From: lwl@graphics.cis.upenn.edu (Lydia Leong)
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 1995 21:40:52 -0400
More questions to be answered at leisure:
Confirmation that the above is true?
(After another look at the rules, I've now noticed that everyone's InCo totals are so low that longevity potions only reduce the chance of characteristic loss to 50%. Whee.)
I was about to ask why it didn't make sense for the magus with the highest InCo total to brew all the potions, and then I went poking about in the rules and discovered that potions brewed for others are much less useful than potions brewed for oneself. Ouch. (This is probably of interest to Rob: Alanus wouldn't have the necessary Lab Total to brew potions for Maggie.)
Urk, Alanus can't make an effective potion for Maggie?!?
Well, then only two outcomes are possible:
(a) Alanus goes bananas studying Corpus in an attempt to preserve both his and his lady love's lives
or
(b) He opts to grow old together with her--and is pretty much a gibbering drooling old man in four years' time.
I really am beginning to dislike the bias in the system toward younger Magi. A 22 year old who's just passed his Gauntlet has as many points in Arts (automatically) as the 34 year old who's going to have to go berserk trying to get that potion brewed. What benefit is there to being old? More skills for Magi? Big deal. Spells and experiments is where Magi spend most of their time. Sure, someone might argue that giving older Magi more Arts points would lead to campaigns of 31-33 year olds, but keeping the aging rules would balance that out. After all, it seems silly that Cain and Alanus and Tariq and Asid all have to retcon convoluted reasons as to why their magic skills aren't as advanced for their age.
Right now chances are quite good that Aging will not be an issue in the Thule game--or, if it is, the boundary age will go up to 40.
Rob
Mi Amici --
I wanted to answer some of Rob's comments about the aging process in AM. I think the problem lies not in the game rules, but in the fact that we (or I, at least) were new players of the game, and misunderstood the general theme of progression from Spring covenant on through to Winter and back to Spring again.
I think the generally-accepted UberPlot for AM has the characters starting out as new magi, in their twenties or so, having just passed their Gauntlets, and either beginning a new Spring Covenant on their own, or becoming the lesser magi in already established Summer-and-later covenants. There really is no advantage to creating an older magus, other than concept-wise, since the Seasonal development rules deliver so much more power-per-unit-time than the character generation rules. I suppose the correct way to do it would have been to create the characters at age 21, and then push them through development Season-by-Season until they reached the desired age. That's the way, more or less, that Pendragon does it, although I shudder to think what kind of magi we'd end up with in the Concilium, and what kind of Nasties I'd have to come up with to challenge their abilities.
Unfortunately, I missed apprehending that particular UberPlot, so we wind up with elderly, underpowered magi running a sort-of-Spring covenant. In game mechanics terms, it doesn't really matter, since I always tailor adventures and adversaries to the characters, and I'm generating all my own material; in Saga terms, I could make up some justification based on the disorder and disintegration following the Massacre, the individual backgrounds of the magi, etc., etc., and so on.
Nah ... play it where it lies. ;)
-m.
It still feels like a weakness in the rules to me. :)
Ars Magica states that an apprentice begins his training between the ages of 8 and 17; younger ones don't have the discipline, and it's too late for the older ones. Supposedly you can do the training in 15 Seasons, but it is normally dragged out to 15 years, which leaves graduating apprentices between the ages of 23 and 32.
New magi who go off and found Spring Covenants probably don't get much time to study, and their arcane libraries are poor, so their progression is slow, initially -- say a Season's worth a year, perhaps?
The same is true of new magi who join established Covenants -- they spend their Seasons in service to the Covenant, copying, scribing, and running whatever errands the older magi want done; one still assumes they'd have at least a Season of study to themselves, though.
Young magi probably don't have good access to vis (either because they can't find it, or the older magi don't give them access to it), so their progression is also going to be restricted by their libraries. For a Spring Covenant, there's only a simple die in all the Arts, so effectively, progression for those magi is going to be quite slow, and rather limited, as well. Thus, a magus with, say, half-a-dozen Seasons of study, over a period of half-a-dozen years, is not going to be all that scary.
I do see it as a distinct flaw in the published material that no guidelines whatsoever are given for magi beyond that first initial 150-points-in-Arts. Houses of Hermes supposedly gives an example of a middle-aged magus for each of the Houses, but I wish that the rules outlined the sorts of things that one would encounter as a "reasonable progression". (After trying to generate bunches of "experienced" magi for Vespers NPCs, this is probably the greatest frustration I have with the rules.)
Bill mentioned that there are several spells which generally form the standard core of a Covenant library, and that, through our ignorance, the Concilium lacks. :) Bill noted the possibility of Vasha having brought his father's books with him, which might provide a possibility for fixing that. I can't, however, recall what the spells were... Bill?
(Hrm. There's one for the FAQ: Basic Design Principles for Newbies Attempting To Design Covenants and Characters.)