Fellas, I wonder if you could indicate how close you are to having a ready Magus and a ready Companion?
I apologise to one of you for the difficulty I’ve been giving him about how the program I’m running to store and check the characters has reacted to his choices. I do think I need the support of Metacreator when I’m not that familiar with the system’s laybrinthine folds.
But none the less we now have one character all the way complete another very nearly complete and another outlined.
I’d like at least the magi done by the time we start the narratiive.
Apologies - have a clear idea for companion and as you know Magus done to my satisfaction (let me know if anything more required). Will sort out Companion in the next few days.
Well, the local noble (Thomas de Guimsey, the Constable of Pickering) is intended as a source of trouble for the covenant.
I’d think I’d rather have him as an NPC. Giving him a son or younger brother as a squire or subordinate knight is possible but wouldn’t they have a duty to do what they’re told and not hang around with those weirdoes in the covenant?
One of the player characters is related to the de Ros family who are intended to be trouble for Sir Thomas.
I’m listening to a certain podcast (the first episode that mentions Ars Magica), it’s very enjoyable… one of the gentlemen sounds remarkably like the late Christopher Lee. (I’m a big fan of his so that’s a compliment.)
I feel the need to recommend a graphic-short-story (too short to be called a graphic novel) by Neil Gaiman: A Study in Emerald.
Also, your discussion of the metaplot of the king in yellow makes me think of Cloud Atlas. I think it might be well-served by hopping back and forth between the stories rather than running them each discretely in series (in pacing similar to that film.) Though that wouldn’t exactly make it easier to manage.
Sorry if I’m going way off-topic, it’s not often I can listen to a podcast and have a place to respond to it.
We now have a stress die roller. Invoke it with {stress X} or {stress X+Y} using square brackets rather than braces. X is the number of botch dice to be rolled if the first roll is a 10; +Y is the modifier in case you don’t get a botch.
The algorithm which I reconstructed from the overly verbose language in the book, and which @MichaelCule told me was correct, was:
specify number of botch dice B.
set multiplier M to 1.
roll d10 (range 1-10)
if this is the first roll and roll = 10, roll B d10s as botch dice; if any of them is 10, a botch has happened. Result is “Botch” and the number of zeroes rolled. If no botch die is a zero (including B=0), result is “0”.
if roll = 1, double M and continue from 3.
otherwise, result is roll × M.
So when you rolled stress 1 + 25, what will have happened is:
first roll = 1, double multiplier to 2
second roll = 1, double multiplier to 4
third roll = 7, result is 7×4=28
add 25, total is 53
If that is not, after all, the algorithm you want, now would be a good time to tell me.
That looks a perfectly normal roll. 1 in 100 rolls will have a multiplier of 4 or more, so that roll is only a 1 in 200 roll of exquisite amazingness. Yes, theoretically sometimes a brand new magus can spontaneously cast something awesome or an amateur can make an artistic masterpiece by the way this works, but unless your game is rolling dice continuously it won’t happend a lot.
