> I think what David's saying is that both initiates and devotees are
> "improvising".
If he's saying that, he should say so. ;-) I think David and I are both clear what the rule _is_, the issue here is its phrasing.
> The difference is, an initiate can only improvise the feats
> he sees devotees do.
Hrm. I'm not sure about taking that too literally. Would something an initiate has literally just seen a heroquester do, qualify as something he can 'improvise'? The logic of the rule isn't so clear to me that I could decode the intent here.
> That said... since the short cult listings in the book don't even list
> feats, I think we have to allow initiates to make up and improvise any feat
> that sounds appropriate. I mean, if a player has a Babeester Gor initiate,
> all the player knows is she has a "combat" affinity.
And rarely can an area of magic be so ill-served by that colourless, generic tag...
> If the player and narrator do not have extra source material, like
> "Storm Tribe", they don't know what the "named feats" are. I think in
> that case, they have to let the initiate improvise any feat that
> sounds reasonable.
I think in *any* case this makes more sense, personally speaking. The new presentation implies at first that initiates just have affinities, and then... oopsies, you have to know what the feats are to be able to use it. As opposed to devotees, who're less tied to that set list, but get/have to write it down. Hrrrrmmmm.
Personally, my implementation of this might be summed up: you can use an affinity as an 'active' ability; a (negative) modifier (call it what you will...) is always going to be involved, magnitude determined on an ad hoc basis depending on familiarity, general plausibility, etc (and typically in the region of -5 for things corresponding to the 'named' feats, as per HQ, so not a huge distinction in practice).
Throw in the dreaded 'stand-alone feats' to all this, and you get a bit of a mess, mind you. Granted the generic description of 'specialised religions' says nothing about them, but the pattern of misapplied worship, guardian beings, and common magic rather implies that they must be in some sense possible, if not necessarily common practice (or magically 'efficient'). My working assumption here is that you can't have both an affinity and such a feat where they'd overlap, and if by some mischance one does (say someone who started with a non-standard relationship to a god, later becomes an initiate), then they function 'independently', for game-mechanical purposes.
Cheers,
Alex.
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