably how the mechanics and the narrative talk to each other.

[fectin]

You gave the game away with the Church comment. In earlier Ars Magica the setting was just to use history books as is. You
can't have had an honest problem with the Church in the game not living up to your idea of the church's historical importance. It's not even possible, because the game asks you to use your own historical understanding. No matter how anachronistic or not the Church was in your game, by definition your group can'take have felt it was a problem.

Frank, that's just not true. They could have been deliberately playing wrong. They could have had wildly different ideas of the historical significance of the church at the same table (e.g., MC has strong views on the lizard people). Or some third ridiculous thing.

Or, more charitably, it actually is fair to complain, "This game requires that you have the political savvy and understanding of a Borgia to make the church work right." Because historically, the church was run by some really, really canny bastards, and did a lot of work with behind-the-scenes influence. If you don't have opportunity and cleverness to pull that off, the actual historical church would look pretty weird.