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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 9690777" data-attributes="member: 177">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.</blockquote>

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