short version of Mage the Ascension?

[souran]

So Frank, if I want to play MtA but in a not-totally-broken way, can this be done?

I'm not Frank, but, well, obviously you can, because quite a lot of people did (and probably still do) that.

I dispute that. I have never heard of someone playing a non-broken game of Mage. Enjoyable yes. Non-broken, never.

-Username17

Honestly, has there ever been any OWOD game played that was not broken?

I realize its annecdotal but I have NEVER met anybody who played old wod that was able to describe anything like a stable game. Infact, the whole thing seemed to rejoice in the fact that they used only what portions of the rules they understood and cared for (and putting those two things together usually meant hardly any) and the thing everybody was most excited to tell me about was always how crazy (like sociopathic) and badass (as in bloodthirsty) their characters were. It didn't matter between mage, vampire or werewolf.

Whenever you see these results repeated as many times as I have you haveto start thinking that maybe the system and setting are problem.

[FatR]

I dispute that. I have never heard of someone playing a non-broken game of Mage. Enjoyable yes. Non-broken, never.

-Username17

What is your definition of "non-broken"? Because if a game allows PCs to provide comparable contributions to the plot and to affect the world on roughly similar level; while also providing reasonable challenges without overwhelming them or making obvious that their GM pulls things out of his ass, in short, if a game actually works, it is clearly not broken (if the system used for the game is, like MtA, that just means that the gaming group fixed it on its own). I've heard of numerous MtA games that met the criteria above and witnessed mages (as enemies or other PCs) in crossover games - including at least one PVP deathmatch game - that also met these criteria.

[Username17]

I dispute that. I have never heard of someone playing a non-broken game of Mage. Enjoyable yes. Non-broken, never.

-Username17

What is your definition of "non-broken"? Because if a game allows PCs to provide comparable contributions to the plot and to affect the world on roughly similar level; while also providing reasonable challenges without overwhelming them or making obvious that their GM pulls things out of his ass, in short, if a game actually works, it is clearly not broken (if the system used for the game is, like MtA, that just means that the gaming group fixed it on its own). I've heard of numerous MtA games that met the criteria above and witnessed mages (as enemies or other PCs) in crossover games - including at least one PVP deathmatch game - that also met these criteria.

There are no reasonable challenges in Mage. Everything anyone can do is all fiat. It's abundantly obvious from talkng to any mage player for five minutes that they are basically playing the same game where 13 year-old D&D players stick vorpal scythes together to make vorpal claws. Seriously, have you ever heard of a Mage game where a new player could come in, even with encyclopedic knowledge of the game rules and a full description of the story so far, have the slightest idea what their character could do? And if you answer no to that, how could you possibly describe the challenges as balanced?

-Username17

[souran]

As a caveat to what frank is saying also remember that what he is describing is then turned around and used AS THE MAJOR SELLING POINT OF THE GAME.

The "magic system limited only by your imagination" is really cool but what they were really selling were $40 hard bound coppies of "power rangers in the backyard for adults"

[Josh_Kablack]

I dispute that. I have never heard of someone playing a non-broken game of Mage. Enjoyable yes. Non-broken, never.-Username17

The closest attempt I am aware of was when some friends of mine decided that it made more sense and for a better system to update Ars Magica into a modern world by juggling a couple of the techniques around to account for a more modern and technological worldview.

[Prak]

What about reworking the spheres' effects so that they're not quite so broken, or so you at least have to have 5 dots in matter before you can freeze bomb the place.

I'm also toying with the idea of instituting a house rule anytime I run mage along the lines of "If you cannot explain the science behind your idea to me in one minute, you cannot do it."

It'll likely be a necessary house rule since the friend I have that really wants to play mage is a fucking Astrophysics major...

[Username17]

What about reworking the spheres' effects so that they're not quite so broken, or so you at least have to have 5 dots in matter before you can freeze bomb the place.

Lolwut? Fuck, I think I need the biting pear for this:


Look, Mage has three kinds of Spheres:

• Three "Pattern" Spheres that change "the universe" into "something else" giving you omnipotence over larger and larger portions of the the universe as you go up in power.
• Three "Perception" Spheres that basically just tell you more about the Storyteller's acid trips. But ideally, these give you omniscience in easy to digest slices.
• Three "Metamagic" Spheres that affect fate or the the goo underneath everything or open the bonus dungeons at the end of the game. These are there to be transcendental so that when you exhaust the limits of omniscience and omnipotence there is still something to do.

There is no "reworking the spheres" into something that isn't broken, because being broken is completely intertwined with the concept. The entire game is basically an episode of Super Jail. Things that literally cannot be understood happen and you are given the power to end the world or renew it and you're supposed to use this as a springboard to confront your own prejudices about reality, man.

The game makes more sense when explained to you by The Dude. There is a reason why, when I was writing up The Witches for aWoD I didn't use any of the Mage backstory or power sets. The whole concept requires not making any sense or having any semblance of balance.

-Username17

[Prak]

So, any game where you have the powers "fuck with gravity," "Create energy" or "turn shit into something else" is broken?

You're saying the Mage magic system is fundamentally unfixable... I find that somewhat hard to believe.

[Koumei]

and you are given the power to end the world or renew it

So it's the Melancholy of Haruhi Suziyama? That makes me want to play it more than anything actual Mage fans have ever said.

[Username17]

and you are given the power to end the world or renew it

So it's the Melancholy of Haruhi Suziyama? That makes me want to play it more than anything actual Mage fans have ever said.

It's more like The Utena Movie.

You're saying the Mage magic system is fundamentally unfixable... I find that somewhat hard to believe.

How is that hard to believe? The "fix" is to throw the entire 400 page magic system out altogether and use a different magic system. Josh said he saw some success using the Ars Magica system. I've seen some success just handing out vampiric disciplines. But the magic system they printed doesn't work on first principles. Not working is the primary selling point. Literally.

-Username17

[endersdouble]

You're saying the Mage magic system is fundamentally unfixable... I find that somewhat hard to believe.

How is that hard to believe? The "fix" is to throw the entire 400 page magic system out altogether and use a different magic system. Josh said he saw some success using the Ars Magica system. I've seen some success just handing out vampiric disciplines. But the magic system they printed doesn't work on first principles. Not working is the primary selling point. Literally.

-Username17

Bullshit. You seem to have an irrational hatred for Mage more than your hatred for many other games which are objectively /worse/. I will freely admit that when I play Mage, I am hoping to play Magical Tea Party. Yes. I won't try to lie about that. But you're really going to claim that it's fundamentally impossible to build a set of rules that help you effectively and reasonably adjudicate such a system? Or that this doesn't hold more interest for most people than padded sumo?

[Username17]

But you're really going to claim that it's fundamentally impossible to build a set of rules that help you effectively and reasonably adjudicate such a system?

It is logically impossible to make a set of rules to allow you to effectively adjudicate or describe a system of magic that cannot be adjudicated or described. Yes. That is exactly what I am saying.

Being impossible to adjudicate or describe is the entire point of the setting and the rules.

-Username17

[Koumei]

It's more like The Utena Movie.

Not sure if want.

But I just knew the link would be the "Now I'm a car!" bit.

[FatR]

There are no reasonable challenges in Mage. Everything anyone can do is all fiat.

Bullshit. Yeah, MtA encompass wildly different power levels, so that different groups can play wholly different games. But this is not even all that different from pre-4E DnD, where you can ask 3 gaming groups and get 4 opinions about acceptable power level, 5 different lists of allowed sources and 6 sets of houserules. What's much worse, power levels in MtA greatly depend on your ability to fast-talk GM into accepting your interpretation of its vague rules (and because I hate wasting my time in long arguments about rules, which MtA spawns way too often, this is one of my least favorite systems in both WoDs). However, a gaming group can get around this by working out a common understanding of how the game should function and sticking to it. And at least some groups manage to.

Seriously, have you ever heard of a Mage game where a new player could come in, even with encyclopedic knowledge of the game rules and a full description of the story so far, have the slightest idea what their character could do?

I fucking participated in such games (okay, these were crossover game, not pure Mage, but that's only makes the mechanics so much more of a clusterfuck). Seriously, I find this idea really insulting, because it assumes that all RPG players are either total morons, who cannot figure out a campaign's power level and existing consensus on what characters can do from a detailed description, or total assholes, who deliberately ignore them, because they want to be assholes, or something.

[endersdouble]

But you're really going to claim that it's fundamentally impossible to build a set of rules that help you effectively and reasonably adjudicate such a system?

It is logically impossible to make a set of rules to allow you to effectively adjudicate or describe a system of magic that cannot be adjudicated or described. Yes. That is exactly what I am saying.

Being impossible to adjudicate or describe is the entire point of the setting and the rules.

-Username17

Being nontrivial, maybe. As everyone but you here has established, no Mage player /wants/ a starting character to be able to freezebomb a room. It would be nice to have a system with some reasonable limits, and some consistent metanotation (i.e. rules) to allow a sane discussion. You honestly think those goals are unobtainable while allowing players a (good degree of) freedom in what their magic can do and how?

[Prak]

seriously, you could improve the magic system by simply rearranging the sphere effects. A starting mage should not be able to freeze bomb a room. But once you've mastered Matter and Forces, sure, why not?

Also, just making a house rule of giving out a conditional amount of Paradox, rather than a flat one point regardless of effect would help too.

Those two rules should cut down on some of the more outrageous, game breaking effects, while also leaving Mage:The Magical Tea Party.

[Username17]

Look, the entire fucking point is that the magic system is neither deterministic nor probabalisitc. Do you know what that fucking leaves? Arbitrary! And that exactly means "not balanced." As in seriously, the actual limits of the powers fluctuate in a non-random, non-predictable, non-rules-determined fashion.

The only thing you could possibly do to make such a game have a semblance of balance or order is to make the rules so long and confusing that no one knows whether they are being followed or not at any given time. That is the only possibility. Mage Games can be fun because the system is hundreds of pages long and reads like a window into madness.

The only ways you can make "you don't what your powers do" into a reality is to either have their effects be based on die-rolls (which would be probabalistic and is therefore out), or based on rules so baroque that neither the player nor the storyteller knows how they apply in any situation. Mage has the perfect system to accomplish its stated objective: one in which no one can objectively tell you how any power interacts with any circumstance.

-Username17

[Vnonymous]

[Anguirus]

I don't mean to derail the thread so if this feel like a derail I'll start another thread but how do people here feel about Nobilis's magic system (which I think is also essentially DM fiat magic tea party hand wave fun time)?

[Username17]

To go into more detail on why there is no point or possibility of improving or fixing Mage's magic system in any way, let's consider Forces. The Freezebomb example is actually Matter (create an open tank of 70 liters of solid nitrogen is the first recognizable spell any matter mage can learn). But right now this instant we are talking about Forces.

Creating a new force that pumped some quantized amount of energy into something over some reasonable distribution could be quite balanced with other effects (including non-magical ones like hand guns), and is basically what people want to do, right? You go all Vader on things, where you telekinetically strangle people or throw things around. Or you make beams of light or raise the temperature in something. Depending on how long you had to concentrate to boil water, it would be somewhere between slightly better than a pistol to kind of lame in combat. And that would be reasonable, predictable, and easy to balance with other effects. But it's not Mage!

In Mage the core conceits are firstly that actually creating Forces like that is almost impossible, because to create a Force of any kind you have to have a strand of quintessence to layer a pattern over and then layer a pattern over it. The very structure of the Mage universe precludes basic telekinesis and room heating being in any way easy. Fuck, it's basically a two Sphere synergy effect to do any of that. But secondly, because if the magic in Mage was in any way predictable like that it would fail the basic claim of being not explainable or predictable. If as gamers we could reasonably expect to know what would happen when we activated our powers it would literally destroy the dream-state that Mage is attempting to evoke. Because then it would be unreasonable to expect the character to not know what their stuff does (at least, not once he has used it a couple of times).

And yes, having the Earth "let go" of a target and have them fly into space at a thousand miles an hour as if they were a released slingstone in the void of space ends up being the easiest possible spell for a Forces Mage. But that is necessarily true because of the fact that the forces are these patterns layered onto quintessence pipelines and you can only attach or detach them with your Pattern magic without getting into complex quintessence shunting.

If at the table you find that launching someone into space at a thousand miles an hour is something you don't want to happen, the solution - in Mage - is not to change the Forces sphere into something that makes any fucking sense or has some semblance of balance or consistency. That would ruin the game. The solution is to tell the player that the Earth isn't really spinning and the Theory of Universal Gravitation is "just a theory" and what is actually happening is that heavier things like the ground more, so when they cut the forces connecting them to the Earth they just float there harmlessly like a balloon and have to swim around through the air, dude.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty2]

Look, the entire fucking point is that the magic system is neither deterministic nor probabalisitc. Do you know what that fucking leaves? Arbitrary! And that exactly means "not balanced." As in seriously, the actual limits of the powers fluctuate in a non-random, non-predictable, non-rules-determined fashion.

Yeah, mage is pretty much magic teaparty with guidelines. Given that for any effect, the DM basically chooses a difficulty threshold that you have to bypass to make it happen. And that can range anywhere from a no brainer with 1 success to like 50+ successes, which is going to be pretty much impossible.

And all that varies from DM to DM. In fact, you're probably better off getting to know your DM rather than the actual rules.

As a codified system mage pretty much fails miserably, but then it's basically supposed to be freeform. And once you realize that, I think it still can be a fun game to play. You just have to realize that most of it is seriously going to be arbitrary.

[Josh_Kablack]

I don't mean to derail the thread so if this feel like a derail I'll start another thread but how do people here feel about Nobilis's magic system (which I think is also essentially DM fiat magic tea party hand wave fun time)?

No idea, never actually knew anybody who played nobilis.

But a bunch of my old gamer buddies and some of their friends-of-friends got paid to write it.

[Koumei]

Nobilis has a novelty book that doesn't fit properly on most shelves and looks messy no matter what books it's with, and the system, such as it is, basically exists for people to circlejerk about how they are real roleplayers.

Holy shit, it's just like the World of Darkness in that respect.

I especially like how one fan was saying it's refreshing because "You can't powergame or munchkin it" while another was saying "Yeah basically the tricks you can do are a bit weak, you just want to spend the points on core stats" and another was saying "So with my (stat) up the highest, everyone has to do as I say when we're at the base."

[K]

All of the WoD systems break when a reasonably creative person hits them.

I mean, in Vampire the most newbie of vampires can assemble a literal army of blood-bonded special forces guys to demo elder vampires and their havens, and the most hardcore vampire can't survive a sniper bullet to the head or being hit with a car, both of which are wicked easy to set up (yay for Obfuscate countering Auspex!).

Mage just breaks right after character creation, while the others take up to two sessions before the core conceits of the game are violated.

[FatR]

Stuff.

I don't even know what to answer, because you clearly speak about a version of MtA from some different dimension, where it doesn't have effects based on dice rolls, or, say, damage caps.

P.S. I cannot believe, that I actually try to defend MtA here.