How do you think Mage 5e will play out?

[Thecursedkatana]

I'm asking for setting, factions, umbra, and adaption to the modern day.

[Ragged Robin]

At an educated guess

1) strong emphasis on low level 'street' magic with less of the larger than life gonzo stuff.

2) downplaying of coherent unified organisations possible to the point were traditions are more general archeotypes.

3) discouragement of technocrat Union play with the possible exception of non aligned technomancers more commonly available.

4) more nihilism on a thematic and setting level. Possible nephandic ascendancy setting wise.

[Newb95]

Based on V5 and on what W5 is shaping up to be, I would say definitelly not good...

[11twiggins]

Magick turned a bit more Magic. Instead of a sacred, coherent(ly incoherent) and cultural practice, Mages will be casting in a fashion which is culturally agnostic and focused more on the idea of utilizing 'props' to get your 'trick' to work. "Magick is all one big joke, and you're in on it" feels like an angle M5 could go for, given the trajectory of the 5th ed stuff as a whole.

The kind of stuff I'm talking about is a reduced emphasis on how culturally, religiously and emotionally important paradigm/practice/instruments are to a mage, and more focus on a utilitarian 'do you have a tool for this job' outlook.

[MyWifeIsScary]

Monumental clusterfuck only sheltered by the fact that MTA isn't that big of an IP. I think if VTM were as big as Star Wars V5 would've caused rioting on the streets.

On the otherhand. I genuinely don't think we'll get an M5. There's a few red flags in V5 like thin blood Alchemy becoming a generic magic potion discipline rather than a practice for enlightenment. The way thaumaturgy and those who practice it have been butchered in V5 is also distressing, as is the drive to keep the whole thing street level. Such people evidently wouldn't have desire in writing something like Mage. Maybe then, we would get fresh-faced experts fully ready to commit to writing an ideal mage game, or more likely someone who hates mage will write mage, at the expense of everyone. There's certainly precedent with what we're seeing with werewolf (and Vampire I'd argue).

[Toby Weingarten]

The Otherworlds will not be a big focus, considering how hard it looks like it will be to get there in W4. There might not be as much in there as before either, as the various Realms of the Middle Umbra no longer seem to be a thing. There still might be an Astral Umbra, but I am thinking it will entirely be more like Awakening's in design, personal rather than shared. The Council will be less culturally/geographically connected, so expect the Ecstatics and Euthanatoi to go back to their former names. The Akashics could be changed wholesale, as their Tradition is the one still tied to a certain culture more than any other. The Crafts would still be tied to local regions, but de-emphasized and not mentioned until late in the cycle. Expect the Union to be either declared "winner' in the Ascension War, or as a possible second side versus the Nephandi. The game could even be changed to go will Sorcerers instead of Mages. Long-shot, but a possibility. Considering what has been going on with W5, unless the right development team is called in, fans will be extremely divided on any changes.

[Muad'Dib]

Magick turned a bit more Magic. Instead of a sacred, coherent(ly incoherent) and cultural practice, Mages will be casting in a fashion which is culturally agnostic and focused more on the idea of utilizing 'props' to get your 'trick' to work. "Magick is all one big joke, and you're in on it" feels like an angle M5 could go for, given the trajectory of the 5th ed stuff as a whole.

The kind of stuff I'm talking about is a reduced emphasis on how culturally, religiously and emotionally important paradigm/practice/instruments are to a mage, and more focus on a utilitarian 'do you have a tool for this job' outlook.

What would happen to the beliefs, philosophies, and outlooks of Mage groups under this approach? Would there be an overall reduced emphasis on the beliefs and ideas of Mages and their organizations? Or the attitude you described would be more or less mainly in regard to researching, learning, casting, and teaching Magick Effects ?
Would there be any changes as to how Mages would be doing the more mundane and normal projects? Like the involvement of the Cult of Ecstasy in regard to enjoyment/entertainment scene, companies, and events; or the Verbenae contribution to caretaking of the various areas that could be called the nature's great outdoors.

[Thecursedkatana]

Based on V5 and on what W5 is shaping up to be, I would say definitelly not good...

Can you give me an example of how you think it will go wrong?

[Dataweaver]

Can you give me an example of how you think it will go wrong?

I don't know if this will be it “going wrong”; but V5, H5, and W5 each are blowing heavily from their Chronicles of Darkness counterparts. H5 went so far that it bears only a vague resemblance to the first edition; it borrowed some of the 1e terminology, but recasts it so that it's now being used to mean something completely different.

With that in mind, I expect that M5 will borrow heavily from Mage: the Awakening. Depending on how they do this, that could be a good thing or a bad thing. If they do things like porting in Wisdom or the Paths, it's going to be bad; on the other hand, Mage: the Awakening 1e's magic system was an attempt to fix some of the problems in Ascension's Magick system; and if they borrow liberally from that, it could be a good thing.

If they're going to try to implement something even vaguely like Paths, I'd prefer them to go the route of the Approaches found in Mage Made Easy. I like how M20 still has Traditions, but no longer years them as the determining factor of the mage's approach to magic; it goes the other way around. Having Approaches in the core book instead of M20's section on Focus could work.

But yeah; I think there's a good chance that they'll go with a more utilitarian approach where all mages accept on some level that the business of philosophies of magic etc is ultimately pointless, and that all that matters is what you can do and which hoops you have to jump through to do it.

[Prometheas]

I think we got an almost preview if we look at a combination of the current WoD5 Content and what designers have talked about in the mage20 threads.

I agree with what's previously been said about breaking up the big mage organizations to focus on "Street level"(which was a bad idea when revised did it). In addition, I think they're going to focus hard on mage magick as primarily what used to be "fast casting" and keep it stuck at a lower level than players are used to with previous mage editions. They'll try keep big rituals out of the players hands, possibly NPC only.

Furthermore, I expect them to justify this by breaking from lore almost entirely as a form of soft reboot, possibly reducing the technocrats back to their 1e roots and with as much subtlety as a modern "We Live in a Society" meme(but less funny and more sad).

[Asmodai]

I Expect Revised 2.0 Electric Boogaloo: This time we weren't kidding. Revised started out with this back to basics approach that said Umbra was bad, structure was bad, freedom to define your own reality and your own game was bad. It was all about going back to the streets and playing small games in a setting where the fight was lost.

The ultimate irony here was that most of late Revised Mage was all about bringing back the freedom, the structures, the umbra and zany over the top plots. Seems like somebody didn't learn from the past.

[HorizonParty2021]

On street level thing)

Some people prefer their stories to be focused on what is happening in a community, rather than a more national or global scope. Both can be fun and a chronicle can consist of both or either. If they are trying to move toward a street level story focus, Primal Utility should remain a Syndicate secret. This gives the Convention some kind of leverage that they can use to preserve their status as the money mages. Within the Technocracy, members of the other Conventions can be happy with the Syndicate owning their projects, because they are supplied with Quintessence they can't generate in the same way and don't know about the method. The Syndicate can use both its in-faction clout and magic-resource advantage to direct efforts against out-faction mages accruing huge fortunes on the stock market with only Entropy 1 and Time 2.

If the mage to sleeper ratio is somewhere around 1 per 100, 000 (low enough to make magic being a secret believable and high enough to make encounters likely), there is plenty of opportunity for a cabal to use their magic to accrue a huge fortune and begin playing on a global scale. After that point, they could be casting Mind Magic as rituals and defusing it through media outlets, for example. It is hard to restrict a story to being street level under default conditions.

On discouraging playing the Technocracy)

Here is a TU chronicle on Onyxpath Publishing's YouTube Channel, where lead writers play. There are six episodes, each over two hours long.

On porting some Awakening features)

I hope they do this for how Paradox erases sleepers' memories of vulgar magic.

[Thecursedkatana]

I think we got an almost preview if we look at a combination of the current WoD5 Content and what designers have talked about in the mage20 threads.

I agree with what's previously been said about breaking up the big mage organizations to focus on "Street level"(which was a bad idea when revised did it). In addition, I think they're going to focus hard on mage magick as primarily what used to be "fast casting" and keep it stuck at a lower level than players are used to with previous mage editions. They'll try keep big rituals out of the players hands, possibly NPC only.

Furthermore, I expect them to justify this by breaking from lore almost entirely as a form of soft reboot, possibly reducing the technocrats back to their 1e roots and with as much subtlety as a modern "We Live in a Society" meme(but less funny and more sad).

I never understood "street level play" a good game will let you play that type of game AND the wacky adventures in weirdspace.

But yeah, tbh they will also make the traditions terrorists, and make them "The good guys"

All of this while ot never considers the conspiractorior Alt-health psudoscience conspiracy things going on today as evidence that the traditions won the ascension war.

[Asmodai]

On street level thing)

Some people prefer their stories to be focused on what is happening in a community, rather than a more national or global scope. Both can be fun and a chronicle can consist of both or either. If they are trying to move toward a street level story focus, Primal Utility should remain a Syndicate secret. This gives the Convention some kind of leverage that they can use to preserve their status as the money mages. Within the Technocracy, members of the other Conventions can be happy with the Syndicate owning their projects, because they are supplied with Quintessence they can't generate in the same way and don't know about the method. The Syndicate can use both its in-faction clout and magic-resource advantage to direct efforts against out-faction mages accruing huge fortunes on the stock market with only Entropy 1 and Time 2.

If the mage to sleeper ratio is somewhere around 1 per 100, 000 (low enough to make magic being a secret believable and high enough to make encounters likely), there is plenty of opportunity for a cabal to use their magic to accrue a huge fortune and begin playing on a global scale. After that point, they could be casting Mind Magic as rituals and defusing it through media outlets, for example. It is hard to restrict a story to being street level under default conditions.

Street level has been a very weird weasel word for a long time in communicating about WoD and especially about Mage. Even before Revised Mage was a game where you could easily play John Constantine, the cast of Neverwhere or the adepts of Unknown Armies. Of course it was also a game where you could play transformers vs. Godzilla, venusian swashbuckling romance, philosophical transcendalist terrorism or wars of ancient sorcerous sects. It was down to the table to define this scale, not just for Mage but for any game you would be running. It's just that mage could easily get weirder than anything else, and I've had my fair share of having to explain to people that they need to tone themselves down, or that they need to be more outlandish, because that's the kind of table/game we're playing.

This is one of the causes for all the arguments about Mage. It's not just philsophy, but it's many things to many people. It's incredible they actually managed to make it as versatile as they did, and it's a shame to see them moving away from it for a poorly thought out ideal.

What Revised did badly was say that only the first type of playing Mage is "good" and everything else is bad. The problem the Paradox version of WoD has is that all their games are supposed to be a singular play experience and anything beyond that is not supported and actively mocked by their spokespeople.

On discouraging playing the Technocracy)

Here is a TU chronicle on Onyxpath Publishing's YouTube Channel, where lead writers play. There are six episodes, each over two hours long.

That's hardly relevant to what Paradox does with M5, though. It's quite clear that they want a clear break with legacy editions.

[HorizonParty2021]

Street level has been a very weird weasel word for a long time in communicating about WoD and especially about Mage. Even before Revised Mage was a game where you could easily play John Constantine, the cast of Neverwhere or the adepts of Unknown Armies. Of course it was also a game where you could play transformers vs. Godzilla, venusian swashbuckling romance, philosophical transcendalist terrorism or wars of ancient sorcerous sects. It was down to the table to define this scale, not just for Mage but for any game you would be running. It's just that mage could easily get weirder than anything else, and I've had my fair share of having to explain to people that they need to tone themselves down, or that they need to be more outlandish, because that's the kind of table/game we're playing.

This is one of the causes for all the arguments about Mage. It's not just philsophy, but it's many things to many people. It's incredible they actually managed to make it as versatile as they did, and it's a shame to see them moving away from it for a poorly thought out ideal.

What Revised did badly was say that only the first type of playing Mage is "good" and everything else is bad. The problem the Paradox version of WoD has is that all their games are supposed to be a singular play experience and anything beyond that is not supported and actively mocked by their spokespeople.

Does singular play experience exclude crossover? I'm just starting on Awakening Core, in which the ten Spheres are grouped into five Paths that tie into other game-lines within CoD. Where can I read or watch their spokespeople explain Singular Play Experience, mocking alternatives?

That's hardly relevant to what Paradox does with M5, though. It's quite clear that they want a clear break with legacy editions.

Paradox is not Onyxpath - right. Still, there is a small but growing audience for Technocracy games on YouTube. It could be a stepping stone toward making a series for a streaming service like Netflix. That's potential revenue. There is one called As Above So Below that was praised in the comment section for its production value. I have also read speculation that the Disparate Alliance would emerge as the heroes of the new metaplot.