RPG Errata: Ars Magica, and Troupe Play

Ars Magica is a bit of an odd duck in RPG land. It was one of the early RPGs, with the first edition released in 1987. The early days of the RPG medium were curious ones, with an interesting mix of experimentation and cloning successes. Games like Atlantis copied D&D, while games like Champions went off in strange new directions.

Ars Magica, despite it’s formulaic pitch (the players being Magic-users in a medieval fantasy setting) is one of the experimental systems.

There is a lot I could talk about with Ars Magica — its magic system is creative and robust, to put it mildly, and the political interplay between magical factions and mundanes plays a huge part in its well developed setting — but what I want to talk about, as you should be able to tell from the title of this piece, is that this is the first system that had a Troupe style of play.

Troupe play is, at its most simple, playing without a single established “character” for each player. There are characters, certainly, but Troupe play is less concerned with one singular player having control over each character’s story.

This manifests in different ways throughout Ars Magica’s many editions, but some simple examples: Each player is encouraged to take a turn as the GM.¹ The book acknowledges that different characters will have different motives, so an adventure might not appeal to your “primary character.” In that case, you should have a secondary character who can be slotted in as required. Most magicians also had companions who did some of the dirty work. Merlin isn’t going to go mucking about in swamps for herbs, after all, and wizards locking themselves away in towers with a valet dealing with the mundanes fits the world-setting.

Then there are the other folk who fill out every story; the side characters, the extras, the skilled peasantry who have a stake in their world, same as anyone else. They all have a place in the game, and putting all of them on the GM’s shoulders…well, that’s a bit much, isn’t it?

When talking about Hirelings, I brought up the idea that giving the responsibilities of the entire world to one player, the GM, is a bit unbalanced. There’s no reason, I said, that players can’t pick up an NPC and act them out, same as any other character. Indeed, I pushed the idea that the difference between NPC and PC is smaller than most RPGs might suggest. PCs may be “main characters,” but what does that mean in a group of five or six?

Troupe systems take it one step further, and say that there may be “main characters” but they don’t belong to individual players, they belong to the story. Thug the Barbarian may be on a quest to save the princess, but the world and surrounding NPCs are as much a part of the quest as Thug, and there’s no reason why seven players can’t tell a story with two main characters.

Or, if you’re less a storyteller and more a gameplayer, there’s no reason why six players can’t play a game with twelve different “units.” If you’re playing a kingdom, you can be either the king, queen, vizier, head priest, warlord, or five-hundred foot-solders at a moments notice. Or you could go the other direction: Touched By Evil focuses on one main character for the whole table, alternating between players as they watch the character’s slow descent into madness.

What this does is play with a very interesting aspect of roleplay: neither the mask nor the face behind it, but the space in-between.

There are multiple ways to roleplay: the first and most commonly expected is when you imagine yourself in a fantastical situation. What would you do if you were met with a reckless king and a conniving vizier? What would you do if you heard of Orc tribes amassing on the border? It’s simple, elegant, and ensures you have a solid foundation from which to pull when deciding “what you do next.”

The second, and only slightly less common is the imagining you are someone else. What would I do if I were an elf from the northern forests? What would I do if I were greedier, kinder, or came from a society of battle-hardened warriors? This is a more character driven style of roleplay, and allows for your characters to make choices that you otherwise wouldn’t.

The third, and the one that occupies the space in-between, is the imagining of someone else. Not “what would I do if I were,” but “what would an elf from the northern forests do?” “What would this person do in this situation?” It is, in effect, taking yourself entirely out of the equation. Not what if your situation was different, not what if you were different, but what if someone else had to choose?

The lovely trick of that third option is that who the “someone else” is can change back and forth between games, sessions, even scenes.

What does this do to the game? For players, it forces them into roles more usually occupied exclusively by the GM. The simple act of being able to play more than one character is a force-multiplier, giving players vast amounts of control over the game.

Remember when I talked about consequences? Now a player can play a reckless thief that causes trouble for the team in one scene, and the police-captain who decides exactly how much trouble in the next scene. Does your PC insult an NPC at the bar? Maybe in the next scene you play that NPC joining up with the bad-guys. Maybe you play them as hesitant, instead of eager, allowing for a heel-turn in a later scene.

What about “keeping the band together?” Never splitting the party isn’t as important when a player can just hop into a different skin and have fun as a town guard, tag-along bard, or squire. Ars Magica calls this out, making it very clear that your wizard might not want to get involved in this or that situation, so why not play another wizard’s apprentice for this adventure?

What does this do for the GM?

The most obvious thing it does is take some of the weight off their shoulders. If the GM doesn’t have to play every Tom, Dick, and Henchfolk in the game, they can focus more on a few important NPCs, describing the world, and managing whatever adventure the players have embarked on.

It also allows the story to advance in interesting ways. Imagine, for example, if in Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam had to stick around with the rest of the Fellowship. Imagine if they had to be present for the battle at Minas Tirath, and then all seven could make their trek through Mordor to Mount Doom. How much more interesting if three players could play as Sam, Frodo, and Gollum in one session, and Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas in the next?

And let’s not beat around the bush, you don’t need a system like Ars Magica to make Troupe play work. Any system can support Troupe play; it’s not a ludo-narrative style of play, but a meta-narrative one.

Personally, I think it’s a style of play well worth adding to your tool-kit. Once players have the freedom to play more than just one character, the game and story expand in some fascinating ways.

But now we get into an interesting question: What happens when a player gets an NPC who is a “villain?” Sure, a GM can simply decide players can’t play as the Foozle, but what happens when a player takes control of another player’s nemesis? What if a player is supposed to try and hurt their fellow players? What if they’re supposed to compete?

Next time, I’d like to talk a bit more about the idea of competition in RPGs, and specifically one game that embraces the idea to interesting lengths.