Trying to catch up....
At 4:56 PM +1000 4/9/02, John Hughes wrote:
>BAREFOOT AND VERY PREGNANT...
>
>Nick's Age Distribution Table is a powerful and very effective tool that's
>made our job much easier, but the present version, in adapting the age
>pyramid to TR's statement that a clan is 50% children, produces some odd
>effects, as I discovered in generating the clan population.
This has been bugging me for quite a while. Children take up way to many "character slots" for their dramatic potential in my opinion.
>I have been discussing this privately with Nick, and we have a few options.
>One is to reduce the 50% children figure, which is historically bizarre.
>Nick notes that the figure for Rome in Empire was only 31.7%.
>
>>TR posits C(x) = 50.0% for ages 0+1+5+10 (i.e. under-15's = 50% of
>>population).
>
> >The Roman model has C(x) = 31.7%
I like this solution.
>Another promising option is to differentiate the male and female birth
>mortality rates so there are a few more women of childbearing age at the
>expense of those live-hard, die-young, adventuring males. (Not too much
>though, for there is little evidence of Heortling polygyny, which would
>arise as an adaptation if there were significantly fewer men).
I don't like this much. There should be more women than men, for these reasons, but it's pretty easy to let it get out of hand. A stead with 80 people, 40 of them children, 17 (or so) of them adult males is one thing, but if we knock it down to, say, 12 adult males, after we remove a couple for elders, we are left with almost no adult males to fill all those fyrd-going, Orlanth worshipping, cattle-punching roles....
>What are the pressure points for male mortality? - early childhood,
>initiation, the wandering and raiding years, and fyrd duty. And for
>emales? - early childhood and childbearing, though the later less deadly
>than historic reality.
>
>A third option, less appealing for me, would be to reduce the age of
>senescence to artificially inflate the children percentage, but this means
>less elders.
Don't like this, either. Frankly, I don't see much need for a 50% children value. Let's reduce the number, even if it contradicts TR (which I usually try to avoid, but if it's going to reduce the number of adult males to near 1/8 of the population...).
Peter Larsen
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