try to talk them out of the idea of “Leveling” they get scared and run back to the system they’re familiar with.
I still think about the time in college I tried to get a D&D friend to consider Mage. I was telling him about how you can just do magic, and the real limitation is paradox and hubris. Like, it’s often not about ‘can you?’ but rather “should you?”
He couldn’t get over “you can just cast whatever you want? Fireballs every turn?”
“Yes, but that’s probably going to make a lot of paradox, and probably isn’t the best way to solve your problem”
The main problem with magic in Mage is that you need a LOT of rule knowledge to even know what the fuck you can cast, especially if you mix different spheres. Your friend might’ve dodged a bullet, but for the wrong reason 😆
I think Mage: The Awakening 2nd edition was a cleaner version of the game, but yeah no version is something you can just phone in.
I ran a game of it a year or so back, and one player just refused to read the book in any detail. She was always frustrated by not knowing what she could do, or how to do it effectively.
👅 Thank goodness for D&D, a game where character optimization and mechanical balance has never been an issue.
The thing about Mage is that you probably can engineer a way to fling fireballs every round if you’re reasonably clever. It’s a modern setting, hand grenades and incendiary bombs and flame throwers exist, and shoving a rag (covered in arcana) into a beer bottle would probably be enough to cause any witnesses to accept what they were seeing at face value.
But the game isn’t D&D. Who do you think you’re throwing that fireball at? As often as not, the primary antagonists are The Cops, the Corporate Executives, the Pharmaceutical Industry, and Silicon Valley. You can’t beat a Pentex sponsored Facebook smear campaign or an FBI/Palantir partnered surveillance state by spamming it with Fire damage.
sigh
Easy enough to hash out between folks who have seriously played the game. Much harder to explain this to someone who only ever knows how to roll for initiative.
I still think about the time in college I tried to get a D&D friend to consider Mage. I was telling him about how you can just do magic, and the real limitation is paradox and hubris. Like, it’s often not about ‘can you?’ but rather “should you?”
He couldn’t get over “you can just cast whatever you want? Fireballs every turn?”
“Yes, but that’s probably going to make a lot of paradox, and probably isn’t the best way to solve your problem”
“Sounds broken,” he said, and lost interest.
The main problem with magic in Mage is that you need a LOT of rule knowledge to even know what the fuck you can cast, especially if you mix different spheres. Your friend might’ve dodged a bullet, but for the wrong reason 😆
I think Mage: The Awakening 2nd edition was a cleaner version of the game, but yeah no version is something you can just phone in.
I ran a game of it a year or so back, and one player just refused to read the book in any detail. She was always frustrated by not knowing what she could do, or how to do it effectively.
👅 Thank goodness for D&D, a game where character optimization and mechanical balance has never been an issue.
The thing about Mage is that you probably can engineer a way to fling fireballs every round if you’re reasonably clever. It’s a modern setting, hand grenades and incendiary bombs and flame throwers exist, and shoving a rag (covered in arcana) into a beer bottle would probably be enough to cause any witnesses to accept what they were seeing at face value.
But the game isn’t D&D. Who do you think you’re throwing that fireball at? As often as not, the primary antagonists are The Cops, the Corporate Executives, the Pharmaceutical Industry, and Silicon Valley. You can’t beat a Pentex sponsored Facebook smear campaign or an FBI/Palantir partnered surveillance state by spamming it with Fire damage.
sigh
Easy enough to hash out between folks who have seriously played the game. Much harder to explain this to someone who only ever knows how to roll for initiative.