We should proceduralize Mage: the Ascension somewhat

Short post today, because A) I'm working on a couple of bigger things and B) this is mostly setup for something else reasonably big I'm going to do in future.

I'm going to assume you know about the game Mage: the Ascension if you're reading this. (If you don't, have a look here to learn a bit about the constructivist chaotes fighting for control of your destiny.) This post started off as a thought experiment where I tried to describe how inter-mage competition would look in the setting if they adopted modestly optimal strategies, and turned into a discussion of how the resultant world lends itself to the sort of modelling proposed by the proceduralist movement of the OSR and Post-OSR (POSR). 

(Yeah, I know that a lot of Mage players just instinctively cringed. I've seen/listened to how you guys talk about the OSR extensively on various discords, subreddits and at least one noteworthy and otherwise-excellent podcast: as a dumb hack-and-slash dungeon fantasy about killing orcs with minimal narrative. It's dismissive and fundamentally misunderstands what a significant chunk of the OSR [and certainly the majority of the OSR blogosphere] has been doing with their games since at least the mid-2010s. If this sweetens the pill at all, I've also listened to how a lot of OSR folks talk about World of Darkness games and I have very little time for that either. I'm not going to spend any time on either willfully-ignorant set of takes.)

A procedure, for those who aren't aware, is something along the lines of 'a type of rule that provides the order of operation (which order typically repeats) for a game and works to structure play'. (Prismatic Wasteland) If a conventional rule is 'roll 4 6+s on x+yd10 to achieve z', a procedure is something more like 'the game proceeds as a narrative conversation until the PCs do something that has significant risk and an interesting outcome for success or failure; the GM then calls for a roll that determines success, failure, and other potential outcomes.' It might be textual, though it isn't necessarily, and it can be a lot more complex or a lot more structural than that. The proceduralist movement, born within the OSR as well as some other classic games such as Traveller, has argued that such procedures should be explicitly designed and expressed in order to produce interesting patterns of play.

Terms defined, let's return for a moment to the WoD and work up out of the comfort zone from there. Some propositions:

• Mages, as a consequence of the strong beliefs required to manifest their paradigm, have overwhelming drives to change the world.
• When Mages, especially groups of mages, use magick, they are nearly unstoppable. Magick can famously, at risk of Paradox, do anything up to and including nuking cities (with Forces 5) and creating pocket dimensions (with Correspondence 5). That's assuming you don't bring in Archspheres. Even at one or two dots, spheres can substantially manipulate roll difficulties in a way that tilts the game's maths in favour of the mages.
• Certain non-innate conditions make it much easier for characters to use magick in these ways. Sanctums dedicated to a mage's paradigm allow a mage to avoid most Paradox in their workings. Even better, shifting a region's Reality Zone can allow a mage to avoid Paradox whilst retaining a normal human scope of action. Quintessence, harvested from nodes, lowers casting difficulties - to almost nothing, if enough is gathered. Cults and magick-using allies make rituals easier, and rituals multiplicatively increase the potential power of effects.
• The natural state of most mages is therefore competition to control or (in extremis) destroy these sources of magickal empowerment. This competition loosely parallels the interstate anarchy theory of international relations (fun explanation/serious explanation): whilst any given mage is not unusually predisposed to hoard sources of power, join groups, or destroy their rivals, mages who do not are inevitably outcompeted by those who do. As such, even mages with strong personal ideals must 'play the game' if they wish to implement those ideals. This need for strength in numbers explains the relatively loose and factious ideological assemblages that are the Traditions and Conventions.
• Quintessence is usually produced at territorially fixed Nodes (or, for Primal Utility-using Syndics, socially fixed enterprises) and produced quite slowly - 2 dots per week per dot of the ability in the 'baseline' given by M20, so somewhere like Stonehenge is only producing 18 or 20 a week. Given that Quint. has to be re-spent to lower difficulties for each stage of a ritual casting, and that rituals are the primary means of enacting effects which could truly shift the balance of power, competition to control as many sites of power as possible will be essential.
• Thanks to the effects of Paradox and paradigm, the number of mortal agents mages can effectively make use of is limited. Attempts to directly establish control over large numbers of mortals would furthermore require a degree of magickal superiority over rival groups to sustain which no faction can yet muster.
• As such, successful mages or groups of mages will often need to engage in competition over long distances (using Correspondence, agents, or conjured spirits) in order to both protect their own power-sources and weaken their enemies at once. Leaving a region undefended might allow an opponent to attack critical locations for Paradigm (walking into a major technological-reality city and conjuring a demon horde), Quintessence (bringing in a Prime specialist to destroy a Node), or Cult/Allies (mass Fireball murder). None of these forms of competition, incidentally, need to look 'game-y' - all of them require actions which have narrative weight beyond mere transfers of points or shifts in difficulties, because these forces are undergirding principles of reality. Indeed, they may look like exactly the sort of bizarre apparently-inconsequential thing wizards often seem to do in fiction to a Sleeper observer.
• Unsuccessful or weak mages will often have to move frequently, stay under the radar and avoid more powerful regional competitors (typically the technocracy). They may stick to marginal regions which lack nodes and are easily forgotten by the paradigmatic mainstream, or they may migrate between minor nodes which the significant players can exert only limited control over.
• For both successful and unsuccessful mages, the Reality Zone in a given area is important. For the powerful: sure, it's nice if your church or lab lets you do things you can't get away with in the street, but A) most groups want to extend their paradigm to the average person in the street and B) even if they don't care, the ability to act more freely throughout an area in magickal as well as mundane ways is a clear advantage in defending the power-sources in that area. For the weak: you'll have a much better chance at looting a minor node or doing anything you might want to if it's easier to avoid exploding in a place.
• Given the importance of these factors of space and distance, it makes sense to have some sort of tool which both delineates specific regions and allows measurement of movement. The conventional tool for this in other genres of TTRPG has long been the hex-map.
• Note that many games built around hex-maps, including OSR games and Traveller, rely on similar assumptions about power-scaling to those defined above: the characters will begin with very limited resources, running about in a dangerous world of more powerful forces, and will end up controlling or moving within a fixed territory where they will amass significant, setting-reshaping power and engage in competition with rivals on a new scale.
• Note also that using a hexmap to track reality zones does not preclude more specific reality zones. The reality zone inside a church is more likely to accept the sudden manifestation of an angel than is a laboratory - but a laboratory in modern-day London and a laboratory in a gentleman's tower in 18th-century Inverness are still very different propositions vis messengers from beyond. As such, sub-zones can apply modifiers whilst still being affected by the general environs of their inhabitants.
• If you are using a hexmap, there's little reason not to at least consider the other tools of proceduralism, many of which have been build around the assumptions of 'crawl' travel - hexcrawl, pointcrawl, barcrawl etc.. Random encounters are useful tools for ensuring the game-world isn't just about the PCs and that travel feels somewhat questlike. Faction turns give you a chance to regularly check how the massive rituals of the Technocracy and Traditions are faring in breaking the deadlock against the other, and how smaller forces might be taking advantage. Random weather might empower or weaken certain magicks, and checks for disease could ground a grimy street-level game.
• Furthermore, Mage already has mechanics which are crying out to have more explicit procedures, mostly in backgrounds. Allies asking for favours returned to generate new plot hooks after helping resolve old ones; businesses prospering or faltering (aided and abetted by Prime magick); contacts alerting you to plot developments - all of these things can already be done, but having those expectations codified would significantly benefit at least those many prospective Storytellers in the fanbase who are put off by the vagueness of the setting and the difficulties of planning plot. Yes, you can sandbox and let plot unfold from player actions, but codifying procedure gives a sense of what pattern that unfolding might take.

To be clear, I'm not talking about big changes or stacks of additional rules here. It's late, so I'll be lazy and quote Prismatic Wasteland on procedures again:

'Simply adding more rules to exploration, like pages and pages of walking speeds for mounts or types of terrain and how that impacts travel, would not add mechanical support to that activity. But adding a procedure, like a hex crawl procedure or an overloaded encounter die for overland travel, gives exploration the structure it needs to stand on its own.'

A framework: a measurable environment, with factions that take actions, encounters (which doesn't. mean. fights.) keyed to specific locations, hex-reality-zones which can be specifically affected whilst also measuring travel, and strict time records kept. Not as revolutionary as it sounds, but, I suspect, nevertheless more so than it strictly should be at this point.

Anyway, I'm going to try it. I have a few more posts on other topics to finish first, but at some point before Samhain I hope to release the first in a (probably long) series building a regional, factional hexcrawl within the Mage: the Ascension setting. It's about more than just the contents of this post, there are a lot of aesthetic influences I've been wanting to use going into it as well on my end, but this was an important theoretical basis to establish for it.