Chapter 10: The Book of Magick: Part I: Casting Magick

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[b]Chapter 10: The Book of Magick: Part I: Casting Magick[/b]

[quote=M20]The ultimate irony of the Ascension War is that everyone’s basically doing the same thing, yet they’re killing one another over their impression of how and why they do it.[/quote]
[i]If you don't believe in Chaos Magick, you're an idiot.[/i]

To cast magick in M20, you need to answer four questions:
[quote=M20][i]What do I WANT to do, and HOW will I do it?
Can I use what I KNOW to get what I WANT?
Did I succeed or not? And…
What happens either way?[/i][/quote]

Five questions. Five questions, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Six questions...

Magick in Mage works by a series of rules (that are universal, and a close approximation to how the metaphysical rules of MTAs works) that are based on the mage's ability to capital-W Will things as they please. How they Will things is, otherwise, arbitrary (except for all those focus rules you need to follow). To wit:

[quote=M20]That’s true even for the simplest Rank 1 perception Effects. You could have three Virtual Adepts using the same Effect in three different ways: one might activate a scanning app on his cell phone; the second could close her eyes, do some three-part yoga breathing, and extend her senses outward; and the third takes a few hits off a joint, open his eyes and sees deeper than the usual levels of human perception.[/quote]
[i]Paradigm? What's that? Nah, you might believe that the entire world is a computer simulation,  but marijuana and yoga are how you cast magick.[/i]

OK, so you want to cast magick. So you answer the five questions, which involves a four-step process:
[quote=M20]
[b]Step One – Effect:[/b] Based on your character’s abilities and needs, decide what you want to do and how you want to do it. This is called the [i]Effect[/i]: the thing you want to accomplish with your magick.

[b]Step Two – Ability:[/b] Based on your mage’s focus and Spheres, figure out if you can create the Effect you want to create… and if so, how your character will make it happen in story terms.

[b]Step Three – Roll: [/b]Roll one die for every dot in your Arete Trait. The difficulty depends upon the Effect you’re trying to use; whether it’s [i]vulgar[/i] or [i]coincidental[/i]; and whether or not someone’s watching you.

[b]Step Four – Results:[/b] The number of successes that you roll determines whether or not you succeed. If you fall short of your goal, you may roll again on subsequent turns in order to get more successes. (See Rituals, Rolls,
and Extended Successes, pp. 538-542.) If you fail, the Effect fizzles out. And if you botch, bad things happen.[/quote]
[i]Step 1 and Step 2 are the same...[/i]

That's all there is to casting magick: You need to go through a [s]four[/s]three-step process to answer [s]four[/s]five questions.

After an explanation of Paradox, there's many many pages of tables and charts for casting magick with MTAs' freeform magick system. And the charts are... something. The tables for determining the Arete roll to succeed and the Paradox effects are perfectly adequate (and unlike certain earlier MTAs books, are not positioned at an oblique angle to the page, thankfully). Exactly how to determine the number of successes necessary to accomplish something with magick is somewhat difficult, since it uses a table of examples. And perhaps it's just my borderline autism speaking[1], but I've never really found examples and descriptions to be good guidelines for determining other things; 5-10 successes are necessary to create simple life-forms[2], blowing up buildings, summoning Otherworldly creatures, having absolute control of a mob of people... but what can I do with [i]Time[/i] magick at 5-10 successes? Entropy? Prime? For that matter, how big is the mob in question? It's somewhere between 2 and 200 people, but no further guidance is given.

The problem with using inexact language to describe in-game effects is that it easily creates a situation where two people have different opinions on what something means. To Alice, "a mob" is about 12 people. To Bob, it's about 70. So when Bob reads in the rules that he can command 70-ish people, he comes across a situation where he thinks "right now, I'm going to use my magick to command as many as possible in this group of 100 people". Then Bob's ST Alice sees Bob roll 10 successes and says "you now command 12 of them". And this is a shitty situation to place Alice and Bob in, because Bob feels disappointed and Alice can't really go back on it. Well, she could, but Alice knew that Bob could mind-control 12 people and made the group number 100; if she knew Bob could mind-control 70, she might have made the group number 550 people. Besides, having to do this negotiation over every single power that's ambiguously described takes a lot of time.

Yes, Alice, Bob, and their friends could all sit down ahead of time and work out exactly how many people 10 successes can mind-control, but a) [i]that's what the 700-page book on playing MTAs is for[/i], and b) the book makes no indication that they should do this.

[1] I can cry about ableism though, right?
[2] And what [i]is[/i] a "simple" life-form, and what distinguishes it from a complex life-form? Is there a standard for this? Do I have to count base-pairs in their genome? Distinct organs? How often they're used to "disprove" evolution on creationist talkshows?

There's a table of difficulty modifiers, and a "personalized instrument" and a "unique instrument" each add -1 Difficulty. So far OK. An "unfamiliar instrument" gives "+2/+1" to the Difficulty, which I'm supposed to interpret how? A personal item from the target gives "-1 to -3" (note the inconsistent notation between unfamiliar instruments and personal items), with no further elaboration. And then there's this note at the bottom:

[quote=M20]Minimum difficulty 3, maximum difficulty 10. If you employ the [i]Thresholds[/i][b][/b] option, max difficulty is 9; in the latter case, extra modifiers add to threshold, requiring one additional success per +1 difficulty modifier.

Modifiers that would take the difficulty above 10 add additional successes at a one-to-one ratio; a +3 modifier to difficulty 10, for example, would demand at least three successes.

If you use both the threshold option [i]and[/i] modifiers that take the difficulty above 10, then each additional +1 difficulty over 9 demands an extra success. A +3 modifier to difficulty 9 would require at least three successes.[/quote]
[i]If you don't remember what Thresholds are, don't worry, there are no pointers to which page said rule is written up on here.[/i]

First, I wish to note the irony that while the Threshold is presented as an optional rule, the rules for magick need to write up a functionally near-identical version of it anyway, to let difficulties increase beyond 10. You might remember that this is the same thing that happened with the core rules anyway, where Degrees of Success are already a thing. Then, additionally, the third line repeats the latter half of line one for no reason; that +1 difficulty increases the required Degrees of Success by +1. Good job, Lindsay Woodstock! It's also somewhat interesting to note that Degrees of Success are used for two things. First, DoS is used to determine whether you can accomplish your magickal effect. Further, DoS is used to account for Difficulties higher than 10. However, if Difficulty is higher than 10 [i]and[/i] you're casting something with a high DoS, the required DoS is not increased.

For example, if you have Difficulty 8 and a minimum DoS of 3, it's pretty hard. If you have a Difficulty 10 and a minimum DoS of 3, it's extremely hard. If you have a Difficulty 13 and a Minimum DoS of 3, it's not harder than when Difficulty was 10, because you needed 3 successes anyway. Not that it really matters when the difficulties are so high anyway, but it makes for a strange edge case.

Using Correspondence gives a minimum Degrees of Success based on how far away, or how familiar, you are with the thing. The "Range" tables goes, in increasing order:
[quote=M20]
1: Line of Sight
2: Very familiar
3: Familiar
4: Visited once
5: Described location
6: Anywhere on Earth[/quote]

I realize that in M20, physical or geometrical concepts of "range" are arbitrary illusions, but I still baulk at "Very familiar" and "Visited once" being used to describe distances. (And, again, how am borderline autistic me supposed to discern between "Familiar" and "Very familiar"?)

Damage follows a progression of:
[quote=M20]
1: None
2: Two levels
3: Six levels
4: Eight levels
5: Ten levels
6+: Number of Successes x 2[/quote]
[i]I again note that they use an actual "X" and not a multiplication sign. Bad form.[/i]

Mind can usually only cause Bashing damage. Most other spheres cause Lethal. Vulgar Entropy, Life, and Prime can cause Aggravated damage. Prime 2 and a point of Quintessence can let any magickal attack cause Aggravated damage. Time and Correspondence can't cause damage by themselves. Forces gets, effectively, +1 successes when successfully cast, and can deal Aggravated with fire and electricity. Hint: buy Forces.

There's an optional rule that lets you spend excess successes on an Arete roll to get bonus effects. These effects are, notably, more powerful on a per-success basis than the regular effects they replicate. For example, excess successes can be traded for damage at a 1:2 basis, which means that a 2-successes damaging spell does 2 damage, while a 2-successes 1-success not-damage spell does it's usual effect [i]and[/i] 2 damage. I think. It says "additional damage", but the rules for using spells to cause harm already specify what additional dice can do, so what's the point? The same applies to duration; spending 1 success to increase duration gives the same effect as 2 successes on a spell rated in terms of duration.

And now my favourite part of the tables; the "I Disbelieve!"-table, which I will quote in it's entirety:
[quote=M20]
[b]Believability Difficulty[/b]
No fucking way! 3
Hard to swallow 4
Implausible 5
Possible 6
Probable 7
Likely 8
Too damned likely! 9[/quote]

In addition to the usual problems I have with holistic descriptions like this, "probable" and "likely" mean the [i]exact same thing[/i]. They're synonyms. Probable is "likely to occur or prove true", while Likely is "probably or apparently destined". Unless you use the definition that has "likely" as "very probable" but I feel the fact that these definitions are not consistent only underlines my point. This table is useless and something inside me dies a little every time I see it.

Similar problems plague the table for determining how powerful magickal illusions are; at three successes you can affect three senses. At four successes, you can affect several senses. At five successes, you can affect multiple senses. At six, the illusion gives "full sensations". Now, tell me, how many senses are included in "several", and is it a different number from the ones in "multiple"? I can guess that it's supposed to be more than two, implicitly (but it would be nice if they used words that just mean "more than one"...), but it's no help to ST or player. This goes back to my example with Alice and Bob; Bob thinks that his 4-success illusion affects about 5 senses; sight, hearing, touch, smell, and balance, while forgoing the less useful ones like taste, nociception, thermoception, and propriception. Alice meanwhile thinks that "full sensations" is supposed to mean the five traditional senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell), and says that 5 senses is [i]way[/i] too much for a mere 4 successes. All of this could have been avoided if old-school White Wolf authors didn't have a [i]crippling phobia of hard numbers.[/i]

And you can age people too! Depending on your number of successes, the ageing is "minor", "noticeable", "severe", "to decrepitude", and "to bring of destruction". Now, since it's only at the second level that the ageing becomes noticeable, and "minor aging" is 3 successes, 3 successes of Time magick has basically no effect.

Now, Paradox! The Paradox effects are a [i]glorious mess[/i].

Whenever you acquire 5 or more Paradox on a single roll, you cause a Paradox Backlash. When you trigger a Paradox Backlash, you roll your Paradox rating as a pool. Each success means you lose a dot of Paradox. However, fancy effects happen when you discharge Paradox this way:
Successes: Effect
1-5: 1 level of Bashing damage per success [i]and[/i] a Trivial Paradox Flaw
6-10: 1B/success [i]or[/i] a Minor Paradox Flaw
11-15: Pick one: 1L/success, Significant Paradox Flaw, Paradox Spirit visitation, [i]or[/i] Mild Quiet.
16-20: 1L/success [i]and[/i] 1 permanent Paradox[i]or[/i] Pick two: Severe Paradox Flaw; Paradox Spirit visitation, Moderate Quiet, or banishment to a Paradox Realm (Is that damage and either a Paradox flaw or two effects from the list, or either damage and flaw or two effects from the list? :iiam:)
20+: 1A/2 successes [i]and[/i] pick one: 2 permanent Paradox, Drastic Paradox Flaw, Paradox Spirit visitation, severe Quiet, or banishment to a Paradox Realm

It really annoys me how inconsistent it is; at 1-5 successes, you get damage [i]and[/i] a Paradox Flaw, while at higher levels it tends to be damage [i]or[/i] a Paradox Flaw or some other effect. Now, speaking of those other effects, at 11-15 successes, you can get a mild Quiet. Checking the adjacent Quiet table, 11-15 successes on the Paradox roll is a Level 4 quiet, described as "[i]Mage either gets trapped in a mindscape of his own design, or else behaves so irrationally that he becomes a danger to himself and everyone nearby.[/i]", including "[i]Deadly fanaticism[/i]", [i]Mindscape or constant hobgoblins[/i]", or "[i]Violent sociopathy[/i]".

[i]Mild[/i].

Oh, and Severe Quiet? That's Level 6 and says "[i]Mage goes Marauder and becomes a Storyteller character.[/i]"

Anyway, Mages can sometimes see auras. This is useful for a number of reasons; you can always tell what mood someone are in, and it also allows the easy identification of other supernatural creatures; Faeries have rainbow-coloured auras, Vampires have pale auras, the ghosts have faded auras, the sick and dying have fading auras, werecreatures have bright and vibrant auras, and I can't tell what Nephandi auras are like because it looks like Brucato has ejaculated onto the page; instead of a sensible entry,  it says "[i]Wouldn’t you like to know?[/i]". :jerkbag: What, has nobody seen a nephandi and lived to tell about it? If nephandi auras are distinct, then surely it would be noticeable what their auras are like? And if nephandi auras look like any other mage's, then wouldn't mages know that you can't tell who is a nephandi? AND IF I'M THE FUCKING ST, WOULDN'T IT BE REALLY USEFUL TO KNOW WHAT MY PLAYERS SEE WHEN THEY LOOK AT A NEPHANDI WITH AURA-SIGHT?

"I look at him with my aura sight. What colour is his aura."
"Uh... 'Wouldn't you like to know?'"
"I would. That's why I'm looking at him with my aura sight. What's his colour?"
"No, seriously, that's what it says: 'Wouldn't you like to know?'"
"Oh, so he's a Nephandi. Right. I blast him with Forces, Prime, and 4 dots of Quintessence."

The last part of this chapter is 2.5 pages of common magical effects and the necessary sphere ratings to cast such magick. Useful, but it's sorted not by the Sphere necessary, but by what the effect is. There's a list of Body Magick feats, including Matter, Life, Prime, and Time effects. Which is great if you need to know how to do something, or if you have almost all the spheres, but if you have only a few spheres, it means you have to look through every single table on those 2.5 pages to learn what you can do. If the feats had been sorted by sphere, it would be easier to just look up your own spheres to see if you can do something.

Argh, this book. It's so bad and Brucato is a smug wanker who can't write rules to save his life.

[b]Next: Part II: The Spheres[/b]