The first time I played Mage, it was a revelation.

I had heard about the game after playing D&D for

years and running more than a few games, when a friend offered to run a short game for a character that
I made. During that initial game I managed to uncover a secret cabal of vampires and fairies, get caught
up in their machinations, and make a deal to upset the power dynamics of a vampire organization. At
the same time, my character used divination to uncover details of this, give himself a tiny artificial
lung, and begin creating anti-vampire armaments. All of this, with essentially 6 spell descriptions. This
is the sort of play that changed everything for me. In typical D&D you get a certain number of spells
per level and they each do one thing: Fireball does this many points of damage, web spreads this much
sticky substance which can be fought like this, the spell wish can only wish for these things. Many
systems try and open this up to subvert this, but most give some strict limits on what you can do. Mage
seems to trust its players more. You get a certain number of points in a magical expertise. For instance
with 3 points in the life expertise, you can do anything up to altering the shape of your or other living
things organs. So long as it is not more that that, you can do anything. I mostly use this to be stronger
or thicker or breathe underwater, but I can make an extra lung or shift my face to look like anyone.

Mage does have equivalent spells called rotes, but they aren’t strictures like the spells in other systems.
Rotes are spells you should be able to cast at your level of expertise. For instance, with enough
expertise in spirit, you should be able to see spirits without rolling any dice. Rotes though are spread
throughout the books and are hard to find and I like to think this is intentional. Yes, you could look
through the books and find every rote for your level of expertise and rule lawyer yourself out of ever
having to roll, but then I think you’re playing in a way that is missing the point. Rotes say what you can
do, so that you can have some idea of stuff that is easy at your level. The person running the game
should let you just do a certain level of magic without a roll because it is fun. The point of rolling is to
see how well you do in challenging situations. You could just run ram-shod over the game and do
magic constantly and be nigh unstoppable, but the game system trusts you to use the mechanics to have
fun in a story. You can in some ways beat D&D, but there is nothing to beat in Mage.

Running Mage was also a revelation in terms of how I ran games. When I started D&D I wrote out
stories with paths. Much like in a prewritten game, you could go down a number of paths and end up in
virtually the same place. For instance, regardless of whether my players stole the artifact, fought the
crime boss, or did nothing, they always would end up meeting the head of the thieves guild. I guess this
is because I had a story and stats written out and I felt helpless if it wasn’t close to my intended story.
This is a lot like the prewritten spells in D&D. At a certain level, all the spells have a relative level of
utility. They can be used in creative ways, but the same spells were all that was available. When I
started running mage, I began to ask “what if.” Instead of making this magical object because it is a
unique idea, the object isn’t unique. Ideas for this object have been distributed to a bunch of mages to
destabilize a market. This came as the character was seeking out a total false lead. This works much
more like Mage’s spells. You can do anything up to this limit of your expertise, so what if instead of an
extra lung the character absorbs air through their skin.

Mage has a lot of game elements that don’t fit with other more strict elements of play. It is harder to be
a rules lawyer about the whole thing, because it works more on a system of judgements.