This I disagree with.

This I agree completely with.

Personally, I would clamp my hands over my ears and start saying LA LA LA LA LA to try to drown it out.

I hate this stuff. It makes no sense to me at all.

If you want to add 3 points to all of your abilities, go right ahead. Heck, add 5, why not? Add 11 to all of your abilities that start with the letter "U" if you like, I don't care. If you've earned the merits, you can spend them however you want. If you want to buy a new ability, knock yourself out. Add some points to Health while you're at it. The world is your oyster.

The game already supports all of those ideas, and all that is required by way of documentation or explanation is a very simple table showing how many merits you'll need to spend.

But this orders and ranks stuff - it's the complexity of it that baffles me. I can't comprehend the need for all the pain and suffering I will endure in trying to remember how all this stuff works, when I don't see any tangible benefit coming out the other side.

Why would I want to advance in rank in an Order? What does that get me?

Well, you can add 3 to this and 2 to that and get this ability at 10 points and you get a horse!

Well, sure, ok, but I can do all that anyway, without all the spaghetti code and page flipping.

So it comes down to the "there's no way to get activations and stuff unless you belong to the secret society" argument, which is questionable in itself, but that's not the part that bugs me most. It's the bit where they won't let you into the secret society unless you're EXACTLY this sort of a person - that's the one that I just can't stomach.

Orders as templates? Sure, no problems there. Call them EXAMPLES of characters that will probably work. No issues as all. But moving beyond that, it just seems like extra rules for no good reason, to me.

Warrior to be in the Knights of Thar (and he has the skills and background to get in as well as the in Avatar roleplaying that goes along with trying to get in) Then fine.