Teaching an Old Renyu New Skills

 or "The Musical Training Of Gan ad-Din"

Gan ad-Din, bearer of all things and constant companion and retainer of Bartholomew Pettibone, has recently sought out a musician, one Anataynus, to learn from him the singing of songs and the playing of the oud. A worthy endeavor! And an opportunity for the Scribes to outline another possible use of downtime for player-characters in the Dual-Cities of Cothon-Gadeed.

When setting out to learn new skills--or "professions", as they are deemed in the page on Creating a Character--there are several steps to follow to set one well on one's path of "professional development":

1. Seeking a tutor
2. Retaining a tutor
3. Initial intensive training
4. Practice makes proficient
5. Continued development

The first three steps are necessary to achieving nominal proficiency in any skill; the last is "optional" though of course anyone who specifically cares for their craft will want to work to master that craft through continued devotion.

Because Gan has already set his feet on the path toward learning to be a musician, we can use him as an example in developing the framework for this downtime process.

Seeking a Tutor

In order to learn, one must have a teacher. To find a teacher, a character must either already know someone proficient in the skill they wish to learn--and perhaps cultivate a relationship such that the person would be a willing mentor--or advertise their interest in learning.

Gan ad-Din, not directly knowing anyone of musical dint, spent a downtime buying drinks around the taverns to the cost of 200 dinars, asking after musicians who might be willing to teach their craft, and rolled 2d6 for a 7 on the dice, plus bonuses. Simple success--he learned the name of a musician willing to teach him (Anataynus). If he'd rolled a 10+ he might have been pointed toward a true master, or really won over and befriended a local musician.

Anataynus

In short, a character looking for a tutor can either

1. cultivate a relationship with a known master to learn from them, OR
2. spend money (at least 100 dinars) on advertising one's interest in a learning from a tutor, 7-9 is a success in finding someone, 10+ the tutor is a master or the referee will adjudicate something

Retaining a Tutor

Having found someone to teach them, the player-character will need to establish the tutor-learner relationship. Unless they've leveraged some kind of connection or obligation to learn for free, the player-character will have to negotiate a price for tutelage.

This price will vary according to the skill to be learned. It may even be leveraged in favor of certain skillsets--a character who wishes to learn baking might apprentice himself to a baker and earn a (plebeian) wage working and learning in the bakery. But for most skills of interest, the learner will have to pay the tutor.

In the case of Gan ad-Din, he has offered to pay Anataynus 200 dinars per month to learn the oud from him. This is suitable to Anataynus, and so the contract is easily established. But other such contracts might require rounds of negotiation--entirely up to what the character is willing to spend to win the loyalty of the would-be mentor.

Intensive Training

In anything I've learned--strumming guitar, dabbling in languages--it simply is the case that to begin to learn requires an initial extended time of intensive effort, just to get the forms straight. After this initial effort, in order to really learn, one must continue practicing, but continuing practice doesn't require the same intense focus and effort as the initial entrance to learning.

To reflect this, characters who wish to learn a new profession or skill should set aside a period of downtimes to devote to their new hobby, in order just to learn the basics. Inevitably, different skillsets will require different amounts of time--one can learn the basics of baking (probably) in a couple of weeks, whereas even to learn the fundamentals of shipwrighting will probably take many months. These will have to be worked out on an individual basis at first between referee and player-character--and then if/as other players take interest in learning new skills, a body of reference material will become available.

In Gan's case, he set aside four weeks of downtime as intensive training to learn the oud. This makes sense to me as the referee, as I remember when I was learning to finger chords on the guitar. So Gan will have to spend at least four weeks of downtime learning the basics of the oud before he can really begin to play (he's actually already been doing so--you might have heard him strumming idly along in the background over at the Kantor while Istrid was dancing to far livelier tunes up on the dance-stage). But he may have to spend more than those four weeks--for Gan needs to roll at least 4 successes, i.e. 7+ on the dice, and to keep studying until he has achieved those 4 successes--or else forfeit everything and start over from scratch. There are no "remarkable" successes here--you can't cheat practice.

In short,

1. Referee and player negotiate time of intensive training and number of requisite successes
2. Player-character spends that downtime training--and nothing else--until the requisite successes are achieved
3. Stopping at any point during intensive training resets the success "clock" to 0

Practice Makes Proficient

Having learned the basics, one must continue practicing and learning if one is to become proficient. And again, the time required for this will vary from skillset to skillset. But at least this next period of learning will be, in a way, less intensive than the first. Having learned the basic forms, one now practices putting them together into a cohesive whole, or a proficient practice ... and at some point, after enough practicing, one will simply know how to do the job--how to play a piece of music, how to bake various breads well, how to build a piece of furniture, &c., &c.

This takes time, of course, and many iterations. This is essentially the time of apprenticeship, at the end of which one is a journeyman, knowledgeable enough to journey away from the master and practice the skill on one's own.

In order to be considered proficient at a new skill, a character must both spend the minimum time practicing, AND succeed at a requisite number of downtime rolls. During this "apprenticeship", a character must also spend at least one downtime every month pursuing their new skill.

By way of example, when once Gan has spent an additional six months and succeeded in six downtime rolls (7+ and again, no remarkable successes), he will be considered proficient. He could approach this in different ways. On the one hand, he could practice intensively in the first couple months and probably earn all the successes he needs then. After that, he would just have to devote downtime to playing the oud for one week out of each of the succeeding months.

On the other hand, Gan could devote the minimum one week per month on oud-practice. If he didn't succeed every time, he would have to extend the apprenticeship past the minimum six months in order to get the requisite six successes.

At the end of this time--whichever way a character chooses to approach it--having spent their time and earned their successes, a character is considered proficient, and need no longer pay their mentor. They are now able to pursue their craft for themselves.

Continued Development

But there may be those who want to become masters of their craft--exceptional musicians, orators able to bring people to tears with their words, shipwrights whose vessels cut through wind and wave like a sword ...

Such excellence can only be achieved by continuing to hone one's craft through constant practice. At this level, a character would have to work on projects expressing their master--masterworks, as it were!--and so continued development would be a continual negotiation between player and referee, based especially on concrete examples of a character's mastery of their art.

Durham's Ringing Anvil comes to mind, given that Durham is continually producing artefacts as an engineer/architect ... or, continuing with the example of Gan ad-Din, if Gan were to compose an especial song, a ballad or epic, on the oud, that would be an example of his continuing development of his craft and a masterwork. As the scribes hear it, he is already at work on composing songs, though he is not yet even a "journeyman" musician--still, it is good to have ambition!