Well, since the guy who was GM:ing didn't really have the rulebook for Mage (although he had rulebooks for werewolf I think), we just ran one of those free downloadable scenarios with the basic rules and pre-generated characters to play, which of course meant that some questions wen't unanswered as to what Mages usually do and how the politics for Orders and Concilium's and Cabals work etc. Also we realized that the magic system in that scenario was, although pretty interesting an versatile, was probably a far cry from the real thing described in the rulebook.Ursus Astrorum said:
As for encounters, they can be quite strange. The whole thing began with our group getting attacked by some sort of spirits that seemed to be manifestations of our characters inner vices. We managed to beat them, but then came the matter of tracking from where they came from and trying to figure out what could be responsible for it.
Had it been normal people that attacked us in another game, this would have resulted in standard detective work like checking out the attackers car, calling the police asking if they knew anything, checking for clues and footprints ettc. But now it was spirits so we had to use some pretty unorthodox and magical forms of detective work instead which was kind of fun, because you had to think in really strange ways.
Then there was the part in the scenario were we had tracked down another of these vice-spirits which was a spirit of manifested sloth, which hade taken upon itself to haunt a couple of bleechers where an old hobo had died a couple of years ago due to no one actually bother to check if he was alright. We couldn't just destroy the spirit, because that would only mean it would reform and show up some other time later so we had to think: how do you get a sloth-spirit to.. you know, move away?
So we thought about it, rolled a few skill rolls for occult knowledge and the basic idea was that sloth-spirits dislike events of high activity and chaos around the area which they haunt. And that we had to provide the spirit with some sort of refuge which would be symbolic of sloth for it to escape to.
This took some trial and eror on our part, but eventually we thought of simply casting really vulgar spells near the bleechers whioch of course would cause paradoxes (paradox = the reality doesn't like that you're doing some pretty blatant activities which completely disregards the laws of reality and so will try to punish you for it), and the very essence of invokihg paradox is quite chaotic, which managed to drive the sloth-spirit away from the bleechers and into a strategically placed (*snigger* yeah right) couch which we had gotten a hold of and where one of our characters were sitting on and just being lazy.
The couch seemed to work just fine, just as long as no one tried to sit in it or touch it with their bare hands because then the sloth spirit would try to suck out that persons mana and eventually their will to live as well. But basically we had tapped the sloth-spirit and after that the gaming session concluded.
It probably sounds very wierd when explained, but I really liked it because you had to think in pretty non-standard ways and it was something different from the usuall, find-the-monster-and-kill-it-with-guns methodology.
This is what made Mage seem the most interesting for me in comparison with Vampire or Werewolf (im not that keen on the idea of playing Vampires and Werewolves at all, because both of their character concepts have been done to death already).
I think the difficulties with Mage can be to come into the proper mindset in order to solve problems, because we had some periods where we had to really put our heads together and just ponder over a given problem because we weren't used to thinking according to the laws of (or lack of thereof) magic. : )
