Glancing through Ars Magica 5th edition, because I've been meaning to look at An Ars Magica game for some time. Love troupe play idea, love it love it love it. Also idly thinking I probably wouldn't be reading this book if I wasn't introduced to D&D and Shadowrun at the same time, followed by learning about World of Darkness a few months later, just because having that early exposure to a ton of stuff helped my interest.
Anyways, troupe play. Every player has a Magus, a Companion, and then can play any number of Grogs as needed. Your Magus is your "Main" character, but they often may not be adventuring or doing anything of note. The Companion is your secondary character and shouldn't be attached to your Magus in any way. They should be friends with other PC Magus or servants, or coworkers or whatever other relationship, because that character will more often be interacting with that Magus versus your own. Companions typically don't have magic, unless you're trying to play like, an Apprentice type character. It's a really neat system and it really can be great for people who love playing multiple characters.
Grogs are cool too because they're like, tertiary or minor characters. This helps keep the GM from having to play a ton of random troops for example, and it gives players someone disposable to play for a session or more (if they don't say, get killed by a dragon trying to save the Magus).
Confidence as a stat is neat. It functions like Edge or Inspiration. You carry a number of points to use to just give you a bonus to a roll. You can restore points of Confidence on a session to session basis, and increase your Confidence Score over time, which helps with specific rolls. Neat way to reflect your self-reliance.
Me, reading the character creation walkthrough "OK, cool cool, you make choices based on childhood, the later life phase after that and if you're a mage you can gain 240 exp per year you were a mage out of apprenticeship... WHAT???" For comparison, during the "later life" (post childhood, pre-mage graduation), you gain 15 exp per year.
OK, here's the other cool part: Magic is built on the fly out of combining Technique and Form. Techniques include "Create", "Control", "Transform", and a few others, while the Form is stuff like "Animals", "Water", "Fire", and so on. So by controlling Fire, you can change the intensity of light sources or snuff them out. Creating Fire can just mean "make a fireball" type thing. This makes magic very flexible, because through clever use of things, you can do a lot.
The second neat thing is that magic has inherent limits, as currently discovered. Magic cannot change things like aging, or love, or other feelings, cannot create any permanent living things, nor a soul, cannot restore Fatigue or Confidence, and more. This means magic is very powerful and flexible, but not a cure for Everything. And it also means that some characters (PCs or NPCs) can spend their research time trying to test these limits and look for the proverbial Fountain of Youth.
Cool system, thematically. Haven't dove into the full on mechanics yet, but it seems like it uses a d10 like others use a d20. Looks like Attribute + Skill + D10. I really like a lot of ideas in this game, and props to them for it.