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54 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So what is magic, anyway?, April 8, 2006
This review is from: Mage the Awakening (World of Darkness (White Wolf Hardcover)) (Hardcover)
I've run Mage: the Ascension in all three of the previous editions. I've tweaked the rules for it, including once having a huge booklet of house rules (which, ironically, were almost the exact same changes between 1st and 2nd edition.)
First, I'm a big fan of the New World of Darkness mechanics. They are cleaner, run much faster, and cause a lot less bickering with my players. Once we played for a bit, people got it.
I had to fight to prove to people that Mage: The Ascension was a playable game - but I did it.
Then came the book "Ascension," which ended the mage line, and I honestly thought it was awful. This also made it so that Awakening was going to be a tough sell for me.
The more I heard about Mage: The Awakening, the less and less I looked forward to it. But I had one on pre-order, so having already paid for it, I figured I'd give it a read when it arrived.
I've had the book for over six months now. I've been running it almost that entire time. My players range from heavy rules-lawyers types to people who hate looking into rulebooks and at most just want to know how many dice to roll so they can get this mechanics thing over with and bacl to the role-playing.
They all seem to like the new mage. As do I.
Some complaints I've heard:
1) Mage: The Awakening doesn't have Technomancers.
Tell that to the guy in my game who has been doing magic using his PDA, laptop, and various devices he's built.
2) This is like D&D magic.
Except that D&D magic doesn't let you improvise - and my players after only a few weeks were making up effects that weren't listed in the rote setions of the mage book.
3) There are no antagonists.
Except for the Seers of the Throne, the Binders, the Scelesti, and the Liches. Oh, and whatever other threats the Storyteller thinks up.
4) Magic is all westernized.
Maybe. Then again, that's a stylistic choice. Who is to say that a mage can't use Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Australian, or Native American style trappings in his workings?
5) Atlantis.
Yeah, maybe a legitimate beef. Though not one that is insurmountable - it just takes a half-minute of crativity to get through that.
What does the new mage offer?
1) Better Paradox.
Finally, Paradox is dangerous the moment you start doing something big and vulgar.
2) Clearer rules.
How much 'Mana' (quintessence) you can spend. How paradox works. What rotes do. How to resist magic. Sure, I never had problems with this when I ran the old mage, but this puts it in clear black and white so I don't have to debate every frickin' time.
3) More limited mages.
I had no problem with mages being flexible, but when you have one player who is developing a character, and another who is buying up their spheres as high as possible, the first guy felt held back and useless as guy #2 did everything magical in the game. Now, that's no longer the case. No one mage can do everything and expect to last long. I appreciate that as both a player and a storyteller.
4) More interesting antagonists.
The Seers of the Throne are just like you. They just have different goals. Their magic is the same, they view magic the same way, and it truly is just a philosophical difference between you and them.
Overall, the book is laid out well, edited fairly well for a White Wolf release, and with the exceptions of the gold specks on every page, easy to read.
As I've found out, you can't judge the game just by reading it - you have to play it to see what it truly is capable of. And having done that, it really isn't that much different from the old mage.
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56 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The new Mage makes much more sense, October 6, 2005
This review is from: Mage the Awakening (World of Darkness (White Wolf Hardcover)) (Hardcover)
My fellow gamers, I've noticed, are often hidebound, conservative to a fault, and resistant to any change. Many reviewers of the new World of Darkness games reject these new ones out of hand for not being the old versions. Paradoxically, when material is similar to the old system, it's not "retained," it's "regurgitated" as if it's some kind of cheat that the company didn't change that, too. This is the same knee-jerk reactions that I have seen in every game system that undergoes a major revision, whether it turns out to ultimately be for the better or not.
Speaking as a 21-year gaming vet, and as a World of Darkness player since Vampire's first edition, I am completely satisfied with the new system and the new versions of the core games. Here is what I like about Mage, in particular.
1. Paradox makes sense. Sure, the old system was wide open, with paradigm, collective belief, who was and wasn't a 'witness' for purposes of paradox, but it was a real pain for a Storyteller at times. Not only that, but I always felt the original explanation for Paradox to be pretty lacking -- this time, as a side effect of the breaking of the world, it has an adequate explanation.
2. The paths and orders combine interestingly. Your character's political leanings now have an expression, and like everything else we humans are involved in, there are certainly factions within factions. Oddly, I find the new Mage most reminiscent of the old Vampire, with its byzantine Camarilla and its politics.
3. New antagonists. Frankly, the Technocracy always bugged me. It never worked as well as I liked to have the Technocracy as the over-arching, world-girdling, undefeatable conspiracy. Simply put, the Technocracy was simply too strong to ever be a truly defeatable enemy. On top of that, the Marauders were cartoonish, comic-book versions of 'madness', bearing about as much semblance to real mental illness as The Joker. And on top of THAT, the Nephandi (yes, they're still around... kind of) were just wretched, never believable as some kind of 'seductive' force with this irresistible allure that kept drawing in mages -- they were so obviously, cartoonishly evil that no mage with an ounce of awareness could have fallen into their clutches. This time around, you have the rather interesting Seers of the Throne, good old fashioned power-mongers; the Banishers, mages who are driven by fear and self-hatred to destroy what they are; and better, more plausible versions of both the Marauders and the Nephandi.
4. Rotes mean something. Rotes were little more than 'suggestions', with not a lot that would make them actually easier to use. Now, there's actually a game effect for something you've practiced, perfected, and done dozens of times before. I know, part of the appeal for the old Mage was that free-form system. It IS still there, but it's neither as wild nor woolly as before. For this Storyteller, it will be much easier to get along with it.
5. "Conflict" is what you make it, this time. There's no forced, product-driven, pre-made conflict that so many people seem to miss so badly. (Paradoxically, many people who profess to miss the old continuity complain that White Wolf scrapped the old continuity to make people buy more products. If that wasn't the purpose of the old continuity, what was?) Begging your pardon, but I like being provided a skeleton to flesh out, rather than a fully-formed body that only needs to be switched on. It requires more effort on the part of the Storyteller to make it go -- and that's how it should be.
6. Despite what all the disgruntled people seem to be saying, this system is not remotely like D&D. I don't know where you people are getting this. It's still flexible and imaginative, and frankly the Atlantean spin on the story is much cooler than I was expecting.
If you're a new player, or even an old player wondering about the new system, don't listen to the disgruntled fanboys. Give it a go, you won't be sorry.
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124 of 162 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Taking a Step Backwards, September 12, 2005
This review is from: Mage the Awakening (World of Darkness (White Wolf Hardcover)) (Hardcover)
Because White Wolf's updated Storyteller System is entirely abscent from this book, I won't speak to it, apart from voicing some mild annoyance that this book, despite being the "core" book to the game, is not enough on its own to play the game. In order to do so, you must buy a second book, whose content I won't review here. Instead, I would like to speak to the themes of the setting and the mechanics of magic specifically, as they comprise the entirety of the book.
As a "reimagining" of an earlier poduct, this book is inevitably going to be compared to its predecessor, Mage: The Ascension. That comparison is important not because of how it might bias the review (better or worse by comparison rather than on its own merits), but because the two products actually speak to radically different conceptions of magic. To the extent that the sourcebooks of the World of Darkness have tried to represent vast, cross-cultural swaths of the mythic and the supernatural, this is vital, in my opinion, to creating a quality product.
The original Mage was a very challenging setting because of its *complexity*, and a challenging set of rules because of their *flexibility.* This emphasis cannot be stressed enough. In many ways, these were a consequence of the extraordinarily diverse views of magic that exit in the real world. Creating a system and setting whereby tantric sex, blood sacrifice, weird science, and possession by the gods could all be captured by a single set of rules was daunting, but the designers were able to do so in a way that was able to explore unusual cultural viewpoints the reader may not have been familiar with.
The new Mage, however, seems to have corrected the wrong problems to some extent. The new setting is fairly rigid, requiring that "doing magic" be defined in terms of "casting spells." More to the point, it is a vision of magic that seems entirely derived from post-17th century European thinking on the occult. Thus, while its certainly open to the player to make a Hawaiian kahuna, the setting's new rigidity forces that character to "do magic" in a manner much more like a German occultist. The five "optional societies" are all European-style secret societies, reminiscent of the Masons or the Order of the Golden Dawn.
This can be explained by the new Mage's systematic avoidance of one of old Mage's central themes: consensual reality. In old Mage, things worked because of belief. Mages had the supernatural belief to bend or break the rules according to their own belief system. The central conflict in the setting was ideological, with various forces trying to "wake people up" to their view of reality. Throwing fireballs around was a bad idea because the collective view of reality wouldn't accept it. The new Mage is not at all about consensual reality. It is about Atlantis (or more generally, the idea of a Lost Civilization that perfected Magic was destroyed by Hubris, and the mages are the Psions of that culture). My issue is that while that is a fine myth, it's *only one myth*. A panoply of other "myths of the creation and destruction of magic" exist around the world, but the new Mage treats them as false and Atlantis as true in a way that is, to my mind, quite unfortunate.
At the same time, the game's new system for magic (in addition to being considerably weakened from its previous state, which is more a matter of taste than quality) has been made simplistic (unecessarily reducing its complexity) in such a way that completely undermines its original flexibility. The emphasis on specific, prepared effects (such as a spell for making a gun shoot silently) over generalized, ambiguous effects (such as the ability to have considerable influence on sound in general) reduces magic to a "bag of ticks."
Given the apparent overwhelmingly negative tone of my review, you might well ask, "well, why give it three stars?" The answer is that, for all of my specific dislikes, it is a well-crafted, well-balanced roleplaying sourcebook with high production values, quality editing, and a considerable amount of information. It's not a terrible book. But it *is* mediocre. But roleplaying games aren't about the art used, they aren't about the fonts or the spell-checking or the fine turn of phrase. They are about the ideas that drive story. Go online, or to any local used bookstore, and think about all of the old, beaten-up roleplaying sourcebooks for sale there, costing a pitiance. The truth is that many of them have excellent settings and systems, even though the art may be dated. And the truth about the "new wave" of expensive sourcebooks is that their ideas aren't necessarily better than what came before them.
Mage: The Awakening is perfect for someone who isn't interested in any culture but the one they grew up in, who want to play characters who are modern-day Aleister Crowleys or Adam Weishaupts. It isn't suited for anything else. As a setting, it has the heavy production value and frame-by-frame editting of a summer blockbuster, and will likely amuse for a short time and then be forgotten.
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