Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3

[hal]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

In Harn, as in much of medieval Europe, most fields are divided into selions, so it should be possible to align the fertile strips along hex rows, I'd think.

The nice thing about knowing what selions are and how and why of the plowing means that if you have this as an established "Fact" of reality, mageborn who want to cast Bless Plant will need to approach the problem as presented, and solve it.

If a field is essentially a long rectangle of a given width, and a given length, inscribing the rectangle within a single circle means you will have "wasted" effects for those areas outside the rectangle right?

But wait! Farmers who have lived with mages for a while will learn to accommodate the needs of the mages too. Instead, they may opt for shorter furrow lengths and go for wider fields (more square like than rectangular like).

Now for the curveball that I have been waiting to present to those who are busy thinking about "Ceremonial spell casting".

Harn Manor, unlike other manorial economics simulations, provides for a pool of labor that is owed to the Lord himself based upon serf contracts. This labor is usually spent on the Lord's fields, where the lord directly benefits from its bounty.

For every 1 man hour spent in rituals, the Lord or the General village loses that 1 man hour from the labor pool. 100 people participating in a 1 hour ritual spell casting, will lose 100 man hours of labor from the labor pool. Assuming 10 hour days during the summer, that's 10 man days of labor lost just for ONE spell casting!

TANSTAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As Free Lunch

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by hal

If ANYONE has suggestions about where I should be drawing the limits percentage wise of a given IQ being a given percentage of the general population, I'm all ears.

If I had my way, I'd go with 13 being the upper limit, but in deference to those of you here on the list, there may very well be "Exceptional" IQ characters who are NPC's as well. Note that I'm using the TEMPLATES book as a guideline here.

Can you dig up the guidelines from GURPS Historical Folks? If you can point people to them they might help.

I think in most people's GURPS, attributes from 8 to 13 should cover 99% of the population.

Edit: it was GURPS Who's Who which had the character creation guidelines, and here is a very unofficial version http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.p...01&postcount=8 (Kromm changes his tune later on the same thread, but this is pretty subjective). If we are discussing a hundred or so mages, I don't see any need to represent stats over 13.

[hal]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Can you dig up the guidelines from GURPS Historical Folks? If you can point people to them they might help.

I think in most people's GURPS, attributes from 8 to 13 should cover 99% of the population.

I think I can live with that. 14 goes out the door then. :)

It looks as though I'm going to have to consult the URL

https://www.mathsisfun.com/data/standard-deviation.html

From there, find a way to use standard deviations to determine whether someone is IQ 8 on up to IQ 13 The Mean IQ will thus be 11.5. I'll try the formulas out and plug them in to see if I can create a random table for percentile dice to determine GURPS Stats that will range from 8 to 13 for NPCs.


As for Historical People, yup, I have that. Thanks for reminding me of it - it may come in handy.

:)

[hal]

Question: Once I generate the data on various NPC mageborn and possibly ordinary people - is anyone going to want this data for themselves? I can work such that I export the data as a CSV file. Not sure how that might work for those clones of Excel.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by hal

Question: Once I generate the data on various NPC mageborn and possibly ordinary people - is anyone going to want this data for themselves? I can work such that I export the data as a CSV file. Not sure how that might work for those clones of Excel.

I will want it: the project could be pretty useful (though I must say I'm as interested in your code as your results). Also, it will let us work through sticky situations. CSV is a pretty universal format. The one I'm not sure of is google docs.

[Polydamas]

LibreOffice takes csv format.

Originally Posted by hal

I think I can live with that. 14 goes out the door then. :)

It looks as though I'm going to have to consult the URL

https://www.mathsisfun.com/data/standard-deviation.html

From there, find a way to use standard deviations to determine whether someone is IQ 8 on up to IQ 13 The Mean IQ will thus be 11.5. I'll try the formulas out and plug them in to see if I can create a random table for percentile dice to determine GURPS Stats that will range from 8 to 13 for NPCs.


As for Historical People, yup, I have that. Thanks for reminding me of it - it may come in handy.

:)

Your 7+2d/2 (round down) does not look bad

Roll (Nr of possible outcomes) Stat (probability)
2 (i) INT 8 (3/36)
3 (ii) INT 8
4 (iii) INT 9 (7/36)
5 (iiii) INT 9
6 (v) INT 10 (11/36)
7 (vi) INT 10
8 (v) INT 11
9 (iiii) INT 11 (9/36)
10 (iii) INT 12 (5/36)
11 (ii) INT 12
12 (i) INT 13 (1/36)

You could also use 6+2d/2 (round down) to allow for increasing Intelligence in mages who get book education. So the average before education would be a bit below 10. I might use this method to generate minor NPCs!

Edit: an alternative is 2-3 INT 8 (3/36), 4-5 INT 9 (7/36), 6-8 INT 10 (16/36), 9-10 INT 11 (7/36), 11-12 INT 12. This gives a 2.3 to 1 ratio between each stat and the next, and has a mean of 10

[StevenH]

What does the lord do with a mageborn who has an IQ of only 8? Do they spend the extra time needed to get them trained up, or do they assign them only the "easy" spells to learn? Or are they ignored as being a waste of time to train, as it will take an immense amount of time to get them as useful as someone who is smarter? Does their level of Magery have influence on the decision? (I would think yes, since in this case Magery acts like IQ).



And have we decided on whether or not we are using Magery 0 for our SimVillage experiment? Or whether it's possible to train up a level in Magery? (Heck, even being able to train just Magery 0 would be very helpful, even without being able to train higher levels of Magery). Then the number of wizards wouldn't be as limited; it then comes down to labor calculations about whether Bob is better being a farmer or a wizard.

[Polydamas]

Edit: p. B235 says that a character can learn a spell as long as they have at least one point in each of its prerequisite spells. This is a change from GURPS Classic Magic p. 5 where the character had to have skill 12 in every prerequisite spell. This is important for the average mage who needs to invest serious effort to learn a spell at 12.

Originally Posted by StevenH

What does the lord do with a mageborn who has an IQ of only 8? Do they spend the extra time needed to get them trained up, or do they assign them only the "easy" spells to learn?

GURPS Banestorm takes the position that most mages just know a spell or two, while professional wizards are a minority (eg. there are two separate registrations in Trederoy) and that most mages have Magery 0.

I think that the first assumption is plausible and that people will be naturally sorted within their estate and that most people with IQ + Magery less than 10 will never get magical training beyond possibly putting a point or two in one spell that a neighbour knows. In real peasant societies which are not desperately poor, the clever child gets sent out to learn about herbs from his relatives, the nimble-fingered one gets taught embroidery, the slow-witted but strong one gets very good at harvesting grain and moving earth.

Just thinking of the average professional wizard as having IQ + Magery around 12 helps us get in the right mindset and not imagine that the average professional wizard is like a PC mage with IQ+Magery 17.

Because its a rural setting, its likely that most people have multiple skills and sources of income. A peasant who can just cast Light and Continual Light has a valuable skill (candles and oil are expensive!) but probably still tends his or her garden, especially in summer when there is not much demand for magic light.

The second assumption is more a "worldbuilding switch."

[hal]

Originally Posted by StevenH

What does the lord do with a mageborn who has an IQ of only 8? Do they spend the extra time needed to get them trained up, or do they assign them only the "easy" spells to learn? Or are they ignored as being a waste of time to train, as it will take an immense amount of time to get them as useful as someone who is smarter? Does their level of Magery have influence on the decision? (I would think yes, since in this case Magery acts like IQ).



And have we decided on whether or not we are using Magery 0 for our SimVillage experiment? Or whether it's possible to train up a level in Magery? (Heck, even being able to train just Magery 0 would be very helpful, even without being able to train higher levels of Magery). Then the number of wizards wouldn't be as limited; it then comes down to labor calculations about whether Bob is better being a farmer or a wizard.

The sad news is, if you only have 2% of the population as having Magery of any kind, then whether you use Magery 0 as a built in assumption, or Magery 1 per the old way, will only determine the "What" rather than the who.

If you look at the Trial numbers based on Magery being 10x more common at a given level than its next higher level, I will either be using at 100/10/1 ratio for the old way, or 1000/100/10/1 ratio with the newer Magery 0 way.

Net result? If you still only have 51 maqeborn, the newer way generates roughly 90% magery 0's and the remaining magery levels are spread in the remaining 10%. The older way, 90% will have magery 1.

So, I'm happy to generate both versions side by side. Heck, if needed? I can have a column for "oldstyle Magery" and next to it, have "Newstyle Magery" so that each NPC mageborn generated, has both stats available for those who want to work with both.

For those who want the code, I can either place the code here in this thread, or I can email the code as a text file directly to you. If you want the executable - I can email that to you as well. When I write the code for generating the NPC's - I'll set it up to export to both Text and to CSV.

In the meantime, I'm going to try one last attempt using Standard Deviation to craft a percentile table for generating "attributes" (Be it ST, DX, IQ, or HT) such that NPCS will have a range of 8 to 12 or 8 to 13 and list it here. I will also code the other version of 7+int(2d6/2) just in case that works out to be the chosen method.

:)

Well, time to get ready for work.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by hal

If you look at the Trial numbers based on Magery being 10x more common at a given level than its next higher level, I will either be using at 100/10/1 ratio for the old way, or 1000/100/10/1 ratio with the newer Magery 0 way.

I would actually do it somewhat differently: 100 Magery 0, 10 Magery 1, 1 Magery 2, 0.1 Magery 3. That seems the closer correspondence. The lack of mages with Magery 3 isn't going to matter much at the social level you're mostly working with.