For a starting (Spring) Covenant, the covenant set up is often the plot. Why are they being given this place, why isn’t there already a covenant here if it’s so lovely, what kind of pig in a poke have they been given?
Add in negotiations with the local political leaders, the fae, finding Vis sources, uncovering the diabolists in the local monastery … it’s quite plotful.
Summer covenants are often working at Tribunal (basically national) politics - this is where you can really dig into inter-covenant rivalries and plots.
Autumn covenants are at the height of their power - they’re often working on a global level.
Winter covenants are icky and weird. We hates them, Bagginnss.
There’s a kind of school that doesn’t teach short multiplication?
Perhaps because my role-playing circles were formed among STEM and economics students I have never had trouble with the primary-school arithmetic in ForeSight. Personally, I find that table look-ups are worse interruptions.
I didn’t know what short multiplication was. I had to look it up.
…
Ah! That’s what that is. In school, we just called it multiplication. What’s “long multiplication”?
Here’s the thing though, I think this approach actually makes it harder for me to do multiplication in my head for large numbers. I can’t always keep all the numbers straight.
Long multiplication is when you are multiplying with more than one digit in the multiplier. You do a short multiplication by each digit of the multiplier in turn, stacking the products each offset to the column of its digit, and then add the products.
In the Ease Factor:Quality Rating resolution system the worst case is a two-digit number multiplied by a single-digit one. So you need only short multiplication, and the simplest possible such.
OK… we weren’t taught there was a distinction between “short” and “long” except that you started with single-digit multipliers in your homework until you worked your way up to multi-digit multipliers.
I’m not at all sure that it was ever explained to me what that ‘long’ meant and anyway it was only ever used in ‘long division’. I never heard ‘long multiplication’. It seems to mean any calculation you can’t do in your head but have to write down. And I never heard ‘short multiplication’ either.
But then I remember reciting times tables up to twelve. I date from when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
As a player in @MichaelCule ‘s forum Ars Magica, it appeared to be getting (in my view) overwhelmed very quickly with the esoterica and busywork. It’s just too much for asynchronous forum work I think.
I have run AM 3rd edition in the late 90s or so, we ran troupe style play with one wizard each year undertaking a quest accompanied by the companions (?) and grunts/the turb(?). We even had a few years run by another GM from the group. That lasted a while, but the clear focus there was GM generated adventures (I even took them to Zara on Crusade). I guess in my view that worked because we were following a traditional form of adventure delivery while the covenant (in Prague) was shared continuity.
On forum games in particular I have set out views before, but they need to be simple. See my Scurry game here - on hiatus but hopefully to resume - to see how long it can take for just three people to work through a simple plot. I have enjoyed it though!
Good memory Companions are your mundane but special characters, and Grogs / Turb are the (usually shared) grunts and coven folk.
My first campaign was a similar era and I really like your framing of ‘shared continuity’ for the covenant - my players concentrated a lot of effort there though because I started them with a mystery of ‘what’s in the cellar?’ with a side order of ‘why have we been given this seemingly fine covenant and what happened to all the magi that were here before?’ (The two were, perhaps unsurprisingly, connected.)
Companions are your mundane but special characters, and Grogs / Turb are the (usually shared) grunts and coven folk.