[Mage: The Awakening] Artifacts vs Other stuff

[DJDizzy]

Heyyo, since I have to make mage character soonish, I have a couple of questions. Would it be best to take Gnosis 3 with my initial 7 merit points, or Extemporaneous Affinity(*,***,*****) which adds +1/2/3 to casting Improvised Spells or a 7dot artifact? If it's the Artifact, what spells would be universally useful on one?

Oh, and I am most likely either playing a Moros or an Acanthus.

[Selrahc]

Heyyo, since I have to make mage character soonish, I have a couple of questions. Would it be best to take Gnosis 3 with my initial 7 merit points, or Extemporaneous Affinity(*,***,*****) which adds +1/2/3 to casting Improvised Spells or a 7dot artifact? If it's the Artifact, what spells would be universally useful on one?

Oh, and I am most likely either playing a Moros or an Acanthus.

Got a character concept in mind?
Artifact is most useful if you want to fulfil a certain role as a magician, but it requires a spell from outside of your core arcana.

Gnosis is good if you want to be doing a lot of spellcasting and as a basis for future character growth. I've never even seen extemporaneous affinity, although it sounds like it fills a similar role to Gnosis.

[DJDizzy]

Either a Moros hacker or an Acanthus trickshooter.

[Selrahc]

Gnosis boost probably works okay for a hacker.

For a trickshooter, I'd skip any magical merits. Just grab some sort of fighting style. Alternatively if the aim is just to perform gun tricks, boost gnosis for improvised magic.

[1of3]

Comparing the merit (where is that from by the way?) and Gnosis,

the merit is more useful for improvised casting, especially since your Gnosis will rise because of Arcane Experience. You do not incur higher paradox pools either.

Gnosis is more useful for rituals (casting time goes down) and you can immediately enter a Legacy.

[Civil War Man]

I only have passing knowledge of new mage. Is the merit character creation only? If it is not, you may want to spend the points on Gnosis to give you the head start, since raising your power stat after character creation gets really expensive really quickly.

If it is character creation only, you'll probably want to buy the merit, under the assumption that the fact you are even considering it means you plan on doing a lot of, if not mostly, improvised casting.

[DJDizzy]

It's from Banishers

[MickJay]

The merit is also pretty much restricted to Banishers, to make up for the fact they can't use or create Rotes. It'd take an extremely lenient ST to allow anyone else to take it.

[DJDizzy]

Not exactly, since the prerequisites only lists: Awakened, whereas the other merits, list Awakened (Banisher or Storytellers permission)

Also, Banishers can use Rotes, they just don't begin with them.

[MickJay]

thanks for correcting me, I don't actually own this book, I must have misremembered this :)

[Project_Mayhem]

Sadly, the way they've made the starting points for power stat system work, it's normally far more xp efficient to sink 6 freebie points into Gnosis. You need Gnosis in mage - it's far too important not to have at at least 3. Consider that you probably have an arcana at 1 dot. With 1 gnosis, your pool to cast improvised spells with it is 2 in combat, 4 when you can use high speech. That's practically worthless.

It's one of my biggest issues with the NWoD system - in my mage game I just let everyone start with 3 gnosis. as they would have all taken it and had less interesting characters otherwise.