[hunting_moon]

I hear what you are saying about the concepts, but I have to disagree with the analogy. In the past they offered long definitions of what was possible with ideology decisions being left up the player to define what is and is not possible. In the current system they just took their examples of how sphere/arcana works and made it into a list of rotes. There are a few places where it is very vague, but that was very true of Ascension as well.

As a storyteller for Mage in both versions I have to say that the thing I have the hardest time defining is the orders and their goals, in the past (under Ascension) I had to spend the first game or two helping the players understand how paradox works, how fast casting worked, why people used rotes and defining a paradigm. Now the paradigm is present and we just need to look for a best case in the rotes for effect and whether it’s vulgar or not. Much simpler.

PS: I believe that Foci (dedicated magical tools) do not add to the dice pool, they reduce the paradox pool (if there is any).