Basic rules

Mage is a game of stories about creating fantastic legends of people who break all the rules. Yet, like any game, Mage has its own set of rules. Rules exist to provide a consistent base for playing the game. Everyone gets a fair shot, an idea of how the world works and a means to arbitrate disputes or random occurrences. Just as the characters in a Mage game break all the rules of reality, though, the game itself has rules that are meant to be broken.
The goal of a good Mage game is to have fun, whether by telling a story, indulging in a little action or reminiscing about old times. Since every player plays for enjoyment, it's important to remember that the rules take second-seat to the entertainment. It's the fun of the game that counts, not how closely everyone cleaves to some imaginary canonical standard. Of course, the more rules you toss out the window, the more free-form your game gets, but the great stories often come from the heroes who defy all established laws and sense. Use your best judgement to decide when to bend, when to break and when to throw away the rules completely.
In the meantime, these rules will give you a quick and consistent base for game moderation.

Time

Running time is a constant consideration. Do you know where your characters are? When did they get there? How long will it take for them to finish their critical goals, and will they have time for a donut on the side?
Whenever the game is played, time passes for the characters. While noon is always followed by one o'clock and the sun continues to rise and set in the characters' world (assuming you're on Earth!), there's no need to roleplay out every second of the characters' lives. Sometimes game time passes relatively normally, such as during a conversation. At other times, the Storyteller will declare that an hour, a night or even a week has passed if nothing interesting or important is going on. During combat or other tense and fast-paced situations, time may even pass faster for the players than it does for the characters as the details of combat, car chases or similar events play out. To help better quantify and describe the passage of time without being burdened with lengthy charts or calculations, Mage uses six basic units to describe game time.
• Turn: The amount of time your character needs to perform a fairly simple action. One turn normally takes between three seconds and three minutes, depending on the current pace of the game. In combat and similar stress situations, turns are almost always three seconds long.
• Scene: Just like in movies and plays, a scene is the time taken by a single event happening at a single location. A fast and furious combat in an Iteration X lab, a lengthy and complex conversation in the characters' Chantry and a ritual performed under the light of the full moon each take one scene. A single scene can take anywhere from a few minutes to many hours, and it contains exactly as many turns as are needed. Scenes that contain only conversation and similar social interactions usually do not contain separate turns.
• Chapter: An independent part of the story, usually played out in a single game session. Most chapters consist of a number of scenes connected by periods of downtime. Chapters in plays or novels are a good example of the same sort of time period. Chapters usually encompass between one hour and several weeks of game time, but they may run much longer on occasion.
• Story: Sometim es known as a scenario or an adventure, a story is a connected series of chapters that proceed from an introduction, to some form of conflict, to some resolution. Some stories require many chapters to complete, while others are finished after a single chapter.
• Chronicle: A series of stories connected by the presence of the same characters and the events surrounding them. Some chronicles involve a single story-arc composed of a closely linked series of stories, while others consist of a sequence of mostly independent stories that are only linked by the presence of the same characters. Chronicles usually take between a few weeks and a few years of game time, lasting between a few months and a few years of play. • Downtime: Time that is "glossed over" with brief descriptions by the Storyteller rather than played out turn-by-turn or scene-by-scene. When a Storyteller says, "All of the characters rest and recover for the next two days," or, "Your characters spend the next two hours gathering the props and tools needed for the big ritual," rather than letting the characters actually play out either of these events, he is invoking downtime. Downtime is used to play through trivial or tedious time periods quickly and to control the time and pacing of a game.

Managing Downtime

Downtime is an immensely helpful way to maintain pacing and interest in a game. It is also when characters take care of the mundane details of their lives, study and otherwise learn to improve themselves (not to mention when the players spend experience points).
Downtime is also often necessary for characters to heal and to recover from the mental and physical stresses of their adventures. Since the Storyteller always controls the amount of downtime provided, she can decide when to allow characters time to relax and when to run them on the ragged edge of sleep-deprived sanity. A helpful technique for downtime, if the Storyteller decides to place a couple of weeks (or months, or years) of downtime between games, is the idea of downtime activities.
The players write down some ideas of what their characters do with the time, and they let this list sketch out a broader picture than the more personal actions usually played in a game session. A character might seek to check up on his Influence or manage a business, for example, all through the course of multiple mundane and time-consuming tasks. Better still, these actions bubble into all sorts of plot hooks for the next game.

Actions

During any game, your character will do many things. Some of these tasks are considered actions, while others aren't. In brief, an action is a task at which your character has a chance of failure or interruption due to the vagaries of chance, skill or outside forces. Speech, breathing and similar simple basic tasks aren't considered actions, but almost everything else is. Everything from performing a magical Effect to climbing a ladder is an action. One action typically takes one turn of game time to complete.

Taking action is easy. You tell your Storyteller what you are planning to have your character do. At this point, the Storyteller must figure out if this action succeeds or fails. A die roll might be involved to determine the outcome of random events, or the Storyteller may make a judgement by fiat.
The Storyteller then regales you with the outcome of your character's feats, whether successful or not. In general, actions fall into three categories: automatic actions, impossible actions and disputed actions. Whenever a player describes an action, Storytellers must first decide if the action is either automatic or impossible.
For such actions no dice are required. Otherwise, the action moves into disputed territory, and it becomes time to resolve the consequences of success or failure. Many actions are simple enough that they are considered automatic. Unless some unseen or hostile forces are at work, your character can walk across an empty street, eat dinner, or read a street sign printed in her native language automatically. Such actions are successful automatically, and they require no dice or other mechanics. Impossible actions are as easy to adjudicate as automatic actions.
A mage with no knowledge of computers cannot simply hack into the Technocracy's computers for data, and no mage — no matter how powerful — can stop the Earth from revolving around the sun. For these and similarly outrageous actions, the Storyteller will let you know that your character has no chance of performing such a feat. However, the entire range of actions that your character might be able to accomplish lies between the trivial and the impossible.
Whether your character is driving in a high -speed chase, creating a powerful talisman, or to shooting a foe in a gunfight, there is a chance that your character might succeed and a chance that your character might fail. In these situations, the Storyteller will ask you to roll dice to determine whether the action succeeds or fails.

Rolling Dice

In any situation where an action's outcome is in doubt, the result is decided by a combination of chance and the character's Traits. Mage uses a simple, easy and time-tested chance-based mechanic: rolling dice. In all cases, the dice used in Mage are 10-sided dice, which you can find at any game store and many bookstores.
The Storyteller will need a dozen or more such dice, while players may need up to 10. Of course, dice can be shared around — 20 dice is usually enough for most gaming groups. Players roll dice to determine the outcome of any action where both success and failure are reasonable possibilities. Your character's Traits affect the number of dice you roll, and they have a direct effect on the chance that your character will succeed at the action.

Ratings

While a character's personality, hopes and dreams are determined purely by your own imagination, her capabilities are defined by her Traits — her innate aptitudes and learned abilities. With the exceptions of Arete, Quintessence, Paradox and Willpower, all Traits have a minimum score of 0 and a maximum score of 5. A 0 in a Trait represents a complete lack of knowledge or competence, while a 5 is the pinnacle of human achievement. Most people in the World of Darkness have Traits ranging from 1 to 3. A 4 represents an excellent degree of ability, while a 5 is extremely rare and quite exceptional.
However, certain supernatural monsters can have Traits greater than 5, and mages can use their magic to increase their Traits above human norms temporarily. Think of Trait ratings as similar to the "star" rating system for hotels and movies. A rating of 1 is fairly dubious, while a rating of 5 is truly excellent. In some unfortunate circumstances, a character might also have a zero in a Trait. A zero would normally be reserved for Abilities that a character never learned or developed, but magical injury, extreme physical damage or severe mental disability could reduce a character to a 0 in an Attribute.

Trait ratings appear in the following format: x Abysmal/ Totally Untrained
• Poor/ Novice
• • Average/ Beginning Professional
• • • Good/ Trained Professional
• • • • Exceptional/ Top-Notch Professional
• • • • • Superb/ World-Class Champion
• • • • • • Legendary

Whenever you roll dice, you roll one die for every dot in the appropriate Trait. For instance, if your character needs to solve a complex riddle over the course of several days, and she has three dots of Intelligence, you'd roll three dice. However, with the exception of Willpower, Arete and Paradox rolls, you almost never use only a single Trait in a roll.
Most often, when you use an Attribute in a roll (such as rolling your dice in Perception to find something), you also add in dice equal to your score in an Ability associated with the specific roll. For example, if Colin the Hermetic were attempting to understand a complex book on metaphysical philosophy the Storyteller might have his player roll Intelligence + Academics — an Attribute plus an Ability.
If Colin had an Intelligence of 3 and an Academics of 4, his player would pick up three dice for the Attribute and four dice for the Ability, rolling the total of seven dice. These dice make up the dice pool for the roll. In most cases, a single such dice pool is the total number of dice you can roll in one turn.

However, some actions take longer than a turn, and it is also possible (if more difficult) to perform multiple actions in a single turn.
See "Extended Actions" and "Multiple Actions" for further information. In some cases, a single Trait is used in a roll; in most cases two Traits (one Attribute and one Ability) are used in a roll. However, there are no cases in which more than two Traits make up a dice pool. Since Arete and Willpower both have maximum scores of 10, and Attributes and Abilities both have maximum scores of five, normal humans can never roll more than 10 dice in a dice pool. Only the most exceptional individuals in the world ever roll 10 dice in a dice pool.
Mages' ability to alter the very fabric of reality means than they can sometimes roll more than 10 dice in a dice pool, but doing so is almost always a rare and special event.

Difficulties

Now that you're rolling great handfuls of dice and you're throwing together every conceivable combination of Attributes and Abilities to figure out what you're doing, the next question is

that of what you're trying to roll. Whenever your character performs an action that requires a roll, the Storyteller will tell you the appropriate difficulty number. A difficulty number is always a number between 2 and 10.
Each time one of the dice you roll scores that number or higher, you are considered to have rolled a success. For example, if an action has a difficulty of 6 (the most common difficulty number) and you roll 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, you rolled three successes. The more successes you roll, the better your character did. You need only score one success for your character to perform most actions, but it's a marginal success. Three or more successes usually means that you've succeeded completely. The lower the difficulty number is, the easier the action is. A difficulty of 6 indicates that the task is neither particular easy nor especially difficult.
Of course, various modifiers can come into play, so don't expect every task to be equally simple! The Storyteller should decide on the difficulty for all actions. Only the easiest actions have a difficulty of 2 or 3. A difficulty 2 task is so simple it's rarely worth the trouble to roll. A difficulty 9 task is extremely hard, and success is unlikely for all but the most skilled. Difficulty 10 tasks are almost impossible, for you have an equal chance of botching as you do of succeeding, regardless of the number of dice you roll.
Only especially onerous tasks set by the Storyteller will have a difficulty of 10. Almost all tasks will thus have difficulties ranging from 3 to 9, and the majority will range from 4 t? 8. A roll of 10 on a task is always a success. If you manage to score a 10, you've blown away the most difficult problem, no matter how complex. The only way you could still fail an action in this case is if the Storyteller decided that the action was impossible, but cruelly made you roll the dice anyway to string you along.

Failure

If you score no successes at all in a roll, your character fails to achieve the desired result. He misses his shot, the lengthy and complex ritual produces no result other than melted candles and clouds of incense, or the code remains beyond his ability to crack. The exact results of failure are up to the Storyteller to decide. However, they are rarely catastrophic — certainly much less bad than a botch.

EXAMPLE: Raven the Verbena attempts to overhear a conversation between a suspected Syndicate agent and a Virtual Adept he knows. Unfortunately, the two are talking in a crowded subway station with trains going by. Not wanting to get close enough that his spying will be obvious, Raven appears to be waiting to use a pay phone while attempting to listen from 15 feet away. Rebecca the Storyteller tells Raven's player, Richard, to roll his Perception + Alertness (difficulty 8). Raven's dice pool for this roll is five dice. Richard ro lls 2,7,6,4,5 — no successes. Rebecca rules that Raven could only catch a word or two of the conversation, and that he has no idea what the two conspirators are talking about.

Botches

Sometimes things go wrong enough to ruin your effort, or perhaps your entire day. The last important rule about dice in the Storyteller system is the "rule of one," also known as botching. Whenever a die comes up one, it cancels a single success. If you roll three successes and three ones, you score (in total) no successes, and your character fails.
Sometimes life's just like that. The easiest way to keep track of this rule is to set aside one of your successful dice with each 1 that comes up. If you have any successes left, then your character succeeded; if you don't, he didn't. As stated previously, you fail if you roll as many or more 1s than successes. Sometimes your character will really screw up. If you ever roll no successes at all, and get one or more 1s, you botch. Rolling no successes and no 1s or even eight 1s and a single success are both merely ordinary failures. Botches require that you roll at least one 1 and no successes even before taking away successful dice.
Botches are considerably worse than ordinary failures. Not only did your character fail, something significantly bad happened in addition. While an ordinary failure on a Stealth roll means your character might have be detected, botching a Stealth roll involves knocking over something loud, or stepping on a dry twig, essentially guaranteeing that he will be noticed. Similarly, botches in combat indicate that not only did your character fail to hit your target, but his weapon broke, or he shot one of his companions by accident.
There's no table or list of botches provided here. It is up to Storytellers to decide both the type and magnitude of the botch. As a rough guide, Storytellers are free to decide that the more 1s rolled during a botch, the worse the botch is. If you roll a single 1 when shooting a gun in combat, your character's gun may jam. If four or more 1s are rolled, accidentally shooting a friend or an ally, or even having the gun explode in your character's hand, might be reasonable results.

Automatic Successes

Rolling huge handfuls of dice may be great fun when your character is trying to understand the inner workings of some vastly powerful technomagical construct, but it is rather less enjoyable when the same character is simply trying to perform a minor repair on her car. While even a relatively simple task may be a worthy challenge for a complete novice, the same task is trivially easy for an expert. Therefore, Mage has a simple and easy system for determining automatic successes for easy tasks. If the number of dice in your character's dice pool equals or exceeds the difficulty number of the task, your character succeeds automatically.
No die roll is necessary. Since an automatic success is equivalent to rolling a single (marginal) success, this system is less than useful for all resisted tasks, and it cannot be used for combat or similarly stressful tasks. Also, if the quality of the success is at issue, you will probably want to roll the dice anyway, to try to achieve more successes. However, for simple and especially for often-repeated actions, this system should speed up activity considerably. Of course, there is another more taxing method of getting an automatic success on any roll: simply spend a Willpower point. You can do so a maximum of once per turn. Because your character has a limited supply of Willpower this tactic should be reserved for emergencies or other important situations.

Trying It Again

When you fail at a task, it is often somewhat harder to try a second time.
This increased difficulty is produced by a combination of stress and the fact that some portions of the task may simply exceed your ability. Failure to pick a lock or repair a device simply means that the character did not succeed, not that he can never succeed at this task.
Characters who fail at a task may usually try again. However, the Storyteller has the option of increasing the difficulty number of the second attempt by one. If the second attempt also fails, then the third attempt increases the difficulty by two (and so on until the difficulty pushes up past a nine). From there, the matter gets really tough, and it's likely that the character will not succeed at all (see "Thresholds"). Increased difficulties should be invoked only in certain cases, like climbing a wall, hacking into a computer system, repairing a device or interrogating a prisoner, where being completely unable to perform the task is a reasonable option. Perhaps the wall is simply too slick, or the computer security is too complex and unfamiliar.
However, retries without penalty are possible in such situations if instead of merely attempting to retry the task the character finds some new piece of information or equipment to aid in the endeavor.
Anything from buying a fancier set of lock picks, to stealing a new password, would count as new equipment or information, but only as long as significant thought or effort went in to obtaining it. As long as the character has obtained such information or equipment then a roll may be retried without penalty. Of course, repeated efforts to obtain new information or equipment should become successively more difficult! In situations such as shooting at an opponent, detecting an ambush or driving to evade pursuit, the situation itself is complex and rapidly changing enough that repeated rolls may always be made without penalty. In other situations, like defusing a bomb that is about to go off, or to jump across a deep chasm, failure is often final and retries are impossible since the character is no longer capable of such actions.

EXAMPLE: Father Michael, a priest who belongs to the Celestial Chorus, is not having a good day. He's in a meeting with his bishop and a wealthy land developer. The developer is offering to buy Father Michael's church and put up an office building instead. Unfortunately, this church happens to contain a powerful Node. Father Michael attempts to persuade his bishop that the Church needs a beautiful old building more than it needs several million dollars. Father Michael makes an impassioned speech to his bishop about the value of tradition over money to help sway him against the developer's tempting offer. The Storyteller suggests that Father Michael's player, Dawn, roll Charisma + Expression (difficulty 6) in addition to roleplaying the speech. Dawn rolls and fails. Father Michael's speech sounds unconvincing and backward to the bishop, who is thinking more about how much several million dollars will help the church's youth programs. Father Michael realizes his mistake and begins now to talk about how valuable that building is to the community and how the Church would lose numerous parishioners if it were torn down. Because of Father Michael's previous failure, the Storyteller tells Dawn that the difficulty of this roll is now 7. Another failure might make the bishop sign the deal just to shut Father Michael up.

Complications

The preceding rules provide the basics needed to resolve most situations, and they are sufficient for chronicles where die-rolling is kept strictly to a minimum. However, those rules don't cover the full range of possible situations. What happens if your character is hacking into a computer network and the system administrator is actively attempting to stop you? In the same situation, what happens if your friend is attempting to help you hack into the system from another computer?
The various additions and complications listed here are designed to add extra color and detail to games. While not strictly necessary to play the game, they often add both realism and suspense to a chronicle. As always, the Storyteller should decide if these rules should be used, preferably in consultation with the players.
The goal should be to have a fun and enjoyable game. For some people, the best game involves using as few rules as possible, while detail and realism are the keys to a good game for others. The following additions are all quite general, and they apply to a wide variety of circumstances.

Extended Actions

Often, complex or difficult tasks require multiple successes to complete. For example, many successes are generally needed to design and build a complex piece of machinery or to extract all possible information from a prisoner. Usually such lengthy tasks also require a considerable amount of time. Instead of a single action that takes one turn to perform, and that requires only a single roll, many turns (and possibly many scenes) are needed; many rolls may be involved as well.
Any action that can succeed with a single success on the die roll is called a simple action.
Shooting a gun, jumping a chasm or even making a short speech are all simple actions whose success or failure depends on a single die roll. Actions that require multiple successes to be even marginally successful are called extended actions. Building an airplane, searching an entire library for a single quote or seducing someone are all examples of extended actions that require both multiple turns and multiple die rolls to complete.
Most actions in Mage are simple actions, but ambitious mages engaged in difficult projects often perform extended actions. Given the difficulty of performing the most powerful feats of magic, magical rituals are often the most common form of extended action found in this game. In any extended action, you roll the character's dice pool multiple times. Depending on the circumstances, you may end up rolling once a turn, once a scene or even once a week.
Regardless, successes are totaled from roll to roll, and the goal is to accumulate the necessary number of successes to complete the task. Unfortunately, each additional roll both lengthens the time necessary to complete the task and increases the likelihood of a botch. While a simple failure on any of the individual rolls merely means that you make no progress during that turn, some disaster occurs if any of the individual rolls botches. Not only are all previous successes lost, but the desired result may well be even more difficult to achieve. For example, if your character attempts to summon a powerful Umbrood, each roll might represent an hour of chanting, gesturing and reciting incantations.
If you know a foul Nephandus is planning to attack your character in five hours, then you will need to achieve the required number of successes in five rolls. If any of these rolls is a botch, not only is all previous effort wasted, but one or more props used in decorating and preparing the ritual area are likely ruined, and your character may well have summoned a hostile spirit by mistake. In some cases, a botch may indicate that no further rolls are possible.
A botch while attempting to repair a complex device often indicates that the device was destroyed and is now a mass of useless scrap that can never be repaired. In cases where there is no time pressure, extended actions may be continued as long as desired, but in the hectic and dangerous life of a mage, who really has time to chant for 36 hours straight?
The task descriptions frequently refer to extended actions when describing difficult or lengthy tasks. However, such actions should not be overused. For the game to be enjoyable for everyone, it should not always be bogged down with endless 12-hour rituals or similarly lengthy tasks.
Time-pressure and the need to act quickly should keep extended actions from intruding unduly on the most intense or action-packed portions of a game.

EXAMPLE: After a highly successful raid on an Iteration X lab, Jag, the chantry's Virtual Adept, manages to steal the parts for a top-of-the-line Trinary computer that comes complete with a full state-of-the-art virtual-reality rig. Unfortunately, the computer was damaged during the raid when it just happened to take a bullet meant for Jag. Jag wants to repair the device. Since the rig suffered only two levels of damage, the Story teller rules that it requires only five successes to repair.
Unfortunately, it is an experimental prototype, so the difficulty necessary to repair it is 9. Jag's Intelligence + Technology dice pool is only 7, so he's definitely going to need to make this an extended task. The Storyteller rules that fixing it will take some time, so a new roll can be made only once a day. Jag's player Robert rolls seven dice the first day. He rods 1, 9, 10, 3, 5, 6, 6 — one success; a good, but unexceptional beginning. The next two rolls don't net Jag any successes — the work is harder than he thought.
He lucks out on the fourth day and rolls two successes; he then rolls another success on both the fifth and sixth days. After resting and taking a shower Jag is ready to test his new computer, which took almost a full week of nearly constant work to repair. If he had botched any of these rolls he would have likely wrecked it beyond all hope of salvage. Note that six days of work has now been compressed into a few minutes of dice roiling.

Resisted Actions

A single roll with a single difficulty number is often insufficient to represent an active struggle between two characters. For instance, two characters may be engaged in a tug of war to see who can grab a potent magical staff. In such a case, you and your opponent make a resisted roll.
Each party rolls dice, and the character with the most successes wins. Oft en the difficulty number of such rolls equals the normal difficulty to perform a similar unresisted task. However, if one party has an advantage he uses a lower difficulty number; in other cases, both parties use some Trait of the opponent as the difficulty number. Regardless of how the roll is determined, your character scores only a number of successes equal to the amount by which you exceed your opponent's successes.
Consider a boxing match between your character and another player's character in which you need five successes over the course of the match to knock your opponent out. If you roll five successes and your opponent rolls four in the same turn, you gain only one success.
Thus, your character wouldn't knock the other out, but he would be in slightly better shape as the fight goes on. In general, resisted actions are the most difficult tasks a character will perform, and large numbers of successes will be quite rare unless the character is facing completely incompetent opposition.
Some actions like wresting contests, car chases or computer-hacking attempts can be both extended and resisted. In such cases, one or both parties must achieve a certain number of successes to succeed. The first one to achieve the required number of successes wins the contest. Since each success by the opponent effectively subtracts successes, actions that are both extended and resisted can require a large number of rolls and a considerable expenditure of both time and effort for the characters (and players) involved.

EXAMPLE: Using his hot new computer, Jag is now ready to get into some serious trouble. No longer content with merely hacking into various corporations' payroll records and making himself loads of money, Jag decides that he'll repay the favor a friend did for him six month back and investigate Allico Chemicals, a company that he suspects is owned secretly by a Technocracy front. If he finds anything damaging in their highsecurity records he'll email it to the EPA and several newspapers.
He may even post it anonymously on the internet. Even if Allco isn't prosecuted, it'll likely be ruined by bad publicity. Unfortunately, the folks at Allco Chemicals are aware of the dangers of their top files being uncovered, so they employ sysops to monitor their network regula rly.
Cass is the on-duty sysop at Allco, and she notices almost immediately that there may have been an unauthorized intrusion. Unfortunately, she cannot kick Jag out immediately, since the software he is using prevents her from discovering exactly who the unauthorized user is. After telling Robert that Jag is fairly sure his intrusion has been detected, the Storyteller decides to use a single resisted roll. If Robert succeeds, Jag has managed to cover his tracks sufficiently to fool Cass; if Cass wins out, she knows that there is a hacker, and she may take steps to remove or identify the intruder.
The Storyteller has Robert roll Jag's Intelligence (4) + Computer (4), resisted by Cass Intelligence (3) + Computer (3). Allco has a large network which uses security software, but Jagis using a Trinary computer and cracking software, so his difficulty number is 7. Cass is on her home turf, but she's facing someone who's using a Trinary computer, so her difficulty is also 7. Robert scores a phenomenal four successes, while Cass manages only two. Cass' successes subtract from Jag's, so his access is rather limited while he's inside and undetected. If he's feeling really lucky, he could try another resisted action to gain deeper access.

Teamwork

Fortunately, while mages may have to perform extremely difficult feats, they can also ask their friends and companions for help. In any situation where two or more individuals can effectively help each other, characters can work together to collect the needed successes. While primarily used when performing extended actions, teamwork can be used for everything from performing first aid, to searching a room or breaking down a door.
For all such tasks, two or more players can roll separately and add their successes together. However, each roll is separate, and different characters may never combine their Traits into a single die pool.
While successes are combined, each character succeeds, fails or botches separately. Depending on the actual project, a botch may affect only the character who rolled it, or it may ruin the entire project. Teamwork can be used in a wide variety of situations ranging from performing a magical ritual, to tailing a suspected enemy. However, it is not the solution to all problems. It won't work if there simply isn't room enough for more than one person to work on something, or in situations like seducing or fast -talking someone where additional participants tend get in the way.
Storytellers must decide for themselves whether teamwork would aid or hinder a sp ecific endeavor. Example: Loraine, one of Jag's companions, has been kidnapped from her apartment. Jag and two other member of his chantry are combing the apartment looking for clues as the identity of the kidnapper. The three split up and search the apartment top to bottom. The Storyteller asks each of the three players to roll. The Storyteller knows that Loraine was kidnapped by a HIT Mark, and that the only significant clue is a small piece of the creature's pseudoflesh that Loraine managed to tear of wh ile struggling to escape.
The Storyteller decides that the group will need five successes on a Perception + Investigation roll (difficulty 7) to find this clue in Loraine's apartment. Jag has a Perception of 4 and an Investigation of 1. One of his allies, Nessa, has a Perception of 3 and an Investigation of 3, while his other companion, Jules, has a Perception of 3 and an Investigation of 1. Jag's player rolls 7,4,1,9,8, scoring three successes and one 1; he gets two successes. Nessa's player rolls 2, 8, 10, 6, 6, 7 — three successes. Jules' player rolk 5, 3, 4, 4 — no success. Between the three of them they have exactly five successes. The Storyteller rules that Nessa (who obtained the most successes) notices the torn bit of pseudoflesh, and the three gather to discuss what they will do next.

Thresholds

The rule for thresholds is a bit of a departure from the usual revised Storyteller rules.
The Storyteller system takes into account modifiers for actions, but in Mage, modifiers have a tendency to push numbers around a lot – and giving everything a difficulty of 10 doesn't accurately simulate the Herculean effort necessary to complete some of the feats that mages tend to try. When you take modifiers that should push a difficulty rating past 9, you generate a threshold instead. Each additional point of difficulty instead takes away one success from your final roll.
That success never happened — the task was so hard that you just barely managed to complete it. If your threshold takes away all of your successes, your character fails; although he gave a good try, the job was just too tough.
Should the threshold remove all of your successes and leave you with any ones on your dice, your character botches. (Watch out, because actions with a threshold tend to botch a lot.) You have to take away successes due to thresholds before you take away successes due to rolling ones, as well. Fortunately, a threshold alone cannot force you to botch. If the threshold removes all of your successes and there is threshold left over, but you didn't score any ones, the roll is still a simple failure.
Occasionally, an action may call for a threshold without modifying difficulty. If's possible to call for an action at difficulty six with a threshold of three, for instance; in such a case, you'd have to score at least four 6s on your roll to succeed at all. This mechanic could represent a task that's not particularly difficult, but that does require a lot of work to accomplish.

EXAMPLE: Mark Gillan needs to climb up a slippery ladder in the middle of a rainstorm, so that he can get away from a Hermetic pursuer and reach his foci back home. Normally, the difficulty would be a 6 or 7 to climb a ladder in a hurry, but it's stormy and rainy, so the Storyteller rules that the difficulty increases to 8. The Hermetic mage fires off a quick Effect to make Mark slip, and it causes a further modifier of two. Instead of pushing the difficulty to a 10, the difficulty goes to 9 and the task gets a threshold of one. Mark's player rolls his Dexterity + Athletics and scores four successes, but one of them goes away due to the threshold. Mark does a great job of climbing, but the circumstances are so rough that even his incredible feat just manages to get him up the ladder in time!

The Golden Rule

The most im portant rule of all, and the only one truly worth following, is that there are no inviolable rules. This is your game. Your own gaming group should make of it what it will. Whether you want to run your game in a diceless (or nearly diceless) fashion, or you want to roll for every task, more power to you.
Even if you want to get highly experimental and have everyone play four mages of widely varying power levels and rotate Storytellers every session, as long as everyone is having fun then you are running a good game and using the rules correctly (for you). The rules in this book should be considered nothing more than useful guidelines. They're not mandatory strictures on the only correct way to play Mage or explore the World of Darkness.
You know what's best in your own game, so have fun and use the rules with which you feel most comfortable.