[Runequest] POW gain - mechanically?

[Styopa]

Well dang, that might explain the strange lack of response....posting again
here:

OK, I'm curious about the various readers' responses and opinions to
mechanistically using disrupt or other trivial spirit magic spells to try to
get POW gain rolls to raise one's POW?

Example: character has a rough experience of divine intervention, leaving
him with POW of 2.  Assuming he had the spirit spell Disrupt before this
happened, what's to prevent him sitting at the entrance to the city sewers,
and casting (POW-1) disrupts every day (casting chance 10%) on visible rats
(I'm ruling they have typically POW 1d6 or 3) thus a 45% chance to overcome
the target's POW and therefore a 4.5% chance per day of getting a POW gain
roll.

This is pretty easy to brute-force out on a spreadsheet.  What I found is
that while the numbers are totally against the character to start (low
chance to cast, low chance to overcome target) it's quite sensitive to
hitting the extremely low rolls early.  Once a character gets up in the 5-6
POW range, they're able to cast the spell a few times a day (assuming only 1
POW gain roll/day), with a decent chance of casting and a good chance of
overcoming the target.  It very roughly seems to average about 30-40 days to
get one's POW to the 9-10 range (from 2), and another 20-30 days to get to
POW 18 if one was that desperate.  Am I missing something?  Happy to send
the spreadsheet to anyone that wants to see it.

On the one hand, it certainly seems like an exploitative mechanic.
On the other, how different is this than spending 12 weeks training (aside
from being able to make some spare change for killing rats)?  (And yes, I
don't always let them get such stretches without interruptions.)

And no, to me it's a silly idea to say that they would run out of rats.  I
just can't think of any reason to disallow it on the face of it; I feel like
I'm vaguely trying to screw my players by trying.  (Truth statement: As a
player decades ago, I had a Sword of Humakt who had a similar situation
leaving him with POW 1, and my DM then let me do it to get up to POW 6
before interrupting me with world events and whispers of cowardice around
town....)

(and added later)

A further comment on this, the more I mull it over.

First, I don't think this can be disallowed on the grounds that it's somehow
prima facie  unreasonable.  I thought there might have been some argument
that the zapping of a rat is trivial, or didn't pose a hazard to the user in
a way that would inspire real 'learning' to take place, but then again, what
real hazard comes from swinging at butts or shooting at targets?

So then my next reasoning was regarding the challenge - a thief would learn
NOTHING about lockpicking from picking open a Fischer-Price toy chest, and
at a certain point a squire would learn nothing about swinging a sword by
ONLY hacking at a wooden target post.  At a certain point there has to be a
challenge for learning to occur, in a sense, you only learn by failure and
thus no chance of failure = no learning.  Maybe you can ONLY get a POW gain
roll where your chance of success is <75%, or is this calculated in that
mechanic already?  There's already 3 stages a character has to 'succeed' at
to get the gain - casting chance, overcoming the target, and the power gain
roll....does there need to be ANOTHER limit?

Finally, I took a step back and tried to review it in a more metagaming
sense: if I sense that POW is gained to easily, why?  Ultimately, and unless
you insert game-world events or roleplaying restrictions, players' access to
POW is the brake on them gaining divine magic (and being able to wield other
magic more effectively).  Does the ability to go from 2-4 POW to 18 POW in
60 days of rat-blasting hurt the game's presumed rate of skill advancement?
I'd say it does indeed - one-use spells become a trivial limitation,
Runelevel characters would have buckets of spells handy at all times, and
sorcerers would need wagons to carry all their enchanted crap.

So from that respect, is it more efficient just to place some arbitrary cap
on POW gain over time?  1 POW (one POW point or one gain roll) per week?  5
per season?   Certainly YGMV, but what does Gloranthan RQ presume is
'normal' for an actively adventuring character?

At the end, we have what I feel is a mechanic that seemed for a long time to
me to be reasonable, but when extrapolated it breaks the system.  Am I right
that this is broken?  Any suggestions?
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