From:	Arcady arcady@***.net
Subject:	Magic
Date:	Thu, 5 Aug 1999 15:40:12 +700

>On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, abortion_engine wrote:
>
>> Supposedly, according to the books, the mage population is, what, one in
a
>> million? For full-blown, priority A mages? And how many of those are really

>> powerful?
>
>Awakenings says One in a hundred people are magically active. Out of
>those magically active people, one out of 10 are full priority A
>magicians. Think about it this way, since so few people are full
>magicians, I guess they'd run into each other in their line of work. You
>know, they're old college buddies from the magic theory major.

This makes a lot of sense. That comes to one in a thousand. That means there's
a few thousand of them in Seattle. Actually that sounds high...

But...

I know that less than one in a thousand people are paid internet proffessionals
such as web producers and system admins. But I sure run into a lot of them...
:) After all being one myself I tend to be in the same circles they do...

>> So, what is the proportion in your games? And in massive magical
>> proliferation games, how do you keep everything plausible, but balanced?

>
>Well think about it this way, maybe one in a hundred people is a doctor.
>We see plenty of doctors don't we? I guess you can have as many magically

>active people in your campaigns as there are doctors. And there are
>always enough doctors around aren't there?

We chose to run an all magical group. My players liked it and I thought it would
be a lot of fun. I love throwing in magical secret socieities. So far it's been
a fairly generic one but as I drag them in I'll let them see just how confused
and convoluted the magical world is.

The NPCs in my world that the players meet most of the time are non cybered
non magical normals. Guards, Office workers, Beat cops, stuffer shack employees,
and so on... Mostly norms. Most of the players are smart enough to know that
even messing with these people will make them targets.
It's when they start unraveling a case that they meet the 'trained opposition'.
That's where the mages and cybered up sams come in. And I figure in both cases
they tend to come in packs to some degree or another.

In my recent scenerio the PCs fought 7 mages (two of which where initiates,
the other 5 where low level cultists). But they know from their investigations
that at least 13 mages are in the group. (They ascenced the ward around the
church basement and on 6 successes I told them it was made 'a few years back
by a circle of 13 blood mages'.)