Re: So what do you really think about Mage? {M:tAw}
In thinking about this more, something clicked.
O-MAGE was a mess- a glorious, chaotic, fantabulous, convoluted, mess. It was a mess made from fantastic ideas, but developed a wild schizophrenia as the line evolved. It was a game that sort of screamed "Do anything with me! Blah! My tongue is longer than Gene Simmons's I'm crazy!” entirely by accident.
If was filled with ideas that made me think “Wow” and ideas that made me think “Pass” but that didn’t matter because I think more than any other WoD game, everyone reinvented Mage around the table. That’s what irritated me about trying to pick up casual Mage games- everyone did it different, and I didn’t like much of their interpretations.
The basic Magic(with a K motherfucker!) rules were either profound or profane, beauty or broken, depending on who you talked to. The factions were either shallow and culturally insulting or weird and inspiring. Everyone had some measure of all these things, and I think people running and playing Mage felt a real freedom to hack and modify the game. It is a game about breaking rules, changing reality, forging perception and point-of-view and mystical inspiration into Truth. It was about revolution and breaking free or about fighting for peace and reason and stability or anything the hell else you wanted it to be about. I loved that, I really did.
The New MAGE is so… polished, so well crafted, balanced, designed… a real dance of the celestial spheres rather than the mystical gang war of old Mage. New mage is like Applebee’s- you get variety, decent service, many locations, and a decent selection of pretty well cooked food that all tastes… suspiciously similar. Old Mage was a bowl of gumbo from Mothers in lost New Orleans- everything went into it, and the restaurant is filthy, the service lousy (unless you’re a regular), and the company dubious. But goddamn, is it the best bowl of Gumbo you’ve ever had.
New MAGE is almost... too well built.
-B
__________________
Scoundrel... Libertine... Monster... Patriot?
The Empire grows strange, and so Her guardians must be strangers - singular individuals of unsettling puissance, cast aside by a Society which would judge them harshly.
So it is good these unseemly heroes have a place of their own, where none may judge, for here all are marked with the same sins and might.
Welcome friend, to...
Re: So what do you really think about Mage? {M:tAw}
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bailywolf
In thinking about this more, something clicked.
O-MAGE was a mess- a glorious, chaotic, fantabulous, convoluted, mess. It was a mess made from fantastic ideas, but developed a wild schizophrenia as the line evolved. It was a game that sort of screamed "Do anything with me! Blah! My tongue is longer than Gene Simmons's I'm crazy!” entirely by accident.
If was filled with ideas that made me think “Wow” and ideas that made me think “Pass” but that didn’t matter because I think more than any other WoD game, everyone reinvented Mage around the table. That’s what irritated me about trying to pick up casual Mage games- everyone did it different, and I didn’t like much of their interpretations.
The basic Magic(with a K motherfucker!) rules were either profound or profane, beauty or broken, depending on who you talked to. The factions were either shallow and culturally insulting or weird and inspiring. Everyone had some measure of all these things, and I think people running and playing Mage felt a real freedom to hack and modify the game. It is a game about breaking rules, changing reality, forging perception and point-of-view and mystical inspiration into Truth. It was about revolution and breaking free or about fighting for peace and reason and stability or anything the hell else you wanted it to be about. I loved that, I really did.
The New MAGE is so… polished, so well crafted, balanced, designed… a real dance of the celestial spheres rather than the mystical gang war of old Mage. New mage is like Applebee’s- you get variety, decent service, many locations, and a decent selection of pretty well cooked food that all tastes… suspiciously similar. Old Mage was a bowl of gumbo from Mothers in lost New Orleans- everything went into it, and the restaurant is filthy, the service lousy (unless you’re a regular), and the company dubious. But goddamn, is it the best bowl of Gumbo you’ve ever had.
New MAGE is almost... too well built.
-B
That's just... beautiful.
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Re: So what do you really think about Mage? {M:tAw}
The system is ... ok. It works, I guess. I don't like everything about it, but it's clearly better than the system of the old game, and good enough for me.
The setting has (almost) everything a horror game called Mage should have. It's damn good.
Re: So what do you really think about Mage? {M:tAw}
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bailywolf
In thinking about this more, something clicked.
Nail on the head. You summed up my experience as well.
Of course, I think also this applies to the other two game lines. Solid, dependable, and lackluster has replaced crazy, wacky, and inspiring. This is either a pro or a con, depending on what you want out of your roleplaying games.
Personally, it's a con for me, but YMMV. Luckily for me, I think there is a lot of potential to build something fascinating off of the core nWoD rulebook. (Lord, I'd kill to see WW allow third party products that use the nWoD rulebook as the system. Essentially, third party fatsplats. Oh well. A boy can dream.)
__________________
Rev. Keith Johnson
keithalanjohnson AT gmail.com http://keithalanjohnson.blogspot.com/
GMing: Nightwatch (weekly nWoD crossover campaign)
GMing: Fading Æon (alternating weekly Trinity/Fading Suns campaign)
Playing: Hong Kong by Night (alternating weekly Kindred of the East campaign)
GMing: The Promise of Fear (weekly Changeling: the Lost campaign)
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit." -- Aristotle
Re: So what do you really think about Mage? {M:tAw}
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bailywolf
The New MAGE is so… polished, so well crafted, balanced, designed… a real dance of the celestial spheres rather than the mystical gang war of old Mage. New mage is like Applebee’s- you get variety, decent service, many locations, and a decent selection of pretty well cooked food that all tastes… suspiciously similar. Old Mage was a bowl of gumbo from Mothers in lost New Orleans- everything went into it, and the restaurant is filthy, the service lousy (unless you’re a regular), and the company dubious. But goddamn, is it the best bowl of Gumbo you’ve ever had.
Unless you got the gumbo with the cigarette ash sprinkled on top, or fingernail clippings, or had to endure a rant from the chef about how it's "The Man's" fault that the bowl you got was cold. :rolleyes:
oMage had the benefit of three iterations and a decade's worth of work to iron out the kinks- and itroduce new ones. People being nostalgic about 0Mage conveniently forget stuff like Tradbook Akashic (superhero template and Dr. Strange Quotes!?), Convention books Progenerators and Iteration X, or the other items in the game that caused people to throw books against the wall in frustration.
A lot of the fun of 0Mage came in spite of the setting and rules, not because of it. It had a great comic-bookish core idea that had little to do with magic at all, and then covered it over with layers of cruft. It took a while, but people eventually learned to tweak Mage until it matched the game inside their heads. And then WW would print a sourcebook that directly contradicted what people had come up with, and the screaming matches on alt.games.whitewolf would start.
I'm pretty sure that in a few years, after WW publishes a few sourcebooks (say ones that both agree and disagree with Amado G.), we'll have a proper layer of contradictory BS to allow people to happily argue AMage dogma. Becuase AMage isn't a botched job like OMage, that'll take longer to do.
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"When life hands you lemons, you squeeze them, hard. Make invisible ink. Make an acid poison. Fling it in their eyes." - Dr. Impossible
"I've entered the information age. I read twenty newspapers on the Internet and subscribe to dozens of RSS-channels. /.../ To be on the safe side, I've gotten myself a PDA with a wireless satellite connection. If anyone brings up a topic I'm not up to date with, I can go online in an instant to find out what I'm supposed to think!" - Donald Duck
I'm pretty sure that in a few years, after WW publishes a few sourcebooks (say ones that both agree and disagree with Amando G.), we'll have a proper layer of contradictory BS to allow people to happily argue AMage dogma. Becuase AMage isn't a botched job like OMage, that'll take longer to do.
Re: So what do you really think about Mage? {M:tAw}
Quote:
Originally Posted by Amado G
- Legacies aren't enough to really diversify things, I'dve preferred to see a more Social/Cultural construct to specialized groups of Mages rather than this Soulcrafting hoohaa business that makes them seem more like Bloodlines.
What I figure they should have done (with Vampire as well) is to do a twofold sub-splat structure. Clans become Bloodlines, Covenants become...I dunno, a Cult or somesuch. A sub-organization, secret society, micro-covenant, whatever. With Mage, I think the same thing would have worked- a Legacy changes what you are, and a mini-Order (sect?) changes who you associate with....
Too often bloodlines double as organizations as well as vampiric sub-species, I think, and I like organizational diversity. The same thing seems to happen with Mage...
Re: So what do you really think about Mage? {M:tAw}
When I say 'Old MAGE' I'm talking first edition- that later editions were getting to the kind of polish and consistency I don't like about the N-MAGE. No, that isn't right. I DO like polish and consistency. I really do. But Mage forces me to break my usual standards... I liked it better because of the mess, and if I had to pick a fingernail off the top of the gumbo, the meal was still worth it because it tasted so damned good.
Though, if you have a conversation with the guy at the next table about the gumbo, you can quickly learn to hate it- as well as all of humanity.
I think that played it too safe with the NWoD, it all seems... tame. No edge at all- and by 'edge' I don't mean "OMG WTF there is a peekture of a nipple in the new MAGE book! LOL!" I mean new ideas that make you pause, tilt your head to the side, and say "I don't quite get it yet.. but Jesus, is that cool as shit." I', having that very experience right now with Weapons of the Gods. I'm coming off a months-long WUSHU jag, and diving into a system waaay the heck more involved than I'm used to, and it is so well put together- and yet, so challanging to grock- I'm finding it rewarding as hell.
MAGE was like that for me way back.
-B
__________________
Scoundrel... Libertine... Monster... Patriot?
The Empire grows strange, and so Her guardians must be strangers - singular individuals of unsettling puissance, cast aside by a Society which would judge them harshly.
So it is good these unseemly heroes have a place of their own, where none may judge, for here all are marked with the same sins and might.
Welcome friend, to...
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