TL;DR: This is a bit of a rant, I suppose. Our group has been playing Ars Magica 5E and I have found that making a character for the game is a real chore. However, playing the game has been quite fun.
I hope that it will prompt some discussion about what it takes to make a successful character in Ars Magica and what experiences people have had playing the game. I'm also very interested in boiling down the game to what is ACTUALLY necessary to run the game successfully (a lot of things on the character sheet don't seem to matter much at all).


Let's start with character creation:
I have found that making a character in Ars Magica is a complex task. (I'm being nice, here. Plain speak: it's a pain in the a$$.)
A bunch of numbers to spend, some seemingly simple decisions to make, a lot of calculations and decisions that actually amount to very little in terms of usefulness. This is due to not having a clear understanding of how certain stats interact together. As a new player, trying to understand what is actually useful within the game is not easy, because everything IS important to some degree. I had a concept for my character and ultimately I think I got pretty close to what I wanted, but I can't yet tell.

The biggest hurdle as a player is that you make decisions about where points go without a clear understanding of what you will need in-game to accomplish magical tasks. Our GM said we would get to play "reality-shattering wizards", however by the time we were done with character creation, it felt like we were a bunch of wimpy, low-level Magi. GM wasn't wrong, but it didn't feel like that at all by the time we were done with assigning numbers.

The second issue I had is that the setting is quite vast, a mix of myths and real world history. This makes things rather complex because we have Magicians from all over the place and not a clear understanding of how the magical community works within the setting.

The book is hard to navigate and takes research. It took our group two game sessions to make characters and go through a basic introduction to the campaign where we got to describe our Magicians.

For a successful experience, I think a one-shot with pre-generated characters would have been useful, so that we can see HOW everything works, then modify the pre-gens or start from scratch for a whole new concept. Without that, every player would need to be very familiar with the rules and setting BEFORE making characters.


Playing the game itself
This was pretty fun. Interacting with the rules was rather interesting, but nothing super exciting. The biggest issue here, being that there is a lot on the character sheet that seemed important but never actually came up.

After our third session, I felt like boiling down characters to Magical Arts, Characteristics, Virtues & Flaws (for building quick backgrounds), and a few other stats such as Fatigue Levels, Parma Magica, etc, would be enough to run the game successfully.

Abilities is my biggest gripe. I feel that they should be more general and categorized, rather than an exhaustive list. It would have made the math portion of character creation a lot simpler and we barely interact with Abilities in a game session.


In Conclusion
I am not a huge fan of the rules, but they work and our covenant is quite capable. The impression I get is that the game designers must have wanted to emulate the research needed to be a Magus by making character creation so complex. I'm a fan of layering simple rule concepts to create a crunchy system, but Ars Magica is not rules-light at all. I have found it to be rule-heavy and concept-heavy.

It's taken me several sessions to get into it, but now our group is having a lot of fun with it, mostly due to the setting we are in and our GM's creativity (as well as his own mastery of the rules themselves, which is super helpful).


I'm really curious if those of you that have run or played the game enjoyed it, what you felt it needed, if it's perfect the way it is, general opinions, etc.

You know you could just buy or use an older edition. I been buying Ars Magica since 2nd edition and ever used the core book once. But I was very successfully in using elements of the system in GURPS, D&D, etc. I love their line.

I like the 5th edition setting info and how magic works. The mechanics seem overkill. I recently got copies of both Ars Magic 1st edition and 2nd edition. If was to run a campaign, I think I would try 2nd edition first and adapt everything to that. It not like Ars Magica is meant to be played where even a half hex/square is important. Most of the mechanic read to me like guidelines how magic works with everything in natural units or natural time.

I just mentioned the 5E in case it mattered to someone out there, for the sake of detail. I do have the 4E book and read it about 6-7 years ago. If I understand correctly, very little has changed in terms of rules, etc, from 4E to 5E.
Character creation seemed like a cluster-f*** back then, and it hasn't improved. Those are just my own gripes about the game and I'm curious what other players/GMs experiences with Ars Magica have been. Ars Magica has just felt complex for the sake of complexity rather than realism/logic. It might be my own lack of experience with it.

That being said, why would you choose 2nd Edition to run it? Were there some things in that edition that made it easier to use/work with? Or is it because you're more familiar with it?