Eh, I see where you're coming from.
However, the same issue applies to essentially all really powerful characters.
PCs are built differently. Hell, in many ways this is explicitly a PC only power...NPCs don't have skill caps so you don't need to throw it on them, just say all their skills are at X rating. Build two PCs that do the same thing...say, combat, or magic, or scholarly inquiry, one with the power and one without and compare
them and you get good info...worrying about giving the power to a particular NPC is well-nigh meaningless.
Nope!
Capping all three casting skills is massive. Epic Lore is strictly superior to Fantastic Lore with 3 Refinements spent getting +1 complexity to six fields of magic. And the Merlin has Complexity bonuses in seven fields of magic.
True...but you can do that without buying the Power in question. That's not a power-level disparity between having the Power and not, it's a power-level disparity between being optimized and not, and those are inevitable.
It's okay to be un-optimized. It's not okay for there to be absolute power disparities.
As stated, there isn't. Make a reasonable character who's not over specialized to the point of insanity in ritual magic and compare versions with and without this ability and we can talk.
By re-arranging the Merlin's skills, you could make him stronger. But I'd be able to say "he's worse at Stealth" or some such thing.
With the changes I made to the Merlin, you cannot say anything like that.
This is bad.
I can say those points could instead have been spent making him a 14 to 15 shift Evocation specialist instead, which is vastly more useful than being Fair in Stealth and Weapons.
The Merlin's an awful example for this because he was built to
explicitly have maxed out specialty pyramids in every aspect of Magic without also having a maxed out Lore skill. I know, I built him. Doing this makes him more effective, sure, but since he's no longer properly representative of being the Merlin there's absolutely no point to it.
I can improve him in a dozen ways that are vastly better than this for the same Refresh, none of which will cost him anything...I don't because there's no point.
I didn't really re-arrange his skills. I just raised them. With the exception of Endurance, no skill on my Merlin is higher than a skill it was not higher than on your Merlin.
Okay...really not the point, though.
Oh, and your proposed Merlin would still be strictly inferior to a Merlin with Experience. Grab Supernatural Experience, make Discipline Epic, drop 4 points of control bonuses. Nothing lost, plenty gained.
This isn't really an argument. This is math.
8 points. You need
8 points of Control bonuses to make that worthwhile (you get 2 per Refinement). Barring Evocation (which isn't so easily dropped for various reasons), I'm not sure the Merlin
has 8 points of control bonuses to drop and maintain his specialty pyramids. And even if he does, this is a ridiculous corner case that effectively applies
only to Senior Council members, since
nobody else has enough Control bonuses to do that.
Try another example if you really want to prove your point. One not built with a ridiculous amount of redundancy and what amount to near-useless refinements taken because they're appropriate, not because they're useful. Try this on Luccio, for example, and you instead get a much
less effective character, not more (her skills get better, but her
important skills are already maxed, and she needs that 4 Refinement). Or try it on a non-Wizard (Wizards get a lot more use out of maxing their top three skills than other people).
Strict mathematical imbalances are not acceptable for PCs. And you've been using the Merlin as a PC-stand-in here, so I'm doing the same.
No...I
really haven't. I've been using him as a really powerful NPC who I think the power in question is thematically inappropriate for. That's...kind of the opposite of using him as a PC example, actually.
