Upkeep

I was looking through my older blog posts, re-reading "Four Titles," and others. As I did, I saw the post on Prerequisites and was reminded that I had revised that role-playing system since then, by adding the principle of Upkeep.

In the standard role-playing system, once you've earned a Benefit, you usually get to keep it. Say a character was a fighter in his twenties and thirties, but he retired from that and now he's in his sixties, not having swung a sword in thirty years. But a horde of goblins raids his village, so he pulls his old sword off the mantle and starts slaying goblins just as easily as he did when he was thirty. The problem with this is that he should be horribly out of practice. He should have forgotten a lot of what he used to know about fighting, and lost almost all of his strength (depending on what he has been doing these thirty years, if not sword-fighting). There's a sort of use-it-or-lose-it principle to most skills in real life, and I'd like that to carry over to gaming.

A problem I saw with my Prerequisites idea is that it seemed too easy for a character to become extremely powerful, just by virtue of growing up. Say a boy of fifteen sets out to become a warrior, and spends five years learning how to fight. Along his adventures, he meets a wizard, and spends five years learning how to do magic, while keeping up his sword-fighting skill in his free time. By now, he's a well-known and very competent adventurer. He goes on an epic quest in which he saves the life of the High Priestess of the Holy Light. In return, she offers to teach him the way of light, which he accepts, spending five years learning the art of holy magic, while simultaneously maintaining his wizardry and swordsmanship. At this point, the man is thirty-ish years old and has spent half his life sword-fighting, has a decade of experience with arcane magic (or wizardry), and has spent the last five years learning divine magic from the High Priestess herself. He would be an incredibly powerful character. But there's just one problem: It would be impossible to keep all those skills in top shape. The more time he spends studying magic, the less time his spends practicing sword-fighting. The more time he spends with divine magic, the less time he spends with arcane magic.

In my Prerequisites system, I want there to be a system of Upkeep, where you need to spend a portion of your time practicing a skill you learned previously in order not to lose it. The fighter in the first example should be fairly useless at sword-fighting after thirty years of no practice, and the adventurer in the second example shouldn't be a great sword-fighter either, having spent so much of his time studying magic instead. There needs to be a way to keep tract of how much time each character spends on each skill, and at what level each of those skills should be as a result of the amount of time spent on them. This is starting to get complicated.

Thankfully, in real life, this system is much more intuitive. We all know that the more time we spend, say, practicing on the piano or learning to cook, the better we get at those things, and the longer it's been since we've done those things, the more those skills will start to slip away from us. The same applies with spiritual matters. The more time we spend reading the scriptures and trying to follow the spirit, the more spiritual we become, and there's a certain amount of effort required just to maintain the level of spirituality we've already achieved. The longer we go without saying our prayers and reading the scriptures, the more our spirituality starts to dwindle. We may lose it entirely, if we're not careful.

So, I'm going to try to spend more time, especially in the evenings, when I'm supposed to read the Book of Mormon, write in my journal, and say my evening prayers, trying to keep my spirituality up. I've felt it slipping the last few days, and forgetting my scripture study may be a large part of that. I need to get back into the habit of meeting the Prerequisites for Divine Favor, or I may lose that benefit entirely, and I seriously cannot afford that.