Ars Magica

I’ve been looking through my copy of Ars Magica, thinking about maybe using it for a game.

Chargen seems to be rather…involved.  I think it’s probably slightly simpler than Burning Wheel, and actually bears some resemblance to that system.  For one thing, your character has a lot of…stuff.  For another, in a normal game, you are probably building at least two different characters.   Non-magus chargen might be simpler.

To build a magus, it goes something like this:
1. Choose a house.  But this isn’t just a flavor decision.  Each house grants  virtue of some sort.  Some of them don’t grant a specific virtue, but instead your choice of a broad class of virtues.  At least one of them grants two virtues and a flaw.  Several of them grant extremely powerful virtues that give you access to different mechanics other Magi won’t have.

2. Choose virtues and flaws.  A magus gets up to 10 points of virtues and flaws, and they have to balance out.  Also there are restrictions on how many flaws and virtues of various types you can take.  Virtues and flaws do a ton of different things, ranging from dice pool bonuses to granting bonus XP at chargen (or later) to granting access to broad classes of abilities.  Virtues tend to be very powerful.

3. Choose characteristics.  These are your physical/mental/social stats.  You don’t get very many points here, but you can trade off lowering some to get more points.  There are also virtues that grant points to spend here.  It turns out some of these are incredibly vital to casting spells.  Which ones are most vital depends on the manner in which you want to cast spells.  Stamina is normal, but doing lab work (enchantment) requires int, and spontaneous casting needs, uh, quickness I think.

4. Choose abilities.  Despite all the sundry virtues you could have chosen or not chosen, this is where things start to get complicated.  You buy abilities with XP.  Some abilities require a specific virtue before you can purchase them.  Magi can get some abilities like that without a virtue, but only once they start their apprenticeship.  And it turns out that you have to select them based on XP doled out on a per-year-of-life basis.  So you have to decide how old your magus is.  Aging sufficiently starts to require other work, like checking to see if they kicked it (you could die in chargen).  This is an arbitrary balance point.  Being older almost categorically makes a magus more powerful.  However, even starting one fresh out of your apprenticeship, you have to do “Early childhood” (0-5) choosing from a rather limited pool of abilities, then the set of years between them and their apprenticeship (broader range, depending on virtues), and then the 15 year apprenticeship,  Like pretty much everything,  abilities rise non-linearly in cost (1=5,2=15,3=30,4=50,5=75) and can be bought up to a (possibly arbitrary; I forget) fairly high value.  The nature of this scale is that you probably don’t focus too much, but rather buy a low rating in a lot of different things.  Some abilities are necessary or very helpful for performing various kinds of magic.  All abilities come with a specialization, even if you only have them rated at 1.

5. Purchase arts.  You get points for this from your apprenticeship and possibly from virtues.  Arts seem cheap because they are.  They also rise in cost extra-linearly, but not at as steep a rate as abilities (1=1,2=3,3=6,4=10,5=15) .  To do a spell you have to combine two arts (a verb and a noun) and then you add various other things to it depending on how you are casting it.  Then you have to get some margin relative to the spell’s level.  Botches are dangerous.

6. Purchase spells.  You can do magic without knowing a spell, but it’s really hard.  You get points (separate from other XP) to purchase levels of spells with.  Each verb-noun arts combination has an outline of what you can do with it at various spell levels (which range from 1 to arbitrarily high) , and then there are several parameters you can adjust (raising them increases the level).

Then there are a few more details, but that is quite a bit of work to figure out everything you need to play the character you want.  There are other fun wrinkles, like how you can add your score in the Philosophiae ability to ritual magic, but you need Artes Liberales first, and to get that you need a 3 in a language that is usually Latin, and you can’t purchase Artes Liberales until you’re an apprentice, unless you get a virtue that lets you.

Basically there are *a lot* of different systems which put different demands on the character, and a lot of parameters to be aware of.

Naturally I really like it, and I think it simplifies a bit if you don’t try too hard to optimize, but I would feel sorry for any new player trying to build their first character without assistance.

Fortunately, all of the complications do not seem to be for naught: looking over this build system I think you could create most any kind of character (Magus-wise, at least) that you would want and the system supports a lot of different things for you to do (I built a mad scientist without having to go out of my way: Verditus Magic +  Inventive Genius).

One thing I like is how the game has a lot of systems for downtime and supports it well.  The assumption is troupe-based play, so there is probably only one maybe two players running their Magus at a time; the others are hard at work in their laboratories, inventing new spells, enchanting items, writing books, etc.; and they still gain XP while not out adventuring.

It’s got fae and demons and angels and magical beasts, and lots and lots of STUFF.  The only real problem it has is a lack of portability.  It has a lot of important setting assumptions, and doesn’t generalize too well without them.  Some degree of modification is probably possible, but takes effort on the GM’s part.