Mage:the Awakening is out. Opinions?

[Funksaw]

You know, I've always wondered why they decided to go the Splat Route on the new WoD, when it might make more sense (in either old or new mage) to make it a merit/background.

Think about it.

 

[Funksaw]

One last thing about New Mage that really bugged me - not a whole lot, but bugged me just a little.

I can't figure out the rules for playing an unaligned Mage.

 

[GRIMJIM]

My reviews/commentaries on the nWOD (including Mage)

Corebook
Vampire
Werewolf
Mage
conclusions

 

[Graf]

This is a completely different game with very very few similarities.

This is very different from Vampire which was the same game with a few differences.

You're too close to the situation if you think it's that black and white.

It depends, I think on what people liked about the settings. Obviously stuff you liked got taken out of Mage and left in Vampire.

That said, I'm unimpressed with the game on it's own merits. I compare it to the old Mage as a point of reference more than as a direct successor - but the game I would say it is most like in system and in cosmology is In Nomine - the game I would say it is most like in theme and "what the PCs end up doing" is Unknown Armies.

You don't like the three games quoted perhaps, but a lot of people do. Having a spiffy game that mixes themes from these games well in a good balanced rules system is a good thing for most players.
In Nomine was a great cosmology that suffered for its rules and playability (for example).

People may be generally pissed for a while because I think that WW threw them for a loop with this one - Vampire and Werewolf didn't undergo a whole lot of changes, Mage did, and I think people are disappointed that Ascension, which had a fan base that thought very highly of it, is now pretty much a "dead line." - something that isn't true so much with Vampire and Werewolf.

This thread has done a good job of not falling over into being locked and I want to keep it that way but...

Have you even read the new Werewolf book? (Or the old one... not having a clue about one would allow you to have this belief)
I wasn't the biggest Werewolf player out there but I couldn't even read more than 15 pages before putting it down in amazement. They didn't keep a single darn thing... It wasn't until a friend did some big talking I went back and could appreciate it for what it was a new (good) game.
-Completely- different. The social structure, game system, world (spirit and material), gifts, character motivations, mythology, campaign foes (try to find the wyrm anywhere in the book) totally totally different.

You can disagree with their decision to stop supporting their old game world, but they did announce that the game lines were ending and then release a last book... Not something that TSR/WotC ever did with DnD which why I find it hard to compare.

While some of eyebeam's posts to some opinion-sharing-EnWorlders had an insufferably snide tone you're certainly working overtime to make him look reasonable.

 

[King of Old School]

(Responding to multiple posts.)

So, if you're a fan of the old Mage, is new Mage the game for you?

There is no correct answer to this question, because it's totally dependent on what you did/didn't like about the old Mage and what you do/don't like in general. They really are two totally different games. It's like asking "if you're a fan of Perdito Street Station, is Eberron the setting for you?" Maybe, maybe not.

If the question you really want to ask is "if you want a game like old Mage, is new Mage the game for you?" then the answer is "no." Funksaw is right that Awakening is totally different from Ascension, and that the latter is a dead line. Incidentally, he's also right that Masquerade fans still have much of the game they liked with Requiem, but if he sincerely thinks that Forsaken is the same game as Apocalypse I have to wonder if he's read either game -- the new Werewolf is as different from its predecessor as the new Mage, if not moreso.

To answer a criticism from upthread: I did like Ascension, a lot. It was a brilliant concept and a better-than-passable game. But as a game about mages and magic... not so much. It was a dirty bit of bait-and-switch in that regard, in that the other OWoD games were about their eponymous creatures and it was only reasonable to expect more of the same. But instead we got Victorian SF heroes sailing spaceships through the ether and having space battles in Jovian orbit, Men in Black chasing after psionic hacker-types, "culture heroes" and endless arguments about post-modernism. Those things are cool and worthwhile in and of themselves (except maybe the "culture heroes" bit), but there's no contradiction in liking them while pointing out that they aren't terribly magely, or congruous with the old World of Darkness as established in the other game lines. I like having a new Mage game for the new World of Darkness that is actually about mages and fits in the World of Darkness. If that idea doesn't appeal to you, then Awakening is not the game for you. I don't have a problem with that, as I have zero interest in convincing anyone to like the game. Like what you like, buy what you like to play.

(I'm not being facetious either: I'd just about kill for a standalone game that was about ethernauts sailing the Umbra.)

That said, I'm unimpressed with the game on it's own merits. I compare it to the old Mage as a point of reference more than as a direct successor - but the game I would say it is most like in system and in cosmology is In Nomine - the game I would say it is most like in theme and "what the PCs end up doing" is Unknown Armies.

Except that unlike In Nomine the characters aren't angels or demons and the cosmology isn't at all Christian, and unlike Unknown Armies the characters generally aren't socially crippled, morally degenerate lowlifes who are incapable of holding a 9-to-5 job and almost invariably end up as petty criminals.

You know, I've always wondered why they decided to go the Splat Route on the new WoD, when it might make more sense (in either old or new mage) to make it a merit/background.

Because splats appeal to a lot of players... and given that this is EN World, I suspect you'll have an uphill struggle convincing the audience otherwise. I don't always agree with their use, but I understand it.

One last thing about New Mage that really bugged me - not a whole lot, but bugged me just a little.

I can't figure out the rules for playing an unaligned Mage.

Now, this is a legitimate complaint. It's not completely impenetrable mechanically, but it's harder to put together than it should be. I think the game pushes players away from playing an unaligned mage a lot harder than it should, and a lot harder than either of VtR or WtF push players away from playing unaligned vamps or weres.

KoOS

 

[painandgreed]

Mage: the Awakening - Now with 100% More Atlantis!

If you liked the old Mage game for its abstract system and background, then you probably won't like the new Mage. When Mage first came out it was widely reguarded by the people I knew and at alt.games.whitewolf as unplayable (or at least lackluster IIRC). Then people who weren't normally looking to play it started to discover the strange new world that it presented with consentual reality and will workers and it gained almost a cult following. The new Mage takes it back to what people were expecting to begin with and presents your standard spell casting wizards that integrate well with the other WoD splats. Some people will like both and many will like one or the other.

 

[eyebeams]

My reviews/commentaries on the nWOD (including Mage)

Corebook
Vampire
Werewolf
Mage
conclusions

You are exactly as credible as Funksaw.

 

[eyebeams]

Right, people connected to the game defending it in such a manner will drive me further away then a bad review.

It's something like the Shadowrun 4 discussions. "We love SR/Mage, but it sucked, so we made a better one! It's not different, it's just evolved into something better!"

So, if you're a fan of the old Mage, is new Mage the game for you?

It depends on what your question means. If you want to play the old game with the new, the mechanics port over very easily, but the setting doesn't. The game's central premises can easily coexist, though, since the views of the Atlantean Diamond are not necessarily accurate.

The things that primarily sucked about the old Mage were its game systems. The Sphere system's math made powerful magic weaker than rudimentary magic, because Effect power depended on successes, and you got fewer successes for powerful spells. Going by the book, punching somebody with rank 2 telekenesis was more powerful than a rank 5 nuclear explosion.

Ascension's setting had some problems in that, more than any other WoD setting, the game focused on the political machinations of a few canon NPCs. Phil Brucato thus felt compelled to destroy a large part of the setting to free it up for PC mages. Jess Heinig and Bill Bridges then spent the next few years rebuilding the setting from the root -- PCs -- up to the "cosmic" end of things, but they had very little time for this and thus, for most of Mage's existence we had a game where you didn't know how mages dealt with each other on a day to ay basis, but you knew how they had loose sex and gryphon rides in their sky castles. Ascension was a game whose setting didn't support its core story. When Revised started to gear up to provide support for the core story, many fans were taken aback, because they were used to nonsensical, escapist fantasy with pretenses toward something important instead of a game where you did things that had real, gritty moral import.

For example, when I wrote the scenario for Manifesto, a minority were either dismayed at its supposed amorality or that it was cliched "raid the Technocracy base" thing. The trouble is that, throughout the line's history, nobody had ever actually written about raiding a Technocracy outpost. This supposed cliche had never been supported in the game, with the possible exception of parts of one very early, obscure book, Loom of Fate. The other problem was that nobody had thought to consider that violently attacking a hidden base of operations wasn't like attacking loads of Stormtroopers a la Star Wars -- that the PCs would kill otherwise decent people in pursuit of their goals. Unfortunately, the game provided no support for exploring this.

Things like this were constant problems. The game went through many hands in an odd way and even changed in its basic premise over time (which was, as I said, very much like Awakening's in 1st Ed). It didn't get a chance to explore the full import of its themes and by the time it did, the fanbase was very uncertain as to what it had in its hands.

Naturally, Awakening's design responds to this with a strong central thesis, magic tied to morality and an emphasis on the basic interpersonal dealings mages have. The current rules set and the interpersonal end f the setting (cabal, Consilium, etc.) provide a basis to play Mage as it was intended: a game where your actions have moral consequences and where the politics of small, allied groups (ulike Vampire, where Kindred aspirations are ultimately personal and the coterie is an untrustworthy ally) are paramount, and where the loftier aspects of the game (free the world from thr yoke of the Exarchs) can be approached according to what the players want.

What Awakening chiefly lacks is the emphasis on paradigm as the touchstone for a character's allegiance. This is a big shift and not necessarily a welcome one for many, but for the purposes of design it lets the line further establish what it's like to be a part of a society of occultists. It also deals with the perceived villification of technology readers walked away from. I don't agree with that simply because I thought those readers were goddamn idiots. Paradigm is there in the form of the Watchtowers, which are basically pathways to realms where a particular paradigm is dominant. But paradigm and allegiance have been totally divorced, and the goal of the Pentacle is not a jostling ground for the supremacy of a particular Watchtower, but to preserve these paths to wisdom from those who would suppress them for the sake of a political viewpoint. Of course, every order believes that they aren't doing anything wrong and it's the other guys, but that's par for the course.

Personally, after 5 years of work on the old game and 2 years on the new, I'll be using the new rules for a game that is neither Awakening nor Ascension. I'm familiar with both and very much think that aspiring to replicate a game written 13 years ago is a sign of stunted vision. But to answer your question: You're talking about a dichotomy between the two games that only exists according to smallminded rhetoric. The relationship between the two is complex. You're better off simply giving it a thorough read and thinking of the kind of game sessions you can run, instead of treating it as philosophy, fanfic and other things that are tangential to the playing of an RPG.

 

[DanMcS]

My reviews/commentaries on the nWOD (including Mage)

Corebook
Vampire
Werewolf
Mage
conclusions

So, you're the same grimjim that was so trolltastic about white wolf games on rpg.net that he got banned from discussing white wolf at all, right?

 

[GRIMJIM]

So, you're the same grimjim that was so trolltastic about white wolf games on rpg.net that he got banned from discussing white wolf at all, right?

No, the one that got into a public argument with Justin Achilli and lacked the requisite amount of celebrity to get away with murder.

None of which is particularly relevent here.

My view on the nWoD (and a lot of White Wolf's more recent actions) is that they are fairly poor and my perspective on the nWoD games is different to a lot of other gamers having been involved in the Cam for so long. That means it is a skewed perspective but still one worth looking at I think.

Anyone can look at a game and think of the ways they can modify and bend it to suit the type of game they prefer but it is hard for those sorts of people to necessarily look at a game _as_it_is_written_. Being in the Cam sort of 'trained' me to take WoD material more at face value, as written. This is a bad thing in some ways - very hard to move outside that and do other things with WoD material - but good in others as you get a more straight review of what's actually there, rather than what COULD be there.

With particular regard to Mage it is the one thing of the new line that could have potentially won me back, oWoD mage was everything White Wolf did right (up to second edition) innovative, edgy, interesting, different.

To my great surprise the best game of the new bunch is the one I liked the least in the old, Werewolf. Still not good enough to win me back but if you don't have the Cam/White Wolf baggage I do its a pretty great game.