"Does that mean it's bad to pray to the gods and ask them to help you, if the thing you're asking for help with isn't really that important?"

"The gods should be doing way less in other countries if it means they can't do as much to help with the Worldwound. Like, if the demons get out, nothing else matters."

 "I heard there's a smaller Worldwound in Garund."

  "I heard Sarenrae is busy making sure Rovagug doesn't get out."

   "Okay, sure, those also seem fine, but it's not like those are the only things they're doing."

"Is there anything we can do to give the Good gods more god-coins to spend?"

"I still don't think that's right. When my little sister was born she was really sick, and we thought she was going to die, but we brought her to a shrine to Sarenrae and Sarenrae did a miracle to save her, and I'm glad she's alive but I don't think it would be worth it to a god if it meant she wasn't able to pick as many clerics."

"Every religion I have ever heard of encourages prayer. I think not answering a prayer if it would not be best to do so all things considered is close enough to free that you should not worry about it against the benefit of providing an allied god information and orienting your thoughts around their philosophy."

"I do not claim to know exactly how the gods are making their spending decisions but the fact that countries exist which operate with more slack than Mendev, including in the form of clerics, is not unrelated to the complement of resources brought to bear against the Wound and other pressing priorities."

"My understanding is that the principal way for mortals to do that is to accomplish the gods' work without requiring their expenditures, or while requiring as little as possible. I believe this is also related to the Commune training that Lastwall runs though I am very interested in finding a way to propagate it elsewhere without losing their efficiency gains."

"Again, I don't know exactly what factors Sarenrae may have been weighing there, or whether there was a genuine miracle at all or how expensive it might be, but it seems plausible to me that if prayers for things like that usually didn't work it would be harder to acquire clerics because fewer people would perceive themselves as aligned with Her based only on assertions that, probably, on other planets, more important things are happening, and also at least Rovagug has not been released. Boneyard-dwelling babies are still an outcome worth some resources to avoid."

One of the Caydenites wants to know if this means he should keep his habit of finding something to spend his spells on before dawn even if it's pretty minor (so that he's not wasting what Cayden spent on those spells) or definitely not do that (if, say, that's more expensive for Cayden).

"I think it's wise to have some emergency capacity even if you usually don't use it - in case something happens during the dawn hour, even if you're normally up early to see about using your spells at the very last minute - and I think it is probably accounted for in the budgeting decisions that you will use your full complement of spells a normal fraction of the time such that it's not worth worrying about, but I don't myself have a very consistent policy on this because I don't know. Getting the information would probably be more expensive than refilling the spells."

The cleric nods.

If Blai doesn't specifically divert this group to some other topic, this group seems perfectly content to occupy him indefinitely with questions about the general concept of intervention budget, though a lot of them boil down to very specific pricing questions that Blai probably does not know the answer to.

Intervention budget is interesting and useful! He's content to talk about it unless they get super into the useless weeds of it.