After having cut my teeth on Dungeons & Dragons and the Star Wars d20 role playing games, I thought I was hot snot on a silver platter when it came to pencil and paper games.
But I wasn't hot snot at all. I was a cold booger on a paper plate.
Y'see, while Wizards of the Coast's games taught me the basics of how to build a world and run a campaign, it was Mage: The Ascension that taught me how to RP.
Yeah, that's right. Mage. Not Vampire: The Masquerade or Werewolf: The Apocalypse, but their ugly cousin Mage. The friend and fellow role player who brought me into the fold described Mage as "The Matrix before The Matrix". The Wachowski's science fiction opus was still fresh in my mind as the coolest thing since Super Nintendo, so it was the kind of descriptor that drew me right in.
(Well, I did have a brief run-in with the Street Fighter d10 game, but that's a whole other can of beans for another time. Let's just say our first and only game ended with Spanish matador Vega losing a bout due to what I now know as erectile dysfunction. I'll leave it at that. More to come in the future . . . maybe . . .)
Mage, and the rest of its World of Darkness brethren, aren't too dissimilar to D&D or Star Wars when it comes to the components used. You need pencils, character sheets, dice, and a couple of heavy hardback books. But that is where the similarities end. World of Darkness games (WoD for short) employ one kind of die for all decision making, from diplomacy to initiative to damage: the d10.
What's neat about this is that in a pinch, you could even play the entire game with a single d10. Of course that would make for a pretty long day at the office. The systems in the game have you performing multiple die rolls for single actions and trying to get "successes". For example, a player might have a chance to roll up to eight dice for damage from a particular weapon, but only die rolls of let's say, six or higher count as successes. The number of successes determines the actual damage dealt.
(Eh, explaining the minutia of these things might not be my strong suit.)
Anyhoo, back to the differences. Characters in WoD games don't really "level up" in the traditional sense. Instead, experience points are used to upgrade individual stats and skills. I always liked this from a role playing standpoint. Rather than just having your character get magically stronger, you can explain your growth as training in a particular skill. It makes the whole thing feel less like Diablo and more like Final Fantasy X, with its sphere grid system.
The books themselves are a real treat. Whereas the D&D Player's Handbook is literally just a collection of races, classes, and other stat fields to be filled, the WoD books mix rules with narrative and have little short stories set in the world strewn throughout, simultaneously introducing you to a mysterious new contemporary setting while also being (for the most part) well-written little supernatural ditties.
I was immediately stricken by this as I flipped through my friend's Mage book. I probably couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but this strange new game had so much more personality than the d20 I'd encountered before. This world felt so fleshed out and full of nuance, while D&D felt vague and almost too open ended for me.
My first Mage session consisted of me and two other guys running for our lives from the Technocracy and trying to make sense of our bizarre and often inpredictable abilities. It was a learning experience and our Storyteller (the WoD version of a dungeon master) felt the best way for us to learn to swim was to be tossed into the deep end of the pool.
Like it says on the tin, Mage is a game about magic and how it functions in the real world. The influences on the setting are all over the place, from Kabbalah to modern chaos magic. As I would soon learn, the trick to using magic in Mage isn't about balancing spells per day or mana points, it's about making the things you do seem coincidental, so as not to disturb the fabric of reality and alert the fascist and very Agent Smith-like Technocracy to your presence.
When a player oversteps those boundaries, reality bites back. And that's where things can get weird . . .
To Be Continued!
Twitter: @ChrisBComics
E-Mail: backissuechris@gmail.com
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Was Mage written by Mark Reinhagen?
ReplyDeleteAccording to Wikipedia, " Mage (1993) was based to a certain extent on a game that Rein-Hagen had imagined back in 1989 as something like a modern-day Ars Magica, although this was the first World of Darkness game in which he was not explicitly involved."
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