@EarthScorpion, you've talked a lot about the Anchors idea for Sorcery. First, I wanted to say that I really like it. I love the aesthetics of spells that are grounded in the trappings of power. I think its pretty brilliant in the type of play it encourages and how it gives incentives for acting in genre appropriate ways.
But I can see some potential problems. Anchors are a good way to make elders powerful while still reliant on infrastructure, but it creates the issue that you're asking players to risk their spells becoming unusable if the Anchor is lost. That's going to turn a lot of people off. If stripping a Sorcerer of their infrastructure is a known way of depriving people of their power, presumably antagonists will try to do that to the players. Since players won't want to risk losing the ability to use their spells, I suspect anyone who can get away with it would learn as many spells as possible through something like Lineage or Artifact tattoos which can't be easily lost, or at least Artifacts which they store with Elsewhere tech whenever they aren't being used to cast spells so that they can't be stolen, and then just pass over learning any spells which require Anchors they can lose. And that's assuming that they'd be willing to switch to the Anchors system over the canon rules in the first place. I find the Anchors system to be beautifully thematic, but I'd still be reluctant to use a system hack that requires that I spend experience on something I can lose. In my experience, players
hate to lose capabilities that they've invested xp into. Whenever its happened in my games, it almost always lead to arguments with the GM. It's the same problem I have with Evocations in 3E, where you can sink xp into an Artifact to unlock its Charms and then have it all be wasted when you get disarmed and someone runs off with your weapon.
If you've given any thought to this, I'd like to hear it, because I really do like the idea of Anchors, and I'd like to be able to use it in my games.
