[UA] Help me pleeeeeease!

[Matt Norwood]

Put me down for C)

As many have said, they are very different games. Mage is more 
open-ended. You could run a UA-style game in the Mage world, with a 
handful of low-powered Tradition mages and Orphans trying to stay alive 
and keep away from their enemies: the NWO (read: Sleeper) agents who try 
to keep them quiet, rival Tradition sects (CotNG), and Marauders (Mak 
Attax?). You could also run a Feng Shui-style action-adventure game, 
with super-powered martial artists and cyberspace hackers going up 
against cyborg stormtroopers in a Matrix-style (reminder: Mage was 
published long before the Matrix) shoot-em-up.

The only things keeping you from playing UA easily in the Mage world are:

1. The inability of open-ended magic rules to sufficiently tie a magical 
style to its side effects. A Mind mage should get hit with lots of 
mental paradox effects, but it's really all up to the GM. In UA, OTOH, 
the side effects (taboo/charging) of a school are instrinsically tied to 
its style.

2. The under-powered nature of normal humans. This is a real difference 
between the two worlds, and it means that Mage characters are imbued 
with great power and great responsibility, as Uncle Ben would say were 
he not dead at the hand of some two-bit thug as a result of his 
nephew's... oh, never mind. Anyway, it means that Mage discourages games 
about sorcerors sitting around their apartments masturbating and waiting 
for their next unemployment check, while that sounds like par for the 
course for a UA story. (Believe it or not, that's actually an 
_endorsement_ of UA.)

Both of these problems can be overcome with the right GM and the right 
players, yadda yadda (this statement is the ultimate cop-out for poor 
game design, I know). And there are a lot of cool, exciting Mage games 
you could play that would never work in UA. Admit it: cyborgs are cool. 
The Terminator is cool. Bacon tastes good. Pork chops taste good.

ALSO: a caveat for all UA writers and fans! UA could _easily_ turn down 
the path that the Mage line has taken if its creators do not maintain 
their vigilance. The road to a game overflowing with Enlightened Tai 
Chi-using Epideromancer Executioner Agents of the Room of Cold 
Reflection is paved with good intentions. I have only played one UA 
game, and my character was a mundane journalist; in spite of the great 
GM and mature players, I sometime found my character overshadowed by the 
magical effects being flung around me. I had to sit through a fair 
amount of "Bill is making the gang members forget that he exists so he 
can sneak up on them, Bob is smiting the leader with a Bolt of 
Hurtiness, and Matt is peeing his pants and surrendering", and while I 
looked forward to developing the character and making the most of his 
mundane abilities, the fact is that UA spends about 50 pages of the 
rulebook on magic for every 10 pages spent on anything else.

This is a big problem. UA tries to counterbalance it a few ways:

1. Some detail on non-magical tasks. UA has a few mundane skills that 
have interesting effects, like Hunches and Do Two Things At Once. 
Cherries are another way to make mundanes feel more involved, as long as 
they're combat-oriented mundanes. But where are the Lie or General 
Athletics cherries? A game that has detailed rules for combat or magic 
at the expense of everything else makes it much less appealing to play a 
non-combatant or a non-magician. And even a mundane combatant can feel 
left out of the party if he rolls his firearms skill every turn while 
his companions are all whipping out different magical effects left and 
right. UA can't fall back on lists of cyberware or futuristic equipment 
like Shadowrun, but how about spicing up combat with a few choices like 
laser sights, aiming for a turn, or different damage types? I understand 
the impulse to keep the rules light and leave detailed descriptions of 
effects up to the GM, but by that standard the epideromancy rules would 
consist of "You can do magic with flesh and stuff. Run with it."

2. Balancing power with liabilities. Adepts have to do lots of crazy 
shit to make their magic work. While this balances them with mundanes 
power-wise, it still leaves most of the game time -- and the game 
rulebook -- consumed with magic-related activity. If a player wants to 
find a piece of information in a secure database, he makes a roll 
against his "3l33t haX0r" skill. If he wants to pick it from someone's 
brain using Cliomancy, he goes on a road trip to the Watergate then 
decides if he's going to boost his effects with extra dice from 
additional minor charges and rolls while trying to avoid screwing up and 
being plagued with an astral parasite blah blah blah. Sure, he might not 
be more _powerful_ than the hacker, but he gets a lot more attention 
from the GM, which makes playing an adept more appealing. Again, this 
can be overcome with a great GM and good players, but see my comment 
above for what I think of that excuse.

3. Introducing complex psychological rules that apply to mundanes as 
well as adepts. The madness meters and the Passions are great. No 
question. They can make the spiritual journey of a housewife as 
compelling as that of a chaos mage. But why stop there? UA could have 
detailed rules on non-magical, non-combat actions that wouldn't bog down 
gameplay but would make mundanes feel more involved. The examples that 
spring to mind are: the hacking rules from GURPS Cyberpunk or from 
BTRC's Spacetime; the intimidation/stare-down rules from AD&D's Oriental 
Adventures, White Wolf, or BTRC's Timelords; and other examples, usually 
drawn from high-detail (read: unplayable) games. UA tries to avoid reams 
of rules for skill use, which is an admirable goal; but they end up with 
pages and pages devoted to the use of a few skills (i.e. magic) and less 
than a paragraph devoted to every other skill. This might be a good 
place for fans to step in and write up detailed descriptions of new 
skills, with special effects, cherries, rules for opposed skill use, etc.

Anyway. I guess that rurned into a bit of a rant. Just a few ideas on 
how UA can avoid the pitfalls that Mage has revealed to us for the 
design of a game of postmodern magic.

Matt Norwood



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