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[Falcon777]

There's a home brew spell that allows you to manipulate objects from a distance (weaving spell, iirc). That is effectively telekinesis, though you'd have to use your own physical abilities instead of your magic. It's similar enough for me, though.

[Falcon777]

Personally, I'd be interested to see some npcs and magic items.

As to the scenarios, the rural sandbox sounds interesting.

[Falcon777]

My expectation is that the effects aren't random once you've figured out the mystery (whether by trial and error or through scrutinizing it, or both). There's not really much of a mystery to strict randomness. I mean, who would go out of their way to create palimpsests if they were only going to create random effects every time you used them?

I do have to say, I wasn't expecting them to introduce the possibility of artificial intelligence with grimoires. That's pretty interesting. If nothing else, that's probably the closest you can come to a dynamic spell without actually using dynamics....

[Falcon777]

There's nothing dishonest about how I did my rebuttal. It's quite clear when I'm speaking and when you are speaking.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Saying "You aren't playing Mage by throwing out a core theme" doesn't contradict the statement of "play how you want." It simply means that you're missing out on potential fun if you throw something critical out. Which is a circular way of simply restating the same thing. So no, there isn't anything hypocritical about what I said.

Forums are places where things get off topic. But frankly, defending...

[Falcon777]

There, that's my rebuttal....

[Falcon777]

The op posited that Mage might need to be brought into line. That presumes that there is a "line" to be brought into, despite the fact that the developers designed ALL the games (minus Beast, just because) to be balanced against themselves. Now, the op hasn't responded at all, but it's quite irritating to see people try to come to the defense of "Anyone can play the game however they want, don't push your way of playing" when the way the op talks about the topic implies that he doesn't understand the game design. The idea that the op probably doesn't understand the design of...

[Falcon777]

You're not playing Mage if you just toss out its core theme. You're just borrowing its mechanics at that point. And, honestly, if that is what you want then you should probably familiarize yourself with those mechanics since they are, after all, what you want. And if that is what you want, why bother with asking how to alter them? Seriously, it's not that hard. I did it for years before appreciating Mage's setting and themes.

[Falcon777]

The notion that horror requires strong mechanics to showcase itself is completely missing the point. ALL the game lines have their own forms of horror and how well the storyteller displays this has absolutely nothing to do with the mechanics of the game. It has everything to do with how the storyteller describes situations and circumstances in the game. In Mage, it's the storyteller's job to get the players to be disgusted with their own choices and thereby showing how mages are monsters. It isn't the job of the developers of the game to scare you, that's your job. It isn't the job of the developers...

[Falcon777]

I think people who have a problem with mages being strong are missing a CORE theme of Mage: Hubris. One of the major points of mage is to have both player characters and npcs be powerful so that they can abuse that power and showcase their hubris. This just highlights the problems with crossover games and the reason why the developers specifically chose not to balance the game lines against each other. Each game has its own themes and attempting to balance the games against each other instead of with themselves defeats the purpose of each game.

Honestly, if you want to do something...

[Falcon777]

And then it gets even funkier when you start messing with the duration. And don't even get me started on scale.

[Falcon777]

Ah, indeed. For anyone that is more into the lore of the game or likes digging just a touch deeper than the surface, SoS definitely seems like where it's at. As to the grimoire section, I really like that they've expanded our options from 1e. In 1e you get the idea of what a grimoire should seem like in general (not just a generic book with rotes in it). This time, however, you get to mess with some of those options. Palimpsests specifically seem like great opportunities for mysteries.

[Falcon777]

I suspect that we will have to wait until either SoS is out or Dave decides to spoil the Awakening chapter to get more material.