Mage is one of the World of Darkness games produced by White Wolf. In Mage the players are Mages, humans with awakened souls, who can use the power of their wills to change reality. These Mages are engaged in the Asenscion war, a battle for the entire world. Whichever faction wins will be able to shape the rules and laws of reality in their favour. In the past it was the Order of Hermes and the Celestial Chorus, representing the forces of mysticism and religion, who dominated, creating the mythic age of our past, but now the Technocracy rules, turning magic into technology, and the Mages of the Traditions, (the old schools of magic), are fighting for their lives against the modern world.

The present day world no longer happily allows miraculous feats, instead a Mage must try and make their magic look like a co-incedence, lest the forces of Paradox destroy them. Thus to teleport across a city a Mage might summon a taxi-cab to carry them out of sight.

The game of Mage has a number of very good system features which have endeared it to some:

1. The system of designing 'coincedental' spells to avoid paradox is very amusing. Essentially the player has to come up with some unlikely, but possible, explanation for the effect of his magic. Indeed the magic system is essentialy freeform.
2. The characters, apart from their ability with magic, are normal humans, and thus are at a disadvantage compared to the Vampires and Werewolves of the World of Darkness world.
3. When the background is more closly examined the characters can satrt to seem like the bad guys, not the good guys. In the mythic age the Chorus and Order of Hermes kept most people (grogs) powerless and without magic, but the technocracy has put magic, in the form of technology, in the hands of everyone. Only the Traditions prevent them from completing their plans.

At the same time the system has many flaws that make many people regard it as unplayable. Indeed it is probably the least played of all the World of Darkness games.

1. The largest problem is that the magic is just too powerful. A Mage can do almost anything if he can avoid paradox, up to and including apparently destroying the world. This makes Mage almost impossible to integrate with any other aspect of the World of Darkness background, especially that of Vampire, which is waht made the whole setting popular in the first place. Furthermore it makes most Mage games quickly degenerate into overpowered apocolyptic scenarios.
2. Part of the problem with the magic is that the cost of spellcasting, as Paradox, is just not great enough. Most players regard Paradox as an annoyance rather than a threat,a nd there are too many ways to get around it (such as using Computers, being near Werewolves, purchasing Familiars etc.) for it to be a real limit on the power of the Mages.
3. Finally the background of Mage, which was really intended to link together all the World of Darkness games, is to incoherent. It introduces no less than three kinds of new enemies (Marauders, Technocracy and Nephandi), none of which bear any relation to the bad guys of the other games, despite the fact that the Technocrcy of Mage and the Pentex of Werewolf seem to be doing the same things for much the same reasons. As with the magic system many gamers find that the background of Mage makes it very hard, or impossible, to integrate with the other World of Darknesss games.

Mike's Response

1. Um yeah, the magic is powerfull but not for starting characters, most starting characters have ~6 dots in their sphere ratings and about 3 dots in Arete. This means that they simply cant do anything too powerfull to start with. They cant have a sphere rating above their Arete which costs bulk Freebies to increase. So they can do 3/5 of the types of magical effects and only have a 3 dice pool for a maximum of 4 successes. This compares to a mortal with 2 Intelligence and 1 Computer skill. . .they can't
2. Ok heres the big kick, if a mage wants to do something thats within the range of his sphere knowledge he can ALWAYS TRY. However if they try something really difficult such as turning a vampire into a lawn chair (requires approx. Life 5 Matter 3 and thus 5 Arete) it is still really difficult. The difficulty for the roll would be 5 (highest sphere rating incvolved) + 4 (standard for all vulgar magics, BTW can you come up with a coincidence for this one?) = 9. They roll 5 dice + get one auto success if they spend willpower. They need about 5 successes to get it right (i.e rip the vampire/life pattern appart, hold on to the bits long enough to weave them back into a lawn chair pattern), also I would rule that the complexity of the thing requires investiture of 2 successes just to get the patterns right, the remaining successes go to duration: 1-one round 2-one scene 3-one chapter 4-one story 5-perhaps perminant.

   Thats just the rules dudes. Also you've got to:

   1. Come up with a coincidence or you'll get taken out by paradox (at least 1 point every vulgar magick feat done, thats a 1 point Flaw in approx. power against the chracter). If the mage rolls his 5 dice + 1 success difficulty 9, hes going to botch about equal his success rate. Botching this kind of roll would give 5 paradox (5 point Flaw. . .ie perminantly turn the mage into a lawn table to go with the chair that he didnt quite make). You see this makes magick a subtle art.
   2. They must come up with a Paradigm reason for their character to do this, ie they must explain exactly how their character conceptualises the process of converting a "dead body" into a solid very inert lawn chair. This may include what happens to they soul of the the vampire (requiring also the addition of Spirit 2 to the magic to actualise properly). This is where Mage gets really interesting. Any fool can soak up on Rage or Celerity and beat the snot out of some one, but it takes real characterisation to explain to the over-poweringly titanic conciousness of all reality just why you should fly like a bird and not just go Pizza.
3. Ok check this one out. . .Mage background doesn't fit with any of the earlier games because the earlier games were just shadows of the true reality background supplied in mage. Yes, in my view and the view of all the WOD players Ive found, the Mage backgound/ explanation system/ reality profile/ etc is the real one. The Vampires/ Werewolves/ etc are not Awakened so they only conceptualise a tiny portion of the whole picture that the Mage system puts forward. After all it has been said the Cain was a mage, cursed by the One deity (whom the Celestial Chorus follow) to be a mere shadow of his former power and to beget a race which would plague human beliefs untill the end of time. Bummer. Ever asked why a werewolf regenerates? Well mage explains it, you see werewolves are half physical and half spiritual, they have such a keen link to their Umbra spirits that they actually constantly manifest. This meens that if their physical body is damaged in the real world their link to their whole spirit selves allows Gaias gift of regeneration to have something to "copy" from. This is also why supernatural creatures do Aggravated damage, as agg. damage is simply the damaging of both the physical and the spiritual due to a similar manifestation of the aggressors spiritual side. All this and more. . .it only begins to get interesting.