The Greatest Game I've Never Played
The following is a ramble about the White Wolf RPG Mage: The Ascension, which ought not be confused with the newer, less maddening sequel Mage: The Awakening.
I had tried to write a basic description of the metaphysics of Mage: The Ascension, but I find that I am unable to beat the version that is in the Wikipedia article I linked to. So I'll reproduce the critical parts here as background:
The basic premise of Mage: The Ascension is that reality is the way people believe it is, thus everyone has the capacity, at some level, to shape reality. In most people, known as sleepers, this capacity is dormant. The capacity itself is personified as a mysterious alter-ego called the Avatar, which is said to be sleeping. In a Mage, the Avatar is said to be Awakened, (many Mages have had encounters with their Avatars). With an awakened Avatar, a Mage can consciously seek to change reality via willpower, beliefs, and specific magical techniques.
The beliefs and techniques of Mages vary enormously, and the ability to alter reality can only exist in the context of a coherent system of belief and technique, called a paradigm. Such a paradigm organizes the way a Mage understands reality, how the universe works, and what things mean. It also provides the Mage with an understanding of how to change reality, through specific magical techniques. For example, an alchemical paradigm might describe the act of wood burning as the wood "releasing its essence of elemental Fire," while modern science would describe fire as "combustion resulting from a complex chemical reaction." Paradigms tend to be nuanced per the individual Mage, but the vast majority belong to broad categories of paradigm, e.g., Shamanism, Medieval Sorcery, religious miracle working, and superscience.
In the Mage setting, everyday reality is governed by commonsense rules derived from the collective beliefs of sleepers. This is called the consensus. The majority of Mages' paradigms differ substantially from the consensus. When a mage performs an act of magic that does not seriously violate this commonsense version of reality, in game terms this is called coincidental magic. Magic that deviates wildly from consensus is called vulgar magic. When it is performed ineptly, or is vulgar, and especially if it is vulgar and witnessed by sleepers, magic can cause Paradox, a phenomenon in which reality tries to resolve the apparent contradiction. Paradox is difficult to predict and almost always bad for the mage.
Got all that? Belief creates reality. But because the vast majority of the people around you all believe the same thing, bucking that consensus is hard. In order to do it you need to believe wholeheartedly in a different paradigm - one that gives *you* in particular the power to reshape reality. Converting from the consensus paradigm to a different one is a huge deal - in order to Awaken you have to believe down to your core that the world really is different than you always thought that it was. That means that the new paradigm has to be self-consistent and comprehensive, which in turn is why the majority of Mages end up in variants of ancient spiritual traditions.
But the exceptions are interesting. How could a practitioner of "superscience" be a Mage? The trick is that a superscientist believes that he has discovered a new scientific principle - unknown to the general public - that has obvious and incredible applications. He's even developed some useful prototypes that demonstrate the principle. But he's still working out the bugs, and they have a nasty tendency to crop up just when he's trying to give a demonstration. Murphy's Law, you know.
If that's the case, then how does "regular" science work? The scientific method purports to explain the workings of the objectively existing natural world through repeated controlled experimentation. But according to Mage: The Ascension, objective reality doesn't exist. The base condition of the universe is shaped by the common sense of all of the sleepers, so you'd think that a scientist would always get results that confirm common sense. But history is replete with examples of famous scientists bucking the commonsense expectations of everyday folk with clever theories and explanations. And there's only one way that could be: those scientists were Mages, too.
Now things start getting really interesting! From a certain perspective, the Scientific Method was the most powerful spell ever cast. Suddenly, people all over Europe started believing that the world was objective and consistent. Moreover, these scientists thought that it was their duty to share this knowledge with everyone. Unlike the priests and wizards of old, they would not hoard knowledge to themselves. Instead, they believed that everyone could be a scientist if they just learned the rules of rationality and inquiry - the Scientific Method, broadly understood.
With Science came Technology. There had always been technology, but it had always worked using basic principles that everyone understood. The bow, for example, is an obvious technology, in the sense that anybody seeing it in action for the first time understands how it would work. But Technology, on the other hand, consists of devices and techniques whose methods of operation need to be explained, even though their workings might be obvious to those who understand the underlying principles. The key is that any Technological device will work the same way every time (in theory). Therefore, once the principles behind the Technology have been discovered and all the bugs have been worked out of the design, anybody can use it. For the first time in history, real power could be in the hands of the sleepers.
And, lo, it began to become so through the power of belief.
Fast forward four hundred years and we discover that these ideas have conquered the world. Lots of people, including the virtual totality of the citizenry of the First World, believe in the basic tenets of Science. The sleepers have been converted. This is why Paradox is so harsh for Mages of other traditions - their paradigms have essentially been ruled out of bounds by the scientists. As more sleepers believe in Science and Technology, ever simpler spells become Vulgar for other Mages and ever more complex Technologies become Coincidental.
So the basic conflict in the world of Mage: The Ascension is between magic and science. Mages of the Traditions (those paradigms whose followers have banded together to protect themselves and their powers) proclaim that they only seek to show people that a different world is possible. A wondrous world, filled with beauty, danger, and exhilaration. A world without injustice or oppression. A world where the only limitation to shaping reality itself are those traits that separate man from beast: imagination and will.
The devotees of Enlightened Science (called the Technocracy) respond that humanity tried it the Mages' way before and it was horrific. There's a reason that we call the time before the Renaissance the "Dark Ages". Before Science, before objectivity and reason, there was chaos. As Carl Sagan put it, men lived in a "demon-haunted world". Monsters lived under the bed. Death was omnipresent. Men were reduced to begging for favors from the supernatural. And God help you if you got caught alone in the dark. Of all the gifts that Science has brought the world, the greatest by far is the simple freedom from fear.
Thus the Traditions and the Technocracy wage unceasing, vicious war over the very nature of reality itself.
I think that has to be the coolest idea for a game ever. Although, like Shadowrun, I think that the makers of the game don't really understand all of the ramifications of their postulate, and that hurts the coherency of their imagined world. I could live with that. What tears at me, though, is that I don't think that it can be played. The very nature of the thing rebels against meta-rules. For example, what draws Paradox? Where is the line between Coincidental and Vulgar drawn? This is tremendously important; the GM at least needs to know this in order to actually play the game. Well, in the rulebook two distinct methods for determining this can be gleaned from the text, which wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that they contradict each other.
The first rule is that a magic spell is Coincidental if and only if a (hypothetical) mundane observer wouldn't be able to tell if magic had been involved. For example, say that a Mage reached into his pocket and pulled out a $20 bill to pay for a cab ride. Unknown to the observer is that the $20 bill didn't exist until the Mage summoned it forth. To the observer, this is totally unremarkable, and thus coincidental. However, had the Mage turned his pockets inside out first, revealing that there was nothing in them, and then produced the bill, it would be Vulgar. If this were the case, then some very powerful magic could be Coincidental in contravention of explicit examples given in the rulebook.
The second rule states that a magic spell is Coincidental if and only if it could have actually happened according to physical law. To use the taxi cab example above, it wouldn't matter if the hypothetical observer could *see* the summoning or not - if he had been told what the Mage was doing he'd have said it was impossible. So it's Vulgar all the way. The problem with this is that it greatly privileges non-rational, "ignorant" paradigms over rationalistic ones. If the Mage is a religious believer who beseeches God for aid in paying for a taxi, then reaches into his pocket and "discovers" twenty bucks - well, who knows? God works in mysterious ways, after all, and the Mage could have just forgot about that $20 until God reminded him of it. So it's coincidence that the bill just happened to be there. But if he's a Hermetic Mage who creates the bill out of the Void by force of will, then it's Vulgar. In the worst case, a superscientist who rejects Quantum Mechanics in favor of 19th Century Determinism simply can't cast Coincidental Magic because he doesn't believe in coincidence! And, of course, this method also contradicts explicit examples of Coincidental Magic given in the rulebook.
But, you see, there are people out there right now who are playing (or have successfully played) Mage: The Ascension. They exist, or the game wouldn't have made it to a Third Edition. They must be able to embrace the contradiction; the paradoxical nature of Paradox doesn't bother them. Somehow, in their minds, it doesn't have to make sense.
There are days I would give up everything I have to join them.
-Nick
I had tried to write a basic description of the metaphysics of Mage: The Ascension, but I find that I am unable to beat the version that is in the Wikipedia article I linked to. So I'll reproduce the critical parts here as background:
The basic premise of Mage: The Ascension is that reality is the way people believe it is, thus everyone has the capacity, at some level, to shape reality. In most people, known as sleepers, this capacity is dormant. The capacity itself is personified as a mysterious alter-ego called the Avatar, which is said to be sleeping. In a Mage, the Avatar is said to be Awakened, (many Mages have had encounters with their Avatars). With an awakened Avatar, a Mage can consciously seek to change reality via willpower, beliefs, and specific magical techniques.
The beliefs and techniques of Mages vary enormously, and the ability to alter reality can only exist in the context of a coherent system of belief and technique, called a paradigm. Such a paradigm organizes the way a Mage understands reality, how the universe works, and what things mean. It also provides the Mage with an understanding of how to change reality, through specific magical techniques. For example, an alchemical paradigm might describe the act of wood burning as the wood "releasing its essence of elemental Fire," while modern science would describe fire as "combustion resulting from a complex chemical reaction." Paradigms tend to be nuanced per the individual Mage, but the vast majority belong to broad categories of paradigm, e.g., Shamanism, Medieval Sorcery, religious miracle working, and superscience.
In the Mage setting, everyday reality is governed by commonsense rules derived from the collective beliefs of sleepers. This is called the consensus. The majority of Mages' paradigms differ substantially from the consensus. When a mage performs an act of magic that does not seriously violate this commonsense version of reality, in game terms this is called coincidental magic. Magic that deviates wildly from consensus is called vulgar magic. When it is performed ineptly, or is vulgar, and especially if it is vulgar and witnessed by sleepers, magic can cause Paradox, a phenomenon in which reality tries to resolve the apparent contradiction. Paradox is difficult to predict and almost always bad for the mage.
Got all that? Belief creates reality. But because the vast majority of the people around you all believe the same thing, bucking that consensus is hard. In order to do it you need to believe wholeheartedly in a different paradigm - one that gives *you* in particular the power to reshape reality. Converting from the consensus paradigm to a different one is a huge deal - in order to Awaken you have to believe down to your core that the world really is different than you always thought that it was. That means that the new paradigm has to be self-consistent and comprehensive, which in turn is why the majority of Mages end up in variants of ancient spiritual traditions.
But the exceptions are interesting. How could a practitioner of "superscience" be a Mage? The trick is that a superscientist believes that he has discovered a new scientific principle - unknown to the general public - that has obvious and incredible applications. He's even developed some useful prototypes that demonstrate the principle. But he's still working out the bugs, and they have a nasty tendency to crop up just when he's trying to give a demonstration. Murphy's Law, you know.
If that's the case, then how does "regular" science work? The scientific method purports to explain the workings of the objectively existing natural world through repeated controlled experimentation. But according to Mage: The Ascension, objective reality doesn't exist. The base condition of the universe is shaped by the common sense of all of the sleepers, so you'd think that a scientist would always get results that confirm common sense. But history is replete with examples of famous scientists bucking the commonsense expectations of everyday folk with clever theories and explanations. And there's only one way that could be: those scientists were Mages, too.
Now things start getting really interesting! From a certain perspective, the Scientific Method was the most powerful spell ever cast. Suddenly, people all over Europe started believing that the world was objective and consistent. Moreover, these scientists thought that it was their duty to share this knowledge with everyone. Unlike the priests and wizards of old, they would not hoard knowledge to themselves. Instead, they believed that everyone could be a scientist if they just learned the rules of rationality and inquiry - the Scientific Method, broadly understood.
With Science came Technology. There had always been technology, but it had always worked using basic principles that everyone understood. The bow, for example, is an obvious technology, in the sense that anybody seeing it in action for the first time understands how it would work. But Technology, on the other hand, consists of devices and techniques whose methods of operation need to be explained, even though their workings might be obvious to those who understand the underlying principles. The key is that any Technological device will work the same way every time (in theory). Therefore, once the principles behind the Technology have been discovered and all the bugs have been worked out of the design, anybody can use it. For the first time in history, real power could be in the hands of the sleepers.
And, lo, it began to become so through the power of belief.
Fast forward four hundred years and we discover that these ideas have conquered the world. Lots of people, including the virtual totality of the citizenry of the First World, believe in the basic tenets of Science. The sleepers have been converted. This is why Paradox is so harsh for Mages of other traditions - their paradigms have essentially been ruled out of bounds by the scientists. As more sleepers believe in Science and Technology, ever simpler spells become Vulgar for other Mages and ever more complex Technologies become Coincidental.
So the basic conflict in the world of Mage: The Ascension is between magic and science. Mages of the Traditions (those paradigms whose followers have banded together to protect themselves and their powers) proclaim that they only seek to show people that a different world is possible. A wondrous world, filled with beauty, danger, and exhilaration. A world without injustice or oppression. A world where the only limitation to shaping reality itself are those traits that separate man from beast: imagination and will.
The devotees of Enlightened Science (called the Technocracy) respond that humanity tried it the Mages' way before and it was horrific. There's a reason that we call the time before the Renaissance the "Dark Ages". Before Science, before objectivity and reason, there was chaos. As Carl Sagan put it, men lived in a "demon-haunted world". Monsters lived under the bed. Death was omnipresent. Men were reduced to begging for favors from the supernatural. And God help you if you got caught alone in the dark. Of all the gifts that Science has brought the world, the greatest by far is the simple freedom from fear.
Thus the Traditions and the Technocracy wage unceasing, vicious war over the very nature of reality itself.
I think that has to be the coolest idea for a game ever. Although, like Shadowrun, I think that the makers of the game don't really understand all of the ramifications of their postulate, and that hurts the coherency of their imagined world. I could live with that. What tears at me, though, is that I don't think that it can be played. The very nature of the thing rebels against meta-rules. For example, what draws Paradox? Where is the line between Coincidental and Vulgar drawn? This is tremendously important; the GM at least needs to know this in order to actually play the game. Well, in the rulebook two distinct methods for determining this can be gleaned from the text, which wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that they contradict each other.
The first rule is that a magic spell is Coincidental if and only if a (hypothetical) mundane observer wouldn't be able to tell if magic had been involved. For example, say that a Mage reached into his pocket and pulled out a $20 bill to pay for a cab ride. Unknown to the observer is that the $20 bill didn't exist until the Mage summoned it forth. To the observer, this is totally unremarkable, and thus coincidental. However, had the Mage turned his pockets inside out first, revealing that there was nothing in them, and then produced the bill, it would be Vulgar. If this were the case, then some very powerful magic could be Coincidental in contravention of explicit examples given in the rulebook.
The second rule states that a magic spell is Coincidental if and only if it could have actually happened according to physical law. To use the taxi cab example above, it wouldn't matter if the hypothetical observer could *see* the summoning or not - if he had been told what the Mage was doing he'd have said it was impossible. So it's Vulgar all the way. The problem with this is that it greatly privileges non-rational, "ignorant" paradigms over rationalistic ones. If the Mage is a religious believer who beseeches God for aid in paying for a taxi, then reaches into his pocket and "discovers" twenty bucks - well, who knows? God works in mysterious ways, after all, and the Mage could have just forgot about that $20 until God reminded him of it. So it's coincidence that the bill just happened to be there. But if he's a Hermetic Mage who creates the bill out of the Void by force of will, then it's Vulgar. In the worst case, a superscientist who rejects Quantum Mechanics in favor of 19th Century Determinism simply can't cast Coincidental Magic because he doesn't believe in coincidence! And, of course, this method also contradicts explicit examples of Coincidental Magic given in the rulebook.
But, you see, there are people out there right now who are playing (or have successfully played) Mage: The Ascension. They exist, or the game wouldn't have made it to a Third Edition. They must be able to embrace the contradiction; the paradoxical nature of Paradox doesn't bother them. Somehow, in their minds, it doesn't have to make sense.
There are days I would give up everything I have to join them.
-Nick