Mage the Ascension: Is it really possible to remove Entropy?

[TheFlatline]

Given the prevalence of 'street magic' around nowadays I'm pretty sure you could launch actual fireballs and go invisible and shit and people would just assume there was some kind of trick to it. They'd be looking for the hidden camera for a while before they finally broke out with the:

That's a 4 point merit I want to say.

[TheFlatline]

Now if the muggle examined that pocket moments before and was sure it was empty, it'd probably be vulgar.

How does Mage's magic system not totally lead to extreme forms of Pyrrhonism for munchkins seeking advantage? For example, if you pull a 20 out of your pocket after the muggle checked it, you could always go 'but how do you know that I didn't have a secret pocket/have a hole in my pocket that leads to my underpants/that I didn't fold it up really tight and put it in my pack of gum/etc.' in order to subvert the vulgar magic penalties. Rinse and repeat for every use of magic and the game becomes a combination Batman/Kira/Tzeentch-esque absurdity.

You're encountering the problems with oMage. Officially if it sounds like something the average person would believe, then it's coincidental... if you're running with 3rd person limited perspective. 3rd person omniscient would still be vulgar because God was watching. So while omniscient hypothetical observer is more consistent probably and leads to less arguments, you're basically nerfed to fuck and back if you want to actually *do* anything.

[virgil]

One method to handle the omniscient observer I've seen from a player was to layer coincidental buffs on otherwise mundane actions; Forces to make the bullet travel with more force, Entropy to improve aim, Matter/Life to assess weak points, etc. Overall, they were casting just as many or fewer spells per combat than the others, but they were all inherently coincidental and had synergy to let handguns shoot down escaping helicopters.

[Longes]

My experience with mage was limited to reading through the MtA book in a borders once, but I always thought you got paradoxed if and only if your magic gets observed by muggles as being blatantly magical. The whole point of it is that you buzz gets hashed because people don't believe it works.

Thus the only observers you're worried about are the actual people who are observing you and if you can fool them then you're golden. Anything else seems like being needless obtuse and punishing just for the sake of it. That's the only solution that makes sense and is remotely workable so it's hard for me to imagine people even considering another method

Nah they later introduced coincidental and vulgar magic and basically blew the whole concept of paradox up. The idea is that if a muggle saw your magic go off and wouldn't necessarily think "that's impossible" (so a car narrowly misses you, bullets miss you, etc) then it's coincidental and easier and doesn't usually involve paradox. Throwing a fireball is vulgar though.

*that* led to the eternal argument of " is reality 3rd person omniscient vs 3rd person limited", and the great schism was created.

Say I used matter to create a 20 in my pocket to pay for lunch. 3rd person limited would argue this is coincidental, since a muggle would just see you pull 20 out of a pocket. Now if the muggle examined that pocket moments before and was sure it was empty, it'd probably be vulgar. 3rd person omniscient is basically God/reality seeing inside your pocket and seeing that 20 didn't exist before, and smacking you with vulgar magic penalties as a result.

3rd person limited makes the game more fun. 3rd person omniscient makes entropy the only really safe sphere to use for coincidental magic since it's whole jag is "probabilities".

The additional problem is that mages can only do magic in a way that fits their paradigm. So Virtual Adepts can only do magic by (somehow) using computers, Order of Hermes does latin chanting and glyphs, Ecstatics have to take drugs and alcohol to do magic. So "I just pull a dollar bill out of an empty pocket" isn't even a thing that can happen. Son of Ether will have to have premade the pocket to function as a teleporter. VA will have to pull out his phone and run PocketBill.exe. Dreamspeaker will have to call out to spirit of pockets.

[virgil]

Really, Doubt just sounds better and better.

[Orion]

One problem that comes up again and again in freeform magic systems is what I'd call "degree of control." There's a closely related concept you could include I'd call "need to visualize." Most of these systems just run with "degree of force" -- they tell you what you can affect and how dramatically, but now how finely. When people realize that's bullshit, they tend to go to a results-based format where the difficulty is based on the impact to the game. I'm curious whether it would be possible to put in degree of control mechanics in a serious way and whether that would help.

For example, someone in this thread recommended using Forces to control fictional dice rolls (dice rolled by the character, not the player). Obviously dice are physical objects and it's possible to turn the right side face up by applying the right force from the right directions. However, I doubt most mages know either intellectually or intuitively how much force from what direction is needed. I haven't read any Mage products, so maybe this kind of thing is explicitly allowed. But, if I were writing a freeform magic game with a power like "Forces" I'd say that a mage could only control the roll of a die by freezing it in midair, spinning it to the correct face, and setting it down. Which would pretty obviously be cheating.

Similar but even more dramatic problem with the lottery balls. Is it really enough to say that you want the right ball to come out if you character has no idea at all what physical processes would have to happen to get that result? A mage should be able to grab the right ball and drag it to the slot, pushing everything else out of the way, but that's again not really a desirable method.

[Longes]

Now if the muggle examined that pocket moments before and was sure it was empty, it'd probably be vulgar.

How does Mage's magic system not totally lead to extreme forms of Pyrrhonism for munchkins seeking advantage? For example, if you pull a 20 out of your pocket after the muggle checked it, you could always go 'but how do you know that I didn't have a secret pocket/have a hole in my pocket that leads to my underpants/that I didn't fold it up really tight and put it in my pack of gum/etc.' in order to subvert the vulgar magic penalties. Rinse and repeat for every use of magic and the game becomes a combination Batman/Kira/Tzeentch-esque absurdity.

You're encountering the problems with oMage. Officially if it sounds like something the average person would believe, then it's coincidental... if you're running with 3rd person limited perspective. 3rd person omniscient would still be vulgar because God was watching. So while omniscient hypothetical observer is more consistent probably and leads to less arguments, you're basically nerfed to fuck and back if you want to actually *do* anything.

Except it's not. Paradox in oMage is really weird and inconsistent, so while some times the books work the way you said they do, other times they say that muggles no longer have True Faith in magic, so even if you are summoning demons while surrounded by your Vicca clubmates, you still get hit by Paradox because your fellow Viccans don't believe in magic on subconscios level and because majority of people in the area don't believe in magic. This gets really important in old settings like Sorcerer's Crusade, where technology like firearms and electricity stop working as you go farther from europe.

To make coincidental/vulgar thing even worse, using Space to teleport into an empty elevator is a vulgar effect. But pulling a bill out of your pocket is coincidental.

[Longes]

One problem that comes up again and again in freeform magic systems is what I'd call "degree of control." There's a closely related concept you could include I'd call "need to visualize." Most of these systems just run with "degree of force" -- they tell you what you can affect and how dramatically, but now how finely. When people realize that's bullshit, they tend to go to a results-based format where the difficulty is based on the impact to the game. I'm curious whether it would be possible to put in degree of control mechanics in a serious way and whether that would help.

For example, someone in this thread recommended using Forces to control fictional dice rolls (dice rolled by the character, not the player). Obviously dice are physical objects and it's possible to turn the right side face up by applying the right force from the right directions. However, I doubt most mages know either intellectually or intuitively how much force from what direction is needed. I haven't read any Mage products, so maybe this kind of thing is explicitly allowed. But, if I were writing a freeform magic game with a power like "Forces" I'd say that a mage could only control the roll of a die by freezing it in midair, spinning it to the correct face, and setting it down. Which would pretty obviously be cheating.

Similar but even more dramatic problem with the lottery balls. Is it really enough to say that you want the right ball to come out if you character has no idea at all what physical processes would have to happen to get that result?

Gnosis/Arete handles that for you. A mage, unless he follows scientific paradigm like Virtual Adepts or Sons of Ether, doesn't apply forces. He wills a result. So a Virtual Adept would use his hyperdimensional math to calculate precisely which part of the table he should tap to alter quantum bullshit to make dice drop as he wants, while Ecstatic would sniff a line of coke and let his expanded mind alter the reality. In Mage system the result isn't "Apply telekinesis to rotate the dice". The result is "Dice fell the way I want them to."

[John Magnum]

I don't understand how it's possible for an effect to be coincidental to an omniscient observer because they can see your character perform whatever is necessary in their idiom to cast the spell, so they would presumably know "Ah, it may look like they got lucky with that taxicab, but I saw them tapping into Entropy to trigger it." Or they would see the bullets, and be able to compare their observed velocity with the energy imparted by the chemical reaction that impelled them in the first place, and go "Clearly a Forces user has been at work", or some similar shit. They're omniscient!

There seems to be a very specific level of awareness posited by "third-person omniscient" vulgarity adjudication which I don't really have a handle on.

[Longes]

I don't understand how it's possible for an effect to be coincidental to an omniscient observer because they can see your character perform whatever is necessary in their idiom to cast the spell, so they would presumably know "Ah, it may look like they got lucky with that taxicab, but I saw them tapping into Entropy to trigger it." Or they would see the bullets, and be able to compare their observed velocity with the energy imparted by the chemical reaction that impelled them in the first place, and go "Clearly a Forces user has been at work", or some similar shit. They're omniscient!

There seems to be a very specific level of awareness posited by "third-person omniscient" vulgarity adjudication which I don't really have a handle on.

You can't get a handle on it because there's just nothing to grab. Pulling a bill out of your empty pocket is explicitly coincidental, but teleporting into an empty elevator is explicitly vulgar. Coincidental/vulgar magic system is just incoherent and unexplainable. Giving people aneurisms with Mind attacks is coincidental, but doing the same with Life is vulgar.

[virgil]

The HOP model typically presumes it's just a regular person with security cameras *everywhere*. They aren't given a good education and their senses are at a pretty human fidelity, so they don't realize that the bullet shouldn't have veered that extra 2 degrees to the left.

And keep in mind, the HOP/HAP was a fan-made attempt to reconcile the mess that is the official rules.

[Ice9]

Something I'd like to try is a Mage-like system that was based solely on actual observers, not any kind of hypothetical ones. So for example:

1) The force resisting magic applies to anything perceived by a sentient creature. The closer to sapient, the more resistance. A few rats watching you just makes things take more effort. A human would make it (nearly?) impossible.

2) This applies using all the traditional senses, plus an extra one - let's call it proximity sense - that detects anything within a short distance of the observer (5', maybe). So even in the dark, trying to conjure dynamite in someone's pocket fails.

3) Mages do count as observers, to an extent. To even be a mage, you have to partially burn out your third eye, meaning you count as like a rat for observer purposes, but that still is some degree of resistance unless you hide the effects from yourself.

4) You can go the whole distance and completely burn out your third eye, at which point you could do magic in front of yourself with no resistance. On the downside, you no longer have any resistance against other people's / creatures' magic.

5) Whether the magic would seem coincidental or not isn't important. If someone is looking at a die, you can't use magic to affect where it lands, even though they'd never know the difference.

[Username17]

I don't understand how it's possible for an effect to be coincidental to an omniscient observer because they can see your character perform whatever is necessary in their idiom to cast the spell, so they would presumably know "Ah, it may look like they got lucky with that taxicab, but I saw them tapping into Entropy to trigger it." Or they would see the bullets, and be able to compare their observed velocity with the energy imparted by the chemical reaction that impelled them in the first place, and go "Clearly a Forces user has been at work", or some similar shit. They're omniscient!

There seems to be a very specific level of awareness posited by "third-person omniscient" vulgarity adjudication which I don't really have a handle on.

You can't get a handle on it because there's just nothing to grab. Pulling a bill out of your empty pocket is explicitly coincidental, but teleporting into an empty elevator is explicitly vulgar. Coincidental/vulgar magic system is just incoherent and unexplainable. Giving people aneurisms with Mind attacks is coincidental, but doing the same with Life is vulgar.

Basically this. Also remember that when they do choose to tell you to work it out yourself, it's ultimately about whether there's an acceptable mundane explanation for the effect. But explanations necessarily happen after the fact, but you get paradox or not right away.

So regardless of whether you want to talk about 3rd person limited or 3rd person semi-omniscient or whatever the fuck, you also have a massive causality fuckup. You get an amount of paradox now based on how satisfying the explanation your (possibly hypothetical) observer is going to get.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

In Mage everything is magic. When Dave the gangster busts a cap in someone's ass with his 9mm glock, he's casting a Forces rote. When Joe the barber cuts someone's hair he's using a Life rote. When Ben calls Cathy on his cell phone they're both casting a Correspondence rote.

It's just that they're all using a stripped-down version of the technocracy paradigm such that casting 9mm requires you to hold a loaded pistol in your hand and pull the trigger, casting haircut requires a long and involved ritual using scissors, and casting mobile phone call requires multiple complex and intricate devices.

The real difference between sleepers and mages is that sleepers can only cast coincidental magic. And this is partly because sleepers are limited due to not being awakened. But it's mostly because the because the sleeper's paradigm is the dominate paradigm and thus everything they can do is by definition coincidental.

The difference between coincidental and non-coincidental is 'can it be explained within the dominate paradigm without breaking logic or credulity'

Though the sleeper paradigm is based on the technocracy paradigm, if a technocratic mage builds a wormhole machine in his basement then that's still vulgar. It's not vulgar because the sleepers don't believe wormholes are possible. It's well established that they are. It's because how the fuck did you build one in your basement when countless scientists and engineers with huge budgets haven't been able to?

On the other hand, if you cast Summon Taxi, that's perfectly explainable within the dominate paradigm as a coincidence. You performed a stupid and crazy ritual that did absolutely nothing and a taxi cab just happened to be driving by.

A everything would be vulgar to a truly omniscient observer because they'd see the magic that underlies the very foundations of the universe.

[TheFlatline]

How does Mage's magic system not totally lead to extreme forms of Pyrrhonism for munchkins seeking advantage? For example, if you pull a 20 out of your pocket after the muggle checked it, you could always go 'but how do you know that I didn't have a secret pocket/have a hole in my pocket that leads to my underpants/that I didn't fold it up really tight and put it in my pack of gum/etc.' in order to subvert the vulgar magic penalties. Rinse and repeat for every use of magic and the game becomes a combination Batman/Kira/Tzeentch-esque absurdity.

You're encountering the problems with oMage. Officially if it sounds like something the average person would believe, then it's coincidental... if you're running with 3rd person limited perspective. 3rd person omniscient would still be vulgar because God was watching. So while omniscient hypothetical observer is more consistent probably and leads to less arguments, you're basically nerfed to fuck and back if you want to actually *do* anything.

Except it's not. Paradox in oMage is really weird and inconsistent, so while some times the books work the way you said they do, other times they say that muggles no longer have True Faith in magic, so even if you are summoning demons while surrounded by your Vicca clubmates, you still get hit by Paradox because your fellow Viccans don't believe in magic on subconscios level and because majority of people in the area don't believe in magic. This gets really important in old settings like Sorcerer's Crusade, where technology like firearms and electricity stop working as you go farther from europe.

To make coincidental/vulgar thing even worse, using Space to teleport into an empty elevator is a vulgar effect. But pulling a bill out of your pocket is coincidental.

Yeah I forgot about that. Some shit is just flat out vulgar. Unless you do it in your sanctum. In which case nothing is.

[TheFlatline]

In Mage everything is magic. When Dave the gangster busts a cap in someone's ass with his 9mm glock, he's casting a Forces rote. When Joe the barber cuts someone's hair he's using a Life rote. When Ben calls Cathy on his cell phone they're both casting a Correspondence rote.

It's just that they're all using a stripped-down version of the technocracy paradigm such that casting 9mm requires you to hold a loaded pistol in your hand and pull the trigger, casting haircut requires a long and involved ritual using scissors, and casting mobile phone call requires multiple complex and intricate devices.

The real difference between sleepers and mages is that sleepers can only cast coincidental magic. And this is partly because sleepers are limited due to not being awakened. But it's mostly because the because the sleeper's paradigm is the dominate paradigm and thus everything they can do is by definition coincidental.

The difference between coincidental and non-coincidental is 'can it be explained within the dominate paradigm without breaking logic or credulity'

Though the sleeper paradigm is based on the technocracy paradigm, if a technocratic mage builds a wormhole machine in his basement then that's still vulgar. It's not vulgar because the sleepers don't believe wormholes are possible. It's well established that they are. It's because how the fuck did you build one in your basement when countless scientists and engineers with huge budgets haven't been able to?

On the other hand, if you cast Summon Taxi, that's perfectly explainable within the dominate paradigm as a coincidence. You performed a stupid and crazy ritual that did absolutely nothing and a taxi cab just happened to be driving by.

A everything would be vulgar to a truly omniscient observer because they'd see the magic that underlies the very foundations of the universe.

That was probably my bad. I should use the phrase "omnipresent". As in watching everything, everywhere, instead of knowing everything. So in theory the omnipresent observer is inside your pocket and knows there is no 20 there, so it's vulgar.

It's still a bad headache.

Also if memory serves once you hit or surpass Arete 5 you can drop the BS with your paradigm and straight up use magic. You get a bonus if you stick with your paradigm though.

[TheFlatline]

Really, Doubt just sounds better and better.

Doubt is one of my favorite concepts for a game ever, if we could figure out a strong mechanic to reinforce it.

Or just accept that player and character knowledge are two different things and run with it.

[Omegonthesane]

Really, Doubt just sounds better and better.

Doubt is one of my favorite concepts for a game ever, if we could figure out a strong mechanic to reinforce it.

Or just accept that player and character knowledge are two different things and run with it.

I thought the other concern for Doubt was whether the PCs should be able to prove to themselves beyond reasonable, well, doubt (or at least have clear and convincing evidence) that they have superpowers.

This could be partly solved by either saying that the powers in question only work if you suspect the Conspiracy is active in the immediate vicinity (in which case the minmaxy solution is to be a paranoid schizophrenic) or simply by designing powers that do not lend themselves to safe testing. You aren't going to run experiments on your own bullet dodging powers lightly after all.

[schpeelah]

I thought the other concern for Doubt was whether the PCs should be able to prove to themselves beyond reasonable, well, doubt (or at least have clear and convincing evidence) that they have superpowers.

This could be partly solved by either saying that the powers in question only work if you suspect the Conspiracy is active in the immediate vicinity (in which case the minmaxy solution is to be a paranoid schizophrenic) or simply by designing powers that do not lend themselves to safe testing. You aren't going to run experiments on your own bullet dodging powers lightly after all.

Not quite. Every power use is required to be coincidental with respect to the first person observer. That was not particularly debated. The debate was over what can be done to mechanically support the players being unsure how their powers work and what they can do. The result was that we could not find a way for them to be useful yet actually uncertain if they exist, or to make the various power paradigms resistant to being researched via experimentation without making them identical for practical purposes.

[TheFlatline]

I thought the other concern for Doubt was whether the PCs should be able to prove to themselves beyond reasonable, well, doubt (or at least have clear and convincing evidence) that they have superpowers.

This could be partly solved by either saying that the powers in question only work if you suspect the Conspiracy is active in the immediate vicinity (in which case the minmaxy solution is to be a paranoid schizophrenic) or simply by designing powers that do not lend themselves to safe testing. You aren't going to run experiments on your own bullet dodging powers lightly after all.

Not quite. Every power use is required to be coincidental with respect to the first person observer. That was not particularly debated. The debate was over what can be done to mechanically support the players being unsure how their powers work and what they can do. The result was that we could not find a way for them to be useful yet actually uncertain if they exist, or to make the various power paradigms resistant to being researched via experimentation without making them identical for practical purposes.

Yea both of you are sort of on it. Effects only *might* work if they are coincidental to the user. So in-character you aren't sure if you're crazy or actually magical.

Aside from separating out player knowledge from PC knowledge, the mechanics are where it gets sticky in having theme reflected in workable mechanics.

[schpeelah]

Yea both of you are sort of on it. Effects only *might* work if they are coincidental to the user. So in-character you aren't sure if you're crazy or actually magical.

Aside from separating out player knowledge from PC knowledge, the mechanics are where it gets sticky in having theme reflected in workable mechanics.

That's no different from any other activation roll. The actual lengthy discussion was about finding a mechanic that would incentivise the players acting unsure of the powers above and beyond roleplaying how their characters feel about them.

The goal is to encourage the players to play their characters as if they were not sure whether their powers work without the ham handed approach of telling MC to take a shit all over the PCs if he thinks that the players are "rollplaying".

In short, to make the doubt and paranoia and double guessing about coincidences be as immersive a process as possible.

If all else fails, you can just ask players to immerse themselves in the role and act like they don't know their powers are real even though they have read the book and know that they are. That is also a solution to the problem. I'd just prefer to have a set of mechanics that encourage that sort of thing.

[Username17]

If you just went the Mage route with Doubt and left it up to the Player to convince the MC that whatever they wanted to do was coincidental to a first person observer, the number one thing you'd have to bring the hammer down on is Fishmalking. Whatever your system is, it has to absolutely put the kibosh on people making dubious genre-fucking claims like "My character is crazy for Street Fighter and thinks it is totally normal to shoot fireballs out of his fist."

Probably you'd want to define specific deviant perceptions you're allowed to have, and have those come with real limitations. So you're allowed to simply lose track of numbers of things, giving you the ability to use innumeromancy on bullets in your gun or chips in your bag, but also causing you to be really bad at math. And to have that stuff work, you have to actually be losing track of things, so if someone else was counting your bullets, you'd be surprised when you pulled the trigger and it went "click." You could effectively "find" all kinds of shit in almost any situation by being blind, but then you have to actually be blind, with all the not being able to hit things that implies.

And of course, people could make your gun go "click" by counting your bullets for you. Because magic would still need to be coincidental to all 3rd person observers in addition to the first person observer. And if it failed to do that, it wouldn't "generate paradox" to cause crazy shit to go off all around you and convince everyone everywhere that magic was for real - it would just not work.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

You... just... repeated basically what I said.

Edit: That wasn't pointed to Frank

[Occluded Sun]

In oMage, the 'problems' associated with coincidental magic aren't problems. They're the obvious benefits of having the dominant paradigm back you up, and it's why the Technocracy was so potent. Their grossly vulgar powers weren't necessarily any more potent than any other magical tradition's, but they could get away with lots and lots of coincidental magic.

I agree that they never formalized a coherent way of looking at the issue in its entirety, but a lot of people worked out compromises with similar features. Bending the rules slightly is coincidental. Contradicting reality in a way that normal people can produce a rational explanation for is 'minor vulgar', and doing so in a way that is observably impossible is 'major vulgar'.

[hyzmarca]

The big problem with Paradox is best summed up by the ending of the first (and only) Matrix movie.

If you go cast a flying spell and go Superman over Manhattan, this is terribly vulger and you'll eat some paradox.

But millions of people have seen you flying around like Superman. Some of them have phones that can record video. And while I'm sure that the technocracy can remove them all from Youtube, that just makes their giant conspiracy glaringly obvious.

So the next time you cast your flight spell, is it any easier?

The rule that magic doesn't work easily because no one believe in it should immediately evaporate once you do actual magic in front of large numbers of people.