Mage the Ascension: Is it really possible to remove Entropy?

[Grek]

The other answer for Doubt (and I make no bones about it being my favourite) is to have a Paradox analogue in the Conspiracy. Whenever you do magic and a Sleeper notices, the Conspiracy steps in to cover it up by memory wiping and disappearing people as appropriate.

[Username17]

It's totally fine if the Conspiracy has overtly magical powers that they can and do cover up afterward, but the player characters should not. When the Conspiracy demonstrates their existence to the player characters and then none of the muggles believe them, that makes them question their sanity. But if their own powers are demonstrable, that just makes them question other peoples' sanity. It's a subtle distinction, but it's there.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

Is there much that can be done with a "Players have subtle magic but sleepers still are unable to process it?" type of deal? If the players have minor magical powers that they are aware of both out of character and in character, but for magical reasons (Conspiracy or otherwise) the average person will simply never accept that magic is real? It seems like it could be internally consistent, but that the powers within that small margin space might not be so interesting to bother over.

[name_here]

The entire idea with Doubt is that the player characters aren't sure they have superpowers.

But for powers which the characters can have that cannot be convincingly demonstrated to sleepers, you'd probably mostly be looking at mental manipulation

[Username17]

Is there much that can be done with a "Players have subtle magic but sleepers still are unable to process it?" type of deal? If the players have minor magical powers that they are aware of both out of character and in character, but for magical reasons (Conspiracy or otherwise) the average person will simply never accept that magic is real? It seems like it could be internally consistent, but that the powers within that small margin space might not be so interesting to bother over.

That kind of thing is actually incredibly hard to roleplay. In the real world, people jump to magical explanations of things all the time. If you pick three winning teams in a row, people will start getting suspicious that you have sorcery, even if your overall success rate is still about 50/50. Literally millions of people believed in the oracular ability of Paul the Octopus.

So to have people not believe in your magic, it kinda has to produce some kind of brain fog that keeps people from remembering it or something. Because let's be honest: in the real world you don't have to produce any evidence at all to convince other people that magic powers are afoot. Remember when the DRC arrested 13 people for sorcerous penis theft? That was in 2008. Hell, Saudi Arabia still executes people for sorcery. The truth is that not only do a majority of people still believe in magic, but there are still real life witch trials where like judges and shit hear evidence of sorcery and witchcraft.

One of the lines that Doubt has to walk is giving people enough power to be interesting while still having it be remotely credible that other people assume you are crazy rather than a magician. And a big part of that for Doubt is making the character seem non-credible in other ways. The Conspiracy cleans up after itself and you can't produce evidence that they were ever doing anything. The characters are forced off the grid and appear to be hobos and career criminals. That sort of thing.

Because even with no powers at all, you can convince a lot of people that you have the magic power to influence a fair die roll just by sounding confident or making vague predictions and having them happen to come true. Getting the players to not be believed requires more than just a lack of evidence - in the real world magic doesn't even exist and a majority of people are believers anyway!

-Username17