Crisis in White Wolf!

I used to play in a Mage: the Ascension game with some of my friends -- part of White Wolf Wednesday. Lately we've been playing Demon: the Fallen. And Demon is fun, until the GM sprung on me that I've got a dark overlord and master who demands human sacrifice, which I did not know going in. And that's okay, I can spend my character's life opposing his dark lord and master -- trying to find a way to destroy him.

But now I can't play Mage: the Elitism anymore. Mage is, in laymans terms, the Unix of roleplaying games. I have played the game for eight years now -- eight of the ten that second edition has been released. But my existing Mage character is too complex for me to play. The GM asked me to fill out an extended character sheet, and I had always thought that many Mage (or White Wolf) GMs in general are really demanding when it comes to character background, explanation, etc. etc. etc. It's part of having a system that claims to be purely dramatic. And that's fine.

But the stack of sheets I was given looked less like any character sheet I'd ever seen before, and more like a stack of tax forms, with a White Wolf Mage: the Ascension (Verbena) character sheet on top. And when I got to page three (of four), I encountered something about 'style' and 'threads'. I had no clue what this was, so I asked the GM.

And Sterling (the GM), says, "Oh. Well, it's kind of like how the Hermetics have a specific way of doing something. Or the Sons of Ether have a style, too. Kind of like that. And if you can't understand it ... I can't really explain it more clearly than that." This doesn't make sense to me. I know that each tradition uses their effects in a different way, and the character sheet I have says 'Verbana' (my character's Tradition) at the top. So it can't be something as simple as which tradition your character is.

So I turn to Jim, thinking he might know. And all he does is nod knowingly and look away.

This isn't the first aspect of the character in a system which I used to know that I'm forced to blunder through, only now instead of just treating me like I'm ignorant for not knowing (I don't own a 3rd edition Mage book, nor am I inclined to get one), they're actively refusing to even give me an example of what I'm supposed to be writing down.

I already blundered my way through Resonance, which our GM said if we didn't have recorded by such-and-such session, we wouldn't recieve EXP. I honestly have no idea what Resonance is, and expect it (now) to only be revealed as having a purpose when I attempt to pull off a rote and he says, "Sorry, you can't do that, your resonance is such-and-such."

And that seriously pisses me off. When I played Mage, for all that time, all those years, we never bothered with Rotes, because that just slowed the game down. We all, always used dynamic magic. The GM would figure out what was required, tell us, and give us a difficulty. If we already knew how we wanted it to work, instead of just the effect we wanted to achieve, we'd give him that, and the GM would just assign a difficulty.

But now, now you're not allowed to use magic without a rote, unless you want a penalty added to your roll (and it's not really a penalty, but when every other PC and NPC gets the 'I have a rote for this situation, as well as any other' bonus, it works out to the same thing).

And the GM promised me at one point he'd help me figure out rotes, and things I could do to get my character workable.

But in all honesty, I just get the feeling that he doesn't want me to play in his games -- any of them.

And that's just crappy. Especially since I'm running a game that he's in.