So essentially the vote here is kind of waiting until all the players who've gained Reward Dice for something can summon them like Pokémon?
Infant mortality in pre-modern societies was definitely brutal and Darwinian, no question, but there's a bit more randomness to it than this I think? A healthy child can still catch a really bad chill and die, or be trampled by a cow and survive with a limp for their rest of their life, and so on. Equally sometimes a child who is a bit undersized or has various other congenital issues will still struggle on into adulthood. (Being small means you need less food, so it's not always strictly a disadvantage.) We know from looking at skeletons in burial sites that a lot of people went through life with some pretty serious pathologies (I.E., serious enough to leave signs on their bones), but still survived into adulthood and sometimes fairly advanced age. Sometimes this was through sheer resilience, and in some cases because other people helped them.
One can see this in stuff like the Sagas I think, where quite often you'll have characters who have signature abilities which are extraordinary but not quite magical, like "Thorfin who can run really fast" or "Bjorn who can see across valleys". If one imagines a society where the background disease load is quite high, and there are periods of food insecurity, then the one guy in the village with genes for long legs who wasn't hit as hard by the bad harvest of '98 or any serious illness is going to be like Usain Bolt compared to his peers.
Infant mortality in pre-modern societies was definitely brutal and Darwinian, no question, but there's a bit more randomness to it than this I think? A healthy child can still catch a really bad chill and die, or be trampled by a cow and survive with a limp for their rest of their life, and so on. Equally sometimes a child who is a bit undersized or has various other congenital issues will still struggle on into adulthood. (Being small means you need less food, so it's not always strictly a disadvantage.) We know from looking at skeletons in burial sites that a lot of people went through life with some pretty serious pathologies (I.E., serious enough to leave signs on their bones), but still survived into adulthood and sometimes fairly advanced age. Sometimes this was through sheer resilience, and in some cases because other people helped them.
One can see this in stuff like the Sagas I think, where quite often you'll have characters who have signature abilities which are extraordinary but not quite magical, like "Thorfin who can run really fast" or "Bjorn who can see across valleys". If one imagines a society where the background disease load is quite high, and there are periods of food insecurity, then the one guy in the village with genes for long legs who wasn't hit as hard by the bad harvest of '98 or any serious illness is going to be like Usain Bolt compared to his peers.
