[Scott Hebert]

Originally posted by Nagot Gick Fel:
To you, to me, to Zen, certainly not - but that's an ethnocentric judgment if I ever saw one. It certainly would make sense to, say, a Dusk Elder or a Sauromancer. Fantasy litterature, movies and RPG are full of alien cultures that worship exactly that kind of guy. Eg, Blizzard's Diablo series, to give just a prominent exemple.

But then, why doesn't the above argument work for the Vampire Queen? What makes the Prince of Death any better than the Vampire Queen to their subjects?

Cheap magic paths - ie, versatility. Human mages are more adaptable just for the reason they're less strongly attuned to a particular magic path. Makes a lot of sense to me, therefore I like it this way.

I'm sorry, but as I've tried to illustrate, I don't agree. You take a Rainbow, and you take a focussed mage, give them the same Dominion (even as low as 4), and it takes 3 Paths to make the Rainbow even come out even, and that's with vastly inferior stats. The reason I chose 4 is because that's the minimum I feel is necessary to grant reasonably quick and sure access to the powerful Rituals from the Path. Gift of Health, Forge of the Ancients, the Elemental Monarch Summons, and so on.

To me, if you're going to take a Pretender with a lot of 2s, the Pretender is going to be able to do a whole lot of nothing. You're going to have to rely on Empowerment or your National mages to cast any useful Rituals. About the only way to justify that kind of Pretender is to go the Coin/Skullcap/Ring of Sorcery/Ring of Wizardry route, and that's extremely expensive in terms of Pearls, Pearls I think would be more effective casting Acashic Record and taking a more focused Pretender.

This is my big beef with Human Pretenders. They look like they should work for the generalist route, but they don't. Whether this is because of a lack of good Rituals to use at low path levels, an imbalance in cost of the Pretender, or relative ease in finding Independent Mages with 2-paths, I don't know. I'm just proposing an idea to make them more palatable on a quantitative level. It certainly makes them more viable, while not overshadowing the other Pretenders.

The only problem is one of theme.