More Powers

[kgauck]

Gary wrote:

> > Anyway, in general, I don`t tend to favor random bloodline generation.

> > It`s too... well, random--which makes little sense in the context of

> > the survival of the fittest after sixty odd generations,



Ryan replied:

> I quite agree. The only reason I`m interested in the random generation

> table is that it`s the only guide we have to the statistical population

> distribution of blood abilities.



Unfortunatly my method for demograpgic analysis produces a significant

variation from the tables. Its possible to save appearances (one of my

favorite phrases from the history of science) by imagining that there are

lost of unattached scions running around with no connection to the land, but

I am not so sure.



My method was genological. I populate the game world with existing nobles

(most of my website consists of this) then I begin to trace their

geneologies, because familial relationships (inter and intra, cordial and

rival) add another layer to politics. My main observation is this, based on

many hundred of individual choices each attempting to maximize the

bloodlines of their offspring, you can with great effort maintain the blood

strength of your first several children, but large families almost always

mean diluting the blood. Further, historcial accidents work against the

continuity of blood strength (to say nothing of derivation). Anything that

will tend to create the conditions which inhibit another family from

desiring an alliance with yours puts you in bloodline jeopardy. In a world

in which your rivals for offices, titles, incomes, privledges, and

opportunity are also the same people you must ally with to advance your

bloodline, there is a tension between cooperation and competition, and

disequalibrium tends much more to produce diluted bloodlines than anything

else. This is of course because the only source for greater blood power is

heroic adventure, while there remains a huge pool of unblooded people, who

might offer advantages to a family (especially if married to younger

children) who will cut the bloodline of the offspring in half in the next

generation. Without commoners and heros, total bloodstrength is a zero sum

game. Circumstances must dictate that there are many more marriages to

commoners (wealthy ones) than there are heros who raise the bloodlines by

great deeds.



Kenneth Gauck

kgauck@mchsi.com

[geeman]

At 12:54 AM 9/7/2003 -0400, Ryan B. Caveney wrote:



> > there have been an average of 5,000 scions per generation

>

>Where does this come from? You`re one of very few people I can think of

>who are as obsessed with accurate large-scale Cerilian demographics as I

>am, so I would very much like to hear the reasoning that went into this

>number. My personal inclination would be to make the number much higher,

>by a factor of ten at least.



It`s not based on anything particularly solid. I just rounded the

"average" of 6-8,000 down to a number that would make for easier

math.... Depending on which numbers one uses the population represented by

province levels comes out to something like 6 or 8 million people. The

number of scions that I find the easiest use is that they represent 1 in

1,000 of the overall population. I rounded the number down to 5,000

because I generally assume that the population has been on the increase in

the past 1,500 years, which would make the total number of scions per

generation lower than the 6-8k number of "modern" Cerilia bringing down the

"average" for the purpose of that little anecdotal bit.



A region with the size and technology of Cerilia should probably have a

population more in the range of 20 to 30 million, but c`est la vie.



>The only reason I`m interested in the random generation

>table is that it`s the only guide we have to the statistical population

>distribution of blood abilities. Of all the scions of Anduiras on the

>continent, how many of them have Battlewise? That`s the kind of question

>which leads me to study the random table. I certainly don`t think they

>actually happen randomly from generation to generation within a family.

>I just want global relative frequency data.



That`s an interesting point. The distribution of the blood abilities is

something that makes those tables part of an overall demographic. It begs

two questions; "which are the more `typical` blood abilities?" and "how

much more likely are they?"



Gary

[ryancaveney]

On Sun, 7 Sep 2003, Kenneth Gauck wrote:



> Unfortunatly my method for demograpgic analysis produces a significant

> variation from the tables.



I like your way better -- I suspect you`ve put a good deal more thought

into your approach than did whoever made up the numbers in the existing

tables. If you have a better guideline than the rulebook, I`m all for it.



> I begin to trace their geneologies, because familial relationships

> (inter and intra, cordial and rival) add another layer to politics.



Very much so! This should definitely be a bigger part of Birthright.

There is a lot of good detail on building and running a strong domain, but

there is far too little information on "building and running" a strong

family to inherit it from you.



> My main observation is this, based on many hundred of individual

> choices each attempting to maximize the bloodlines of their offspring,

> you can with great effort maintain the blood strength of your first

> several children, but large families almost always mean diluting the

> blood.



I don`t see why this should be so. If one parent`s bloodline is much

higher than the other`s, bloodline investiture could make the one most

favored child maintain the bloodline -- but I don`t see why there`s a

difference between two kids and twenty. In fact, I would think it could

mean the reverse of diluting the blood -- an Avan (70) and a Dosiere (64)

would have children with a bloodline of 67. Having lots of these and

marrying them off into every realm in Anuire would substantially increase

everyone else`s bloodlines, and thus the overall average. It would also

turn every realm ruler in the next generation into a scion of Anduiras,

which I`m sure Haelyn`s temples would like. Though it would increase the

power of the other realms and thus diminish Avan`s advantage over them, it

would also provide a much stronger pool of marriage candidates for the

next generation, and would put everyone else in his debt.



> Further, historcial accidents work against the continuity of blood

> strength (to say nothing of derivation).



Do you mean that families die out over time? That random events can cause

blood score loss? Something else? I`d like a bit more detail here.



> Anything that will tend to create the conditions which inhibit another

> family from desiring an alliance with yours puts you in bloodline

> jeopardy.



One of the great questions of Anuirean family politics is how the Avans

and Boeruines maintain bloodlines distinctly higher than anyone else`s

without having to marry each other exclusively! Who else is out there

with bloodlines of 60-70, (Caliedhe Dosiere) or is it all done with

bloodline investiture? If so, loss of the one 70 in a family of 50s

(looking at the other rulers of Anuire, marriage with a 30 seems pretty

likely, with up to mid 40s possible) could set the family back a huge pile

of RP. However, many of the NPCs in the books don`t seem to follow the

rule. The children of Hierl Diem, Daeric Mhoried and Darien Avan are all

listed (2 in RoE, the last in Sword and Crown) as having exactly the same

bloodline score as their fathers. How can this be? Are these families

following pharaonic practice and engaging routinely in incestous marriage?

Or did someone just forget how the rule works?



> Without commoners and heros, total bloodstrength is a zero sum game.



This is not precisely true. Most importantly, you can generate bloodline

strength points out of thin air merely by having lots of children. If

Avan has 20 illegitimate children by commoners, that creates twenty new

Anduiras, great, 35 bloodlines in Avanil`s next generation! With this

kind of thing possible, I actually find it difficult to see why, sixty

generations of philandering noblemen after Deismaar, it isn`t the case

that *most* people in Cerilia are blooded! Yes, blooded scions need to

worry about additional selection pressures (being hunted for bloodtheft

or hunted as potential rebels or pretenders to the throne), but the blood

abilities they gain are often very useful in day-to-day life. I would

suspect that unless there is some aspect of magical biology which

specifically limits scion fertility, the tendency would be for blooded

people to survive better than their unblooded neighbors, and thus

gradually increase as a proportion of the population over time.



To be sure, in a closed system of scions interacting only by marriage, no

one will ever end up higher than the initial high score or lower than the

initial low one (indeed, each generation must remain within the bounds set

by the previous one; this is why having a zero in the mix would indeed

seem likely to drag everything down), but depending on which families have

more children, and whether some families are unable to find marriage

partners for their children, the average blood score of the group can tend

to any point within the initial range. As an illustration, extend the

"everyone marries an Avan" example above. The top score drops from 70 to

67 (barring incest, which by this calculation does seem to make good sense

for the most powerful Cerilian families; bloodline investiture helps a

little -- it`s slow, but can actually draw everyone up to the maximum over

time), but the bottom one rises from 17 to 43, or more if the lowest few

families cannot find mates and thus die off. The average bloodline score

of the regents would rise from 39 to 53. The average bloodline score of

all blooded scions in the group would depend on exactly which families had

more children than others; this could be substantially different from the

regent average in either direction. Also, note that the spread is so

large that commoners may not be such a problem: 9 of Anuire`s 22 regents

of human realms have lower bloodlines than would the child of Avan and a

commoner.



> Circumstances must dictate that there are many more marriages to

> commoners (wealthy ones) than there are heros who raise the bloodlines

> by great deeds.



Agreed. But as this continues to happen over a long enough time, it is

distinctly possible (I think quite likely) that you also end up with the

middle class composed mostly of people with (minor) bloodlines themselves.



Also, I think the single most interesting sentence in the rulebook (in

terms of unrealized implications) is this one, from page 29:



Similarly, if a blooded mother becomes the Great High Queen

after her daughter`s birth, the mother`s increase in bloodline

does not increase the daughter`s strength.



Note the word "increase". It seems to treat such an upward change of

status as directly causing a significant positive change to the bloodline.

As a source of possible rules implementations of this, I like to look at

the rules for Regency losses on page 48. If failure to respond to events

causes a bloodline loss, why should gaining a resounding success in

dealing with one not be worth a few extra bonus bloodline points? More

mechanically, since every holding lost loses you a blood point and every

province lost loses you 1d3 (I prefer a flat 3), why should the side

gaining those provinces by investiture not gain 1 to 3 bloodline points

for each new holding or province?



The one part of this it`s a bit unclear on how to manage is children:

should the same family continue to have its bloodline score go up upon

every investiture of a child with same the holdings its parent had at its

birth? I tend to say no, for the same reason that I prefer the Gorgon not

to be able to gain thousands of bloodline strength points just by sitting

at home and harvesting his own children with his tighmaevril weapons.

The idea here is that to increase one`s patrimony (the highest goal of any

medieval nobleman) is the clearest way to demonstrate one`s divine right

to rule, and as such should be reflected in the power of one`s blood tie

to the land.





Ryan Caveney

[kgauck]

----- Original Message -----

From: "Ryan B. Caveney" <ryanb@CYBERCOM.NET>

Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2003 2:01 PM





I wrote:

> > My main observation is this, based on many hundred of individual

> > choices each attempting to maximize the bloodlines of their offspring,

> > you can with great effort maintain the blood strength of your first

> > several children, but large families almost always mean diluting the

> > blood.



Ryan replied:

> I don`t see why this should be so. If one parent`s bloodline is much

> higher than the other`s, bloodline investiture could make the one most

> favored child maintain the bloodline



I don`t consider investiture, because I am only looking at bloodline by

decent. Investiture only effects one person, not the family, and it isn`t

neccesarily applied to the family. Land`s Choice is a whole other ball of

wax that might have any effect you want it to, so I don`t consider it. If

you want the land to throw up six dozen new Great bloodlines, who is to say

no?



> -- but I don`t see why there`s a difference between two kids and

> twenty. In fact, I would think it could mean the reverse of diluting

> the blood -- an Avan (70) and a Dosiere (64) would have children

> with a bloodline of 67. Having lots of these and marrying them off

> into every realm in Anuire would substantially increase

> everyone else`s bloodlines, and thus the overall average.



It doesn`t change the average, its zero sum. Twenty scions of Avan started

with twenty (70) bloolines. They marry a random selection of other blooded

nobles.

You could call this the convection of bloodline strength. The law of

conservation still applies, no new bloodstrength was created, it just moved

around. From the point of view of the lucky families marrying Avans this is

a good thing, from the point of view of the Avan`s its dilution. Its why I

describe all inter-blooded marriage as zero-sum.



> It would also turn every realm ruler in the next generation into a scion

of

> Anduiras, which I`m sure Haelyn`s temples would like.



I think if you use the two derivation system, the old bloodlines will begin

to re-assert themselves in subsequent generations. But this is why I didn`t

address derivation, only strength.



> > Further, historcial accidents work against the continuity of blood

> > strength (to say nothing of derivation).

>

> Do you mean that families die out over time? That random events can cause

> blood score loss? Something else? I`d like a bit more detail here.



Take a relatively small pool of scions, a far number of them can`t find

marriagable partners in the group. Some of these scions can be matched to

other pools (assuming that one pool`s surplus of a male can be matched to

another pool`s surplus of a female). This is why sometimes in my

geneologies I just throw in someone from far, far away. It strains

credibility to assume that all surpluses can be matched that way, so the

alternative is marrying commoners. Not the same as perpetuating the

bloodline, as I will show later.



Yes, families can die out. Branches die out all the time, when an

individual dies before having children. One of the things I do when

creating geneologies is allow for some shift of family leadership. I

generate the numbers of offspring and gender by die. A family can have few

children, too many of those children can die an early death, go childless,

be unable to marry, or a family can have all girls.



There are two different issues here regarding the loss of families. One is

loss of blood potency, and the other is that the family name becomes an

artifact, though its blood lives on. I am really only interested here in

the loss of blood potency through early death, failure to marry, marrying a

commoner, or many generations of few children.



> One of the great questions of Anuirean family politics is how the Avans

> and Boeruines maintain bloodlines distinctly higher than anyone else`s

> without having to marry each other exclusively! Who else is out there

> with bloodlines of 60-70, (Caliedhe Dosiere) or is it all done with

> bloodline investiture?



We discussed this in November of 1998, and July 2001. We were scheduled to

bring this topic up again in March of 2003, what took you so long?



> The children of Hierl Diem, Daeric Mhoried and Darien Avan are all

> listed (2 in RoE, the last in Sword and Crown) as having exactly the same

> bloodline score as their fathers. How can this be? Are these families

> following pharaonic practice and engaging routinely in incestous marriage?

> Or did someone just forget how the rule works?



I don`t stick absolutly too closely to this. The people who made the books

took almost account of family into their system and so families are more

Ptomkin constructs than they are functioning dynasties. When I encounter

this, I tend to figure I must find a wife for those rulers with as close a

bloodscore as possible, and that either there is a slight difference between

the character and their listing, or they aquired some bloodscore on their

own in heroic fashion.



> > Without commoners and heros, total bloodstrength is a zero sum game.

>

> This is not precisely true. Most importantly, you can generate bloodline

> strength points out of thin air merely by having lots of children. If

> Avan has 20 illegitimate children by commoners, that creates twenty new

> Anduiras, great, 35 bloodlines in Avanil`s next generation!



But I said "without commoners". This example uses commoners. Ultimately

examples like this fit into the same catagory as Land`s Choice. A DM

decides how much of this goes on.



> I would suspect that unless there is some aspect of magical biology

> which specifically limits scion fertility, the tendency would be for

> blooded people to survive better than their unblooded neighbors,

> and thus gradually increase as a proportion of the population over time.



The reason I take the reverse view is that low bloodlines (the low end of

tainted) are very vulnerable to bloodstrength loss. Given a population of

blacksmiths who are walking around with 4 bloodlines, how many step up to

respond to dangers threatening their community? If they shirk, that`s one

less point of blood strength. I suspect most shirk. They are blacksmiths,

not champions.



> To be sure, in a closed system of scions interacting only by marriage, no

> one will ever end up higher than the initial high score or lower than the

> initial low one, but depending on which families have more children, and

> whether some families are unable to find marriage partners for their

> children, the average blood score of the group can tend to any point

> within the initial range.



Though given a random process of selection for number of children, gender,

and age at death, given a sufficiently large population, and and multiple

generations, the tendency will be to the average.



> Agreed. But as this continues to happen over a long enough time, it is

> distinctly possible (I think quite likely) that you also end up with the

> middle class composed mostly of people with (minor) bloodlines themselves.



Tainted more than minor, and most of those I think would be lost by the

absence of action in the interest of the community.



> As a source of possible rules implementations of this, I like to look at

> the rules for Regency losses on page 48. If failure to respond to events

> causes a bloodline loss, why should gaining a resounding success in

> dealing with one not be worth a few extra bonus bloodline points? More

> mechanically, since every holding lost loses you a blood point and every

> province lost loses you 1d3 (I prefer a flat 3), why should the side

> gaining those provinces by investiture not gain 1 to 3 bloodline points

> for each new holding or province?



Agreed. I`ve long taken that possition. I also apply it to all scions

(though the stakes are not provicnes).



Kenneth Gauck

kgauck@mchsi.com

[ryancaveney]

On Sun, 7 Sep 2003, Gary wrote:



> Depending on which numbers one uses the population represented by

> province levels comes out to something like 6 or 8 million people.



That is astonishingly low. Cerilia is about a million square miles: even

having it be 60 to 80 million people total is rather low for medieval tech!



According to the system of province population I personally prefer (i.e.,

*max* level, not current level, determines the number), I make Anuire

alone about 16 million (including elves, dwarves and goblins) in 270,000

square miles for a reasonable density of 94.5 per square mile, still not

up to the France analog normally made for Anuire.



> The number of scions that I find the easiest use is that they

> represent 1 in 1,000 of the overall population.



Ah, the PS Muden figure. Why do you prefer that to the rulebook`s 1 in 100?



Putting this together with the population figures I like makes my total

scion population about a hundred times yours. Since the rulebook suggests

your population figure with my scion fraction, the number it would predict

is 10 times yours and 1/10th mine. Mind you, I`ve not worked out the

precise implications of any of these overall numbers. Shall we? =)



> I rounded the number down to 5,000 because I generally assume that the

> population has been on the increase in the past 1,500 years, which

> would make the total number of scions per generation lower than the

> 6-8k number of "modern" Cerilia bringing down the "average" for the

> purpose of that little anecdotal bit.



OK, so you`re assuming no change in the blooded fraction over the

years. Certainly the simplest, though I could see it a variety of ways.

In my model, with nearly a million blooded scions in Cerilia by 1500 HC,

and probably no more than a few thousand survivors of Deismaar, I think in

my Cerilia the fraction who are blooded has likely increased over time.



> A region with the size and technology of Cerilia should probably have a

> population more in the range of 20 to 30 million, but c`est la vie.



I`d put a pretty firm lower limit of 40 million, and a total of over 100

million would not be at all unreasonable.



> That`s an interesting point. The distribution of the blood abilities

> is something that makes those tables part of an overall demographic.

> It begs two questions; "which are the more `typical` blood abilities?"

> and "how much more likely are they?"



Well, I think "beg" is a little strong. True, going from random

generation tables to overall population distribution is an assumption, but

nonetheless taking that table at face value is the only possibility of a

canon answer to those two questions, oh "published word geek". ;)



Has anyone got a better idea?





Ryan Caveney

[ConjurerDragon]

Ryan B. Caveney schrieb:



>On Sun, 7 Sep 2003, Kenneth Gauck wrote:

>

...



>and Boeruines maintain bloodlines distinctly higher than anyone else`s

>without having to marry each other exclusively! Who else is out there

>with bloodlines of 60-70, (Caliedhe Dosiere) or is it all done with

>bloodline investiture? If so, loss of the one 70 in a family of 50s

>(looking at the other rulers of Anuire, marriage with a 30 seems pretty

>likely, with up to mid 40s possible) could set the family back a huge pile

>of RP. However, many of the NPCs in the books don`t seem to follow the

>rule. The children of Hierl Diem, Daeric Mhoried and Darien Avan are all

>listed (2 in RoE, the last in Sword and Crown) as having exactly the same

>bloodline score as their fathers. How can this be? Are these families

>following pharaonic practice and engaging routinely in incestous marriage?

>Or did someone just forget how the rule works?

>

>

If we assume that the listed childrens scores are correct, then we have

several ways how it could have worked.

1) The mother was much higher in bloodline score than the father making

the average of the child as high as the father.

2) The child was the child which got the full score of the mother by

bloodline investiture - perhaps it´s a custom that one of the parents

sometimes gives up his bloodline to one of the childs? The mothers of

the children are nowwhere listed in the books, right?

3) The child started with the average score and did some really heroic

things raising the score - or commited bloodtheft like mad. ;-)

bye

Michael

[ryancaveney]

On Sun, 7 Sep 2003, Kenneth Gauck wrote:



> I don`t consider investiture, because I am only looking at bloodline

> by decent. Investiture only effects one person, not the family, and

> it isn`t neccesarily applied to the family.



Yes, I agree. I was just having trouble figuring out any other way for

bloodlines of the children within a family to get weaker as their number

grew. I have belately realized that what you actually mean is that too

large a family in one generation means not that its immediate members have

lowered bloodline scores, but rather that the *next* generation does: the

more kids you have, the harder it is to get well-blooded mates for them,

and thus the lower your *grandchildren*`s average bloodline score. Now

that I perceive this argument, I agree it is rather compelling. Still,

see below for how it could help, instead.



> It doesn`t change the average, its zero sum. Twenty scions of Avan

> started with twenty (70) bloolines. They marry a random selection of

> other blooded nobles.



Ah, but this is the key. If families are of varying size, the average of

the next generation can be adjusted. If the marriage selection is indeed

random, then Avan`s best plan for finding good mates is to encourage the

Mhor to have many more children than Rogr Aglondier: this is because the

overall average depends not only on each family`s score, but also on the

number of people in each family. The average bloodline score of all

blooded scions would change even without marriage just by varying the

number of children born to each family: if Boeruine has lots of children,

that will increase the average bloodline of the members of the ruling

families of Anuire. If Arron Vaumel has lots of children, that will

decrease it.



> You could call this the convection of bloodline strength. The law of

> conservation still applies, no new bloodstrength was created, it just

> moved around.



Except that this isn`t precisely true. In a closed system of bloodlines,

depending on which families are more fertile and who marries whom, it is

possible to arrange things so that after a finite number of generations

(15 should suffice for Anuire), every noble has exactly the same blood

strength, which can be any number between the lowest and the highest of

the starting range of bloodline scores! If all families are equally

fertile and marry completely randomly, then after some number of

generations everyone will have exactly the original average bloodline

score. Given random marriage but unequal fertility, the degree to which

fertility is correlated with bloodline score will determine how far and in

what direction the final average is different from the initial average.

If marriage is not random, almost anything can happen.



> From the point of view of the lucky families marrying Avans this is a

> good thing, from the point of view of the Avan`s its dilution. Its

> why I describe all inter-blooded marriage as zero-sum.



The degree of dilution depends on the pool of available partners. In the

long view, since your great-grandchildren will be marrying each other,

putting more Avans into the pool in this generation significantly improves

the marriage prospects of later generations further down the road. I

don`t know if any of the regents of Cerilia actually think this way, but

it is a plan well supported by the mathematics of bloodlines.



> I think if you use the two derivation system, the old bloodlines will

> begin to re-assert themselves in subsequent generations. But this is

> why I didn`t address derivation, only strength.



Two derivation system? Certainly, it would be a shame for all regents to

be so homogenized. That said, Anduiras and Brenna together already

account for 87% of the human realm rulers in Anuire.



> I generate the numbers of offspring and gender by die.



Would you share your table(s)?



> I am really only interested here in the loss of blood potency through

> early death, failure to marry, marrying a commoner, or many

> generations of few children.



I thought you said it was too many children which imperiled blood potency.



> We discussed this in November of 1998, and July 2001. We were scheduled

> to bring this topic up again in March of 2003, what took you so long?



*grin* But July `01 - Nov `98 is 2 years 8 months, which means the next

scheduled discussion is not until 2 years 8 months after July `01, which

is March 2004, yes? =) Mark your calendars for November 2006. ;)



> I don`t stick absolutly too closely to this. The people who made the

> books took almost account of family into their system and so families

> are more Ptomkin constructs than they are functioning dynasties.



That`s "took almost no account", yes? Sadly, I must agree.



> When I encounter this, I tend to figure I must find a wife for those

> rulers with as close a bloodscore as possible, and that either there

> is a slight difference between the character and their listing, or

> they aquired some bloodscore on their own in heroic fashion.



One question is, what do you figure the options are like for marrying

families who are blooded but are not listed in the books as regents?

What is the bloodline distribution of lower-level provincial nobles (for

example, the people who would be jarls in Anuire if they used the Rjurik

system, or even families which have sunk from realm rulership in the past

to be mere knights of a few manors) in your view? If there are really

thousands of blooded families in Anuire instead of just a few score, then

finding a mate of the same bloodline score seems more likely.



> > This is not precisely true. Most importantly, you can generate bloodline

> > strength points out of thin air merely by having lots of children. If

> > Avan has 20 illegitimate children by commoners, that creates twenty new

> > Anduiras, great, 35 bloodlines in Avanil`s next generation!

>

> But I said "without commoners". This example uses commoners.

> Ultimately examples like this fit into the same catagory as Land`s

> Choice. A DM decides how much of this goes on.



Alright, but it`s still true that the average blood score of the next

generation of all Anuirean blooded folks is strongly affected by how many

of them have Avan or Boeruine for a parent as opposed to Aglondier or

Roesone, even without any information about the blood score of the other

parent. Differential fertility can cause major shifts in averages.



> The reason I take the reverse view is that low bloodlines (the low end

> of tainted) are very vulnerable to bloodstrength loss. Given a

> population of blacksmiths who are walking around with 4 bloodlines,

> how many step up to respond to dangers threatening their community?

> If they shirk, that`s one less point of blood strength. I suspect

> most shirk. They are blacksmiths, not champions.



Aha! I had not thought of this, but it makes a great deal of sense.

This finally satisfies me as to why everyone is not blooded. Thank you!



> Though given a random process of selection for number of children,

> gender, and age at death, given a sufficiently large population, and

> and multiple generations, the tendency will be to the average.



Yes, if everything is completely random. However, I don`t think it is.

The higher the bloodline, the more money and power the family is likely to

have, and thus the more children it can afford to support and the more

likely those children will be healthy enough to breed themselves. Also,

the more powerful the family, the more likely they will be able to find

mates of good quality. Therefore I think there will be a natural upward

drift within the existing nobility which can compensate for the gradual

introduction of moderate numbers of commoners and the loss of tainted lines.



> Tainted more than minor, and most of those I think would be lost by

> the absence of action in the interest of the community.



Applying this to non-regents is certainly a very interesting proposition!





Ryan Caveney

[kgauck]

----- Original Message -----

From: "Ryan B. Caveney" <ryanb@CYBERCOM.NET>

Sent: Monday, September 08, 2003 10:46 AM





> Except that this isn`t precisely true. Given random marriage but

> unequal fertility, the degree to which fertility is correlated with

> bloodline score will determine how far and in what direction the

> final average is different from the initial average.



My own assumption of conservation obscured this point. You are correct:

differential fertility rates would skew the trend line in favor of the more

fertile. I just see no reason why there would be differentail fertility

rates for either high or low bloodlines (or any other group with the

possible exception of blooded as compared to unblooded, but I doubt that

too).



> If marriage is not random, almost anything can happen.



Marriage isn`t random, but I think the same self interest governs all the

parties. Everyone want to perpetuate their bloodline, extend the influence

of their dynasty, and climb the ladder of bloodline, title, and/or wealth.

But all the nobles (blooded indivdiuals) have access to sufficient networks

to marry at their level if such marriages are available.



> Two derivation system?



Keeping track of the dominant and secondary blood score, rather just the

leading score.



> Would you share your table(s)?



I use two sets. One for living generations, which are more complex, and one

for past generations, in which I fold, say number of children and chance of

death, determining only surviving children. Gender is a high-low die roll.

Surviving children is 2d6. Then I fill in the gaps to make the geneologies

look more like geneologies. I look at real ones as idea pools for things to

do.



In living generations, gender is still high-low. Their is a 40% chance for

some number of births every 5 years. Success on this roll guarantees one

birth, and leads to a (70-age) percent changce of a subsequent birth, and a

(50-age) percent chance for all subsequent births up to a maximum of four

births every five years. The chance for a child surviving to age 10 is 75%,

and the survival rate is 90% for each decade until I get to their present

age (age if alive today).



> I thought you said it was too many children which imperiled blood potency.



Too many children mean you may find some of your children unmarriagable.

Too few children means that even one early death is a serious blow.



> *grin* But July `01 - Nov `98 is 2 years 8 months, which means the next

> scheduled discussion is not until 2 years 8 months after July `01, which

> is March 2004, yes? =) Mark your calendars for November 2006. ;)



You got the joke and corrected my math. Well done.



> One question is, what do you figure the options are like for marrying

> families who are blooded but are not listed in the books as regents?

> What is the bloodline distribution of lower-level provincial nobles (for

> example, the people who would be jarls in Anuire if they used the Rjurik

> system, or even families which have sunk from realm rulership in the past

> to be mere knights of a few manors) in your view? If there are really

> thousands of blooded families in Anuire instead of just a few score, then

> finding a mate of the same bloodline score seems more likely.



I figure there are four blooded, nuclear families per province level, plus

the count/earl/graf of the province, plus any rulers who control

multi-province realms. I will end up adding a few blooded characters over

the course of a campaign.



I figure that rulers at the count/earl/graf are in the high teens or

twenties in blood strength, and they have minor bloodlines. Exceptions need

some explanation. At the lord level (there are as many lords as their are

province levels, and you can find abbots or guilders who also are at this

level in their organizations) bloodlines are tainted or minor and are in the

low teens or single digits. There are more exceptions at this level as

counts might well fill a vacancy among the lords (or if a province is ruled

up, fill a new possition) with a second son.



Kenneth Gauck

kgauck@mchsi.com