#that way i can shuffle my queue with impunity

[mallowstep]

i literally havent been able to stop thinking about the wbcd thing, its so needed in the series. how do you decide which cats die when? do you weigh eventual offspring when deciding, like thornkit/claw eventually having four kits while lynxkit obviously having none? will "important" canonical deaths like swiftpaw, brindleface, etc count towards the death count for the season, or will those types of things be bonus deaths?

figured i'd answer this b4 i went to bed!

i need to scrub the wbcd posts from my queue and rewrite them up to a higher standard, but i'm going to keep the outcomes the same. i've gotten the hang of things now.

anyway, this is all done in one notebook, and the way i do it for wbcd is a little Special. (i've done similar things for fan-ish clans to make sure the numbers work out. they do, generally. sometimes you have bad luck.)

but wbcd doesn't account for moving to the elders' den, increased death rates because of moving to the elders' den, and i don't think i was doing double rolls (i'll explain) last time i queued the posts.

(it's a bit of a mess rn is why i need to scrub and rewrite. or maybe start a(nother) sideblog for it? just for my own sanity?)

anyway.

i've done this out a few times, and i've decided writing shit out by hand is best. maybe i just have no restraint and overcomplicate shit when i start typing, and someone else could make it work.

so first up, determining leader lives: i literally knock off 2/book. if i'm doing something for a fanclan, i generate numbers the same way i do for litters, a normal distribution with mean 2 and standard deviation 4. N(2, 16) if you want to be fancy. i've considered lowering the standard deviation, but i like the swingy-ness of it. (i also permit "gaining" lives to account for this. it's a little hokey, but it makes leaders live for the Right amount of time.)

deputies have a 1/10 chance of dying every season. all of my numbers, here, are estimations based on my initial calculations, then smoothed out to a number that easily goes into 100. again, i do wbcd in batches, and my methodology has changed slightly, so it's possible i was still not rolling for deputies.

seers/medicine cats (seer = 4 letters, and i'm writing by hand, also it fits the Aesthetics of the idea) have a 1/20 chance in dying. i don't usually bother rolling for them, though, because their deaths uh. don't matter? bc wbcd follows canon timeline, i can kill them for drama as needed.

as for warriors, they have a 1/25 chance in dying every season. i believe i calculated the odds for 1/10 living to 40 seasons and 1/3 living to 40 seasons, and then found a number that was easy to remember in between. because i don't track elders in wbcd, no one ever actually retires, but when i do this for other things, i give elders 1/10 chance of dying. just to make sure they don't stack up.

but! wbcd is special because i don't just roll and move on. what i do is, i roll for every warrior, and then i shuffle deaths. did whitestorm die, but i need him to live long enough to be firestar's deputy? well, XYZ is right there not doing anything, why not kill them instead?

and so on.

there's certainly a bit of favouritism going on: when i decided to kill barley, it Hurt me a Lot. but it needed to be done.

the factors that go into my decision are about what their death does to the future. killing whitestorm before he becomes firestar's deputy is frustrating to the plot in ways i didn't want to deal with. killing darkstripe early does nothing.

so non-canon characters (i don't want to say ocs, bc it's more lynxkit, ravenpaw & barley, etc) have a higher risk of dying, because their deaths, well, by their nature their deaths Cannot change the plot.

but that's not the same as offspring. see, blossomfall and thornclaw's kits are very, very, very minor. stemleaf is the only one who matters, and i can easily work around that.

so important canonical deaths do count in the seasonal tally, because the numbers are supposed to be high for drama. the only exception to this is that i rolled really well for the season of the great battle, so i ended up using my litter size generator for an extra number of deaths. i'd do this again for a time when there was that kind of Big Event Death if i rolled "too well."

now, you didn't ask about this, but i want to be thorough: how do i do kits and apprentices?

okay, apprentices are my favourite part, because they're the only group that has dynamic odds. uh, i'm going to say seasons, but what i mean is, when i'm on my leafbare page, i then roll to see who lives through newleaf, and i call that the newleaf roll. i know it's confusing, that's just the convention i started with.

so anyway, seasonal odds of death for apprentices

newleaf: 0/1 greenleaf: 1/10 leaffall: 1/5 leafbare: 1/10

if you recall my overall apprentice odds, this might seem odd, but you have to remember that "leaffall" really means "1 out of 5 apprentices dies every greenleaf."

i've considered flipping this, but for reasons i'll explain in kits, having the newleaf "palette cleanser" means that the warmer months aren't as brutal as they seem.

so for kits: when there's a litter born in a season, i don't do anything. if there are multiple, i try to space them out. there's not like. a reason for this, other than helping me keep the numbers straight.

for seasons with no litters, i generate a litter size and pick a queen who's "free."

the litter size generated is N(3, 9), or mean 3, standard deviation 3. negative numbers mean nothing here, and there's a fair amount of Large Litters. it would be realistic to split those up, but that takes a Lot of time and bookkeeping.

anyway, generated litters usually have no father, because you know. keeping things moving here. i pick a free queen, which basically means:

the queen whose next canon litter and last litter in wbcd are furthest away.

this is a balancing act, and i usually favour not giving a couple an early litter before their first canon litter. but if, say, willowpelt needs to have a litter in two seasons, even if she could have two litters back to back, i don't like doing that.

so i might find someone who has had their last canon litter and give them an extra one, or someone who's a while away from their next litter.

for generated litters, i give them an extra roll. because i disregard negatives, litter sizes trend larger than intended, so an extra first roll keeps them down. all rolls for kits are 1/5 odds of death.

but if i roll a 5, i circle the bullet point, and roll twice next season. this is because 4/5 * 4/5 is 0.64, which is more than my ideal survival rate of 0.50. add in another 4/5, for the bonus roll, and you drop to 0.512. the occasional extra rolls sends some kits down to 0.40 survival rating.

one day, i will figure out what those odds are to see if my numbers are still accurate, but having played this scenario out pretty far, i think it works.

i also employ the double roll for apprentices. hence having no rolls in leafbare means i can sort of. stop anything from cycling over.

if u have more questions about the mechanics/my process behind this, let me know. i hope i explained everything clearly, but it's all basically scribbled in a single notebook that i actually need to dig out so i can fix things.

thanks for asking! i'll be out with more wbcd content soon.