[World-building] Population breakdown by level?

[ILM]

I've read that level 5+ characters are already Big Damn Heroes; level 10+ guys have got songs sung about them and level 20 people are quasi-gods. And then I've looked at the city builging guidelines in the DMG (page 139) and did a test run, and for a metropolis of around 70,000 people, I've got like 30 level 15+ characters with PC classes (and another bunch of guys with NPC class levels, including level 24 commoners).

Lulwut?

Now, it seems to me that the first step to building a world that makes a tiny bit of sense is to flesh out the outlines of available resources, regional specificities and other idiosyncracies, power levels, power centres and the like. Getting a rough idea (and I'm stressing "rough" here) of your population by level - which sort of indicates who your notable individuals are going to be - seems to me like something you want to do at the very beginning, and there appears to be a massive discrepancy in the above guidelines.

So, how did you fix that, and how did you split the population by level in your worlds/ countries/ cities?

[Bloodgruve]

I'm not too familiar with the rules for world building but I would take those higher level numbers and cut them to 10% to 50%. 70,000 seems like a pretty large city and I could see it containing some high level NPCs but its really up to your concept of the world.

The Domesday Book Calculator (http://www.rpglibrary.org/utils/meddemog/) may be of interest to you also. Demographics of 11th century medieval England.

GL

Blood~

[lunar2]

i believe the fame assumptions of high level characters are based on the fact that dnd hits superhuman at 6th level. characters of lower level than that, while they may be able to have types of power that you can't really have, are still restricted to roughly the same degree of power that you can really have. also, according to the dmg, you aren't even famous until you hit level 6, which just goes to show you the power curve of a standard dnd campaign setting. what would be considered borderline godlike in the real world barely even registers on the radar in the game. and from that standpoint, those high level npcs make perfect sense. also, about the commoner. those tables aren't supposed to generate epic level characters. any epic results are supposed to cap at 20.

as far as generating the population of the entire world, i've done that for a setting, even going so far as to finding the population of every species of creature native to the material plane (monster manual and magic of incarnum only), and every template combination of every species (that 1 half celestial great wyrm gold dragon was very well known, by the way).

[ILM]

My idea was rather to map out the population per level group (say, level 2, 3-4, 5-7, 8-10, etc.) and then just flesh out as needed. Need an ECL 18 demilich mineral warrior feral awakened porpoise Truenamer? Yup, there's room left for one of those.

It's really more of a guideline I'm looking for, just so I avoid getting carried away in a cycle of "well he's going to be level 20, which means he must be 20 as well, and those guys too" until you end up with two dozen level 20 people in the same city. That way, I can take a look at the chart and think that the guard captain I want needs to be well-known and above the cut of normal men, but not the stuff of legends either -> level 8-9 or so. Then, if the PCs want to start mucking around with the population when they hit a level where they're significantly stronger than all but a fraction of the locals, well, that's up to them :smallsmile:.

[hamishspence]

If you're using the rules for settlements in Epic Handbook, the number of high level characters in metropolises (and, I think, large cities) goes up quite a bit.

(in DMG you can't have level 24 commoners since there's an NPC level cap of 20- but using the Epic Handbook rules, you can).

It also introduces "planar metropolises"- cities with populations of 100,000 or more, that usually have some kind of extraplanar traffic.

Books like Cityscape tend to go with the presumption that level 10 isn't all that special- it's a city guard veteran, a master crafter, a senior aristocratic politician, a high-ranking thief in the Guild.