[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Gef

Depends on how bad the triggering event has to be. Flu season? You need a Blessing annually, because the blessing doesn't know about other healing magic you have access to. More serious disease, or a horrible accident? You need one every few years; I can think of a few times in my life, car crash or near miss, when a Bless would've been used up.

I don't think a Bless is used up when you might run into a problem, it gets used up when you do run into it, and retroactively prevents it. Most communicable diseases - outside of nasty bits like plagues and the like - are likely either minor enough they wouldn't burn up the Bless, or are things you probably got innoculated against if you made it through childhood. Additionally, the passive +1 to HT rolls from Bless is going to make you less likely to catch much of anything, and unless you're suggesting most people caught a serious disease once a year, you aren't going to need anual renewal of the Bless. Additionally, while serious farming, forge, and wagon accidents certainly did happen, I doubt they were anywhere near as common as a car crash, and note many car crashes might not even burn up the Bless, as they don't seriously injure the driver or passengers.

Originally Posted by Gef

My campaign assumptions are that there are 3k practicing wizards of each college per 10M pop. If a third of metemagic wizards are in the blessing business (journeyman level with Shortcut to Power), each has to Bless 1000 people per year, just 4 per day, to cover the entire population annually. Further assuming typical recipients split the benefit between greater productivity and more leisure, and you get 5% productivity increase, pure profit, and that's not counting the improved morale that comes from having a more pleasant life. I wonder if that's enough to put low performers out of work, with attendant social ills, or if you need mass production for that.

Do keep in mind that those wizards are unlikely to be evenly distributed through the population - you can probably expect most of them to cluster together in major cities. It's more likely that most will be in an area where they'd only need to Bless a person a day (or less) to cover the entire population anually, while others will be in locations where they'd have to Bless hundreds each day to keep up.

As for low performers, note that Bless may well serve to make some of those who are otherwise unfit to make it in the workforce to simply have slightly less output and leisure time - that Village Blacksmith upthread needs ST, Farming, and Smith at 11 each, but with Bless he might be able to get away with having each of those at 10. People could become overly reliant on the spell, resulting in many being in such a category - meaning your society might not see a real gain from the spell, but rather ocasional loss during the periods when people's Bless has run out but hasn't yet been renewed. That's heavy on the Skepticism side of the Sliding Scale, of course, so needn't be the way your world works.

Originally Posted by Gef

A sharecropper may not make enough take home pay to purchase annual blessings, but the lord on whose manor he works may make enough to justify blessing his crew. Over time, these lords would probably figure out where the sweet spot is: One blessing every other year? Every 5? My guess is every 3 years, but again, that's where something less hazy regarding terminal conditions would be helpful.

Indeed. Assuming we're staying away from the Skepticism bit above, the break-even point would be the 14 months I listed above. That isn't quite right, as that $500 per head he's spending could have been invested elsewhere, but the other bonuses from Bless may well be enough to offset that. Offhand, I'd say the lord will probably make a tidy sum if he allows his serfs to have their Blessings renewed every other year, although honestly so long as serious accidents and sickness aren't too prevalent, he would probably make a profit if he simply lets them renew the Blessing anytime it is expended. He may need to keep an eye on some of his serfs to insure they aren't abusing the privilege ("Hey y'all, watch this!"), however.