Ars Magica™ Fifth Edition is a rather good edition that has cleaned up a number of ambiguities and problems with previous editions' rules. Not everything in the official rule book is quite the way I would like it for my game, so I have created these house rules. If you like them, feel free to borrow or adapt them for your own Saga.
I have made a couple of minor changes to stramline character creation and simplify characters themselves.
Disregard the "Early Childhood" section of the character creation rules on page 31. Instead, during the first five years of life, all characters gain a score of 4 (not 5) in their native language, plus 70 experience points that may be spent on any General Abilities or any Supernatural Abilities granted by the character's Virtues. Academic, Arcane, and Martial Abilities may not be purchased with early childhood experience, even if the character has access to those types of abilities.
The reason for this rule is that I disagree with the designer's implicit assumption that characters under the age of five learn much of anything that both stays with them into adulthood, and has a useful application for adults. I also don't think a five-year-old peasant and an educated monk should have the same level of mastery of their native tongue. However, I do not want to "nerf" starting experience points just because I don't like the idea of characters starting their career training as toddlers. Instead, I decided to interpret the "early childhood" experience points as things learned through exposure during the course of the character's everyday life - both during childhood and as an adult. My house rule is completely compatible with the Fifth Edition as written - players can still make their characters according to the "early childhood" rules if they like. The total number of experience points at adulthood is the same. My rule does allow players to re-allocate a number of experience point from Speak Own Language into something else, and I expect this will be commonly done, at least for grogs.
Some ways to spend the 70 starting experience points are:
Specialization is limited to Abilities in which the character has 4 ranks or more. (In the official rules, a character can and must specialize in every Ability.) Also, one can choose a specializtion any time after reaching rank 4, but that choice can never be changed or undone.
The main reason for this is that I don't like Ability Specializations very much. They are meant to add definition to the character, but in fact I find they add more complication than actual role-playing value. New players, in particular, often have no idea what they want to specialize in, and they find it onerous to make this choice for every Ability on the character sheet. Specializations also tend to slow down play: almost every time I ask a player to make an Ability roll, the player chimes in, "I have Specialization X. Does it apply?" Not only does this get a bit annoying after playing for a dozen years, it slows down the action and pulls the players' minds away from the imagined scene and toward the mechanics and dice. That's not what I'm looking for from the game mechanics.
I think players would feel they had lost something if I took away Ability specializations entirely, so this rule is a compromise. Characters can still have Ability specialties but they will only have four or five per character, not a dozen or more. If one wants a rationalization for this rule - I think my reasons are solid enough not to need an in-game justification - one could say a character needs to become proficient in an Ability before he can be specialized.
The only thing in this chapter I really felt needed some changes was magic resistance. As written, it seems easy for a magus to abuse his own magic resistance to make him invulnerable to mundane attacks.
The Magic Resistance rules in Fifth Edition are clear, consistent, and easy to use. They work quite well.
There is a slight problem which is made apparent by the spell Edge of the Razor (MuTe20, p. 154). The text states, "...the resulting sword is resisted by Magic Resistance...". This implies that since the sword is affected by Edge of the Razor, it has become a "magical" sword according to the Magic Resistance guidelines on pp. 85-86.
In itself, this is fine with me, though some players dislike the idea that magical swords can be stopped by Magic Resistance - this makes an enchanted sword potentially less effective against dragons than a mundane one. The real problem for me arises when a magus casts a spell with Target:Group (or Room) on a bunch of enemies' weapons for the sole purpose of making them magical. The weapons would then be stopped by the magus's Magic Resistance - and if he had shared his Parma Magica with his grogs, then the weapons would be stopped by the grogs' Magic Resistance as well.
After thinking about it for a few days, I no longer saw this as a problem with the Magic Resistance rules themselves. The problem, in my opinion, is that Magic Resistance as written can stop a mundane sword with one tiny magically-created pink dot on the blade. Or can it? The rules for Magic Resistance do not define what does and does not count as "magical," and hence what resisted by Magic Resistance.
Here is my definition: a "magical" effect for purposes of Magic Resistance is one that is unnatural. By my definition, Edge of the Razor does not count as unnatural and would not be resisted. I think it's easiest to explain it one Technique at a time:
Then there is the special case of Imaginem effects. I've come up with a rule interpretation that allows magic resistance to let in illusions and magically-altered images, but keep out invisible object. The rationale goes like this. According to p. 79, Imaginem spells that alter the way something appears cause the object to emit natural species, not magical ones. Presumably this is to illusions are not kept out by magic resistance. By my "unnatural effects" reasoning, I rule that these kind of image-altering effects are not unnatural, because they create natural species. However, something concealed by Perdo Imaginem counts as unnatural and is blocked, because matter in its natural state emits species. Note that the magic is unnatural even if there is nothing to cause or transmit the species: a person in a dark room doesn't normally emit species because there is no light to transmit them, but an invisible person in the same room cannot emit species due to a magical effect. It's the magic that prevents species from being emitted, and that is an active, unnatural effect regardless of whether it happens to be stopping any species at the moment.
I've made a couple of minor changes to the combat rules.
I don't like the group combat rules. I think they make it harder, not easier, to run battles because of the added bookkeeping and organization needed. They also detract from the contributions of individual characters, which I think is contrary to good role-playing.
Our experiments with the group combat rules showed that using the group rules gave very different results than fighting the same battle with individual-combat rules. That still doesn't sit well with me. We simply avoid using the group combat rules. All characters fight individually.
I appreciate the point of view expressed on p. 171: "if you make a serious mistake while someone competent is trying to kill you, you will die." However, I don't think it's a good idea to let player characters be killed with a single unlucky die roll.
I would mind less if I were in the habit of fudging die rolls to manipulate the outcome for a better story. I actually don't do that: I think the story is best when characters aren't sheltered from the effects of their own actions. As my players know, if the dice say your character died, well, make a new one. I think this policy of mine, plus my tendency to add lots of extra botch dice, combined the rules about getting a total of zero if you botch, add up to bad news for player characters. I had to change either my style or the rules, so of course I changed the rules.
Combat botches in my game are (slightly) less deadly. On Defense rolls only, a botch does not reduce the character's defense total to zero. Instead, a Defense botch is treated as a normal (non-botched) roll of zero, plus something bad happens. Examples of bad things that can happen:
Crossbow stats were intentionally omitted from Fifth Edition for brevity (see the FAQ for a discussion of this). Here are my rules for them.
There is a new martial Ability, Crossbows, to cover these weapons. Specialties for the Crossbow Ability include specific weapons, short-range shots, long-range shots, or tournament shooting.
Crossbows must be spanned (cocked) before they can be fired. A wooden crossbow may be spanned using a belt hook. This takes one round, and then one round is required to load the weapon. A heavier, steel-bowed crossbow will be referred to as an arbalest. It must be cocked with a goat's foot lever, which involves bracing the stock of the weapon firmly on the ground, fiddling with the lever a little to get its cloven "foot" end over the string, and yanking it down. This takes two rounds, plus an additional round to load the weapon. Therefore, a crossbow may be fired every third round and an arbalest, every fourth round.
Once loaded, a crossbow has a positive Initiative modifier because it is relatively quick to aim and fire.
My statistics for crossbows are:
| Weapon | Ability | Init | Atk | Def | Dam | Range | Str | Load | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crossbow | Crossbows | +2 | +5 | 0 | +5 | 20 | +1 | 2 | Std. |
| Arbalest | Crossbows | +1 | +6 | 0 | +7 | 25 | 0 | 3 | Exp. |
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