Granted, Entropy 4 can just give someone a disease, so Jesse is overcomplicating the matter and I really don’t think this oculd be anything but Vulgar Magic, but…
Having run both MTAs and MTAw, I prefer not having so many spheres to achieve a relatively simple goal. Like in this case, you are looking to use three spheres at reasonably high ratings to just remove a guard. In MTAw you could use any one Arcana at 3 or 4 to accomplish the same task.
Time 4: The guard is transported a day into the future.
Forces 2: Render your group invisible and soundless.
Life 4: The guard is turned into a rat or whatever.
Mind 2: The guard forgets the group was there, or any higher rank to just mind control the guard in various ways (MTAs can also do this with the single sphere)
Prime 4: The guard is forced to look into the Supernal and his eyes are burned out in the process. Dick move.
Space 4: The guard is teleported away.
Spirit 4: Chuck the guard across the gauntlet.
And if you just want to kill or incapacitate the guard any single Arcana can do that at 3 (bashing) or 4 (lethal) all by itself.
TBF, this is clearly an intern-level slinger gettin’ sweaty and blithely careening toward oblivion at record speed. I give 'em two sessions tops before they’re rolling up a new character. 🤣
Ehat is mta?
World of Darkness is a setting that includes Mage: The Ascension which OP is referencing. (MTAs)
The same publisher released a later gameline now referred to as Chronicles of Darkness which includes Mage: The Awakening (MTAw) with a similar dynamic magic system.
I really like Awakening but it’s hard to find players for it.
I had a group for about six months once, and it was pretty good. Except one player just never learned the rules, and refused to read clues. Like they found a clue on site that was like 10 sentences and she was like “I’m not reading all that”.
It takes a level of buy-in from players that is hard to get. I couldn’t run it at my table for years due to having a few players for whom the magic system and general focus on esotericism were RPG kryptonite. The main thing I have noticed is that the game changes pretty dramatically at Gnosis 3, so I establish at the start that the entire cabal has to go from 2->3 at the same time.
I had to stop due to some IRL stuff, but I am hoping to start a new campaign soon or I might try running Mummy: The Curse since I find it really interesting.
I was in a band called Vulgar Magic. We were dreadful but charming.
I don’t pressume I could listen to your songs anywhere?
Nah, that’s the drawback of bands invented for a joke: no music to listen to 🤷
Cuts down on practice time, though…
Had a similar argument someone wanting to use heat metal to make and impromptu fireball using metal powder, I don’t think any one agreed with the guy that it wasn’t pushing things a bit too hard
this makes me want to see an elecromancer and aeromancer carrying around bags of flour and sawdust to fucking annihilate entire buildings with a single spark, while everyone thinks it’s some grand pyromancer summoning hellfire
Better yet they wouldn’t even need to be madic users
on one hand it could be accidental where everyone is looking for any kind of magic even artificers but it’s just very bad luck that magically ground flour is a new craze so the docks and warehouses that keep exploding haven’t been storing the flour right, there’s enough left over magic in the flour to make it disperse in the air sometimes then some old fashioned places are still using lanterns for light, police and gangs alike are on a man hunt
or you could have a pretty basic setup of a fine finely ground powder inside of an empty egg with some kind of rune that let’s out a small fireball when destroyed painted on the side, everyone thinks this low lever magic user is some grand wizard for transmogrifying eggs into explosions, on top of that I wonder if thermite can be set off in a powder explosion kind of way
I love the magic system in Genesys, with just basic spells (attack, heal, augment, curse, etc), some varying effects with suggested flavor (e.g. “Ice” adds ensnare to an attack, but mechanically it doesn’t matter if it is vines, goop, whatever), and how much that effect increases spell difficulty. It lets the players go into a brainstorming session trying to come up with a spell to get out of a very specific situation, and having the game support almost anything.
E.g. this create water idea could be an attack spell with the poisonous quality (making it a hard check), which requires the target to make a hard resilience check or take a bunch of extra damage and strain, which for a skilled mage against a non-boss creature (e.g. an overly ambitious bandit) is well within one-shot range. If they pass the check, they would still take damage from the attack, but would be able to cough up most of the water before it got too serious.
This system sounds very cool also, and I have recently heard of Mage in another thread. I would like to play a system that gives players the ability to come up with spells that the GM doesn’t know ahead of time (I seriously dislike long lists of predefined spells), but also has a little more of that hard magic-science set of rules to satisfy my inner Sanderson fanboy. I have built in some external scaffolding around the magic in my Genesys setting that does this, and it has been a ton of fun so far.
My main gripe is that I wish I had more time to play RPGs (more than a couple sessions a month) so I could try out more systems.
Hey, now. I feel attacked. 🤣🤌🏼
