I’ve been following a discussion on realm limitations over on the Forums. While this was an RMU discussion, I’ve written extensively about realm access in my own rules (SWARM) and as a house rule in general for Rolemaster.
We’ve been playing without any realm limitations for years and haven’t seen any functional or mechanical issues. For instance, a PC with Mage lists can also be a High Priest and have access to Channeling lists from that religion. A Hedge Wizard or a Witch has spells lists from multiple realms as they are really dabblers of magic.
RM has allowed multiple realm access in it’s baseline: hybrid casters in the regular rules and the “Archmage” in the Companion. I don’t see much push back on those classes, and I attribute this to the basic theory that if someone writes it into the rules it becomes generally accepted and assumed to be “balanced”. Part of the problem is the idea that a PC is aspected to a specific magical realm, when a more useful perspective is that each realm is a different casting mechanic.
This circles me back to one of my pet peeves: the worship at the altar of balance. To be clear, balance is a personal construct that is usually driven by someone’s measure of over or underpowered character builds. Reality is that balance is purely driven by the GM in the way they run their game, the types of challenges and story lines they bring and their choices of mediation of rules.
The simple takeaway is that it’s really hard for a PC to develop multiple lists in multiple realms. It costs a lot. This is without some sort of balancing mechanism using higher skill costs, or talents, or some other arbitrary “balance tax”. Casters can either be narrowly focused and really good, or generalized with great utility. The specialist versus jack of all trades.
I thought about writing a more in depth and compelling argument for this, but it’s exhausting. I’m usually amazed at how much D&D DNA is still imbedded in our game system that really doesn’t make much sense!