This Mage is better than the old Mage games.

I brought the new Mage last month and I feel it is better and more playable than the old mage game. It isnot tie to our world do much  like the old ones.

The old Mage was tied to the real world?

Well it was more tied to mystic traditions that exist in the real world. I actually kind of like that myself.

I like how its more flexible than the Traditions were.   You can gut the "heirs of a lost kingdom" myth, then use whatever tradition or style that you want with Style & Substance.

I must admit I really liked Ascension, especially the battle for consensus and the harsher threat of Paradox, and especially trying to negotiate your magic with the consensus to avoid paradox and still keep to your style. I also enjoyed the link the traditions had to actually existing esoteric beliefs. Ok, you can find that in Awakening as well but not as one of the core ideas.
Same goes for personal paradigm, style and foci usage. I was fascinated by Mage, because it had the first magic system that didn't work on the basis of "I cast spell x for effect y". That lacks flavour and makes a mage more like a strange kind of gun (pull trigger --> fry target).

What definetly improved is balance and elegance in the rules, which is why we decided to stick to the old background using the Awakening ruleset with some modifications.
And with Tome of the Mysteries the creative part of spellcasting came back, although I still think the huge number of described spells actually prevent many players from coming up with their own ideas.

Awakening has lost quite a bit of the philosophical and esoteric as well as openness compared with ascension but gained in rules. It feels more towards an adventure game to me with hard and fast rules dictating it.

Just my two cents,
lorekeeper

That kinda depends. Awakening can use pretty much anything from Ascension, if you simply bother to incorporate it. Also the Traditions were only tied rather loosely to any real world stuff.

Michael:

Awakening can use pretty much anything from Ascension, if you simply bother to incorporate it.

Sure you can, but you can make that argument with everything related to the setting of two games which are so closely related, rendering this whole thread moot, as long as you are not only looking at rule mechanisms.

Michael:

Also the Traditions were only tied rather loosely to any real world stuff.

Definetly true, but closer than what we have in Awakening.

I do miss consensual reality and the Technocracy, though.

No doubt the Technocracy was pretty cool, although I have to admit, the Seers of the Throne book has done a lot to rekindle many of the same emotions I had about the former archvillains of the Mage universe. It's pretty easy to reconstruct a slightly less magically potent version of the Technocracy with just one of the Seer Ministries and leave very little behind. Unless you require every last division of the old Technocrats, but you can preserve most of the imagery and feel (Men in Black, for instance.)

Consensual reality, I could give or take. We have Traditions now to fill some of that gap, though it's not really the same. I sort of like that I no longer have to arbitrate if something is close enough to the local paradigm. Also, paradigms in general. I loved the ideas of paradigms and try to get my players to take up their mantle; explain what it is, exactly, that they're doing when they cast spells. But in Old World, invariably the older players would try to manufacture a paradigm in which anything was possible, while new players took correspondingly restrictive paradigms. I don't like that kind of "fluff powergaming". It's like taking a Motivation of, "Whatever it is I want to do" in Exalted.

I think you can sum that up by saying that the oWOD had many awesome setting elements that were lackluster game elements.  Consensual reality is a really cool idea, but working into a game leaves a lot of that cool on the sidelines.

barenziah58:

I brought the new Mage last month and I feel it is better and more playable than the old mage game. It isnot tie to our world do much  like the old ones.

Hey barenziah58! I too belong to the "I like Mage the Awakening better than Mage the Ascencion" fan club. Welcome.

;-)

Is there a "I was never a player of Ascension so Awakening is better by default" fan club?

Doublehex:

Is there a "I was never a player of Ascension so Awakening is better by default" fan club?

Of course.  Surprisingly, that club is caught in an intractable blood feud with the club of guys who played Ascension and like Awakening better.  It's an ideological battle; part of it is that you guys are contemptuous enough of the game's predecessor, and part of it is that you don't have enough elitism in your background.  Whatever it is, if you decide to join the club, always watch your back, because you never know when a "Awakening good, Ascension bad" hit squad will be coming up behind you with a bunch of Mage: the Ascension second edition books in hand to beat you about the skull with.

I fall under the "both Mage games kick much ass" club.

Doublehex:

Is there a "I was never a player of Ascension so Awakening is better by default" fan club?

Yes, its called "You are very lucky to have only played Mage the Awakening and can ignore these silly debates of which is better and why" club.

:-P