How did you learn to run or play Mage?

[RenleyRenfield]

This questions applies to both versions of Mage: Awakening and Ascension

Have you played or run a long campaign (chronicle) of Mage? if so, how hard was it to run? Was it easy or hard to make adventures and plots?

If you have played Mage = how did you pick and create your character? Was it obvious from the moment you opened the book for what you were excited to play as? Why?


Did you bounce off Mage? Why?

Did anyone have trouble keeping Mage games interesting or dramatic?

 

[MNblockhead]

I bounced off of Mage the Ascension. A couple players in my main group really liked the system and convinced me to try running it. I like the concept of how magic works, but I found the rules to be very esoteric, poorly presented and difficult pickup. My main reason for not sticking with it was that I couldn't find enough adventure ("scenario") material and I had too much else going on in my life that I couldn't keep up with a home brew campaign ("chronicle"). I think that I would like to be a player in a MtA game, but have no interest in running it.

I don't think I would have had trouble keeping Mage games interesting or dramatic, no more so than any other TTRPG. There is a lot of juicy lore inspire hooks, scenarios, and story arcs from. If I started as a player and built up system mastery I could get over my frustration with the system. But if I wanted to run a Mage Style game and had time to create a bespoke campaign, I would probably build a system from Cortex Prime rather than use the MtA system.

The following old thread has some links folks posted that are helpful when just starting with the system:

Thread 'Please share tips and resources for Mage the Ascension'

Nov 6, 2020

I like the flavor and concept of MtA and have the PDFs for the 20th Anniversary version. But the sheer volume content in just the core book is daunting.

I'm thinking that I will have the players all be "orphans" in the sense of not having much knowledge of the wider world. The characters can learn more about the different factions, lore, etc. as I learn it though game prep. I do want to have a fairly good grasp of the mechanics but even the quickstart guide is taking time for me to absorb.

If anyone has any tips for how to get started in MtA, esp as a game master, and if there are any...

• MNblockhead
• Replies: 19
• Forum: *TTRPGs General

Mage Made Easy is worth getting. The last post has a list of adventures.

 

[Umbran]

Oh, Mage. Yes, back in grad school I played in a Mage: the Ascension Chronicle that lasted for years. Probably the best tabletop RPG campaign I've ever been in.

Mind you, I came out of it feeling that Mage: the Ascension was both the best RPG, and also the worst, depending on who was running and playing. It requires players who are interested in investigating what the magic system and their individual paradigms can do, but not to the point that they abuse the system. And it needs a GM who will allow them to, just short of them abusing the system. It also needs players who can work with inter-personal differences. Mages of different types really should have remarkably different views on the world, and you have to have people who can do that, but not degrade into conflict within the party.

Our GM never suggested that running it was hard. It seemed like it took a goodly amount of preparation, in that solid adversaries for Mages really needed to be fully statted out. A D&D fighter can go up against a critter with a cut-down, sketch of a stat block, but Mages can try some really weird things, such that the GM is better off with all the details at hand.

The GM didn't seem to have any issues coming up with interesting "adventures" either. He seemed to generally approach it as, 1) Define an interesting antagonist. 2) Define what thing that antagonist is gonna do that the PCs wouldn't like to see happen. 3) define any interesting places involved. The Mages trying to work out how to approach the problems usually did the rest of the "adventure" work for him.

We mostly played as a group of four, with occasional solos - he had us all developing individual resources of various kinds, and those involved solo adventures. And Arete quests were solos as well. But we also explored some "troupe play" approaches...

After our Mages had run for a while, he had us make up secondary characters as well, most of whom were not themselves mages, to explore other corners of the WW universe, and give us stuff to do when our own Mage was for some reason out of the picture, or someone was absent and we didn't want to move the core plot without them. And for those we got creative. In discussion, for example, I'd said I was glad we were playing Mage, rather than Vampire, because I'd probably not have fun playing what I personally viewed as a monster. So the GM challenged me to make up a vampire I could have fun playing - and that character became a frequent go-to when the Mages butted up against the vampires of the city.

Then, he added a "B-Group" of mages, run by a different set of players, and our A-group characters would make appearances (singly - we were at that point much more powerful than they were and more than one of us would dominate a session). And we each had very different approaches to magic and our world, so we were really entertaining for B-group.

None of us seemed to ever have an issue coming up with characters we wanted to play. Our original characters, our secondaries, and a second Chronicle (which had to end when the GM moved away), character concepts seemed to leap out of us. The first round of characters, for example, was super-easy: The comp-sci major took a Virtual Adept. The biology student pre-veterinarian took a Verbena, the guy who really wanted to tear things up took a Werewolf, and I slid really smoothly into a dangerously curious Dreamspeaker...

We did try a spin at Mage: the Awakening, and we all hated it.

Keeping things dramatic? So not a problem. See above about trying weird stuff with magic, and having highly different points of view. For most of us, it was the first time we really threw ourselves into playing characters as deeply fully-realized people as possible.

 

[aramis erak]

This questions applies to both versions of Mage: Awakening and Ascension

Have you played or run a long campaign (chronicle) of Mage?

No, just a few scenarios

if so, how hard was it to run? Was it easy or hard to make adventures and plots?

It's easy to come up with plots... but dealing with the total mayhem that a party, especially a mixed party, can do is not as easy. Improv was essential.

Did you bounce off Mage? Why?

Kind of... it was easier to run the kinds of game I wanted using Ars Magica (which was also Marc Rein•Hagen)...
And that was because of the combination of paradox and hyper-creative players, making it too hard to keep track of the "reality" of the adventure. I never got Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade, which would have been more my speed.

 

[John Dallman]

Most of the Mage I've been played has been under GURPS. There were GURPS 3e versions of Mage and Vampire produced back in the 1990s. There was a falling-out between White Wolf and SJ Games. which means those books have never appeared as PDFs, but they work OK. GURPS Thaumatology for 4e, includes, among several magic systems, a meta-system that can be used to generate Mage-like magic systems for any number of Spheres, and that got used to produce the magic system in the 4e GURPS Discworld.

The only time I've played Mage with its original game system, the GM was using rather strange variant rules. If you didn't have enough dots in the relevant Sphere, you could still attempt workings. Your target numbers were just one harder for each dot you were missing. Since the pre-generated characters had quite high Arete, the numbers of dots in a sphere you had had become a general measure of your training, rather than a hard cap on your capabilities.

I've also seen Mage used as a system of "higher magic" in variant D&D games. It didn't give you a lot of extra power, but it gave you a lot more control over what D&D magic did.

The only long campaign I've played was GURPS Mage: the Sorcerers' Crusade, set in Elizabethan England, dealing with the machinations of an opposing group of mages, and creating plot lines for the young William Shakespeare, an NPC. It was really good, but one of the main players became crippled by multiple sclerosis and we didn't want to continue without her.

To answer the original question, to learn to play the game, I read the rules, and asked the GM for help with the first few workings until I got the hang of it. It did not seem especially hard, but the SJ Games rules-writing style is a lot clearer than the White Wolf style.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I ran MtA 1e back in the 90s.

The 1e rules were a fascinating idea with a few dumb decisions. I'm pretty sure 2e and later fixed the "useless" sphere ranks. Plus, I really dislike the WW mechanics and prefer the Shadowrun mechanics it was based on.

At a meta-plot level you had to take out the evil-for-evil's sake Technocracy stuff and turn it into "we were right to influence the masses so everything we do from now on is right" self-righteous egotism. Less mustache-twirling-evil and more evil-tony-stark-who-is-smarter-than-you-and-never-wrong-wait-why-does-Captain-America-disagree-with-me kind of evil.

Mage was, imo, a great game to run other WoD plots. They are going to want to stop vampires, non-euclidean horrors, evil cults that run corporations, monsters that eat children's dreams, etc, etc.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I played a ton in the 90s.
I think Umbran's comment about it being "both the best RPG, and also the worst, depending on who was running and playing" is incredibly accurate (for all of White Wolf World of Darkness, but Mage in particular). This is a game that needs everyone on board with trying to make it work -- both mechanically and thematically.

Like all of 90s WoD, the mechanics are wildly unbalanced, moreso with the freeform magic. There are useless choices, and abusive choices, and things that you think will work one way but end up working another, etc. Some of the lore and social implications of the game world are... we'll say 'risky' at best. Mage has fewer 'you're playing the racists' moments than Vampire or Werewolf, but an equal number of minor factions that resemble a well-intentioned-but-clueless-sophomore's first time abroad understanding of other cultures. That and the central conceit of doctors and scientists are wrong (/only right through forcing it on everyone else) but your kookie aunt into curing with crystals and astrology are equally right (to say nothing of the 'the conspiracy theorists were right' implications all the games imply) has not aged well. In all cases, you need a group on the same page about how to react to realizing X is overpowered, Y ends up being useless, and Z ends up being really uncomfortable in the implication.

That said, IF you have that trustworthy play group, the game can be a lot of fun. Like all urban fantasy (or other modern games), I will caution: -- a lot of this stuff actually works better if you keep the setting in the 90s. Like tv scripts, there are a lot of issues that ubiquitous cell phones obviate, and others that ubiquitous cameras create.

 

[Bae'zel]

With a lot of difficulty.

And arguing over what was Paradox-inducing and what wasn't.

Had a Life mage character who did workouts every morning to perfect their body (you know, like millions of people who exercise every day). I used that as a ritual to use Life magick to enhance my physical stats a bit. The DM stopped the game and started shouting at me, asking me WHY I was doing this. What was the in-game reason? I just told him, but he took it as meta-power-gaming or something.

Please note that this was a person who memorized game rules and power gamed relentlessly, usually with even LESS rationale than I did.

Otherwise our games were the same as Vampire katanas in trenchcoats.

Would have loved to have experienced the game with some good people.

 

[Seramus]

I ran Mage: the Ascension for many years and I also found it to be both an amazing RPG and a terrible one. I've always been a somewhat permissive ST, so the sheer amount of incredibly creative ideas my players would come up with to resolve problems was a great deal of fun to me. Some of them would even get up to Rube Goldberg levels of shenanigans just to try and keep things Coincidental, and they didn't fight me when I ruled something was Paradox. It was a solid set of players overall, I would say.

Mage was exceptionally easy for me to run campaigns for, because I could get really creative with the locations both in-world and out of world. I admit, I probably botched some of the more culturally sensitive locations the players visited, including short trips through horizon realms steeped in the mythology of places I simply didn't know much about despite my good faith attempt to keep it thematic. But I can see some groups easily bouncing off how much of a tonal shift a Mage game can be when you move the spotlight from one culture or world view to another too quickly. Not that it's hard to pick a specific theme and stick with it for your Mage game, but I always felt Mage was naturally disposed towards rapid shifts in perspective far more than Vampire or Werewolf ever were.

But the bad? While I had some players who embraced it with tremendous love, I also had far more players freeze up like a deer in headlights when I tried to describe how the (mostly) freeform magic system worked. Despite my best efforts, and my between game talks trying to coach players through how it worked, player after player just bricked up. At one point I even introduced a stepping stone idea of just starting the Mages out with rotes and no freeform casting until they felt more comfortable with the system.

In the end, I just decided that Vampire was the better system for me to run. I genuinely had MORE fun with Mage than any other World of Darkness system, and would rather have been running it, but it takes a strange alchemy of good players to have a good Mage game, and it was much easier to find players who could vibe with Vampire.

 

[Umbran]

And arguing over what was Paradox-inducing and what wasn't.

Had a Life mage character who did workouts every morning to perfect their body (you know, like millions of people who exercise every day). I used that as a ritual to use Life magick to enhance my physical stats a bit.

So, in our group, that would have worked to establish a justification for spending XP in Strength or Stamina later, but would not have made the magical working coincidental.

Coincidence is about what local observers would see at the time you do something that defies the dominant paradigm. What you did hours before or miles away are unlikely to matter.