Distributing X.P. Among Clan Members

Rest assured, I'm coming back to the shaman and the clan.  I just want to take a little detour first.

On the tech 14 post, I included the table on the right.  Now I'm rethinking that table somewhat - not because there are too many levels at the high end but because the bottom end is light.  If I use the number as given, there's a high probability that my proposed clan of 25-40 persons won't have any levels in it at all.

That makes it boring for any party above third level.  What is perhaps a better way of doing it?

Way back in the day, I was playing with different kinds of leveled persons and seeking to develop a system that would tell me how much experience that persons of a given social status should have (to make a relation between age and level).  I imagined that individuals would draw up a certain number of experience per year.  Let's pull up the relevant table from that post and have a look at it:

old table, old colour scheme

Quoting from my old post,

An adherent would have the adequate skills to be leveled, without possessing extraordinary abilities; they would adhere to their class structure, serving as functionaries such as parish priests, city officials, laboratory workers and so on. A zealot would be an adherent who has adopted a particular political or religious calling. An adventurer would include persons who explore or who serve as freelancers. A celebrity, or hero, would be an adventurer who has had notable success. A title holder would include the nobility, or persons who have risen to the highest rank in their profession, such as admirals, bishops, marshals or guild masters. Finally, a liege would include masters of primary political divisions, of religious groups or class-based organizations.

Like most of the ideas I have, this one got shelved.  It isn't so much that it doesn't work, it's just that - like the clan experiment I'm playing with right now - it didn't consequentially add to the effectively describing my world in the actual game.  Still, it's sort of useful now, as I think I can adapt this to propose a different way of calculating out experience for each tech level.

Suppose I take the X.P. per year and multiply that by 0.2%, giving us this table:

new table, new color scheme.  numbers are rounded, so a zero indicated
may yet provide some experience over several years.

Then we can adjust the level form from titles designed for obviously higher tech levels and apply them to the sort of people that represent the clan.  Here's where I have to stretch somewhat, as I did not come up with these titles originally to apply them to very primitive cultures - so if the reader will forgive me, I'll drastically change some of the above.

The liege becomes the chief and title holders are shamans.  Celebrities and adventurers are those warriors in the tribe with varying commitment to wandering about on their own outside the immediate group.  The zealot becomes the aforementioned sea dog, the tribal drummer, the mushroom hunter and so on.  Adherents, then, are everyone else: the workers of the tribe.  I'll republish the table with the change in titles:

Better?

 

Obviously, no worker will ever reach second level.  Moreover, I've been holding back on a system idea I have for starting all untrained, inexperienced youths (age 14 and less) at -1500 x.p.  To get to be combat trained (something that affects morale) a non-level must obtain reach -1000 x.p. through combat or be rigorously trained by a fighter (a sage ability I haven't written/designed yet).  Individuals must gain that second thousand experience to reach 1st level (zero experience), where the players start their characters.

This means that in the above table, all the members of the clan would have to gain a base 1500 experience just to be leveled.  Since the maximum experience in a lifetime a worker would obtain on the table above would be 73 x.p., no worker can even be combat trained.

Our skilled worker (mushroom hunter) is limited to a lifetime maximum of 194 x.p..  Ordinary warriors are limited to 516 x.p.  The quality warriors could gain 1377 x.p., enough to make them combat experienced.  The shaman (who is a fighter, remember) could rise to 3,671 x.p. (making 1st level) and the chiefs are able to reach 9,789 x.p.  This just gets them to 4th level (subtracting 1500 x.p. off the bottom).

Of course, we could always play with these numbers, make them a central average, so that the young adult warrior could earn from 1-28 x.p. per year instead of 14.  This might enable 2nd level shamans, the occasional 1st level quality warrior and more combat trained ordinary warriors.  I'm working on a random table that would produce this sort of result.  Here are rolls for 10 quality warriors, 

And we could create some sort of random chance for a big bonus gain, so that we might actually get a combat trained worker, showing total x.p. based on their ages (with how much they earn at each age range for comparison):

Combat experienced warriors will have at least -1000 x.p.
Leveled characters will have 0 or more x.p.

The way I've designed it, being oldest doesn't necessarily mean the most experience.  H is 70 and yet has 674 x.p. less than E, who is a 1st level fighter.  Obviously, though, being younger than 26 is a serious handicap regarding experience.

I'm not entirely happy with the table above.  The original table concept from 2010 was based on the lowest level form getting 1 x.p. per day; perhaps that premise is too low for what I want to do with it now, and needs to be adjusted.  I'm good with the 1,500 x.p. needed for levelling; this has worked very well in play with my campaigners raising up followers and men-at-arms.

Anyway, just a bit to show where my head is.  I'll get back to the breakdown of the tech-5 clan with my next post.