opening match 3: Pathfinder 2e vs Mage: the Awakening
these two are systems I've played only a little bit. as a result they seem pretty evenly matched overall-- at least markedly more even than either of the prior pairs. my brain has had about the same amount of exposure to each of them. that's all we need for less bias, right?
both systems seem pretty complex and crunchy, with pretty hefty rulebooks (600+ pages and almost 400 pages, respectively). and both have grown out of/alongside other core systems. Pathfinder more or less began as a splintered-off version of older Dungeons & Dragons editions; it's got plenty of unique flavor and mechanics all its own, but the two share plenty of DNA.
Mage, of course, is designed to work with World of Darkness and its other various add-on systems. Jeremiah has thrilling tales of extended roleplaying campaigns (the live-action kind) in which vampires, mages, and werewolves all interact within the same in-game territories. in our past Vampire chronicles, NPC mages have shown up as rather major threats, bending reality and wielding fireballs in quite a horrifying manner.
the commonality I see in Mage and Pathfinder is in the double-sided freedom and responsibility they present to their players. these massively detailed systems encourage customization in many senses of the word. player imagination and choices are important in all RPGs, but with these games, even moreso. they both seem to ask for an extra step or two of proactive engagement.
| SYSTEM | Pathfinder (2e) | Mage: the Awakening |
| back cover tagline = | "Advance your game." |
"A storytelling game of modern sorcery." |
| publisher = |
Paizo |
White Wolf |
| pub. date = |
2019 | 2005 |
| original cost = |
$59.99 | $39.99 |
| length = |
11 chapters / 638 pages |
9 major sections / 398 pages |
| my exp. level = | some | some |
previous characters + games
husband and I, during the pandemic, turned to Pathfinder as a relatively new-to-us-both game that we could learn together and, as we learned, run for each other in an informal, two-person campaign. we planned to trade off roles as dungeon master and share in the work of creating and exploring the in-game world. Jeremiah made a halfling named Tibeth, and I made a whisper elf monk named Kasahna Dohrn. we played for a month or so, traversing forests and rivers and towns. but it fell to the wayside after a while. I do want to go back to it, someday. I have notes and sketches for a pseudo prince-and-the-pauper side quest stashed away for if we ever do.
my Mage experience does add up to very slightly more than my Pathfinder experience. two characters, two different short games--one solo and one with friends. there is the aforementioned Hannah McLaughlin, shadow name Rosemary, who started out as a normal enough teenager and bumbled her way a few yards into this dark world of magical threats...
and there is Poppy. that's her shadow name, which is the name your Mage character sheet leaves space for at the top (real names in this world being too precious and dangerous to share with just anyone). Poppy does have a real name, but I do not recall what it must have been. I created her as a savvy local businesswoman running a bakery, Awakened to the Path of Doom to wield Moros magic (the kind that some call necromancy, focused on transitions, transformations, borders). for a group one-shot some months back she joined up with two others first to mentor a brand new member of Awakened society, and then to find out how and why some mysterious evil enemies attacked him and drained away his life force. it was a short game, concluding on the most ominous of cliffhangers. I think at least one of us got yanked into another dimension, never to be heard from again.
new characters
once again I have used my base World of Darkness character, Briella Jameson, as a template. in her Mage form, she's been Awakened to the Thyrsus path of magic, which attunes her more deeply to plants and animals and primal forces, granting her access to Life magic. I gave her a hummingbird familiar, too, partially in honor of the little plain-capped starthroat that has built a nest in the strands of twinkly lights around our patio in real life.my new Pathfinder character was not much more difficult to throw together. I had never played a bard before, and I thought I'd explore some of the ancestries unique to Pathfinder, even if those concepts likely wouldn't be my first choice in an actual game. playing a goblin just seems odd, doesn't it? goblins are grimy little antagonist minions-- they can't be heroes, can they?
stereotypical attitudes aside, I created Damlyn the snow goblin bard, with the barrister background. she started out as a fancy lawyer, got bored of it, and started adventuring as a way of showing off how smart and talented she is. her chosen instrument is the harmonica. very cool.
because I've played at least a little bit of both games, there are no summer one-shots scheduled for these, and thus my new characters haven't seen any gameplay. most likely they won't for a good while. but it was fun to make them and think about what stories I might want to enact using them as lenses.
aesthetics
as I look over Pathfinder's core rulebook, the word that comes to mind is 'sumptuous.' it conjures warmth and sturdiness, embossed leather and shiny buckles, hand-carved lintels and ornate knife handles, slightly wrinkled parchment and candlewax. the gameworlds of Pathfinder follow along somewhat with the Tolkein-ish high fantasy of D&D, that same very Lord-of-the-Rings style but somewhat more evolved. I find its vibe less black-and-white with regard to moral and racial structures. in fact, Pathfinder doesn't use "race" as a category at all, opting for "ancestry" as a more acceptable term for pretty much the same in-game concept.
the ornate style of the Mage rulebook shines glossy and green, its cover iridescent and reflective, half the type on its pages colored in gold. the contrasts of gilded headings and rather spare line art here give a sense of some slightly rustic, slightly refined Arthurian glamour mixed with just a tablespoon of modern grunge. it feels less sumptuous and more delicate, at least on the surface. Mage takes handfuls of urban grit from the World of Darkness core and frames each little particle of it with a lot of silvery-gold occult filigree. maybe we could call it Arthurian noir, or something like that.
{ interior of Mage: the Awakening. that font for the minor headings is straight up Zapfino-- quite classy, but not always easy to read. }
Mage narrows in on that arcane magical potential in a more grounded and gritty way-- darker and more tragic, which we should expect given its core World of Darkness basis, of course.
Pathfinder paints with broader strokes. I could repeat 89% of my aesthetic assessment for D&D here and I think all of it would still apply. in general I imagine that people play a game like Pathfinder to be straightforwardly heroic, and people play Mage for tricksy, arcane politics and keeping secrets.
approachability
have I mentioned how fat these books are? I think Pathfinder is the fattest RPG book in our collection, though I haven't actually compared them all properly. Shadowrun might be its nearest rival.
but anyway, regardless of its massive page count, Pathfinder is very nicely designed. it's got all the lovely paratextual bits one loves to see in a lengthy instructional document-- concise table of contents, headers, page numbers, navigation tabs, good cross references, etc. the order of things makes tons of sense overall, and the combo glossary/index is usefully detailed. without all of that, the sheer amount of information and options and details in this book would be horribly overwhelming. as it is, it's still a little bit overwhelming, but nothing a determined roleplayer wouldn't be able to overcome as they get used to the system.
I find Mage a difficult book for a few reasons. as far as intimidating levels of information and detail go, the chapter on magic alone is almost 200 pages of spell descriptions and mechanics. some of the same wayfinding design elements are here, too, but they seem less effective to me, mostly down to the relative lack of contrast. the type and line spacing feel small, the columns a bit on the crowded side, and the gold headings aren't the easiest to discern. all the real useful wayfinding is in the index. which is alright, but could be better.
both games come with added risk of decision fatigue: Mage moreso in its basic character creation process and Pathfinder moreso in its later advancement options. some people (even me on the right afternoon, perhaps) might find all those decisions delightful.
mechanics
like D&D, Pathfinder uses the same set of 7 polyhedral dice, with the d20 as a centerpiece. and like its base game, Mage uses d10s.
so what's different? gameplay-wise, Pathfinder follows in D&D's footsteps fairly closely. explore, encounter stuff, fight, and get creative with downtime, in whatever ratios you like. the main differences I see are in its character advancement systems and its action economy-- both more granular and therefore a little more flexible. each class comes with an outline to follow for character advancement: new feats and skill boosts, etc. but players often have lots of choice for which feats they want to take from each specified list of options. and instead of the basic actions, bonus actions, and reactions of D&D, Pathfinder breaks things down further into free actions, single actions, reactions, and 'activities' (either two-action or three-action versions). it seems like a lot to keep track of, but you do get used to it.
the Pathfinder character sheet does invite the player to keep track of what seems like million things, from the progression of attributes and skills, to specific feats, spell components, and nuances of proficiency. the attributes and skills themselves are simple enough-- almost but not quite the same as D&D's,
but as we've established Pathfinder likes so much to be, it's more granular. each skill, every weapon, and any piece of armor you might use in this game comes with four possible levels of proficiency-- your character can be untrained, trained, expert, masterful, or legendary. and this level of granularity means you get to choose specifically where you want to focus as your character advances and gains skills. but with great options for flexibility comes a great deal of math.
one more thing that I liked a lot about Pathfinder is the process of character creation has you choose ancestry and background before choosing your class-- it makes so much sense to think through it that way, and it helps make your character feel more like a real personality, not just a mechanical construct.
what does Mage add to the mechanics of regular World of Darkness? similarly to Werewolf, we get to choose which of 5 unique arcane paths our character will Awaken to and which of 5 unique political orders of mages we'll align ourselves with. (the 5 x 5 matrix of options is a staple of these early World of Darkness games, it seems).
and then of course you choose (to some degree) your magical powers. the Path you choose dictates which Arcana you'll have access to, but from there you are free to balance those Arcana in a few different directions and to choose the merits and advantages you might tie to your magic.
the system of Arcana is highly interesting to me. there are ten, arranged into gross/subtle pairs along the points and lines of the pentagram: Death, Fate, Forces, Life, Matter, Mind, Prime, Spirit, Space, and Time. whichever pair your character learns, you can choose which is primary by assigning more or fewer dots to that line on your character sheet. beyond those two Arcana, you also get to choose a third to round out your abilities.
one of the most tedious decision-making pieces of creating a Mage character, for me, is choosing rotes: the "ready-made" spells that a mage can cast most easily from the Arcana she knows. even if your character only has access to less than one-third of the 200-pages-worth of possible rotes, that is still plenty to go over and decide about. and those 200 pages of rotes isn't even all the possible magic your mage can cast during any given game session. improvised spells can be almost anything! you're really only limited by your imaginative and descriptive capabilities (and the prerogatives of your lead storyteller, of course).
Mage swaps out the essence and primal urge of Werewolf with gnosis and mana-- resources spent to enhance your magics in various ways. instead of Morality or Harmony, we have Wisdom. using magic wisely and carefully will prevent Paradox and prevent mages and humans alike from its dangers. the same Virtue and Vice system is also at play.
decision fatigue aside, gameplay for both these systems may involve a few more nooks and nuances than the prior games I've reviewed.
preliminary verdicts
of course all my broad strokes descriptions and assessments above are going to break down if your DM or storyteller wants to run things very differently. I have no way of accounting for those endless possibilities, do I? it's been tricky enough to boil down the expanse of possibilities that the game systems themselves are offering here.
in my admittedly limited and
very-influenced-by-my-life-partner's-views perspective, Pathfinder has a
reputation for being crunchy and numbers-y and mechanically on-purpose quite min-max-able. I have a sense that it is designed to be even more combat-focused than D&D and even more exacting, perhaps more 'realistic.' I didn't think I'd enjoy it very much, but for the few months we played it was quite fun. we made it our own. and I found myself getting used to the crunchiness.
I really love the idea of Mage. waking up to a world that is exponentially deeper and more mysterious than you ever dreamed just sounds cool. tapping into an intellectual, spiritual reality and making exciting things happen in the name of saving the world... yeah why not? some of the introductory paragraphs of Mage put it like this:
"The modern scientific worldview tends to treat ideas as secondary realities, less real than matter. The magical worldview knows that ideas are more real than matter" (p. 34)
and I love that. ideas with real physical influence? heck yes. thinking and willing some awesome result just hard enough, leaning at just the right angle on the right mystical buttons, and watching your power bend reality into what you want it to be? sign me up.
my experience with Mage hasn't (yet) measured up to just how cool it sounds on paper. this is in part because in practice, I'm quite intimidated by the wide open possibility this game throws at me. being prepared to grapple with all that, while balancing the strictures of the mechanics fairly, and somehow also roleplay effectively has been too difficult.
and so despite how evenly matched these two appeared in the beginning, my review is clearly leaning towards one over the other.
next match-up review: Changeling: the Lost vs. Star Wars: Force & Destiny
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