“Any character may possess any number of Faith Points (gained through the sacraments, a pilgrimage, or other holy endeavors) that once spent, do not return” -RoPD:57/AMDE417. But, at least in modern times, Christians participate in a sacrament (Communion) every Sunday, plus holy days of obligation which were reduced to 10 in modern times – so probably more in Mythic Europe. Many churches have daily mass, so the presiding priest will participate every day. Since they are uncapped, they can be banked indefinitely, though only used so quickly. This would however imply that even the standard peasant still has steady supply of faith points and priests have a massive supply. But as far as I can find, its assumed that people have no faith points unless they have true faith.
Now, my understanding is that for a portion of the middle ages the laity did not partake in communion as frequently, but reconciliation/penance was more common, but I cannot find any good sources for how common it was or when are where – ‘middle ages’ is about a thousand years over an entire continent. Even in the worst case, it has long been the case that catholics should receive communion and reconciliation at least once a year, which would still give 2 points a year, and priests would gain a minimum of 60 a year.
Follow on question what would the equivalent be for the other faiths? While some sacraments have similar rituals (baptism, confirmation, holy orders, and matrimony), as far as I know they don’t have an equivalent to communion.
While they're not banked, that does imply that anyone goes to at least weekly mass gets to spend a Faith Point every week - which does, mechanically, track with the idea that a person of faith lives a blessed life in relative proportion to how devout they are, and are thus more likely to heal well, or win an argument, or catch a good deer while hunting. And having at least one good thing in your life every week, especially in the rugged frontiers of the middle ages, is pretty attractive.
That said, the implication is thus that going to mass once a week (a probably pretty safe journey of at most an hour or two there and back) has the same mechanical impact as going on a pilgrimage (a risky journey of at least days if not weeks), which feels Not Right, and also if going to weekly communion meant you got your one-a-week Good Thing, you'd go more (which doesn't necessarily model historical behavior, as stated above). Is there an argument that you only get that first Faith Point from your first Communion, or perhaps that there would have to be some other event after which Communion gives you a new Faith Point (eg, you go on a pilgrimage, you reset your Communion Counter; or it resets every Easter and/or Christmas, etc.)?
For performing a three month pilgrimage, a character can gain a Minor Virtue or lose a Minor Flaw, Major ones for a multi-season pilgrimage. (The Church, p. 16)
The Church p.40 says two things about Mass:
"In this Sacrament, bread and wine is turned into the body and blood of Christ. This is consumed by the congregation, which grants them a Faith Point each." - So it's not attending Mass, but receiving Holy Communion that results in a Faith Point.
"Every Christian must attend Mass at least once a year at Easter", and that's how I see it. Most people only receive Holy Communion once a year, at Easter, so no weekly Faith Points. You can attend Mass daily, but you won't get the bread and wine, that's for the priest only.
For PCs it's different of course. Remember that Priest is a minor Virtue, so every covenant can have a grog herd of holy cows that you can milk for Faith Points daily. I guess that's why Pagan is a Major Flaw (just kidding...).
Ooh, good spot. I always forget The Church exists.
I would assume that the LORD would not look kindly at the grog herd of holy cows industrializing His blessings, but then again, if they're intentionally using their faith points to do some healing or write strongly worded letters urging virtue upon the nobility you might get away with it - and a circumspect mage could perhaps work to fine tune which virtues are being urged.
IMO, RoP:Divine is a strong candidate for worst book in the 5e line, and the stuff in it that appears to be overpowered or not make sense (like this) should simply be disregarded.
Mind, when you compare it to the worst offerings of other RPGs, it really shows you how consistently high the quality of the ArM 5e line has been.
I think that is something of an artifact of the underlying premises of the default setting assuming that the Divine is in fact objectively supreme (hence capital D/G), in both God and the Realm as an embodiment of that power etc. But all while wishing to avoid endorsing a particular Divine oriented religion as objectively true. The Divine "should" be strong, because that Realm is objectively the most powerful, etc.
Which ... I won't pretend I have a perfect solution for these problems or that changing these underlying premises of the setting isn't something that has consequences. However I think in general my default answer (with no small amount of hand waving of incongruities involved) is simply a house rule that the Realms are all "objectively" equal (as far as anyone can tell), and must rely on explicit interactions of powers/levels of things for resolution.
I do however readily agree with you about the overarching high quality level for the overwhelming majority of the AM5E line.
Well, this is a subject that I have capital-O Opinions on.
I don't have a problem with the Divine being supreme, in and of itself.
That God is benevolent and all-powerful is just a premise of the Mythic European setting the same way "devils and faeries exist" is; it comes with the "all the myths are real" territory. I do think though, that if that's the direction you want to go, it really behooves you to consider how different the narrative function of the Divine must be from that of the other Realms.
As you say, the line doesn't want to endorse any particular religion as "the true one." It's clear from the simple fact that Jewish, Muslim and Catholic holy sites and faithful are all Divine within the world of Mythic Europe that the three Abrahamitic religions are all on to something, but none of them are right. And this is a time period with a lot of religious strife, and people using religion instrumentally for worldly political aims. So a Divine that's actually supposed to be benevolent can't be nearly as interventionist as RoP:D makes it out to be, that makes no sense, it requires a lot of people to ignore the manifest will of their own God if the world is to remain recognizably medieval. If they're going to play the 'ineffable divine will' card so hard, God has to actually be obscure.
A Divine that's just as agentic as the manifestations of the other Realms is also damaging to player agency, because the Divine is set up as, at least obliquely, an antagonistic force. Magic is sinful, faith and relics protect from it, PCs are supposed to play magicians. Then you can't keep hitting the characters over the head with interventions of a force that is definitionally both more powerful and more in the right than them.
Compounded by the (one assumes unpleasant) realization by those who are able to do so that the Divine Realm supernaturally affects/supports/enacts (however you want to term it) things for these multiple religions that disagree about things so very strongly.
If the Divine can be demonstrably invoked and support you and your cause, viewing this as affirmation is ... well, lets just say it isn't unintuitive to make such a connection.
And how then do you determine who does and does not get such Divine favor while remaining neutral to religious factors, but treating the Divine as somehow objective and true?
I think this is very true. It has I think an effect of ultimately limiting and undermining the "sandbox" of play, and being too often invoked as the power that ultimately is just a trump card over anything the players can/could do. (As opposed to simply seeing through all consequences of what someone does, as an alternative.)
Part of my personal solution for instead making the Realms "equal" and relate/interact with one another on equal mechanical footing is I think it removes both of these issues. Someone able to invoke/use Divine powers basically becomes a Divine affiliated power user instead of someone with a direct line to powers sponsored by capital G-od, and the game play snarls that entails. Which also means two (or more) such individuals can disagree with one another and I don't have to figure out why capital G-od doesn't tell their two camps of very ardent followers they should get along. Instead ... they are just Divine practitioners who don't get along, and that is as ok as any other types that don't along. Humans being humans is understandable for everyone (mostly).
I don't know that I'd say magic is sinful - at least in 1220 AD, the idea that ALL magic was sinful wasn't a thing, yet. Certainly, Divine Auras limit Magic magic, but so does the (ostensibly value neutral) Aegis of the Hearth. I do agree that there's ludo-narrative dissonance between how agentic God should be, as written, vs how agentic God is in text and ought to be for the sake of facilitating gameplay.
It seems necessary to pick between "God is Omnipotent" and "God is Perfectly Good" - either are fine, but having both fall apart in practice. If God is Perfectly Good, but has a technically limited amount of ability to influence the world, it puts the onus on mortal hands to do The Lord's work (or fail to do so) which helps add weight to character decisions and perhaps usher in a world where God's limitations are less, for the sake of the Victory of Virtue. If God is Omnipotent, and aligned to virtue but not perfectly good all the time, there becomes a compelling question of how much characters should trust The Plan, especially when it is obscure and when they may be a necessary sacrifice in God's Strategy - doubly so for anyone aligned with the Magic or Faerie Realms whose Whole Deal seems to be not part of The Plan.
Either way, the success (or failure) of The Divine Project relies on faith rather than certain proof, which feels appropriate, and serves as another argument for Faith Points being not-that-common, lest Heaven tips its hand too clearly.
That or God is a Faerie and any contradictions are due to discrepancies in the human telling.
This is huge (And you know, I can believe I missed this. Its 20 pages away.) A priest with purity can’t bank as many faith points as he needs to perform high-level miraculous effects, but it doesn’t alter the total number of faith points available to him. Unfortunate for the bookkeeping though.
It also clarifies that “Many of the sacraments impart Faith Points.” – not all of them, and most importantly the other repeatable sacrament, Reconciliation, does not (it grants a confidence point to aid in performing one’s penance, but not a faith point).
I also forgot The Church exists.
However, “You may spend Faith Points like Confidence Points (and may spend as many Faith Points at once as your True Faith Score), as long as you are acting in accordance with God’s will.” (emp added) would probably stop you from using grogs for faith points, unless its for a Divine Cause, at which point your starting to look a lot like a mission or monastery. And it would make sense if monasteries and the like can put out a lot of faith points.
The once a year requirement is still current; to me it just doesn’t hold much weight without either a mythic or historical source to back it up as common. Conversely, searching through the church yields exactly the sort of clarification I needed. Thank you for reminding me it exists.
“At least once a year it is necessary to attend Mass and take communion, and this usually takes place on Easter Sunday, but most Sundays the congregation will gather if possible, and communion can be taken more often — even daily if so desired.” TC:11
"Pursuing contemplative-style mysticism involves an intense form of personal imaginative meditation on the life and sufferings of Christ; regular, often daily, attendance at Mass (and especially participation in the communion); " TC: 21
Side bar outlining the daily life of a benedictine monk "8 am: Mass for non-monks, then ablutions and breakfast. The monastery gates open, and Mass is celebrated for servants and lay folk. " TC: 53
“Many of them have an intense devotion to the holy eucharist and desire holy communion as often as every week, which is viewed as very disturbing since the custom among most religious is to partake just a few times annually.” TC: 73
“The Riwle suggests that the anchoress limit herself to receiving holy communion 15 times a year, on certain feast days, so it does not become a habit or less than special, and make a full confession before each occasion.” TC: 75
"he frequent, indeed often several times daily, celebration of the Mass is one of the most noted features of the Cluniacs" TC: 85. Though they are explictily included as a sect that could, but is not nessesarily, corrupt.
To me a 'Few' indicates 3-5 for most people, with monks, nuns, and other holy people usually taking communion about 15 tmes a year, but some groups do partake weekly or even daily.
Especially since Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are really not that compatible with each other, let alone with the other faiths listed. If the Eucharist, which is pretty uniquely catholic, gives a faith point then isn’t that a straight from the divine proof that there is something too it, especially if the others don’t have an equivalent.
And while I can see the occasional +3 not getting noticed, TC does indicate that some people do have weekly, biweekly, or daily faith points. (the biweekly comes from the good records we have of 36 universal non-sunday Holy Days of Obligation, which yields an average of 83 masses per year, plus some for holy days that are always not a sunday (some are specified based on Easter), plus local patron saint’s feast days), and I do think that degree of blessed luck is going to be notable.
I read it more as The Church defined the mecanism for catholics, some of which may apply to orthodox. Mecanisms for the other Dominion faiths were left undefined.
Between the fact that these faith points have to be spent according to god's will, and that most of the times the type of person who gets one is going to be fairly pious, it seems to me that most of this "luck" will be spent helping others selflessly and without too much calculation. The result is that the community will benefit, in a way hard to differentiate from that of a community blessed by many tiny miracles along the theme noble-selfless-actions-get-divine-help.
Now, are Christian communities going to be helped observably more than, say, Jewish or Muslim ones? I think that would be exceedingly hard to notice. In general, different religious communities in the same area are influenced by the socio-political environment to an extent that would drown that of that once-a-week faith point; and this is even more true for different religious communities in different areas.
I disagree. God can be Perfectly-but-ineffably-good, and Omnipotent-but-self-restrained.
This works. That said ...
It's worth noting that this is exactly the Zoroastrian view: God created man as the weapon that would allow Him to conquer Evil. It may also be true in e.g. the Christian, Jewish, or Muslim view, where God might be less constrained (but note that He is still constrained by His own nature, see e.g. Augustine), and yet still refrains from acting because it is His will / His nature to have humans act in His stead.
I think ultimately one has to clarify a little what "good" means in this context. In ArM5 God is by definition "good", because "goodness" in the game is by definition alignment to God, which in turn is roughly alignment with the seven virtues and opposition to the seven vices. To avoid confusion, I tend to refer to this "goodness" as "righteouness".
Now, I think it's perfectly reasonable for both (some) players and (some) characters to have a notion of "good" (in the sense of appealing to one's sense of how-things-should-be) different from the above one of "righteous". For example, imagine a character who believes there is no God or objective justice, but feels the duty to find within himself a personal moral compass to his own actions, because he thinks only in this way he can be fully accomplished (something akin to Kant's "the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me"); and who wants to live life to the fullest, enjoying it, performing great deeds, leaving a legacy after himself. Such a character can be construed as the quintessence of Pride according to ArM5's Divine (and according to many religious people in real life) but I think many players would feel quite sympathetic, and would have a hard time definiing him as not "good". Similarly, imagine a young nun and the priest attending her nunnery falling desperately in love with each other, eloping, and running away to build themselves a new life far away (these are actually two covenfolk in my saga): would you not root for them? But according to ArM5's Divine (and according to many religious people in real life), unless they repent, they are bound for Hell.
This is not to say that the RoP:D is a bad book, in that it tells you that stuff is good when it actually isn't (and viceversa). It's just to say that you can definitely build characters that, according to the modern sensiblities of many of us are "good", and yet according to the metaphysics of the Ars Magica universe are "bad". That's perfectly ok!
The Church clarified a lot of the mechanisms for Catholics, and provided several examples. But it didn't resolve descrepency in Realms of Power: Divine where they gave Christians a method to gain a faith point every day that takes about an hour, while the others have vague 'holy endevours'.
Cosnidering its based on Mideaval eurpoe, it makes sense that they would give The Church significantly more detail in its own book; it was the dominant faith in Europe. But unless I find something roughly equivelent for Judaism and Islam, one faith is clearly a more favored than the others.
While it is very clear that the Divine is Very Very Powerful, it might well appear to be more directly interventionist than it is as the Infernal doe try to involve itself in ways that look divine, in order to confuse people about what the divine wants.
So while the divine protects pilgrims going to visit the holy lad, the infernal pretends to be divine while empowering crusaders to invade the holy land... some of its hapless victims in that invasion might receive divine protection to one degree or another because they are after all hapless dupes led by their sincere faith who are in danger of being killed by the zealous Muslims who are also being misdirected b the infernal into putting land above human lives in value and being led to kill all Christians in defense of their faith.,,,
So what is definitely not clear, due to infernal intervention, is exactly what the divine actually wants.
Unless, of course it is not as benevolent as believed and wants to watch the violence and place bets on which True Faith (TM) will prevail.
My general approach is that everything Divine-related is absolutely true, correct, and perfect -- inside Divine-auras. But I like the God-is-just-a-big-Fae approach a lot, and it fits; there is an absolutely fundamental book of Stories (Oops, 'parables'), & faithful are encouraged to deny proof and buy into the story whole-heartedly. The details of what reality may be is unimportant, and whatever the Story changes to over time is fine, as long as humans keep interacting with it.
Granted, this doesn't answer the 'Faith Points' question -- sorry. But the idea of Fae-based faith points is a concept I think is interesting.
As I said, I would limit Holy Communion to once a year for most people. I really like this description of the Easter Mass, I think it captures the spirit really well. Other faiths may have equivalent feasts, like Eid al-Fitr or Eid al-Adha in Islam or Jom Kippur in Judaism.
Thats a fine house rule. But its not well supported by either RoPD or TC. And when TC has a tradition (contemplative mystics) that takes Communion daily, I would like an equivelent for other faiths.
the idea of Fae-based faith points is a concept I think is interesting.
I (and I can't believe I'm saying this) am hesitant with that, since there's already a decent amount of ways to express the perks of being on good terms with the Good Neighbors - Charms, Sympathy, the various Faerie Wizardries, a Faerie using the Grant (Thing) power, etc. The difference, on a sort of mechanical level is that the different Faerie Things are Especially Good at Specific Things Nearby* to the Faerie, whereas Faith Points are often Kinda Good at General Things Everywhere, and I like having that differentiation. It tracks that "A generalized nudge towards success for most of the faithful" would win out over "a circumstantial and conditional accelerant" too, in the broad arc of historical/cultural change.
That said, if one wanted to model Faerie Things but you wanted to not have to keep track of all the rules in RoPF*, a parallel system of Faeth Points, one that works similarly but with slight changes to acquisition and application, could be a way to do that. Since Faith Points are limited (admittedly in an intentionally vaguely defined way) to those behaving "righteously" (as @ezzelino put it in the excellent essay above) the same could apply to Faeth Points with the relevant Gods only sponsoring those who act Heroic, or maintain Beauty, etc etc.