Thinking about Spiritual Output in a Medieval Society
For most of human history something like 90 percent of all productivity was directed towards agriculture. Wildly generalizing across thousands of years of human history and civilisations (Ancient Egypt, India, China, Europe, the Americas) People in the past were mostly farming, or engage in supporting farming. That is because only when you have a surplus of food, can you do other things. Merchants, Artisans, Warriors and Clerics all have to eat something. And it takes a lot of people to feed one extra person with medieval agricultural technology.
So agricultural economies directed 90 percent of productivity towards agricultural output. What of the remaining 10 percent? They are Artisans (blacksmiths, carpenter, potter, etc), Warriors (armies, peacekeeping, castles, etc.), Merchants (markets, trade, etc.) and Clergy (spiritual services, education, etc.).
When we are playing roleplaying games those are the parts of the economy players, playing heroes or adventurers, are most likely to interact with. They are also parts that are probably easier to understand for the modern economics brain. We know what artisans, warriors and merchants do. But what about Clergy?
From a modern view genuine spiritual production, not the community service, ritual and education parts, but the doing service to a higher power seems somewhat strange. In a medieval world something like 15-25 percent of the surplus was directed towards spiritual productionCitation needed. But probably in the ballpark. . Imagine spending a quarter of your net income every month on church services. But people in the past were not stupid, they very likely believed this was both necessary and reasonable. They simply had a different understanding of the world.
When I run games I notice that players are very happy to spend money on weapons, gear, magic items. Sometimes they will even spend money on personal luxury or a good party. I have never seen a player character spend 25 percent of their well earned loot at a church or temple, if they did not have to or got something tangible in return. Certainly not for the peace of their immortal soul. Part of this is that we know we are playing a game and spending money on making my character faster, better and stronger is more in line with what the game rewards and punishes. There are misaligned incentives between what the character wants and what the player wants.
So how can we align incentives to encourage our adventurers to value spiritual production?
This is a game design problem. Here are some thoughts and solutions:
Give XP
The trivial solution is doing a gold spend for xp scheme, were you gain xp via worship and you can pay someone to worship for you. So you could pay 100 gold for a couple of priests to pray in your name for a month and you gain 100xp. Does that mean that rich people are all of higher level since they spend more gold on worship? How do we explain high level characters that have not spend money on worship?
Give Power
Temples are the only places to get healing from. They can sell holy water and health potions. Health potions can heal minor sickness, and large health potions also heal major sickness. Maybe in this world there is no germ theory of disease but instead a curse theory of disease, and thus all illness must be treated by spiritual means.
Lack of Concern for Ones Eternal Soul
The game happens during the live of your character, that is the primary concern of the player. When a character dies, you cant keep playing them. A player gets nothing from a character going to heaven, nor to hell, they don’t notice one way or another. You might feel bad for a moment, but if you want to keep playing, you move on to the next character.
So we have to put the fear of Damnation into players, or the promise of Salvation. The problem here is the disconnect between player and character. We have to make the fate of the character mechanically affect the player.
In basic dnd the one incentive we have that exists out of game is xp. We could design a direct feedback mechanism of giving xp for spiritual output, and xp penalties for lack of spiritual output. Given the incentive structure we should expect more spiritual production from characters. Though we still have a disconnect between player and character. The player acts for short-term gains via xp, were as the character ought to do it for long-term gains fearing for their immortal soul or wanting to go to paradise. If we want to align player motivation with character motivation we have to design a feedback mechanism that impacts the player in the long-term.
We could imagine this as something like a xp bonus for each character that has reached paradise, and a penalty for characters that are condemned to hell. In practice this will only starts mattering a few sessions into the campaign, when you retire a character, which is not great. And skilled players, in the sense of not getting their characters killed will not gain anything. How do you solve that? Pregenerate previous characters? Give the option to retire characters? A softer version of this might be that the starting level of new characters could be determined by the fate of previous. So say you had 3 characters going to heaven and one going to hell, your new starting level would be at + 3 minus 1, so +2. I like that this directly connects the fate of your last character to your next, and so the feedback is very direct. It also should not matter too much, since starting at Level 1 is completely fine and lower level characters catch up quick. There are probably better solutions but this is good enough for now.
Communal Worship in the Society of the Murder Hobo
Much behavior of groups of humans is best explained because they have build a society in which they will spend time together and repeatedly interact. Because of that things like reputation, trust and organization matter. This is not the case for adventurers. They usually operate outside of civilization and greater society. The traditional social incentives and punishments do not affect them much.
To produce the communal worship of pre-modern societies we have to also incentivize the group and not just the individual. The first step is to have spiritual output scale better with quantity rather then with quality. We want a world were 10 monks are better then 1 archpriest. Or at the very least we want 10 monks to be more economical in producing the same amount of spiritual output. The second step is having spiritual production being able to be shared with the larger community. Directly that means selling holy water and health potions, curing wounds and removing curses, but those are expensive and singular. We also want a reason for the masses to chip in. So spiritual output should also have broad benefits such as improving the fertility of the land, warding against monsters and evil and protecting from plagues.
What to make of this?
I think it is worthwhile to experiment with making spiritual activity and output matter. Player should want and need to spend a good amount of their money on spiritual service and production. I am less certain on the precise mechanical implementation, but if you want to make player behave in a certain way, that is the only reliable way.
I will experiment and playtest and hopefully write a follow up post, being somewhat wiser.