I run a modernized Ars Magica game every other Wednesday. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s sometimes challenging to try to adapt a game system written for a Medieval setting to something set in the early 1970s.
Fortunately for me, I was able to borrow a huge chunk of the work from the house rules for a game that a friend of mine ran back in the late 90’s, but there have been several revisions of the rules since then. The last major overhaul I did was back in 2004 when I first put the Ars Moderna rules up on the web.
I’ve done some minor tweaking since then, of course. But since it went up, a couple of gaming sites have linked to it, so I figure I should probably do a better job of maintaining it. After all, every so often a player will come up with something so clever that the modern rule revisions need revising to deal with.
Like using a typewriter.
Yes, yes, it should be blindingly obvious that typing is faster than writing things out longhand. And a typed document is easier to read than a handwritten one. But how do you quantify those differences? Well, after hashing things out in e-mail, this is what we came up with.