| Magic Vs Mundane, The Secret War Part One : Mages vs Samurais Its often said from the rafters that Mages kick ass, and they're much more powerful that Samurais. I'll have to be honest with you here. MAges do kick ass on MUXes, but only in certain situations. Online gaming is traditionally very karma heavy, and its much easier and takes less effort to get than nuyen. Sometimes, a mux brings on a karma2cash command, trying to address the balance, allowing Samurais with a lot of karma and not much money to get some cash, theoretically for their new toys. Well, I've been around for quite a while in the online environment, and I have to say that when it comes down to a run situation, I've never really had a game where the mages ran ahead and took centre stage, or even wiped the floor with most people before anyone else could get a chance. Mages are quite good, in theory, but in practise its still usually the Sammie who does the bulk of the work. Now I'm sure there are occasional exceptions to this, but in general, this is what I have seen. There's a line of thinking that Mages are Too Powerful, and that their creating should be limited in Chargen. When I was young and foolish, and didnt know the dynamics of a MUX or MUSH that well, I would have agreed with this line of thought. But, lets face it kids. There's one, maybe two slots on a team that a mage can fill. Even the Uber-Physads arent all that great, and while they're useful in close quarters, their reliance on twinky katanas and hand to hand combat really does limit their usefullness on a lot of runs. The other thing with mages is their complete lack of technical expertise in a lot of cases. Some mages know absolutely squat all about electronic security. This is a big problem, because it just so happens that 99% of the security measures you will be dealing with on a run are mundane and electronic. Some spells are useful, but many arent, and a simple lock can really cause a mage a lot of heartache on a stealthy run. Another problem with Mages is that they're very reliant on getting in a hit or two first. Drain really kicks into them, especially if they're trying a hard spell and use a lot of their spell pool on the first spell casting, and dont have much left for drain or the next pass. Mages are good in confrontations against slower, weak witted or distracted mundanes, but they're really in trouble up against another mage, and usually the mundanes are assigned to target an opposition mage. Mages can advance very quickly, as well, but this has OOC ramifications. An awakened character, spell slinger or adept, that becomes highly powerful will usually also become inactive. Its an odd situation, really, but it seems the more powerful a PC becomes, the less active they get. This is probably due to a couple of reasons...the truly powerful mages tend to be twinky, and as such other people dont like playing with them. GM's dont like GMing for super-characters, either, especially when they need to up the difficulty to challenge the super mage so much that they kill off all the lesser PCs in the process. Finally, the all powerful, nothing's hard character becomes rather boring. The REAL problem that most people have in the Mage Vs Sammie debate is how easily a mage can take out a bar of samurai. Which is exactly the situations players shouldnt be worrying about, in the first place. Given a mage sitting at the bar, he can get the jump on most PCs there and hit them all with a powerful spell simply because none of the PCs knew OOCly that trouble was coming. PCs in a run situation behave very differently than they do in soft RP. Most of the really tough and dangerous PCs, awakened or mundane (but especially physads) were simply feared and hated because they were twinky PvP Bar-brawlers. Part Two |