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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Seramus" data-source="post: 9691100" data-attributes="member: 6812658">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.</blockquote>

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