Rules and Continuity
The core rules of the game are similar to those in other World of Darkness games; see Storyteller System for an explanation.
Like other storytelling games Mage emphasizes personal creativity and that ultimately the game's powers and traits should be used to tell a satisfying story. One of Mage's highlights is its system for describing magic, based on spheres, a relatively open-ended 'toolkit' approach to using game mechanics to define the bounds of a given character's magical ability. Different Mages will have differing aptitudes for spheres, and player-characters' magical expertise is described by allocation of points in the spheres.
There are nine known spheres:
Read more about this topic: Mage: The Ascension
Famous quotes containing the words rules and/or continuity:
“For rhetoric, he could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope;
And when he happend to break off
I th middle of his speech, or cough,
H had hard words ready to show why,
And tell what rules he did it by;”
—Samuel Butler (16121680)
“There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)