Just a quick correction - Practitioners are the "equivalent" of initiates in terms of being one level up, and they, too do not have to concentrate (although they can't get spirit allies if they do not, so the ones I've seen have concentrated). A better way to think of it is that only Devotees and Shamans, the highest levels of each type of magic, must concentrate. Nobody else does.
This is important, because people should feel the "balance" that these other options provide. Basically, being an unconcentrated Practitioner, for instance, allows the character to join a theist religion later on. I think that people overlook this option. But, essentially, you can pick up whole additional keywords if the opportunity presents itself. If you are concentrated, this is only one third as likely, and if you are a Shaman or Devotee, you lose all ability to gain new keywords. Yes a shaman can still bind other spirits, and a devotee may still be able to pick up abilities from sub-cults etc, but this is a lot more limited.
The point being that the balance is between flexibility and power. That's hard for a player to see starting out, however, and that's why I think in the games I've seen that players go for the power right away. But I've thought that for a long term game that it would be a lot of fun to go unconcentrated for a long time, pick up a bunch of religions, and then later perhaps concentrate if one turned out to have a greater appeal for the character. I think it would be really interesting to have a generalist magic character who knew magic from all sorts of sources.
Just some thoughts.
Mike
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