> Now players never like to hear this, because they love
> to have 'kewl' powers but devotees are religion geeks
> with a serious time penalty. They have an abnormal
> interest in religion and spend an inordinate amount of
> time on it (lots of us here know all about being
> geeks).
Now that analogy I like. There's not a lot of point in comparing (modern) RW religion to Gloranthan religion, because Gloranthan religion actually has some (lots of) relevance to everyday life. But to geekdom - yes.
I am a geek, and proud of it. I Devote myself to playing with computers, solving "interesting" coding and database problems, and so on. As a rather nice extra, if I do this at a place called "work", and follow some minimal guidance about what to do, I get paid for it, enabling me to eat, be housed, and so on. Time commitment far more than 60%, when you realise that I go home and carry on doing more of the same, for fun.
No-one in their right mind would ask me to become a department head. But if I or my fellow geeks say to our department head something like "unless you spend loadscash on replacing that server RIGHT NOW Finance will come to a halt", then he'll take notice without necessarily understanding the details. He's only an initiate. Technically, what he's doing isn't taking orders. But.
Of course, if I wander into a strange computer centre, they may not realise that I'm a fully qualified geek. And they may have geeks of their own. Here the analogy starts to fall apart, as I don't go around with my runes emblazoned on my soul for all to see (does a Tshirt with "there's no place like 127.0.0.1" count?), and geeks are more common than Devotees.
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