The Inside Scoop on Gaming

I ran Ars Magica last night. It is only the second time I have ever run the game and the first Ars session I have participated in in about a decade. It was joyous, fun, and inspiring ... and a huge relief. My brief review of the session, an example of how dedicated D&D players adapted to Ars Magica, follows (scroll down a ways to Part II). But first: the journey to last night. My dedication to Ars Magica nearly destroyed me and my gaming group.

Part I: Change Is Hard ====================

Ars Magica is one of my favorite role-playing games. I've been wanting to do a capsule review of Ars Magica and/or a number of its supplements for some time now, but never seemed to get together the right combination of time and effort. The problem is that, while I own the 4th edition core rules and many of the 4th edition supplements, I haven't played the game since White Wolf's 3rd edition of Ars was new (something like ten or eleven years ago). So it's been nearly impossible to read one of the sourcebooks quickly enough that it was all fresh enough in my mind to write something I felt might actually be worthwhile. The problem, in sum, has been my gaming group.

Don't get me wrong, I *love* my gaming group. Such a cohesive, intelligent, and creative group I have never before seen. We're 9 strong, yet we all share the same gaming values. Perfection ... almost. The only complaint I have is that my group has a tunnel-visioned, monogomous relationship with Dungeons & Dragons. We've been playing D&D, and nothing but D&D, since years before the 3rd edition arrived in August 2000. I thoroughly enjoy D&D, too, but I've been wanting some variety in my gaming experience for quite some time.

It has proved extraordinarily difficult to convince my gaming group that Ars Magica deserves consideration.

By contrast, when 3rd edition D&D came out, there was little hesitation to dump tens of hundreds of dollars worth of old 2nd edition AD&D material and replace it with tens of hundreds of dollards worth of new 3rd edition D&D material. It was obvious the new rules were better, and everyone was willing to go through the pain of conversion and learning new mechanics, terminology, combat systems, etc. There was quite a bit of pain. We jumped in headlong, and while there weren't any arguments, it did take about 3 or 4 months before we were actually comfortable and consistent with our gameplay under the new rules. But it was all worth it, right? Hey! It's still D&D, only better!

To my chagrin, this openness to change has not extended beyond D&D.

With 9 people in a group, you can imagine how difficult it can be to have everyone present for every game session. In long-standing D&D campaigns, it is a serious chore to deal with players who can be present only sporadically, or not at all, from time to time. D&D really only works well when everyone makes it to play all the time.

"Aha!" I thought. "Such a situation is perfect for Ars Magica. This is a game with a stable setting (the covenant) and a stable group of characters (the magi, companions, grogs, and other covenfolk). Furthermore, player characters are never punished for not participating in adventures. In fact, participating in adventures can sometimes *hinder* a character's advancement. Once we have our covenent and characters, we never have to worry about which players, or even how many players, are present for a game session. Whoever is present can play their characters, and whoever is absent has their characters continuing their off-time activities." That is, I saw Ars as the *perfect* game to play when we didn't have an arbitrary "quorum" of players handy to run one of our normal D&D campaigns. Ars characters just aren't punished for not adventuring. They'll keep even with their adventuring peers. Ars Magica's mechanical emphasis on the troupe style of play takes the pressure off of players to always be present. If we played Ars on our non-main-D&D-campaign nights, we wouldn't have to struggle with an ever increasing number of one-off D&D characters and settings that were proliferating, and we wouldn't have to struggle with PCs in the D&D campaigns being virtually unplayed (and losing XP, effectively) because the owning player wasn't around. "This will be an easy sell," I thought.

It wasn't. When I first proposed the idea of Ars Magica as the off-night game for us, I received a couple of polite nods and then the subject was dropped. I gave it a rest for several weeks, but then, after a difficult period of 2 or 3 months in which several players were always absent (making even the existence of our gaming night unpredictable; it was sometimes just plain cancelled, causing great consternation), I tried it again. This time the idea was met with polite skepticism, but one player (to whom I had given my 3rd edition Ars rules as a free gift) got really eager to try it. And one other player, one of our two main DMs (I'm the other one) also liked the idea of actually using his considerable historical and linguistic knowledge in a very direct manner. Once these two thought it could happen, several of the others, but still not all of them, thought well enough of the idea that they agreed that we should "try it some time, after it's all set up." So I let a few more weeks go by, mentioning it at most game sessions, asking if people had bought a copy of the rules (or read my copy, which I was loaning out to whoever wanted it), of if anyone had any thoughts on where our covenant should be located, and the like, but was always met with, "Well, no. Haven't had time. Too busy reading the new D&D supplement that just came out, and making up neat characters [that will probably never be played], etc., etc. Have you seen the new [d20-based game X]? Really neat! We should try it some time. It's d20, so we wouldn't have to learn anything new." You get the idea. Finally I got them to agree to let me just try and come up with something and let them modify it to suit their tastes. I also hinted that setting an actual play date might help get things rolling to everyone's satisfaction. You know, just one gaming session? Sacrifice just one D&D session to get everyone grounded, and then we can come back to it only when we needed? I'm not trying to replace D&D. You know that, right? "Yeah. We should do that." Sigh.

Frustrated but hopeful, I set to work developing a covenant. I released the background and stats via e-mail to the group, and the two supportive players immediately began chewing it up. They made their magi and companions, and I made mine in return. They started bouncing ideas around about the covenent, changing this and adding that. Really fun stuff this was, and all by e-mail. When suddenly, one of the players who were supportive-but-on-the-fence, but nevertheless had bought a copy of the rules and had started reading them and was asking a few questions every now and then, got extremely frustrated. So frustrated that he sent a scathing e-mail to the three of us, but mostly targeted at me, about how insensitive we were to the whole group, and how we were just barging ahead developing what had been touted as a shared creative effort, and how this game looked way too hard to learn, and what was I thinking trying to force everyone to play it? Ouch. This really hurt, and fully realized my biggest fear, which was that my enthusiasm was just turning people off. It certainly seemed that his letter had sympathetic repurcusions around much of the group. People were somewhat ticked off at me.

Fortunately, it didn't take long for me to patch things up with the player (we're pretty good friends), but the very next game session I decided we just had to work this out, in the open, once and for all. As I was DMing at the time, I just decided that the first 30 to 60 minutes of our session would be devoted to the subject. Would we try Ars or not? Luckily, things went quite well. The frustrated player apologized for his outburst, and enthusiastically promised to give the game a try. Everyone else agreed to try it out. I offered them three options then: use the covenent already created, use a covenent in Mythic Scandanavia (I own Ultima Thule, which sketches out Heorot in Denmark; two of our players are nuts for vikings and medieval Scandanavian literature and myth), or create something entirely new somewhere in "standard" Mythic Europe. The vote went to Ultima Thule. After an inner cheer, I set a deadline of two months for pepole to create at least a magus or companion, and promised to let them create as much of the covenant as they wanted (which was no different than the first promise, actually, but this time it stuck). As the holidays were coming up, and vacations were likely, it seemed like playing Ars around the New Year might actually be the smartest thing to do with an unpredictable number of players available.

Unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way. Four of us made characters and the covenent got detailed, but nobody else could be convinced to read the rules well enough to make a character, nor did anyone want to "waste" time at less populated game sessions talking about or dealing with Ars. So we struggled through several short D&D one-shots and semi-sporadic campaign adventures ... and then it was back to normal. We've been playing the same D&D campaign now for six months, and Ars has hardly been mentioned other than "Boy, we should really try that." Throughout this whole time I kept emphasizing that the Ars mechanics weren't that different from D&D3. They were both invented by the same guy (Jonathon Tweet), they both involved rolling a die, adding modifiers, and beating a target number (I think Ars was the first game to do this, actually), and we could all relate to medieval Europe pretty easily. This all fell on deaf ears. "The rules are too difficult. The book is too intimidating." I admitted there were a *lot* of rules, and that the book could use better organization, but that most of them had nothing to do with creating a character, and very few of them were important to actual game session play (e.g., the lab rules and rules for books and libraries just won't get used except between adventures, which means out of session). Despite my subtlest efforts, and detailed instructions about what to actually read (about 20% of the book, 80 pages, is all, including all the spells and spellcasting rules!), inertia kept its hold.

But then the DM told us he would be vacationing in Greece for over a month! And about three other players would be absent, too, during at least part of this time. The remaining players were, by an large, those of us who had spearheaded Ars development and already had characters or were more positively inclined to give Ars a chance. Finally, the time had arrived. We only needed three people to make a character or, barring that, just show up and play one of the grogs or leftover PCs (like mine, since I would be running the session).

Part II: The Game ====================

So last night, everybody showed up that was supposed to ... except for one. More on her later (see Part III, below). Everyone else showed up with at least a magus and most had both a magus and a companion. One came empty-handed, hadn't even read the rules!, but he had an open mind. I handed him my magus, companion, and a handful of grogs and said, "Play what you want when you want." And the game was on.

After all the hullaballoo over this game, I didn't know what to expect. So I went hunting on the Web for a couple of very simple story ideas and ended up choosing two ("He's Got a Big Heart" and "ANTS!", linked from http://www.cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~corwin/ArsMagica/Adventures/Index.html) that looked to be short but could be connected with a little bit of ingenuity up front on my part (and some alterations to the premises underlying the stories as they are presented). Just in case the players were quick studies.

They were! As I had promised, their training with d20 D&D served them well under Ars Magica. Other than die size (d20 vs. d10), the core mechanic for both games is the same. Ars does distinguish between "qualitiy", "simple", and "stress" die rolls, but the players immediately grasped those distinctions. And like all games, you only need to roll dice to resolve three kinds of events:

* Resolving combat. * Determining whether a character's use of an innate or learned ability or skill is successful. (When the player says their character wishes to do something, like cast a spontaneous spell or hunt for deer.) * Determining whether a character is capable of noticing or reacting appropriately to situations outside of player's knowledge. (When the GM rules that a character has a chance to do something, like catch herself from falling over a cliff or noticing the odd color of a rose at the periphery of her vision.)

The players picked this up very quickly.

===== Ars Magica Combat ===== The jury is still out on combat. We saw it as neither an improvement nor a step back from D&D. Neither scenario I ran was designed to incur much combat, but the D&D-trained players never hesitated to enter it. Even so, there wasn't too much, and it wasn't difficult to work out. Ars combat involves more dice-rolling and math than in D&D (initiative every round, calculations involving your attack and defense scores), but the combat is also considerably deadlier, so it doesn't take any longer to resolve. They felt it ironic that Ars asks for round-by-round initiative rolls when they feel that the D&D turn-based system is an improvement over the way AD&D 2nd edition handled it. I explained that the reason was to emphasize the different weapon qualities, especially as relates to size and speed, such that the combat might be more "realistic".

In any case, our combats ended very quickly, much faster than similar combats in D&D would have. In D&D they would have been willing to put up with the pounding for a much longer period of time in the hopes that their little dinks would eventually wear the big giants down. But in Ars the players figured out very quickly that they just couldn't hurt the giants at all, who in turn could easily kill them in a single blow, so they didn't hesitate to try other options. All of us appreciated the difference.

===== A Note on Ars Magica "Hit Points" ===== Ars Magica characters don't have hit points, they have body levels, and not that many of them. If you've played a White Wolf game, this is the same territory. It doesn't take too much damage to take your character out, and without raw vis (magical energy that is physically manifested) magical healing doesn't help out much. So characters get damaged quickly, easily, and take a long time to heal. This got hammered home when a character missed several Strength Climb rolls and plummeted down quite a distance, suffering several body levels of damage. One of the magi cast a low-level spontaneous Creo Corpus spell to steady him temporarily while another character performed chirurgy. When I informed the player that the injured character would require 28 days to recover just one body level, he yelped in surprise! "Ouch! I'm just so used to the cleric walking up and going 'Zip! You're healed!' What good did chirurgy do?" I replied that if the chirurgeon had rolled lower, it could have taken 80 days to heal. We all had a good laugh, and they appreciated the difference between the games again. This incident completely changed how they approached the rest of the encounters. But they seemed to like the challenge quite a bit.

===== Skill Use ===== If you've played D&D you know how Ars skills work. The Storyguide (D&D: DM) sets an ease factor (D&D: difficulty class) that the player must match or exceed. The player rolls a die, adds in the appropriate characteristic score (D&D: ability score modifier) and ability score (D&D: skill ranks) to get a result. 'Nuff said. I used ad hoc rolls, often based on Quickness because the dangers they encountered typically involved being quick to react, to simulate D&D "saving throws" when a character got into trouble. Made sense to all of us.

===== Ars Magica Magic ===== The skill mechanic is also the same mechanic for spell-casting. Many people, myself included, are drawn to the Ars Magica magic system because it is "the best one in any RPG". A magus has ranks in the magical Arts, which come in two flavors: Techniques (verbs) and Forms (nouns). High ranks indicate high facility with that type of magic. A magus with a high Perdo score (technique for "I destroy"), for example, can cause nearly anything to decay or be destroyed, while a high Animal score (technique for all things related to animals, of course) means she has a wide variety of powers over animals. A magus makes magic by choosing a noun-verb combination, adding the score for each technique and form employed to a die roll. To make a fireball, you'd use Creo Ignem ("I make fire" [or heat or light, depending on the desired effect]). To make someone fall asleep you'd use Rego Mentem ("I control the mind" [or ghostly spirits, perhaps]). The more potent the desired magical effect, the higher the ease factor (spell level) required to achieve it. Very simple. Very flexible. It was a real treasure watching my player's eyes grow wide with pleasure when it finally sunk in how much power was at their fingertips, even as beginning-level magi. (I have to admit I was a little suprised at their surpise. Wasn't it obvious? I guess not!) They all had several questions about "Now, if I want to do that, what technique do I need?" and really enjoyed working out the logic behind the system. They had a great time with the magic, so much so that it became habitual for them to look at the spell lists in the rules to get ideas for magical solutions to their problems.

Part III: The Envelope, Please. ==================== At the end of the session, I asked if they wanted to play again at our next scheduled session. There was a unanimous and eager "Yes!" Today I received three separate e-mails about what a good time everyone had. The player who didn't have any characters was eager to read up on the rules and make one of his own. The others were so jazzed, and learned enough about the game, that they are tweaking their own characters to more closely fit what they want them to do in preparation for next time. There are also more grogs on the way, badly needed for an as-yet-incomplete covenant.

All in all, I'm very relieved that everything went so smoothly and that everyone had such a good time. I feel vindicated sticking with Ars Magica and convincing everyone to give it a try. I truly feel that Ars is the perfect "off-night game" venue for our group, and that it is likely now, at this point, to be played often enough to keep interest sustained. Hooray! Given enough time and experience, we might even venture into playing lengthier scenarios requiring multiple sessions to resolve. I can't wait.

But not all is well in Paradise. There was one player that was supposed to come but didn't. Her attitude still hangs like a pall over this in-progress experiment with Ars Magica.

A few hours before game-time, she sent me an email to tell me that she had tried to read and understand the rules such that she could create a magus ... all in just one day! After being frustrated (of course) by that effort, she told me she had "no idea" how to come up with good magus character ideas, that the "ultra-realistic" setting was "too intimidating", that the character creation process was "uninuitive", and that the rules were "too confusing and too hard". In fact, she was giving up completely "and would probably never play it". All this despite the fact that her live-in partner *would* be playing and was helping her to create her character. Ironically, she was the one who was adamant that we stick with a Scandanavian setting. By e-mail I tried to reassure her that there would still be characters for her to play, that the mechanics were not hard and that I would be helping everybody through them, etc. But in the end, she remained unconvinced and chose to stay at home.

I think there are still a couple of players in the group who share this attitude, and it remains to be seen how it will all play out. I have confidence now that at least some of us will make the effort to play Ars Magica at least once in a while, and I am hopeful that we can convince everyone else to give the game a try. It is still possible that Ars will not become the "default" game when our "default D&D" game can't happen. The d20 inertia is difficult to overcome for reasons I do not fully understand, especially given the enthusiastic response from the players who gave the game a try. If only I had some ranks in Muto Mentem....

Ars Magica 4th Edition