In Champions which uses the HERO System, you pay character points for everything. Supers may get powers cheaper by putting them in the form of an Elemental Control.
A Fire Mutant might have Fire Blast, Fiery Tail Flight, Explosion Centered on Self of Fire, and Fire Cage which creates a cage of fiery lines to entrap a thug. He gets all of these at something like half to maybe a third off the price.
He can't toss in his Laser Beam Eyes, or his Sword of Lightning because that doesn't fit the concept even though he can buy them.
You can do as much with any of dozens of other EC's that you create and the GM then has final approval over whether the EC is fair, or if its too advantageous.
I'm going to reccommend the creation of something like Elemental Controls for the magic system for Multiverser (I also think some sort of small learning advantage for psi's who focus on one are....like a TK guy who focuses on TK would be good.)
Now this can be represented by a skill perhaps (I'm fairly sure that the Psi bonus can be.)
One of the chief problems that any system magic systems have...like Mage the Ascension is that the magic becomes flavorless. What is needed in Mage are stronger reasons to create flavor for the magic. And creating a sort of Elemental Control, a magic system, that the character defines, and has certain specified advantages and disadvantages and just general ways of doing things would greatly add to the flavor for Multiverser's magic.
Otherwise you've got a sort of close to purely mechanicalism that the system encourages, and its only the GM's and the player's awareness that pushes back against it, and frequently the player is going to be tempted to 'go mechanical' to seek an advantage in game play.
Forex:
Gramarye
Jim Smith, in his fourth world, landed in an Ireland where the Wild Hunt and the Daoine Sidhe reigned, where goblins and brownies hid behind every bush, or so it seemed.
He learned the art of Gramarye from the Faerie Queen who he enchanted with tales of other worlds and with Kipling's poetry.
(I'm actually not that familar with Irish magic so I'm kinda making this up.)
Gramarye:
1. Requires a physical movement (one tosses something, or walks, or dances...).
2. If an item is not involved, then great physical movement is required (you can open the elfmound gate by walking around the mound seven times clockwise.)
3. Items, if two, should be at least one weird and one normal. (Salt would be normal, but four leaf clover gathered at dawn with the dew still on it and then this dew mixed with the fat of a lamb killed by wolves would be weird.)
4. Items have to be things that a 9th century Irishman could have gotten his hands on.
5. Magic, except for the magic of the dwarves, cannot be bound for more than one day.
6. All magic has 'contingency traps' in it. Such as "If you let the potion burn, thou wilt be cursed with bad luck for seven days." OR "If you look up when you walk around the elfmound, you will be lost in the space between."
And then Jim Smith, whenever he uses a Gramarye spell, he has to use all of these six limits. This package limit is another limit, and its a limit on learning magic. He can't just make up a Gramarye spell without some physical component if he is tied up in shackles in the Dungeon of the Iron Lord even if he has the skill to make up a new spell on the spot.
One might reasonably add a generalized contingency trap to this EC...that is, if you attempt a magic against your theory, you activate a contingency trap which can be rolled on a GE roll. '3' and you deepen and broaden your theory of magic having made a breakthrough. '10' and you have negatives like say -20, '16' and you're at -35....'20' and its auto failure....'25 and above' and its autobotch.
Another way would be a Difficult Intuition challenge which depending on the situation might be sit-modded to boot.
This generalized contingency trap would be another part of the limit for all Gramarye magic for Jim Smith.
Thus...
1. Must take all package together when doing any Gramarye spell.
2. Generalized Contingency Trap for Attempting to use Gramarye in un-Gramarye fashion.
3. Enemy may reason out style and define likely powers. This is similar to the Champions Knowledge Skill for martial arts which allows you to figure out the likely moves of the other combatant based on his style.
4. Style bonus.
So any Gramarye spell would have the beginning six disads, and the last four sit-mods as well. Jim then proves he can learn Gramarye pretty easily with all of this.
Later, Jim arrives in D20 world, and learns how to be a D20 Wizard which is a wholly different thing with a number of style disads, and it qualifies as its own style.
Now, the bias gained using Gramarye carries over, but the Gramarye style sit-mods and such do not.
I think this is a step in the wrong direction for Multiverser. It works for Champions - although I've heard stories about mechanically-minded Champions players cramming every possible thing into their Elemental Controls, motivated entirely by the "free" mathematical boost and not at all by any alleged flavor this might add to their characters - but this sort of mechanic runs counter to how Multiverser works.
The critical point is that Champions runs on an experience system, where every ability is balanced against the abilities of the other characters and of the opponents, and the growth of these abilities is carefully monitored and regulated by the referee. Given this careful economy of points and power, there is some meaning in rewarding desired (read: genre-consistant) behavior by granting a little extra cost-effectiveness.
In Multiverser, there is no point economy, power growth is unmonitored and only loosely regulated, and so there is no meaning in providing extra cost-effectiveness as a reward for "desired" behavior - what is the buck for which the character is getting more bang, in your proposed system?
Also, what is the desired behavior you are rewarding? There is no genre with which to be consistent; there is no artificially constructed character to which flavor must be added.
I can see the value in something like what you're suggesting; I also think it's really foreign to Multiverser the way you present it at first, and quite normal for Multiverser the way you then example it.
That is, the notion that one character is particularly good at fire-based magic does not work well in our system. The number of different categories of magic that create or control fire is just too small to give you that sort of thing, and then you wind up really creating energy forces that are "colored" as fire and things like that.
But your guy who learns his magic in Ireland and is thereafter somewhat locked into that kind of magic has many examples in actual play.
One of the earliest examples would be Whisp. He attended a magical university in some universe (before I was involved in the game design, so I don't know all the details). He learned two distinct kinds of magic, which he calls "mirror magic" and "cauldron magic". Mirror magic is all based on the summoning of a supernatural being, through his magical mirror, who then accomplishes his wishes by whatever means he (the being) is able. It doesn't always work, for a wealth of reasons, but it does involve phrasing his desires as poems containing a direct address to the mirror. Thus he believes (since he doesn't really understand how it works) that he performs magic by speaking to the mirror in metered rhyme. Because that's what he believes, that's how he does it. The cauldron magic, by contrast, involves extremely elaborate ritual, complex formulae in which a combination of "magical" and appropriate ingredients are combined in significant volume to create what amounts to a potion which has the effect desired. All of Whisp's magic is either one form or the other.
The Architect is completely different. He learned psionics in NagaWorld, but then he went to Vampire Chicago (very like my Vampire Philadelphia). There he started using faith-based magic--the magic Lauren Hastings independently discovers in Verse Three, Chapter One, but with a few more complexities. He uses only New Testament texts, and he quotes them in Koine Greek. Much of his earliest magic is directed at undead beings such as vampires, ghouls, and zombies, but he expanded to include helper magic, that is, using scripture to make things happen which indirectly aided him in his efforts--opening doors, walking through hyperspace, creating light. Because his first experiments with magic were scripture-based, that infects his thinking about magic very deeply, even though he subsequently studied with Merlin and learned arcane skills as well.
My character in the forum game is another example. His first encounters with magic were in Haston, in which (for the benefit of those who were not with us then--Eric created the world) all songs are magic and do what the words describe. Being an accomplished musician and composer, he used songs to do many things in that world--and since then, when he wants to do magic he thinks in terms of music.
Kyler's character tried to teach himself some magic when he was in NagaWorld, and botched himself out; then, however, he landed in a D&D fantasy world, where he apprenticed with a Wu Jen. He took as his first "taboo" abstinence from alcoholic beverages. Because of this beginning, he thinks of magic is something he can do as long as he observes his taboo, and that he will be able to do more magic if he adopts additional taboos.
Graeme is another wonderful example. I don't recall what gave him the idea that magic was possible, but he started his first spells by using bits of his engineering knowledge--using binoculars to make things larger and smaller, for example. Nearly all of Graeme's many home-made spells include fragments of technological knowledge reconfigured to have magical results. He has used television sets to scry, for example, and a magic wand containing a battery for "power" and a magic marker to mark the area to be affected.
Player characters do create highly-colored magic, working in connection with their referees within the contexts of the worlds in which they find themselves. Even Adam Keller's magic has something of the "feeling" of D&D/Hackmaster magic, from which he gets many of his spell ideas; I've tried not to intefere overly with this conceptualization even while he has been studying with Merlin, because individual color makes individual magic more interesting.
On the other hand, a system that made certain kinds of skills easier and others more difficult is rather complex. I can see doing it as part of holy magic--that someone who worships a fire god primarily gets bonused in fire skills and penalized in water skills, for example--but to do the same with arcane magic winds up making for complexities in the rules that are better managed by the players individually than by the game system. If a player wants to create a special focus out of a cigarette lighter that bonuses all his fire-based magic heavily as long as it is an included component, that will make him a master of fire elemental magic pretty directly. It will not, however, prevent him from also being a master of water elemental magic when he uses his other special focus, made from a sealed water-filled tube of blown glass.
--M. J. Young
I think this is a step in the wrong direction for Multiverser. It works for Champions - although I've heard stories about mechanically-minded Champions players cramming every possible thing into their Elemental Controls, motivated entirely by the "free" mathematical boost and not at all by any alleged flavor this might add to their characters - but this sort of mechanic runs counter to how Multiverser works.
==To the point about cramming, why yes. One of the best Champion's GM's I know practised say "No way!" during chargen. He was a bit awestruck by J's character as he said he'd seen every version of game-breaking min-maxing J used, but not all of them in the same character.
And Soliton: The Multiversal Man (so named before I met MJ and the Multiverse) was the product of a desire to twist the system until it just gave up and suffered in silence. This is the Soliton in Northgate City for Multiverser.
However, each game requires some degree of active GM participation in chargen. Champions is just a bit more obvious about it.
The critical point is that Champions runs on an experience system, where every ability is balanced against the abilities of the other characters and of the opponents, and the growth of these abilities is carefully monitored and regulated by the referee. Given this careful economy of points and power, there is some meaning in rewarding desired (read: genre-consistant) behavior by granting a little extra cost-effectiveness.
==The Style Bonus I suggested is the only real innovation. Its a bonus for being in-genre with your magic. The bonus is to make the magic easier. Although I could also see making the magic quicker to learn in practise sessions.
In Multiverser, there is no point economy, power growth is unmonitored and only loosely regulated, and so there is no meaning in providing extra cost-effectiveness as a reward for "desired" behavior - what is the buck for which the character is getting more bang, in your proposed system?
==Already answered.
Also, what is the desired behavior you are rewarding? There is no genre with which to be consistent; there is no artificially constructed character to which flavor must be added.
==To have them fill out their magic system a bit more rigorously. There is a genre.
I can see the value in something like what you're suggesting; I also think it's really foreign to Multiverser the way you present it at first, and quite normal for Multiverser the way you then example it.
==I'm just comparing it to games I know...Champions and Mage. I know you don't want an Elemental Control, but some sort of Fire Magic Group...perhaps someone who worships Kossuth, D&D god or goddess of fire, or someone who is a Fire Elementalist--Period... (and there's a fair number of stories where you join a magic faction and you can't use opposing magic). The idea of a taboo you discuss is valuable here as well.
That is, the notion that one character is particularly good at fire-based magic does not work well in our system. The number of different categories of magic that create or control fire is just too small to give you that sort of thing, and then you wind up really creating energy forces that are "colored" as fire and things like that.
==I'm not sure that 'colored' is an all that bad a thing.
But your guy who learns his magic in Ireland and is thereafter somewhat locked into that kind of magic has many examples in actual play.
==This is a very good point. There does seem to be a lot of diversity in magic in Multiverser. I was extrapolating somewhat from my own experience with the plasma cannon and the healing spell and how ridiculous that was, but that may be in part just because I'm a so-so player.
One of the earliest examples would be Whisp. He attended a magical university in some universe (before I was involved in the game design, so I don't know all the details). He learned two distinct kinds of magic, which he calls "mirror magic" and "cauldron magic". Mirror magic is all based on the summoning of a supernatural being, through his magical mirror, who then accomplishes his wishes by whatever means he (the being) is able. It doesn't always work, for a wealth of reasons, but it does involve phrasing his desires as poems containing a direct address to the mirror. Thus he believes (since he doesn't really understand how it works) that he performs magic by speaking to the mirror in metered rhyme. Because that's what he believes, that's how he does it. The cauldron magic, by contrast, involves extremely elaborate ritual, complex formulae in which a combination of "magical" and appropriate ingredients are combined in significant volume to create what amounts to a potion which has the effect desired. All of Whisp's magic is either one form or the other.
The Architect is completely different. He learned psionics in NagaWorld, but then he went to Vampire Chicago (very like my Vampire Philadelphia). There he started using faith-based magic--the magic Lauren Hastings independently discovers in Verse Three, Chapter One, but with a few more complexities. He uses only New Testament texts, and he quotes them in Koine Greek. Much of his earliest magic is directed at undead beings such as vampires, ghouls, and zombies, but he expanded to include helper magic, that is, using scripture to make things happen which indirectly aided him in his efforts--opening doors, walking through hyperspace, creating light. Because his first experiments with magic were scripture-based, that infects his thinking about magic very deeply, even though he subsequently studied with Merlin and learned arcane skills as well.
My character in the forum game is another example. His first encounters with magic were in Haston, in which (for the benefit of those who were not with us then--Eric created the world) all songs are magic and do what the words describe. Being an accomplished musician and composer, he used songs to do many things in that world--and since then, when he wants to do magic he thinks in terms of music.
Kyler's character tried to teach himself some magic when he was in NagaWorld, and botched himself out; then, however, he landed in a D&D fantasy world, where he apprenticed with a Wu Jen. He took as his first "taboo" abstinence from alcoholic beverages. Because of this beginning, he thinks of magic is something he can do as long as he observes his taboo, and that he will be able to do more magic if he adopts additional taboos.
Graeme is another wonderful example. I don't recall what gave him the idea that magic was possible, but he started his first spells by using bits of his engineering knowledge--using binoculars to make things larger and smaller, for example. Nearly all of Graeme's many home-made spells include fragments of technological knowledge reconfigured to have magical results. He has used television sets to scry, for example, and a magic wand containing a battery for "power" and a magic marker to mark the area to be affected.
Player characters do create highly-colored magic, working in connection with their referees within the contexts of the worlds in which they find themselves. Even Adam Keller's magic has something of the "feeling" of D&D/Hackmaster magic, from which he gets many of his spell ideas; I've tried not to intefere overly with this conceptualization even while he has been studying with Merlin, because individual color makes individual magic more interesting.
On the other hand, a system that made certain kinds of skills easier and others more difficult is rather complex. I can see doing it as part of holy magic--that someone who worships a fire god primarily gets bonused in fire skills and penalized in water skills, for example--but to do the same with arcane magic winds up making for complexities in the rules that are better managed by the players individually than by the game system. If a player wants to create a special focus out of a cigarette lighter that bonuses all his fire-based magic heavily as long as it is an included component, that will make him a master of fire elemental magic pretty directly. It will not, however, prevent him from also being a master of water elemental magic when he uses his other special focus, made from a sealed water-filled tube of blown glass.
==If the player has a Style Bonus, a number of taboos (which include some sort of generalized contingency trap), and all that written on his character sheet, I'm not sure how this is very strongly game controlled rather than player controlled.
I'm thinking that except for the notion of style bonus, everything I've suggested is workable with the rules as they are. It just needs an article with some examples to make the GM's aware of this particular way of using the rules.
--M. J. Young
This is actually something I'm trying to work out for my Guide to the Divine.
Look, for example, at how my Verser self does his divine magic. He always invokes a litany of gods appropriate to what he's doing. If he's about to do battle at sea, he'll invoke Njordr (god of the sea) and Thor (god of battle) at the very least, usually including Odin (his patron, and patron deity of sorcerers) and anyone else whose aspects have anything to do with the task at hand. Each of them really ought to be applying a bonus for a prayer that is stylistically appropriate to them. (Of course, it should be harder than just invoking them - probably each god should also require an appropriate sacrifice or taboo built into the prayer. But sacrifices and taboos built into the prayer are already a mechanic, so where do the gods themselves come in?) But MultiVerser has no recourse for that, yet.
So, since I have some of the smartest MV game-mechanists in the house all at once on this thread, I'll ask it here: What would be an appropriate bonus, and what would be an appropriate price, for including an appropriate deity in your prayers? Conversely, should a divine spellcaster be penalized if he accidentally invokes an inappropriate god? If, for instance, he were to invoke Persephone for a healing spell in the winter - when she is serving not as a fertility goddess, but as the queen of the realm of the dead?
(And, for MJ and the other Christians in the house, my answer to the Christian God is that he gives bonuses to just about everything, but they are both A: Smaller and B: Easier to get. For the Catholics in the house - the really devout ones - they can probably expect to be able to milk an extra point or two out of including an appropriate patron saint in there along with.)
There is certainly the bonus for something "appropriate"; it is specifically limited to +5 and one application per spell. This is specifically to prevent the sort of nit-picking point-building that might come from arguing that invoking both Odin and Thor in the same prayer is good for two "appropriate" bonuses, plus another for including the use of a hammer, because that's Thor's holy symbol, and another for asking specifically for the combat bonus--it exists to distinguish spells which contain some element that focuses specifically on the desired outcome and those which are more random, and so creates a slight preference for sense over nonsense in magic.
Also, the invocation of any deity at all moves the skill from arcane to holy, which automatically means a bonus equal to half the character's religion SAL. It is thus incorporating into your chance of success the value of including the invocation to the deity based to a significant degree on your own faith in that deity (religion encompassing faith and understanding in one score).
But you've suggested that you want multiple bonuses for including multiple deities. I'll tell you first why that won't work as stated, and second how to make it work in practice.
Let's take your example, of calling upon Odin as god of sorcerers and your patron, plus Thor as god of war and Njordr as god of the sea. We'll set Odin aside as covered by the religion bonus. You would then argue
my answer to the Christian God is that he gives bonuses to just about everything, but they are both A: Smaller and B: Easier to get.So for the Christian, invoking God in the same situation would be worth +3, but for you invoking Thor would be worth +5 and invoking Njordr would be worth +5, so you can get +10 by invoking two deities while the Christian cannot get the same bonus by invoking one.
However, according to the game's cosmology, the leading deity of all ethical monotheisms is the ultimate source and creator of all other deities. Thus from the Christian perspective, invoking God should produce a bonus equal to invoking all other deities combined--they all either work for Him or abuse an authority originally granted by Him, so He can act in any way that any lesser deity can act. (Even granted arguendo that those other deities are not created by Him, the fact that He is lord over everything and all other deities have spheres of authority or influence makes Him greater and them lesser.)
I have had this argument with some who believe that if they pray, the answer ought to be automatic because God cannot fail. I have objected that it is unfair to those who do not embrace an ethical monotheism for my personal prejudices in this regard to mean that they are treated as second-class characters. The God may be greater than all other gods combined, but there is a level playing field--and that means that it does not matter how many deities you invoke individually, you only get one credit for religion and one for appropriateness. As it is, you are already a step ahead of the Christian, because invoking Thor is automatically "appropriate" for a battle prayer, while invoking God for a battle prayer is not more appropriate than invoking Him for any other request. The Christian has to include something else to make it appropriate (such as a reference to a biblical text or the story of a saint which suggests something of this sort).
But then, you've also already given the answer for how to get the multiple-deity bonuses: incorporate sacrifices appropriate to each. If your ritual includes dowsing a flame in water, you'll get +1 for the water, +1 for the burning object, and probably another +1 for destroying the burning object--three points for including an appropriate sacrifice to Njordr, given as material components of the skill. If you must also strike the ground on which you stand with a hammer, you'll probably get +3 for a hammer (a manufactured object) as that which makes the skill appropriate to Thor. Destroy the hammer and you double that value by virtue of sacrifice.
The result is that you build your ritual around the deities involved, but you do so by incorporating objects or sacrifices of some sort, and this gives you points.
Eric, though, is concerned about something else--about that notion of schools of magic, in which a character or an entire collection of characters builds arcane magic on a specific model. In some incarnations of D&D you have your elementalists, illusionists, necromantists, conjurers, and so on. You've also got your Wu Jen, who can be masters of a particular element (or of all the elements, if they're good enough) but who must adhere to their taboos in order to perform their magic. I have not done much with the White Wolf magic system, and not for a lot of years, but I understand that the wizards in the World of Darkness also have their specific fields of interest and application which control what they do and what they do well.
There's a really simple reason why these limits don't work well for Versers: it's too easy for the verser to transcend the limitations, and too difficult to create reasonable limitations. For example, I was in Haston where I learned to perform magic by singing. My other self was in Vampire Chicago where he learned to perform magic by quoting New Testament Greek. Let's suppose, though, that I didn't have two characters--that I began in that Vampire Chicago, learned to do that Greek-based holy magic against the vampires, and then later versed into Haston. The rules of the game will not permit the referee to strip me of my magic (no matter how much Eric wants them to do that) as long as others can perform the same skills. It is a matter of character integrity: I know how to work magic by quoting the Greek New Testament, and if alliance holy magic of those bias levels works, then my magic works. But it's not going to take me long to recognize that all around me are wizards who are performing magic by singing--and I'm good at singing and know far more songs than I know verses of scripture in the original Greek. This is a way of doing magic tailor-made for me. So now I'm going to break out of my limitations and copy the way they do magic--and now I have two types of magic. Later let us suppose I find myself in Willow, where I see the way the magicians of that world operate--so I copy them as well, learning new spells that do not fit either of my prior patterns.
Now, how many patterns do I have to learn before it occurs to me that the pattern doesn't matter? Once I learn that, I can create my own patterns. I can decide that the way to do water-based spells is to include items from a particular list of water-related ingredients--salt to control it, fish scales to enter it. I can have a separate collection of ingredients for fire spells, including perhaps napalm, phosphorus, sulphur, and parafin. The pattern was useful at the beginning, and sometimes I will fall back on one pattern or another where I see a good way to accomplish a particular objective--say, I realize I know a song that says exactly what I want to do. But I'll also mix and match patterns, if what I want to do is cross the river safely as in a boat and so I can pronounce the Greek from some passage about Jesus sleeping in the boat and sing Michael Row the Boat Ashore while sprinkling salt onto the surface of the river. The fact is, I can learn a thousand different patterns and tap all of them to expand my magical abilities. It is perfectly reasonable for indigs to fall into the trap of believing that magic is done this way and this way only, but it is not reasonable to expect gamers ever to think in those terms, because we already know that different magicians even in the same world use different patterns to achieve their objectives.
So a player can create his own patterns, but that's between the player and his own choices, and not something the referee can or should impose. Magic works because the magician expects it. Whatever enhances that expectation enhances making it work. Patterns help because they give you the bonus for doing what is appropriate within some context, but ultimately they are set aside because they are too limiting for a person who can see beyond them.
--M. J. Young
Except, in stories, O7's magic would be more effectual for invoking Njord when he was trying to dodge a storm in a longboat.
Also, some magics do mention gods or powers by name, but don't really seem to be holy. Doctor Strange was always saying things like "By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, by the Crimson Bands of Cytorrakk, I bind you!" At one point, he faces off against a major league bad guy, and he realizes that he's been calling on this bad guy for help with his spells. Oops. That'd be Dormannu.
I'd be okay with a +3 for invoking the Creator, but making it a +2 more for calling on Him in his office of Lord of Hosts in a combat situation. I think this fits reality.
I'll admit I'm having another go at the +5 appropriateness problem we've discussed before. I'm trying to see another way around this, IMHO, unfortunate limit.
I could see doing this taboo thing with holy magic. Actually taboos and holy magic go together very well. So my idea is not limited to arcane magic.
Mages in White Wolf have a set of nine spheres of influence that cover reality, and they have ranks in each sphere. They also have Traditions such as Celestial Chorus (which most of your characters would be) or Sons of Ether (which Whisp would be). However, there is a distinct tendency for the Chorister to say "I burn the vampire with my Forces Three fire." instead of "I raise my hands to Heaven, and call on Michael Archangel, Prince of the Fourth Heaven, and Lord of Lightning to strike down this wicked beast with lightning so he burns."
Some of the Mage game designers wrote about this problem, and I think it was widespread.
My solution to this is to change the limits on appropriateness they had in their game, and give more bonuses. Their solution was to exhort the players to do better.
==Patterns help because they give you the bonus for doing what is appropriate within some context,
So you agree with me! Kewl.
I did not mean that your ideas did not apply to holy magic; I meant that it was really easy to see how to apply them to holy magic, but you wanted to carry over the same ideas to arcane magic. It's pretty evident that someone who calls upon a warrior god like Thor for healing is not going to get great healing response--he's going to get the coach's "tough it out" speech, more likely. Go to a healing god instead, and you'll get bonuses on healing spells but penalties on damaging attacks.
It gets more complicated with the religious attitudes of someone like Harry, of course. If Harry were a devotee of Thor, I could then easily say that all his magic that is directly combat-supportive is bonused, his healing magic is penalized, and other magic is unaffected--but that he must act at all times in a manner appropriate to a warrior of Thor. That should mean that he can't then turn around and call upon Persephone for healing, because to do so he would have had to be acting like a caring and healing devotee of Persephone, not a warrior of Thor. Yet his beliefs allow him to mix-and-match deities according to his needs--they are his tools, not his masters.
The solution there is to treat the names of the gods strictly as appropriate words, and the sacrifices or other components as spell components. That's not as much of a problem as Harry seems to think. After all, if you're doing holy magic, at least part of the point of the ritual is to win the favor of the deity so that the deity will act on your behalf (or something like that). Thus the things done to make the spell "work" are inherently done to communicate to the deity, and so involve invoking the deity by their very inclusion. You don't have to figure out how to make the involvement of the deity part of the mechanic--the mechanic makes the involvement of the deity part of the spell.
The problem arises with arcane magic, because we lose this stricture. That is, a warrior of Thor or a devotee of Persephone is expected to act at all times in accordance with the principles of his deity, and to use magic in harmony with that deity. A student of arcane lore is always looking to broaden his horizons, to learn new techniques. There is a degree to which specialization can mean focus, and thus more power in a limited area--but there is even more the factor that generalization means greater range of abilities, more options, and thus more power through flexibility.
I think that the specialist course is self-supporting. If I decide that I am going to limit myself to fire magic, I have a very limited number of skills to learn--and I can get very good at them, because there aren't that many of them. If I generalize, I can learn a lot more skills, but it will take me a lot longer to make them reliable.
It's thus a matter of character choice. I myself am a generalist, so I think in generalist terms. I see the advantages of the specialist, and they don't tempt me.
--M. J. Young