Not to go off-topic (which inevitably means I will) Wesley's death worked for the story. (Whether he'd be stupid enough to try magic against a sorcerer is something else entirely, but that's not the point here.) His death and the "Shall I lie to you now?" and the turning blue as she knocks sorcerer-boy's block off and Illyria feeling grief all worked as part of the narrative.

Trip, on Enterprise, blowing himself up for no good reason other than "It's the last episode, someone has to die" is an example of how not to do it.

I wasn't looking at it from the perspective of running a Dresden game. We've got the Dresden RPG coming out for that.

I was just commenting on my opinions of new WoD versus old WoD.

Really, you can (at least try to) run any kind of game with any system. Some systems just work a whole lot better than others.

The basic concept behind Mage: The Ascension is that reality is based on perception and belief. Mages were individuals who could change reality by basically believing enough in something happening that it happened. They used a wide variety of styles, rituals and implements to focus their beliefs (and these implements were collectively known as foci).

However, since reality was based on belief, the beliefs of normal people (called Sleepers) mattered as well. Not as strongly as Mage's, but they outnumbered the mages by about a million to one, so they kind of had the advantage. When there was a conflict between what the Mage was doing and what the Sleeper's believed, it would create a Paradox, which would then do bad things to the Mage in question. So most Mages tried to stick to non-obvious (Coincidental) magic as much as possible to avoid getting bitch-slapped by reality.

In the Mage universe, technology is also a form of magic, just one that's accepted by most of the modern world and thus doesn't suffer from Paradox. There's a group known of Mages as the Technocracy that are sort of shadow rulers of the world, and as one would expect, use "technomagic" to achieve their aims.

The game is actually a lot of fun, and is my all-time favorite RPG. However, it's really, really tough to run due to the freeform nature of the magic system, so I haven't played it nearly as often as I've played other games. The first Mage campaign I ran, however, is still the best game in any system I ever ran. My players still talk fondly about it 10 years later.

I can't speak for the new Mage: The Awakening game, though. White Wolf "destroyed" their world a year or so ago and re-created all their games from the ground up. I've yet to pick any of them up.