TEXT: There were two main issues with character creation
  that had to be addressed in the revision. The first was
  Virtues and Flaws; what they should cost, and how
  they should be organized. The second was the mis-
  match between character generation and characters
  developed in play.
  The solution to the first ended up as a fairly radical
  overhaul. I quickly realized that there was no way to
  accurately grade Virtues and Flaws on a six or seven
  point scale, especially given the varying importance
  of different Virtues in different sagas. Instead, I con-
  solidated them into two groups, Major and Minor.
  This is a much easier distinction to make, although
  there are, of course, still borderline cases. However,
  with only one borderline instead of five or six, things
  are much easier. Further, most Major Virtues are
  Major whatever the saga style, and similarly most
  Minor Virtues are Minor. It also makes the arithmetic
  of character creation rather easier.
  The other change concerned Flaws dealing with per-
  sonality and story. These have always bothered me;
  story-producing flaws are a good thing to have, sure-
  ly, and all characters should have a well-defined per-
  sonality. However, if the storyguide tries to make
  these flaws into disadvantages, you end up with one
  character dominating the saga, or a character with
  flaws that never come into play. Neither of these are
  good.
  Thus, I changed the way I was looking at those
  Flaws. Suppose that they were designed to give the
  storyguide ways to get characters involved in a story.
  Then, they’d be useful to storyguides as well as help-
  ing the player define the character. After a few rounds
  of clarification with the playtesters, I made it explicit
  that these Flaws were only supposed to come up once
  every ten sessions or so for a given character.
  Roughly speaking, one Story Flaw would come up
  per session, or per story, so the precise frequency
  depends on the number of characters. Thus, these
  Flaws don’t really disadvantage the character at all;
  they just make the storyguide’s job easier, as he
  knows how to get that character involved in a story.
  DESIGN NOTES: CHARACTER CREATION
  
  Then I made them all Major Flaws, unless they had
  some attached advantage, in which case they were
  only Minor. This makes them a really good deal for
  player characters, and makes it very likely that all
  magi will have such a Flaw. (Normally, character are
  only allowed one, because more would lead to a sin-
  gle character being central in too many stories.) This
  gives the storyguide a useful hook by which to drag
  magi out of their sancta and into adventures; if you
  took the Flaw, you can’t refuse to follow the adven-
  ture hook when it’s dangled in front of you, because
  you have decided that your character will drop every-
  thing to deal with this issue.
  As a result, ArM5 characters tend to have a very dif-
  ferent mix of Virtues and Flaws from characters gen-
  erated under Fourth Edition.
  The second problem was much simpler in principle,
  but quite hard in practice. The results of character
  generation should be very close to the results of play-
  ing a character through every season of his life. Thus,
  the character generation rules should allow you to
  generate experienced magi, in a reasonable amount of
  time, and have them look more or less the same as
  magi advanced in play. Under ArM4 it was impossi-
  ble to generate advanced magi using the character
  generation rules, and companions generated that way
  were significantly weaker than those created in play.
  In ArM5, the character generation rules cover magi of
  any age, and magi and companions created that way
  seem to match those generated by going through all
  the seasons. It still takes a while to generate a magus
  over 100 years old, but it’s much, much faster than it
  was under ArM4. And these rules define what elder
  magi will look like in all ArM5 supplements, so final-
  ly the game will have a consistent base power level.
  In the next set of design notes, I’ll talk about the heart
  of Ars Magica, it’s magic system. The spell guidelines
  define what all the numbers in the magic system
  mean, so mistakes and problems here can have very
  wide-ranging consequences. So be sure to check
  back!
  David Chart
  Ars Magica 5th Edition Developer
  Copyright 2004 Trident, Inc. d/b/a Atlas Games. All rights reserved. Ars Magica, Mythic Europe, and Covenants are trademarks of Trident, Inc. 
  Order of Hermes, Tremere, and Doissetep are trademarks of White Wolf, Inc. and are used with permission. Illustration by Scott Reeves.
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Ars Magica [multi]/5th edition/Ars Magica 5e - Design Notes - Character Creation.pdf