Project Slaughterhouse and Settlement XP

[Drakevarg]

So the other day I posted a thread about trying to figure out NPC generation (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?569907-NPC-Generation) for settlements. Played around with some ideas for a while, then I found an old link about a certain Project Slaughterhouse (https://theangrygm.com/schrodinger-chekhov-samus/) in my favorites and decided that was a much better basis for what I wanted to accomplish than trying to define the exact roster of all NPCs in a given area.

Now, the basic premise of Project Slaughterhouse works great for what I want - it lets me have a pretty solid idea of what forces can be brought to muster at any given moment, without the restriction of having to define every last individual in the area. Great middle ground between flexibility and pre-planning. Rather than stating definitively that I have 4 captains, 12 lieutenants, and 28 militia in a garrison, I can just say I have such-and-such xp worth of troops, which can be any combination of captain, lieutenants and militia I happen to need. The problem comes in with defining that "such-and-such."

Part of the problem is I'm simply not used to dealing with XP. In the past I've simply waved it off and leveled up my party at the end of every story arc. Meant that the plot progressed at the pace I wanted it to, nobody got left behind, and I didn't need to make sure violence happened at regular intervals for the sake of having XP to deal out. Meant there was a bit of a fiddly area in the department of XP costs, but I never liked those anyway and frankly they haven't come up yet. However, in the context of dealing with large populations of NPCs, the ability to abstract them into a single value is extremely useful.

But not being used to XP means I have no context for what an appropriate XP value looks like. So when it comes to reducing a town of 4,000 people into a single XP value to be spent at my discretion, I don't really know what sounds right. Using the Unearthed Arcana ruleset for giving every individual their own XP value rather than based on combined Encounter Level, I could get the following values:

Calculated as 4,000 Level 1 encounters, a town of 4,000 people is worth 1,200,000 xp.
Calculated as half the settlement's population worth of Level 3 encounters (the setting's standard for a professional combatant), the town is worth 1,800,000 xp.
Calculated as 1/5th the settlement's population worth of Level 6 encounters (the second-highest tier of NPC available in a town of that size), the town is worth 1,920,000 xp.
Calculated as 10% of the settlement's population worth of Level 9 encounters (the highest-level NPC available in a town that size), the town is worth 2,880,000 xp.

There are any number of calculations I could make using variously arbitrary logic, but at the end of the day I'd basically just be making a guess that "sounds right." When I did an early experiment with the system using a single pirate crew using 1/5th of the population times the captain's XP value, it lined up nicely with the XP value of the crew were I to populate it by hand. But the same equation applied to a large population center (the above town), the resulting 5,760,000 xp felt excessive.

So I figured it was time to crowdsource this matter. I don't know what a big pile of XP is "supposed" to look like, especially applied to an area this big. But if I can figure it out, it would help me populate not just settlements, but dungeons and areas of wilderness as well. I just need to have a frame of reference. So, what do you think?

[Fizban]

Nothing in the game uses xp that way, so I doubt anyone who hasn't instated a similar mechanic will be able to eyeball it anyway. You still need to figure out the demographics of "professional combatants." Note that if you're running a pre-industrial setting, you can't have more than 10% of the population doing anything other than farming- so even if professional combatants are 3rd level, you can't have all that many professional combatants, because a good number of the non-farmers need to be craftsmen.

[Drakevarg]

Note that if you're running a pre-industrial setting, you can't have more than 10% of the population doing anything other than farming- so even if professional combatants are 3rd level, you can't have all that many professional combatants, because a good number of the non-farmers need to be craftsmen.

It's a basic rule for my setting that virtually every adult is at least combat-capable, because there are so many monsters running around that just being able to work the fields, or chop wood, or head down the street for groceries requires that you be prepared to defend yourself against a rat the size of a dog or whatever. So while most people may indeed just be food-makers, they still know their way around a weapon, even if that weapon is just their wheat scythe. Added on top of that, people who professionally deal with large animals - hunters, sailors, beast-tamers, etc. - would need combat skills at least on par with the common soldier if not moreso. Humans aren't at the tippy-top of the food chain in this world and so being at least a little bit of a badass is kind of a prerequisite for having anything resembling civilization at all.

So while "total population as L1 encounters" is understandable in that context, the thing that gets a bit fuzzy is how much the XP values of higher-level NPCs (soldiers, artisans, hunters, whatever) would bloat that value. Or what the threshold is wherein the fact that every man and woman old enough to lift a sword knows how to use one becomes irrelevant because they're not going to stick around long enough to face whatever tore through the professional fighters.

[Jack_Simth]

Computers are useful for this kind of thing:
Town Generator (https://www.myth-weavers.com/generate_town.php)
NPC Generator (https://www.myth-weavers.com/generate_npc.php)

Just replace all instances of Commoner with Warrior, and you're set, really.

[Drakevarg]

Computers are useful for this kind of thing:
Town Generator (https://www.myth-weavers.com/generate_town.php)
NPC Generator (https://www.myth-weavers.com/generate_npc.php)

Just replace all instances of Commoner with Warrior, and you're set, really.

Aside from the added work of having to comb out all the aspects not in my setting (casters and nonhumans), this doesn't really cover what I'm looking for. I know how to use the town generation rules from the DMG - which these are basically just an automated form of. I just don't like the town generation rules from the DMG, hence me trying out the Project Slaughterhouse thing. In regards to which I don't really see how these would help me figure out what the XP value of a settlement would be.

Edit: One idea might be to do something similar to a settlement's gp limit, using different base values. For example, by DMG rules a town of 4,000 would have 600,000 gp available to spend at any given time. I could try taking the basic equation for that and tweaking it for XP rather than gp. I do have systems in place already for deciding the highest-level NPC available in a settlement, which could take the place of the town's gp limit. Which for the sample town of 4,000 would be 1,440,000 xp, sets it within the same range as the other calculations but is a bit higher than just casting the entire population as L1 encounters.

On the other hand, plugging smaller settlements into the equation paints a different picture. A hamlet of 60 gets 18,000 xp laid out as L1 encounters but only 2,700 xp using the above formula. Hm.