Mage, Cultural Irrelevancy, and the New Despair

The other day someone who liked Genius: The Transgression asked me what Mage: The Ascension books were worth reading. White Wolf (what's left of it) is coming out with a 20th anniversary Mage just like they did with Vampire and Werewolf, trying to recapture the magic. Some of the designers seem aware of the problem with Mage: The Ascension: it's a New Age game about mysticism and technology-as-the-enemy, heir to Carlos Castaneda and the LSD-enlightenment movements of the 60s and 70s, and right now the Nerd World could not be further from that. Right now everything is steampunk and ray guns and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the anti-scientific thinking Mage pushes is about as hip as liberalism after the Iran Hostage Crisis or conservatism after Hurricane Katrina.

I watched as the 90s became the 2000s and geekdom shifted away from the pagan/postmodern thinking that helped produce Mage into the (often equally shallow, but still diametrically opposed) "hurray for science" attitude that continues to persist, despite economic and ecological calamity. Now Mage's themes look more dated than the Captain Planet ecofascism that litters Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Meanwhile, Marvel movies sweep up the box office because 1962 and 2014 are similar in a lot of ways. The same gee-whiz attitude unites the present day and the years when Kirby and co. were creating the Marvel universe; the early 90s might as well be the Cretaceous.

There are ways out of the 20th anniversary game's conundrum, though. I would emphasize the empowerment offered by Mage. Phil Brucato, one of the chief architects of Ascension, has spoken several times about Mage's empowering elements, and I think that message, more than the mysticism, is what still resonates. This is especially the case as more people from traditionally disadvantaged groups get online and realize that they are not as powerless or alone as society told them they were. Tumblr--much-maligned, frequently-ridiculous Tumblr--probably feels like a Mage-style Awakening to the historically disenfranchised people who get on there and realize their concerns and opinions are real and shared by thousands of others. Translating the energy of that discovery into Mage is a better idea than digging around in the detritus of postmodern philosophy and New Age.

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I wonder if the pendulum of geek culture can swing back. It's hard to imagine, in the middle of it! No more steampunk, no more bacon science robots, no more happy Pinterest garden projects--at least, not as anything but a cultural relic. But culture shifts fast.

The rise of New Age coincides with the failure of the Space Age. I'm not sure if that's a coincidence or a cause, but the timing is conspicuous, and we have another failure on the horizon: the second dotcom bust. No one can look at the death spiral of Yahoo!, the frenzied world of pointless app creation, the corrosion of Google, and see anything but disaster on the horizon. When the whole farce comes crashing down--harder than the first dotcom bust, maybe harder than any collapse we've seen since the gutting of American manufacturing or the slow death of American unions--we will see more than enough despair to fuel a furious reaction against the science-fetishism that characterized the early 60s and that characterizes our current age. Maybe, the collapse of Silicon Valley will be enough to end this age of do-it-yourself tinkering and can-do spirit. Maybe in a few years, we can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas again and look west, and see another high-water mark, where the wave broke and rolled back once more.

Game Systems That Push Back

As I analyze what I want from a game it's increasingly clear that my chief criterion for a game I like is this: I want a game that lets me come up with a concept and then supports multiple ways to build a character like that.

Most classless point-buy systems, though I can respect them, offer me no visceral satisfaction when creating a character because there's only one obvious way to create any given concept. Want to be a swashbuckler? Get a high Dexterity, crank up your Rapier skill, and select swashbuckler-related Advantages. Breezily simple, and ideal for many purposes, but in some perverse fashion, I would rather feel my hands sink into clay when building a character rather than swimming through air.

In the opposite fashion, old-school D&D-style games are frustrating because other than the handful of concepts the game supports, there's no way to build most characters. Want a swashbuckler? Ask your DM to carve out exceptions for you because otherwise the rules say you'll be sub-optimal to the point of total ineffectiveness.

By contrast, robust class systems (and a few robust skill-and-power systems) offer multiple routes to a single core concept. In D&D3/3.5/Pathfinder, you want a swashbuckler? Right out of the core book, you've got the obvious choice (a rogue), rangers, certain fighter builds, bards, maybe one or two other classes if you rope in supplements. You've got a system that pushes back and gives you chewy mechanical ways to build different kinds of swashbucklers, or dragon wizards, or pyromancers, or whatever nerdy stuff you want.

(One of my frustrations with the monk when I ran D&D3 was its lack of conceptual flexibility. The strict, limited power progression meant that there was only one concept associated with the monk class: the "monk" concept.)

In creating Genius: The Transgression, this goal of mine reaches its deranged and borderline-ridiculous zenith, where for almost any given mad scientist concept, you can find a home in the game's 5x2 structure (ten groups total, built along two axes,  so all characters belong to a "job" group and a "personality" group). And each option gives you a bit of mechanical "pushback" to your concept and a lot of narrative and conceptual pushback. If you want to play a "plant scientist," the obvious choice is the Progenitor Foundation, but less obvious choices create weird new juxtapositions that are inherently interesting. What about a Direct Plant scientist? King of the plant people! What about a Navigator (the "combat" Foundation)? A knight of thorns? Spore guns and vine grapple-hooks? Likewise, the personality axis yields strange, chewy results that enrich whatever concept you've envisioned. Genius' classes don't just support your core concept, they distort it through a prism of unusual assumptions that, I hope, gives you more ideas than you started out with.