I'm one of the suckers who paid for a copy of the Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition. It finally got delivered this week, and a cursory review of the MC screen - not even the book, which I have not had time/will to crack open yet; the freaking
screen - reveals mediocre-at-best art, truly atrocious editing, and exciting new awful design on top of the awful design left uncorrected from earlier editions. Some highlights from the art:
- The new iconic Virtual Adept has plagiarized the Assassin's Creed hood.
- The new iconic Euthanatos is wearing a black wifebeater with some kind of weird knock-off of the Soviet hammer and sickle on it. WTF?
- The new iconic Dreamspeaker appears to have exactly one (1) breast.
The editing and general design:
- Honest to fucking God, there is a "p.XX" reference in the MC screen. It's in the "General Circumstances" section of the "Magickal Difficulty Modifiers" table, for the line item "Domino Effect," which appears to be a totally new concept, so it was extra necessary to have a real page reference here.
- Speaking of the difficulty modifiers: there is a -1 difficulty bonus when you are "Manipulating Mythic Threads/hypernarrative." What the fuck does that mean? I thought I knew this game, but apparently not.
- On the Damage table, one hit gets you 0 levels of damage, two hits nets you 2 levels of damage, 3 hits nets you six levels, and from there it ascends by twos. WTF? Why the four-level jump?
- Witnesses remain undefined for Paradox purposes, and they have tweaked the Paradox rules on a botch once again. I think that in 4 editions of M:tAs, we have now had four different Paradox botch rules that vary from each other only slightly.
- On the difficulty modifiers table, "Outlandish to Godlike Feat" carries a +1 to +3 difficulty penalty. An Outlandish feat is already defined as requiring 10-20 successes, while a Godlike feat requires 20+. I don't need to calculate the expected value of the dicepool to know that your odds of success start to drop precipitously once you do anything that requires more than 10 successes. Past that point the game becomes a matter of "are you casting this as a ritual with helpers, a week of prep time, and all other positive circumstances you can scrounge, or do you fail?" The game would have been better served if they had just cut off the possible scope of Effects at a certain point and said "past this, you use these different rules and separate formula for ritual magic."
- Jesus fucking Christ the math is so bad here. Since the base difficulty calculation still has the form of "highest Sphere + {3, 4, 5 based on vulgarity}" this means that you can push difficulties over 10 without too much trouble, and the screen presents no fewer than 3 alternative calculations for this:
- Maximum difficulty is set at 10, ignoring any modifiers that would go over. (This is apparently the rules default, which is terrible.)
- Maximum difficulty is set at 10, but every +1 to difficulty over 10 adds another required hit for minimum success. (Even worse!)
- Maximum difficulty is 9, and every +1 to difficulty over 9 adds another required hit to succeed. (Why did they throw this out from Revised? Cargo cult design is why.)
- Whoever was responsible for the Gauntlet Ratings chart that made it to print deserves a special place in RPG hell, in whatever circle punishes the innumerate. Here is the table, with an added column for actual chance of success for each line item for an Arete 5 Mage who spends no Willpower or Quintessence:
Area // Difficulty // Hits // % Chance of success
Node // 3 // 1 // 96%
Deep Wilderness // 5 // 2 // 76%
Rural Countryside // 6 // 3 // 39%
Most Urban Areas // 7 // 4 // 7%
Downtown // 8 // 5 // 0.24%
Technocracy Lab // 9 // 5 // 0.03%
- Even a goddamn Oracle (Arete 9) has about a 1% chance to step sideways from a Technocracy lab, and has a 9% chance to botch without spending from the power pool. Once again this is a case where you should have a separate set of rules for Mighty Rituals of Vast Power. I pity the poor MC who didn't take the time to calculate these probabilities in advance and lets the party inadvertently smear themselves all over the pavement when they try to jump into the Umbra to escape the ItX killbots.
- Last but not least, the editing in the "Paradox Backlash Roll" table is just an atrocity. Terms like "Permanent Paradox" and "Paradox Realm" are randomly bolded or not as the editor's meds dictated, and the description of what happens on 21+ successes on a Paradox roll is incoherent to the point that I'm pretty sure that as written, it's less of a big deal than the effects of a 16-20 success Backlash. That whole table has its "ands" and "ors" confused in general, but you can reconstruct most of the intended meaning from context until you hit that last line item for 21+. Sheesh.
The fact that M20 sucks shouldn't surprise anyone, but I honestly didn't expect that even the freaking reference screen would reek of failure.