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Old 08-15-2018, 11:58 AM   #11
muduri
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
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Default Re: social classes at TL1

First off, congratulations to the nixie on being ready for courting! I'm with Philip K. Dick on believing that more fantasy / SF time should be spent on the messes men and women (and anyone else pursuing romantic activity) get into over each other.

Seems like some interesting discussion over the societal model. To AlexanderHowl's first point, the distribution (10% Status -2, 80% -1, 9% 0, 1% 1+) sounds about right to me for all TL1 - and even on to TL3 or so? I think our historical go-tos for TL1 states (to distinguish from TL2 classical societies also mentioned) generally have pretty concentrated power at the top, partly because of the resources necessary for bronze armor and chariots, states typically grew around hydraulic networks, and pre-coinage it was mostly prestige objects being traded palace-to-palace, is that fair?

Of course, doesn't seem like any of these social rules are inevitable for a technologically TL1 society. For nixies where bronze rusts and horses aren't ridden, you don't need irrigation, and maybe coinage has been invented early, very cool to have a thriving Regency- or Roman Republic-style middle and upper-middle class. I think exceptions to the various rules for Earth too - hmm, TL1 Halstatt A/B maybe?

Finally, it occurs to me that of course this distribution is really only a reshuffling of the 10% Status 0+ - "are there 0.9% Status 1 merchants serving the populace or only 0.3% catering to the palace?" "Is the focus on a jostling court of 0.1% Status 2-3 or are these all fawning representatives of the semi-divine ruler and his 0.001% family at status 4?" Very curious about AlexanderHowl's and Polydamas' comments on particularities of population distribution from Knossos to Memphis to Old Babylon (and to Mohenjo-Daro and Anyang), but depending on what status your nixie is marrying into these may be totally critical distinctions or totally irrelevant, ha.
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Old 08-15-2018, 12:18 PM   #12
The Colonel
 
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Default Re: social classes at TL1

Are there any records of the Roman census left? We know they had a fairly well defined social structure for a big chunk of their citizenry, and if someone has details of how many people were in each of the five classes that would seem very useful...
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Old 08-15-2018, 01:21 PM   #13
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Default Re: social classes at TL1

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Originally Posted by muduri View Post
Seems like some interesting discussion over the societal model. To AlexanderHowl's first point, the distribution (10% Status -2, 80% -1, 9% 0, 1% 1+) sounds about right to me for all TL1 - and even on to TL3 or so? I think our historical go-tos for TL1 states (to distinguish from TL2 classical societies also mentioned) generally have pretty concentrated power at the top, partly because of the resources necessary for bronze armor and chariots, states typically grew around hydraulic networks, and pre-coinage it was mostly prestige objects being traded palace-to-palace, is that fair?
I was wondering about that 80% Status -1. Is that for a TL1 society as a whole? My impression was that most TL1 societies were overwhelmingly rural, perhaps around 90%, and that rural populations tended to center at Status -1. But city populations may have a quite different distribution; "lives in a city" as such conveys certain social advantages, and it also tends to raise your cost of living, largely because of the expense of food transport. A Status -1 farmer can afford to feed his whole family (so long as the crops don't fail!), but a Status -1 urban laborer probably can't afford a wife.

Using AlexanderHowl's ratios, I get a mean wealth of 0.2 x 0.1 + 0.5 x 0.8 + 1.0 x 0.09 + 2.0 x 0.009 + 5.0 x 0.001, ignoring the extreme heights of the distribution for simplicity. That comes to 0.02 + 0.4 + 0.09 + 0.018 + 0.005 = 0.533, which puts the average right at Struggling.

Now, I'm going to say that I wonder if the average wealth in any society ought to be at Average, 1.0. If you have large numbers down at Struggling, 0.5, then you probably ought to have enough at very high levels so that the average balances out. Say for example you have a village of 50 peasant families, each providing output of 1; if half that output goes to them, putting them at 0.5 each, the other half goes to the village landlord, putting them at 25.0, or just above Very Wealthy. You might well have a bimodal distribution, with a huge bump of cultivators, a modest bump of elite, and then a scattering of artisans and merchants in between, who mainly sell to the elite, of course. (You could argue that the output ought to be 0.5 each, I suppose, but that doesn't look right to me; Average wealth ought to be normalized to the TL, so whatever the output is, that ought to be scored as 1.0, and you just have 1.0 at TL1 be a lot smaller than 1.0 at TL5, as in fact it is in GURPS.)

That's not taking into account the "racial" peculiarities of nixies, by the way; it's just thinking about the math.

Nixies have several factors that alter the economics of social class and rural/urban differences. They seldom live far from bodies of water, so they have transport by boat or raft, which as about one-fifth as costly as transport by bearer or oxcart. The fertility of their soil is renewed by alluvial deposits, not to the same extent (at Portus Argenti) as for the cities of Egypt, but enough to make farming more productive. So on one hand they can afford modestly larger urban populations, and on the other their rural populations are a little more "urbane" than we normally imagine, as a result of occasional travel to the city and of more of them being in the inner ring of the von Thünen "isolated city" model.

So as a result of all that, they're a bit more "modern" than other cultures of Tela. (At least, that's true of the nixies of the Urbes Septemplex; Dumetum Furtum and Regio Oryzae have different patterns.) They serve as the "modern people" group of the setting, like hobbits in Middle-Earth, though they're not nearly as modernized as the Shire!
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Old 08-15-2018, 02:03 PM   #14
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Default Re: social classes at TL1

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Originally Posted by muduri View Post
Very curious about AlexanderHowl's and Polydamas' comments on particularities of population distribution from Knossos to Memphis to Old Babylon (and to Mohenjo-Daro and Anyang), but depending on what status your nixie is marrying into these may be totally critical distinctions or totally irrelevant, ha.
As for my campaign, before I did any of this analysis or historical inquiry, we had agreed that Hanno (a Phoenician name, please note!) is Wealthy but has Status 1; he's the son of the second wife of an interregional merchant, so he didn't inherit his father's full Status, but he's entrepreneurial and has raised his own Wealth above what he inherited through a journey to Regio Oryzae. He has three prospects:

Belessunu is Very Wealthy but Status 2, being something of a bohemian and thus not maintaining her family's full Status

Iltani is Status 2 but only Comfortable, as her father has not been able to make a go of the business he inherited from her grandfather, and the family fortunes are declinging ("shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations")

Ettu is Status 0 and Average, but upwardly mobile—she was born into a Status -1 family, took a domestic service job with a scribe, and when he discovered that she had learned to read, he taught her more, enabling her to enter the guild, where she's gradually working her way upward
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Old 08-15-2018, 02:42 PM   #15
AlexanderHowl
 
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Default Re: social classes at TL1

In pre-modern societies, the vast majority of the population are Serfs (or the local equivalent), basically agricultural workers, who earn a Struggling Income and therefore support Status -1. When it comes to surplus production, agriculture housholds at TL1 support 1.25 households (actually comparable to hunter-gatherers or pastoralists at TL1), they just take up much less land, so they can support a denser population. If climate, location, or magic allows for greater agricultural productivity (for example, Egypt averaged around 25% greater productivity because of the flooding of the Nile), then adjust as needed.
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Old 08-15-2018, 02:47 PM   #16
jason taylor
 
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Default Re: social classes at TL1

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
I was wondering about that 80% Status -1. Is that for a TL1 society as a whole? My impression was that most TL1 societies were overwhelmingly rural, perhaps around 90%, and that rural populations tended to center at Status -1. But city populations may have a quite different distribution; "lives in a city" as such conveys certain social advantages, and it also tends to raise your cost of living, largely because of the expense of food transport. A Status -1 farmer can afford to feed his whole family (so long as the crops don't fail!), but a Status -1 urban laborer probably can't afford a wife.

Using AlexanderHowl's ratios, I get a mean wealth of 0.2 x 0.1 + 0.5 x 0.8 + 1.0 x 0.09 + 2.0 x 0.009 + 5.0 x 0.001, ignoring the extreme heights of the distribution for simplicity. That comes to 0.02 + 0.4 + 0.09 + 0.018 + 0.005 = 0.533, which puts the average right at Struggling.

Now, I'm going to say that I wonder if the average wealth in any society ought to be at Average, 1.0. If you have large numbers down at Struggling, 0.5, then you probably ought to have enough at very high levels so that the average balances out. Say for example you have a village of 50 peasant families, each providing output of 1; if half that output goes to them, putting them at 0.5 each, the other half goes to the village landlord, putting them at 25.0, or just above Very Wealthy. You might well have a bimodal distribution, with a huge bump of cultivators, a modest bump of elite, and then a scattering of artisans and merchants in between, who mainly sell to the elite, of course. (You could argue that the output ought to be 0.5 each, I suppose, but that doesn't look right to me; Average wealth ought to be normalized to the TL, so whatever the output is, that ought to be scored as 1.0, and you just have 1.0 at TL1 be a lot smaller than 1.0 at TL5, as in fact it is in GURPS.)

That's not taking into account the "racial" peculiarities of nixies, by the way; it's just thinking about the math.

Nixies have several factors that alter the economics of social class and rural/urban differences. They seldom live far from bodies of water, so they have transport by boat or raft, which as about one-fifth as costly as transport by bearer or oxcart. The fertility of their soil is renewed by alluvial deposits, not to the same extent (at Portus Argenti) as for the cities of Egypt, but enough to make farming more productive. So on one hand they can afford modestly larger urban populations, and on the other their rural populations are a little more "urbane" than we normally imagine, as a result of occasional travel to the city and of more of them being in the inner ring of the von Thünen "isolated city" model.

So as a result of all that, they're a bit more "modern" than other cultures of Tela. (At least, that's true of the nixies of the Urbes Septemplex; Dumetum Furtum and Regio Oryzae have different patterns.) They serve as the "modern people" group of the setting, like hobbits in Middle-Earth, though they're not nearly as modernized as the Shire!
Half their income goes in rent? Well I believe it but it makes me wonder if ANYONE, remembered to shear the sheep instead of slaughtering them?
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Old 08-15-2018, 03:16 PM   #17
whswhs
 
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Half their income goes in rent? Well I believe it but it makes me wonder if ANYONE, remembered to shear the sheep instead of slaughtering them?
I remember reading a set of figures for the middle ages (the British Isles, I think): half for the land, two-thirds if the landlord rented you the plow, three-fourths if he also rented you the oxen.

There's a sort of theorem in economic anthropology: free land, free labor, rental payments for farms, choose two. I think the nixies in Urbes Septemplex have free labor and rental payments. The land isn't free, in the sense that, first, they're used to working highly fertile land that doesn't need heavy duty plowing, and reluctant to take on the hard labor of clearing less fertile land away from the rivers and streams; second, good land has a juridicial as well as a physical existence, and you have to pay fees to the deed registry and to whoever evicts trespassers (I haven't worked out how nixie law enforcement works).
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Old 08-15-2018, 03:49 PM   #18
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Default Re: social classes at TL1

Unless there is significant trade to increase wealth levels, I don't believe that the agricultural output at TL1 was that much different from TL2. Same for fishing, hunting, etc. That means that the underpinnings of society aren't going to change that much.

Last edited by Pursuivant; 08-15-2018 at 03:55 PM.
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Old 08-15-2018, 04:19 PM   #19
whswhs
 
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Unless there is significant trade to increase wealth levels, I don't believe that the agricultural output at TL1 was that much different from TL2. Same for fishing, hunting, etc. That means that the underpinnings of society aren't going to change that much.
Up to TL5, you have what Deepak Lal (IIRC) called "Smithian growth," where wealth increases as more land is cultivated; only after that do you get "Promethean growth." So yes. But I'm also concerned with differences in productivity between habitats at the same TL.
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Old 08-15-2018, 05:13 PM   #20
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Default Re: social classes at TL1

Anyways, after Deir el Medina and Athens and the early Chinese censi we really do not have much before the late middle ages. Societies only become able to track these things precisely in the 19th century with income taxes and well-staffed, professional censi (when one of the Gracchi offered public land to citizens, the next census roll was 25% bigger from people who had been avoiding registration and conscription finding a census taker ... today pretty much everywhere not in the middle of a civil war has a census accurate within 1%).
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