RPM Invisibility rituals

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

It messes with play balance when you can have one Path do the things other Paths are supposed to do.

A significant consideration. Also the gamist ones that you probably need to encourage mages to study more than one path, and it's more interesting if the characters not just One-Trick Ponies, running around the game world looking for nails to hit with their hammer.

If you're sufficiently clever, you can come up with a justification for doing almost anything in the guise of some Path. If that were the case in the metaphysics of the game world, then why are there Paths? Shouldn't it just be one of those worlds where "magic" is just one universal thing?

If the system lets you name your own Path, then munchkins can just go for Control Quantum Fields and Control Spacetime (or claim those can be successfully unified -- or already were, in a future setting -- so they're really the same thing and they only need one Path).

But you'll get more flavor and more variety if there's more than one Path to rule them all. That will probably come at the cost of a few somewhat arbitrary decisions as to what falls into which category. Personally, I'd like to encourage mages to solve problems in ways that befit their theme, and so keep some flexibility. But there's always that player that wants to stack just one thing until the system breaks.

Another useful tool for encouraging diversity is to have spell builds commonly require more than just one Path. There might be one primary one that seems like it's the main effect, but pulling in other Paths for details and supporting effort encourages mages to do more than just dump all their points in one skill. Only knowing one Path then means that the One-Path Pony mage simply can't cast most spells due to their lack of breadth of knowledge and interactions between the Paths.