Masteries.

David Dunham:
> While I believe that Masteries should be more significant than 1st
> Edition makes them, I don't think there needs to be any impediment in
> the way of characters earning them. This sort of thing sounds awkward
> in play, given that you may have several players wanting to add a
> mastery to a skill in any session. It also means the Narrator has to
> come up with a lot of quests/tests which are in fact of little
> dramatic significance.

But certain numbers of masteries do have a cosmological significance in the game world. Witness the "barriers", in particular. One could regard this in two ways: either there's some added "difficulty" in one's own person starting to breach the (HP) barrier, which one could represent by increasing the in-game cost of doing so, for example; or that doing so has certain _consequences_, that inevitably follow after one does so. In other words, if one doesn't interacted with the HP, to paraphrase Greg, it'll darn well interact with you. Looked at that way, a 1W4 in one ability, 14 in everything else, is the worst possible type of char to have, since it's barrier-breaking enough to attract the attention of the other side, and conversely, woefully prepared to deal with it.

Or one could ignore it entirely, but then I think you're playing a little fast and loose with Glorantha as a world.