[UA] Channelling Multiple Archetypes

[holycrow at mindspring.com]

My considered reaction to this idea is "Say, how come you see so few fundamentalist Christians who are also practicing animist shamans?"  The answer being, of course, that the two are mutually exclusive.  Most people are variagated and distracted enough that they can't channel ONE archetype.  Channeling two is like running at top speed both east and west, at once.  

That's the rationale.  Now for the rationale for the rationale.

On the level of game balance, multiple archetypes are (quite simply) a fucking nightmare.  Sure, you can throw on home-brewed restrictions -- the "can't cross 50%" is a good one, until you get someone who figures out which three, or five, or eight archetypes have first-rank channels that don't require rolls and takes 1% skill in all of them.  

On the level of game play, they're also a colossal pain the tuckus.  Sure, theoretically it's the player's duty to track his taboos and ritual actions, but since the GM has smackdown duties it also behooves her to keep track of a character's Do's and Don'ts.  I, personally, have enough trouble keeping track of one set of taboos per character.

But really, the reason that weighs most heavily against this for me is, for want of a better term, the "White Wolf Baggage" problem.  I love the Wolfies and they've done better by me than any other game company -- but they ran into the problem of supernatural proliferation early and hard.  There are all kinds of rationales -- the vampires control everything (or, as of Achilli, just influence everything) just seeing some of these critters makes people nuts, you can buy a cheap background that just makes people forget you... but I wanted to get away from those dodges with UA.  I want people to be unaware of the supernatural because it really IS as rare as it's supposed to be in other settings.  In RPGs there's a natural tendency for the paranormal elements in a game to bloat, because they're shiny and fun to play with, but I think that in the long run a game line suffers from getting into the constant "But I can top THAT!" loop.

How do the multivatars affect this?  Because they lower the bar for avatarhood.  If someone can follow more than one accidentally, it makes it very plausible for many people to follow a single path accidentally (when in fact this doesn't happen all that much at all).  If it's very plausible for many people to do it by accident, the question naturally arises "Well, why don't more people do it on purpose?  Especially in the Internet Age when it's presumably easy to find out about all these funky powers you can get just by acting a certain way!"

Next stop, Shadowrun.

So maybe a more appropriate question would concern, not fundamentalist Christians, but neurosurgeons.  Why is it that so few neurosurgeons are also professional NBA basketball players?

-G.

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