Mage the Ascension Question

[eyebeams]

This may come as a shock to you, but I don't really care if my opinions mesh well with your experience, or even what the developers might have intended to say but sadly failed to communicate in the core releases. All I care about is whether my opinions reflect what was actually written and released, and for that purpose I'm comfortable standing by them.

Since they don't, you shouldn't be.

1) Your critique of the VAs and the SOE is not critique. The Technocracy bears as little relationship with real science as they do and to claim that one is more sincerely scientific than the other is sheer balderdash.

2) Your view on how "fields of knowledge" are represented is so vague as to bear no dialectical weight whatsoever. Of course, if you mean conventional empiricism, you'll have to modify it in light of the setting, which says reality is subjective. As a result, the Sons of Ether, who you characterized as anti-science, are the most honest pure scientists in the game. But you don't like 'em because they're "pulp." It's much more plausible to like the Technocracy, which is based on James Bond flicks.

3) Numerous books in the line (the core, the STH and others) say that your point . . .ain't a point. The Mage Storytellers Handbook says right out that technology isn't good or bad. The Guide to the Traditions says that technology is only disliked by a small minority of insane or nigh-immortal Masters that ahve almost all been dead since 1997. Horizon: Stronghold of Hope features science and technology along with magic as part of the wonder of the Realm. Basically, your opinion is so much moe informed by a surface reading and appeal to your own issues rather than an actual reading of the text it leads me to ask: What Mage books have you actually owned and read?

If you think of something other than your experiences or vaguely cited conversations that invalidates my opinions, perhaps I'll give what you say more weight. Until then, have fun.

Honestly, the text citations necessary to respond are so obvious that I assumed you knew the game and were coming from some meta-angle. Now it just seems that you don't actually know the game.

 

[eyebeams]

Mage may suffer from a malady I shall now name Borgstromitis, in which a gaming book succeeds well in conveying the themes and overall ideas of a setting but somehow frequently fails as an instruction manual for play.

Again, I think lots of this depends on your acculturation as far as RPGs are concerned. Nobilis is another one of those games that friends of mine who were either largely neophyte or alt-gamers got in a brief read, and folks who came up through quasi-wargaming treated like Greek.

Many of these same people could never play a full-on game of 3.5e without some serious coaching, so it works both ways.

 

[Umbran]

It just seemed that my gamers, mostly blue collar working-class types, had more difficulty understanding what they could do with certain spheres and so they used them less or used them to do very 'standard' things. Forces comes to mind as a sphere where, the better you understood how energy worked in the real world, the more you could get away with in the game. Others, like Mind, seemed easier to grasp for one reason or another.

I think this is the sort of place where a good GM, who has a solid grip on what he feels the spheres do, and can convey that to the players, makes all the difference.

As to the moral stances displayed within the game, I think I have to come down on the side of those who say the game wasn't so much against technology as it was for freedom of thought.

My main evidence comes from the WoD history. The organization that eventually became the Technocracy was, in early times, called the Order of Reason. Before that, it was called the Order of Pure thought, and included mystics who were not scientific at all, but were very into doctrine.

 

[ajanders]

Then there are lots and lots of people playing the game wrong. :\

I'm so deeply pleased you're here to tell me how I should be playing my game. Can you give me advice about graduate schools and window treatments as well?
Mage is a lovely game spoiled with too much artifice...like entire sourcebooks written as delightfully witty satires.
Man, I'll never look at that book the same way again.
At its worst, it degenerates into a metaphysical slap-fight between pompous pseudo-intellectuals. (Bad college gaming experience, trust me.)
With a good GM and players, the game rapidly shifts away from the standard gamer questions of "What can I do?" and "How do I do it?" to "What should I do?" and "Why should I do it?".
You can make it rain squid.
You can make it rain big squid.
You can add Force dots and make it rain big fried squid.
After one or two sessions of this sort of thing, then you start to get to the thinking.
And after that, you reach saizhan, blow the doors off your mind, and transcend the source material.
At least I think you do: I could never get the game to go past calmari storms.

 

[Crothian]

I'm so deeply pleased you're here to tell me how I should be playing my game.

Wow, in what context where you reading my post, because it clearly wasn't the one it was in.

I wasn't telling anyone how to run their game. I started with a comical quote from RPGNow. Someone else told me that defintion of the game was wrong and not what Mage is. I replied saying that many people must play it wrong them. It was sarcastic and not purely serious as the smile indicated. So, I'm not telling you how to run your game and I'm at a lose how you jumped to that conclusion.

 

[Rel]

Wow, in what context where you reading my post, because it clearly wasn't the one it was in.

I got Crothian's back on this one.

[Inigo Montoya]I do not think he means what you think he means.[/Inigio Montoya]

 

[Hurtfultater]

Again, I think lots of this depends on your acculturation as far as RPGs are concerned. Nobilis is another one of those games that friends of mine who were either largely neophyte or alt-gamers got in a brief read, and folks who came up through quasi-wargaming treated like Greek.

Many of these same people could never play a full-on game of 3.5e without some serious coaching, so it works both ways.

According to that model, I'm split. I think of Nobilis as one of the two best gaming books I've read, and it made sense to me immediately. I was referring to the problems other people have had with it.

I have difficulty, though, ajudicating the magic in Mage. I'm not the best GM in the world, though, and I'm sure it will all change when I finally find a game of Mage run well. The fact remains that for many people, the books are insufficient in telling people how to run the game. Much like people addressing metagame issues face to face, there seems to be a common reluctance on the part of writers to explicitly address play style and reasons behind game-balancing mechanics. Writing game books is like a mutant offshoot of technical writing, and technical writing is a hard field. Nonetheless, I am not convinced that the communication problem is wholly the result of the players' (including GM) experience or that it is insolvable. Wittness Rebecca Borgstrom's recent distribution of epiphanies about the Fair Folk Exalted book when she explained her motivations behind certain rules.

 

[Saeviomagy]

That's not actually what the game's past setting was, though. Mages were representative of humanity as a whole. Mages did not bother running Sleeper affairs for any length of time (with the exception of China, at certain points in the game) until the 19th Century. The seige of Mistridge happened in the game because mages *didn't* act to help people, not because they interfered with them.

...

All of which is a pretty in-depth look at the history behind stuff. If you're just flicking through the book for "whats all this about then", then the core book makes it sound like the following happened:

1. The world existed, and it was crazy nuts. Mages did what they wanted, horrible monsters rampaged, and everything was a mess.
2. The technocracy (or it's forebears) came into existence and realised that by manipulating people's beliefs, they could change the world. They did so for the betterment of mankind - instituting a sort of "fairness" to everything.
3. The traditions don't like this, and want to 'free' everyone. Since the stability of reality, and the survival of most non-mage members of mankind is an obstruction to this, they want to rip it down and go back to rampant chaos.

Now if that's not what the case is, it doesn't really matter - it's what the book is getting across to people.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

The later books in Revised edition put more of an emphasis on "technology isn't evil" by essentially introducing at least one technomancer faction to every tradition. For example the Order of Hermes who resemble your most typical high fantasy mage (in fact they're the organization from Ars Magica itself), they got House Thig which used modern and advanced technology with they're magic.

Revised edition did try to be more sympathetic to the Technocracy, introducing a growing schism in the organization and a bunch of Technocrats who viewed themselves as knights of avalon, as well as friends of this rogue agent named John Courage who was supposed to be a noble guy. Later books also went through the whole thing with the Traditions trying to clean themselves of their more luddite-type members.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

Mage is probably my favorite game of all time but it is also the most difficult to run. It isn't difficult due to the system which mechanically is super easy but from the philosophy. Mages have influence over a variety of spheres that make up reality and in character creation you set your control over those spheres by buying "dots" in the spheres. The more dots you have, the more control you have over the sphere.
Where it gets hairy is the philosophy of each Mage tradition. When a mage works magic he is basically forcing his view of reality (his philosophy) onto that held by the world at large. If a mage is by himself with no witnesses and the magic can be explained away as coincidence it is fairly easy. If a mage does it in front of mundane people and it is obviously supernatural then it becomes very difficult. Here is where the problem comes in... if a Mage's personal philosophy doesn't allow for the magic the "player" wants to accomplish then he is his own witness, his own reality view says that what he is attempting can't happen. Each player really needs to understand his character's philosophy on how magic works. SO... it is VERY difficult to have a pick-up game of Mage unless each player is VERY familiar with the game and the various philosophies of magic.

This all said I love Mage for these very reasons. It doesn't fall into the D&D style of magic with spell slots per day and spell levels. It is up to the player to use his/her own creativity to come up with magical effects.