[UA] Channelling Multiple Archetypes

[Nick Wedig]

>>Thoughts?

My initial gut reaction is to try to avoid allowing dual avatars (why stop there? why not triple or quadruple avatars?  Itwould seem easy to graft the Mystic Hermaphrodite or two faced man or both onto any avataric coupling).  It seems to me that the power you get by being an avatar is directly connected to notbeing something else.  You focus your acts to match the archetype, but if you follow two or more avatar paths you're not focused on anything any more.

The difference between, say, me and, say, Musashi, the Masterless Man down the street, is that I play the parts of numerous different archetypes in a single day (Fool, Masterless Man, Two Faced Man, Scholar, Dutiful Son, Hermit, Hanged Man, etc, etc) whereas Musashi limits the time he spends as anything else so he can be the Masterless Man all the time (or as much as possible).

That said, do as thou wilt.

>
>A couple.
>
>First, if you decide it's possible (more on that in a moment), there are a 
>couple of things you could do to reduce munchkinism. You could say that an 
>increase of one Avatar skill must come with a reduction of another (i.e. to 
>raise my Avatar: The Gamer from 10 to 12, I'd have to lower my Avatar: 
>Computer Programmer from 30 to 28). 

How would you determine what initial values are?  By how many points they initially put in the two skills?  Doesn't seem to work.  This kicks in after the total is higher than some number?  (50?  100?)  

Or, you could say that any two Avatar 
>skills can coexist, but only if both are in the first channel. To get a 
>second channel (i.e. to raise the skill above 50), you must completely 
>renounce the other path. (The latter has a slight problem in that a 
>munchkin could have two Avatar skills at 50, which could be problematic.) 

It seems less problematic than allowing two avatar skills at higher than 50%.  

>Second, is it possible? Hm. Certain ones (as you indicated) are 
>incompatible. Others are compatible to varying degrees.

Some weird trouble appears when I think about taboos for ones like the Mother, the Flying Woman and the Masterless Man when combined with the Mystic Hermaphrodite.

>
>The Messenger fiction in the main rulebook suggested something interesting. 
>Don't know if I was the only one who read it this way, but it sounded like 
>he [forgot his name, don't have the book handy]
> thought he was getting 
>distracted by the WECHBY archetype, and (here's the interesting part) it 
>sounded to me like he was falling off the path of the Messenger and onto 
>the WECHBY path. 

I thought that the passage you refer to was saying that he was beginning to be attracted to her path (which also implies the path is larger than the WECBY, more like the Object of Desire) and thus losing power in his own (which was very important to him, as he was heading out for a battle against the Messenger godwalker IIRC)

Ona somewhat related note:  I was sitting around thinking of really unusual interpetations of archetypes and started thinking about a professional hitman channeling the Necessary Servant.  He uses some of the powers (esp. the 71%+ channel if he could get that high) for his job, but otherwise channels it merely because he is very necessary for his employer's continuing welfare (probably a mob boss or government agency).  Gives a very different, dark spin on the scheming vizier type (why don't you get scheming vizier types in modern fictions?  probably because there's no sense of legitimacy to the king himself, so he makes a fine villian alone.  but I digress from a digression).

Mr. Teapot
recursively enumerable

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