Mercule
Adventurer
As others have said, Awakening has significantly better mechanics, but Ascension had stronger fluff. I'm not sure I'd call Ascension's fluff "better", though, just because I strongly dislike technomagic and the Technocracy is difficult (at best) to marginalize in Ascension.
For Ascension, with or without the Technocracy, you have a fairly compelling system for exploring worldviews, philosophy, and the nature of self using the nature of reality as proxy. As a philosophy minor in college at the time of the original publishing of Ascension, I thought it looked fairly interesting. In practice, however, it only took one player who didn't want to navel gaze to break things.
That isn't to say it's wrong to not navel gaze, just that a lot of the rules issues that were fixed with Awakening make the game more difficult to break. A lot less is left to vague questions of paradigms and "what does your character believe".
My recommendation is, if your group is fairly into character-building and open to philosophy and metaphors, Ascension would probably be a pretty fun game. Doubly so, if you want to reflect on how technology can starch the soul or how your worldview can affect the way you do things.
If you just want to play wizards in the modern world, and don't care if everyone has personalities and motivations that require some fairly deep thought from the players, then Awakening is probably a better choice. Awakening has the capability to add some of the paradigm-oriented pieces from Ascension, along with the variety of magical traditions. It just doesn't assume them. An experienced GM could probably duplicate the Ascension fluff, almost exactly, with Awakening. It'd take effort, but (IMO) it takes a fair amount of effort to hold an Ascension game together, anyway.
For Ascension, with or without the Technocracy, you have a fairly compelling system for exploring worldviews, philosophy, and the nature of self using the nature of reality as proxy. As a philosophy minor in college at the time of the original publishing of Ascension, I thought it looked fairly interesting. In practice, however, it only took one player who didn't want to navel gaze to break things.
That isn't to say it's wrong to not navel gaze, just that a lot of the rules issues that were fixed with Awakening make the game more difficult to break. A lot less is left to vague questions of paradigms and "what does your character believe".
My recommendation is, if your group is fairly into character-building and open to philosophy and metaphors, Ascension would probably be a pretty fun game. Doubly so, if you want to reflect on how technology can starch the soul or how your worldview can affect the way you do things.
If you just want to play wizards in the modern world, and don't care if everyone has personalities and motivations that require some fairly deep thought from the players, then Awakening is probably a better choice. Awakening has the capability to add some of the paradigm-oriented pieces from Ascension, along with the variety of magical traditions. It just doesn't assume them. An experienced GM could probably duplicate the Ascension fluff, almost exactly, with Awakening. It'd take effort, but (IMO) it takes a fair amount of effort to hold an Ascension game together, anyway.