"Rationalist" in this context does not mean "rational person," but rather "person who rationalizes."

Rationalizing the fantasy. Like LARPing. Only you lack weapons, armor, magic missiles…

Most "rationalists" throughout history have been very deeply religious people. Secular enlightenment-era rationalism is not the only direction you can go with it. It depends very much, as others have said, on what your axioms are.

But, fwiw, that particular role-playing game was very much based on trendy at the time occult beliefs in things like chaos magic, so it's not completely off the wall.

Mage is an interesting game though: it's fantasy, but not "swords and dragons" fantasy. It's set in the real world, and the "magic" is just the "mage" shifting probabilities so that unlikely (but possible) things occur.

Such a setting would seem like the perfect backdrop for a cult that claims "we have the power to subtly influence reality and make improbable things (ie. "magic") occur".

I my experience, religious people are perfectly fine with contradicted worldview.

Like christians are very flexible in following 10 commandments, always been.

That example isn’t a contradictory worldview though, just “people being people, and therefore failing to be as good as the ideal they claim to strive for.”

Being fine with cognitive dissonance would be a prerequisite for holding religious beliefs i'd say.

I mean, is it a really good game?

I’ve never played, but now I’m kind of interesting.

It's reportedly alright - the resolution mechanic seems a little fiddly with varying pools of dice for everything. The lore is pretty interesting though and I think a lot of the point of that series of games was reading up on that.

I ran a long running campaign, it is pretty fun. The game books were obviously written by artists and no mathematician was involved, some of the rules are very broken (may have been fixed in later revisions).

The magic system is very fun and gives players complete freedom to come up with spells on the fly. The tl;dr is there aren't pre-made spells, you have spheres you have learned, and you can combine those spheres of magic however you want. So if someone has matter and life, reaching into someone's chest and pulling out their still beating heart would be a perfectly fine thing for a brand new character to be able to do. (Of course magic has downsides, reality doesn't like being bent and it will snap back with violent force is coerced too hard!)

The books are laid out horribly, there isn't a single set of tables to refer to, you have to post it note bookmark everything. Picking up and playing the rules are really simple, the number of dots you have in attributes + skill is how many d10 dice you get to roll for a check. 8+ is a success, and you can reroll 10s. 90% of the game is as simple as that, but then there are like 5 pages of rules for grappling including basically a complete breakdown of wrestling moves and gaining position, but feel free to just ignore those.

I mean see also the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. You can't really take what groups call themselves too seriously.

> I don't know how you can call yourself a "rationalist" and base your worldview on a fantasy game.

Most rationalists wouldn't know either, except for the five members of the cult.

They all do this, only most prefer to name the fantasy they play with something a little more grounded like "mathematics" or "statistics" or "longtermism" or "rationality."