The RoPs were written well before HMRE, and accordingly they use somewhat different mechanics. Holy and Infernal characters are normally Mythic Companions and their powers are expected to be bought as Virtues, and yet True Faith and infernal contact seem to work more-or-less equivalently to opening the Gift. If you have True Faith, you can join a Holy Tradition (and anyone can join an Infernal Tradition, of course, just sign on the dotted line...) and get access to a set of four abilities (Difficult Arts, of course, but pretty powerful for that).
So I was wondering if it would be better to treat members of Holy and Infernal traditions as equivalent to Gifted Companions (sans Gift) and allow them to simply learn their respective traditions' Favored Abilities freely, instead of constructing them as Mythic Companions?
I dunno about Infernal characters, but that is how True Faith works! Characters with True Faith learn their Favored Abilities as Supernatural Abilities, but at no penalty for knowing others of their Favored Abilities. As you may notice, none of the Mythic Companion examples presented in the book actually have True Faith! (Well, the Islamic might... I never actually looked at that section. But I don't figure they would) Instead, Mythic Companions are made that way because they don't in fact have True Faith, and thus need to learn all the Virtues. This makes characters with True Faith and a Holy Tradition rather exceptionally powerful for a normal Companion, quite possibly moreso than their non-True Faith Mythic counterparts.
Infernalists don't have a Gift-equivalent if I recall, aside from the obvious "False Gift" which is just the Gift (even gives you Magic stuff, not Infernal stuff) but removable if you pray hard enough. So that idea doesn't really work for them either, unless you want the "Infernalist" social status virtue to endow such an effect, in which case every Infernalist would be Mythic Companion-level.
So in the broadest of senses, I think it already works the way you're describing, but Infernalists don't have a Gift-equivalent Virtue and the Holy Gift is a Major Virtue instead of Free, but makes up for it by giving you an extra pool of Confidence and free Magic Resistance.
In most cases, there is no difference since most Divine/Infernal traditions consist of exactly 10 points of favoured abilities (this corresponds to the number of bonus Virtue points a Mythic Companion gets if she takes the full complement of Flaws). Note also that characters with True Faith or a point of Infernal Warping can already learn Divine or Infernal powers respectively - especially those favoured by their tradition.
In the case of Divine characters, this does create a perverse incentive to start your character with a motley selection of M&P and learn your tradition's favoured abilities in play, but there are a number of excellent houserules if you feel that'll become a problem with your troupe.
Wait, what? Favored Abilities only remove the learning penalty for other Favored Abilities. Unless you mean to start with 1s in a bunch of abilities so your penalty is naturally really low and then learn your entire Tradition really early on? Which is hilariously and deliciously cheap. +respect
To be fair it is hard to make up a character and not think "It would be cool if I took this method/power too. That would synergize with my character's abilities from their tradition really well". Which naturally leads one to invent Gremlin's "hilariously cheap" exploit.
A Method and/or Power to round out a concept is one thing; I assume Gremlin meant using your entire allocation on Supernatural Ability Virtues and keeping them all at score 1 until you can access a Tradition in-game and then taking said tradition to get everything+, which seems hilariously cheap to me.
Right, but once you do it the first time with one more method you can't help but realize that you don't have to limit yourself to just one. I agree with you that it is distasteful. I was presenting what I believed to perspective on the deviousness of it. To the typical gamer mind this section of rules is practically begging the player to take advantage of it.
Favored Abilities don't count against learning new Supernatural Abilities, and other Supernatural Abilities don't count against Favored Abilities, so there's no real need to keep your Favored Abilities at low levels. Non-Favored Abilities, yeah, if you want lots of them. This is kind of a proto-Hermetic magus-- I imagine this is sort of what Bonisagus was doing before he developed his Magic Theory.
I don't think that's actually accurate; Any Opening of the Gift and acquisition of involved Favored Abilities (even the Hermetic Arts are, by technicality, Favored, but it's only a technical distinction as they're all learned at once) is both hindered by and hinders the learning of new abilities, and Noble's Parma but I'm almost certain RoP:D makes explicit note in its traditions section (where it introduces the Ascetics) that Favored Ability penalties apply to learning non-Favored Abilities.
Mulhidun (and other Goeticists) are twelve-pointers.
Apparently, the only way to have supernatural abilities that don't hinder other supernatural abilities is to Integrate it into Hermetic tradition. Note that it appears that this ability doesn't actually exist within the Folk Witch tradition that you would be integrating from, but that's another cauldron of batwings.
As for the gimmick with buying outside of your tradition and learning in play, at best that's a story (where you have a couple exotic abilities that likely have no synergy on their own and want to join the tradition). If you haven't done enough to make that sound interesting, then instead it's a disease, best cured by use of the corebook, applied directly to your head. In-universe, extra Supernatural Virtues are either individual quirks, something that your master knew and built into your early training, or a Mystery; developing a lot of abilities on your own pretty much marks you as a Non-Traditionalist.
My recollection could be faulty, but I thought that RoP:D didn't mention whether or not Favored Abilities applied to non-Favored Abilities, so I clarified in RoP:I that they didn't. I also recall copying the text directly from RoP:I for the first draft of RoP:F, but it looks like the final product doesn't mention non-Favored Abilities at all.
