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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TikkchikFenTikktikk" data-source="post: 5171193" data-attributes="member: 67494">I did not care for my experiences with Ars Magica 5th Edition. I have played in a tabletop campaign and a play-by-email campaign, both run by a friend who went head-over-heels for it.In my opinion, "playing" Ars Magica felt more like doing homework, or simulating university politics than a game. If you think you might want to play ArM5, I recommend you instead go back to school to get a doctorate degree in history or chemistry, then suffer through post-doc work while trying to find a job, ending up as a tenured professor with post-docs working under you. The pinnacle would be becoming dean of the department with profs working under you. Seriously--you'd probably have more fun and you'd actually be affecting change in your life.The "idea" of ArM vs. the reality of ArM can be summed up by this xkcd comic: <a href="http://xkcd.com/683/" target="_blank">xkcd: Science Montage</a>Instead of adventuring, your "powerful" professor, I mean, magi sits in a university, I mean, covenant researching or politicing. You end up spending most of your adventuring time playing as undergrads and post-docs, I mean, grogs and companions. They get spell components and fight off badies. The rest of your play time will be spent trying to figure out the ridiculously complicated, I mean, flexible rules for creating spells and magic items.As I remember it, combat was pretty deadly too. If you got into a fight, someone in your party was going to die and they weren't coming back. This served to reinforce the point that the wizard wants to stay at home: it takes hours to make a magi and that time would be lost forever the first time they found themselves in a fight. That fragility also means you don't want to emotionally invest in the characters you actually do the heroic stuff with, the supposedly bit player companions and grogs. The same problem, as I see it, with fragile characters exists in original and basic D&D. But there it is mitigated by the ease of character creation and the fun and easy mechanics that make up the core gameplay. ArM's mechanical budget apparently was all spent on the magic system and the adventuring mechanics are pretty lame.It has been several years since I've played and I don't have my dust-covered core rulebook to reference. So this post is based on my memory and emotional scars. Apologies for any factual errors. I'll have to flip through the book and the old play logs I kept to see if it was as bad as I remember.The final problem is that the core book went out of print for a long stretch, and the supplements have short runs and go out of print quickly too. So even if you really want to play it was pretty much impossible to do so for cover price for a couple years.tl;dr: ArM is a game for academic nerds who like to spend more time twiddling dials than engaging in heroics. ArM isn't popular for the same reason old-school wargames aren't  popular: too much work for too little payoff.P.S. I think Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying has succeeded where ArM failed,  but this post is already too long to get into it. I recommend you take a  close look at it before investing too much time in ArM.</blockquote>

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