I want to do some city math, but don't know where to start

[Quertus]

As the title says. So, I'm wanting to look at math for, "when does it become viable for a settlement / village / town / city / whatever to do X", except that I'm not sure how to set the baselines.

Let me explain.

Using pure RAW, most D&D creatures are extinct. They simply cannot consistently make the Survival / Wilderness Lore rolls to consistently feed themselves, let alone their offspring (which, by RAW, can start making their own Survival rolls ~6 seconds after birth / hatching / whatever?).

For purposes of this thread, we're looking at the world with that level of pedantry.

So, by RAW, is agriculture better or worse than Hunter-Gatherer? Assuming "better", how much time does it free up?

You can use that time to… craft? Except… where and how do you get the raw materials, by RAW?

In short, if you start the world running with nothing but Nature, and a bunch of naked Folk, in a thousand years, or a million, what could they optimally have developed?

If you add in Monsters, or Dragons, or the gods, what changes?

This is the problem that I'm scratching my head over, trying to figure out if there's any way for RAW to actually produce civilization, without requiring… civilization.

Then, if I can get that far, what numbers it will give me for production values of "optimal" civilizations at various stages of growth / evolution.

[Saintheart]

I think this is going to be one tricky exercise because the setting presumes magic, and if you presume that, you're presuming all sorts of things that quickly lead to the Tippyverse.

For example, one 5th level druid, or a 5th level cleric with the Plant domain, or in a pinch a single 11th level ranger, and by RAW agricultural production rises to the stage where you can make the desert bloom and the Fremen cry - because they can all cast Plant Growth (the classes, not the Fremen) which improves the productivity of plants "within a range of one half mile", which isn't clear but by RAW could mean a one mile radius, by one third for one year.. Nothing in there saying you can't stack subsequent castings on top of one another, which means a Druid 5 can create an agricultural paradise on Earth.

[InvisibleBison]

Using pure RAW, most D&D creatures are extinct. They simply cannot consistently make the Survival / Wilderness Lore rolls to consistently feed themselves, let alone their offspring (which, by RAW, can start making their own Survival rolls ~6 seconds after birth / hatching / whatever?).

I'm not sure about this, actually - there's nothing stopping you from taking 10 on the Survival check to forage, so only creatures that have a Wisdom penalty would be unable to support themselves, and even they would be able to survive in highly fertile lands that give a circumstance bonus to the check.


So, by RAW, is agriculture better or worse than Hunter-Gatherer?

RAW, farming is absurdly more productive than hunting-gathering. Assuming no skill ranks and 10 Wisdom, a hunter-gatherer can support themselves by taking 10, so long as there aren't any unfavorable circumstances. A no skill ranks, 10 Wis farmer, on the other hand, can produce 7.5 tons of grain a year*. Because the people writing the craft rules and the people pricing food weren't talking to each other, one pound of wheat can be crafted into 1.5 pounds of flour, and 1 flour can be crafted into 1.5 pounds of bread. Thus, the farmer's 7.5 tons of grain becomes 16.875 tons of bread, enough to feed ~37 people for a year.

*Wheat takes 7 - 8 months to grow, which I'm calling 30 weeks for simplicity. Taking 10 on the Profession check creates 5 gp/week, or 150 gp/year. 150 gp of wheat = 15,000 pounds.


Assuming "better", how much time does it free up?

Unfortunately, I don't think this question can be answered. Both Survival and Profession are fairly vague about how time-consuming checks are; Survival says that a check "may represent activity over the course of hours or a full day", but doesn't give any guidance about how to determine precisely how long a check takes. Profession says "a single check generally represents a week of work", but doesn't say anything about how much time each day you spend making that check.


You can use that time to… craft? Except… where and how do you get the raw materials, by RAW?

Unsurprisingly, there aren't any rules for domesticating crops.


In short, if you start the world running with nothing but Nature, and a bunch of naked Folk, in a thousand years, or a million, what could they optimally have developed?

RAW, there's no way to make the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture. That being said, with a moderate level of investment (4 skill ranks and Skill Focus (Survival)), a hunter-gatherer can support 4 people, which means that only 1/4 of your population needs to be involved in food production - a level of efficiency that the real world didn't reach until the 20th century. There's no real need to develop agriculture in this situation. Anything that RAW can be done can be done by this civilization.



If you add in Monsters, or Dragons, or the gods, what changes?

Either the monsters kill and/or enslave all the people, or they provide high-level magic to jump-start civilization.


This is the problem that I'm scratching my head over, trying to figure out if there's any way for RAW to actually produce civilization, without requiring… civilization.

Then, if I can get that far, what numbers it will give me for production values of "optimal" civilizations at various stages of growth / evolution.

What do you mean by civilization? If you just mean people living in cities, that seems possible with sufficient Survival proficiency. In the real world, hunter-gatherers did sometimes settle in sufficiently productive lands, which RAW D&D lands definitely constitute. Making the actual cities is just a matter of Craft checks.

[zlefin]

I think it's simply not possible; the world simply isn't coherently developed enough to hold up to that kind of scrutiny. The RAW simply does not allow it; and many things were simply skipped over because they weren't pertinent to the intent of the game (like as you note, realistically many creatures, most notably animals, should have survival as a skill). Too many things are simply missing an adequate RAW answer, let alone enough detail to account for many of the vagaries that truly happen. You'd have to use a pile of homebrew to get to something remotely feasible. And you'd need to run economic simulations to make it actually resemble something sound.

If you try to force it using RAW, the answers will either come down to because Magic (and gods), and reasonable variations in the assumptions will cause such huge divergences in the result that it'd just be silly.

[Biggus]

Using pure RAW, most D&D creatures are extinct. They simply cannot consistently make the Survival / Wilderness Lore rolls to consistently feed themselves, let alone their offspring (which, by RAW, can start making their own Survival rolls ~6 seconds after birth / hatching / whatever?).


Are you referring to the DC10 Survival check to get along in the wild? That's the DC for feeding yourself while travelling:


Get along in the wild. Move up to one-half your overland speed while hunting and foraging (no food or water supplies needed).

So this only applies when animals are migrating, not when they're finding food in their home territory. The DC would be significantly lower when not travelling, and animals which migrate build up fat stocks before doing so.

For bringing up young, animals don't breed all year round, only when circumstance bonuses apply (ie, this is the time of year when food is most abundant).

[el minster]

I think herbivores should get a bonus on their checks because they can just eat plants, and carnivores will just find animals fight them and eat them raw.

[Quertus]

Well, I'm not sure why I thought that you couldn't take 10 on Survival checks. That means that most animals don't simply die off, so long as they never have to worry about penalties to the check. If their environment changes, then mass extinction is likely.

Profession doesn't seem a big problem; ignoring realism, by RAW, couldn't you simply lock a "farmer" in a box, come back a year later, and find 7.5 tons of grain waiting for you? With realism, those seeds that the farmer needs look suspiciously like the food that the "gathering" half of the hunter-gatherers are gathering with their survival checks.

Craft, however, has some very stringent requirements about "materials" and "tools". And, the more I think about it, the more I realize that someone, somewhere is probably smart enough to explain the litany of "build the tools to build the tools" necessary to get to the default D&D state.

So, yes, an optimized society could have a member who took max ranks in "craft stone hatchet" or whatever, or otherwise get enough bonuses (via Aid Another, perhaps) to create the tools from improvised tools.


RAW, farming is absurdly more productive than hunting-gathering. Assuming no skill ranks and 10 Wisdom, a hunter-gatherer can support themselves by taking 10, so long as there aren't any unfavorable circumstances. A no skill ranks, 10 Wis farmer, on the other hand, can produce 7.5 tons of grain a year*. Because the people writing the craft rules and the people pricing food weren't talking to each other, one pound of wheat can be crafted into 1.5 pounds of flour, and 1 flour can be crafted into 1.5 pounds of bread. Thus, the farmer's 7.5 tons of grain becomes 16.875 tons of bread, enough to feed ~37 people for a year.

*Wheat takes 7 - 8 months to grow, which I'm calling 30 weeks for simplicity. Taking 10 on the Profession check creates 5 gp/week, or 150 gp/year. 150 gp of wheat = 15,000 pounds.

So, one pound of bread can be crafted into 1.5 pounds of French Toast, and 1 pound of French Toast can be crafted into 1.5 pounds of edible French Toast sculpture, raising our grain to food efficiency another 125%! So, one newborn farmer (or "farming kitten", since they need not be human, and smaller creatures eat less (and RAW cats are deadly)) can keep at least 83 people fed by his first birthday… with the help of some cooks.

French Toast sculptures are hard, and I can only make French Toast because I have a +2 "studied under a French Toast Master" circumstance bonus, so let's go back to the original 37 number.

Craft defines the output in gold pieces (or, well, silver pieces, but whatever).

A pound of flour has a listed value of 0.2 SP per pound; bread (contrary to the crafting rules?) has a listed price of 0.4 SP per pound. Assuming untrained cooks and DC 10, they can output 100 SP of product per week each, which means 500 pounds of flour or 250 pounds of bread per cook week.

To output 16.875 tons of bread, plus the intermediate 10.75 tons of flour, therefore requires… 21.5 cook weeks on the flour, and 67.5 cook weeks on the bread. Assuming that grinding flour is easier than making bread, and is only DC 5, that doubles the time required to make it, for 43 cook weeks on the flour, and 67.5 cook weeks on the bread.

Assuming that the entire society was so suboptimal as to only work 30 weeks out of the year, and that no one did anything productive outside their assigned task, 37 people can be fed off the efforts of (less than) 5, leaving 32 full people to perform other productive duties.

Alternately, those 140.5 weeks worth of work to keep 37 man-sized beings fed could be handled by 3 full-time farmer/baker kittens (or, if we start to add in magic, unseen servants, effigy kittens, or some other "doesn't need to eat" investment).

Yeah, that seems like a massive productivity upgrade. Create Food and Water traps seem kinda… pointlessly extravagant, next to what RAW muggles (let alone RAW multipurpose magic) can already accomplish.

[Kayblis]

To output 16.875 tons of bread, plus the intermediate 10.75 tons of flour, therefore requires… 21.5 cook weeks on the flour, and 67.5 cook weeks on the bread. Assuming that grinding flour is easier than making bread, and is only DC 5, that doubles the time required to make it, for 43 cook weeks on the flour, and 67.5 cook weeks on the bread.


Do note that, if you lower the crafting DC to 5 for anything, you can have people trained on the job(at least a total +5) to assume a +10 DC modifier to complete it quicker, by the crafting rules. So it actually gets faster if it's simpler to make.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

In short, if you start the world running with nothing but Nature, and a bunch of naked Folk, in a thousand years, or a million, what could they optimally have developed?

The key question, I think, is whether you assume that all races/classes/feats/etc. existed from the very start of civilization or whether things changed one or more times. Elves may or may not have been around before dwarves and both may or may not have been around before humans, depending on the local creation myth; whether sorcery, druidism, or clericism came first is important in determining the survival rates and productivity of various early peoples, and wizardry and archivism definitely couldn't have developed until at least some form of physical recording of information developed; there are a bunch of PrCs in various settings where "learning the lore of X ancient people/creatures" gives you unique abilities, implying that those ancient peoples/creatures had their own "setting specific" PrCs and feats and such granting said abilities; and in some settings (most notably FR) the laws of physics literally changed multiple times between the creation of the world and the present.

RAW doesn't provide any guidance on hunter-gathering, or even demographics since it gives demographics in the context of settlements that wouldn't have existed yet before fixed settlements were created, so there's a big hole where you as DM have to decide whether the Commoner with Craft and Profession ranks has been the default humanoid for all of history or whether e.g. there were once Hunter and Farmer classes instead of Warrior and Expert, with relevant class features for finding and killing big game and gathering natural materials from scratch, respectively.

One example you might want to look into is the Dungeoncraft series in the late-200s Dragon Magazine issues, where they created a "primitive" setting where dinosaurs and humanoids existed side by side, clerics drew power from dinosaur "gods" and had different class features and tweaked spell lists compared to standard clerics, and other classes were more limited. Won't give you much mechanical guidance, I don't think, but I recall them talking about settlement building and the role of certain classes in society and so forth, which may help.

At the end of the day, when you say "when" and "stages of growth," what are you looking to determine, exactly? Time difference between "first village in the world is created" and "first town in the world is created"? First point at which N level X Commoners are self-sufficient as farmers? Break-even point when a settlement of NPCs can fight off monsters of CR X so they don't get eaten?

[MR_Anderson]

As the title says. So, I'm wanting to look at math for, "when does it become viable for a settlement / village / town / city / whatever to do X", except that I'm not sure how to set the baselines.

Let me explain...

In short, if you start the world running with nothing but Nature, and a bunch of naked Folk, in a thousand years, or a million, what could they optimally have developed?

If you add in Monsters, or Dragons, or the gods, what changes?

I did something similar for my current campaign, and after playing it out multiple times in my head for the first few levels of what the players would most likely do, I determined it was best not to start a campaign from point zero.

Not because it could not be done, but instead because the players would not enjoy role-playing farming and tending of animals. I know our group and players should enjoy themselves, otherwise you are DM’ing just to satisfy your own desires as a DM.

As for constructing the environment you mention, what races are you allowing? If you have different races, tribe effect should kick in, and ultimately some group will try to eliminate or enslaved another.

Reproduction is a huge issue for early civilization, and the other is length or life. Longer Lives of people means technology will grow quicker.

Civilizations will grow much faster than most people realize. Look at colonization in our own world. People arrived in a single location and lived on their own sometimes creating whole civilizations.

Ultimately, I modeled my world on the pre-flood times of the Bible, and placed the my characters in the middle of it. Humans lived longer lives, and populations were booming. I’m running a Spelljammer campaign and they will be departing the Terran home world and be similar to Aragorn when they are out about the stars.

That is where they will start seeing more of the Dragons and Elves and other D&D things.

[NigelWalmsley]

It depends a lot on how RAW you go.

By strict RAW, someone is going to hit an infinite loop (probably an unrestricted SLA Wish), get their infinite power, and then turn the world into their personal playground. It simply takes a lot longer to develop farming, and writing, and civilization than it does to express that you would in fact like to get infinite power when it's on offer.

So let's assume we're going with some kind of "fuzzy RAW". We want a plausible-ish history of a D&D setting, but we don't want it to be dominated by unsatisfying stuff like "and then everyone was turned into Shadows" or "the first guy to beat up a Noble Djinn became Emperor of the Multiverse".

The first question is how stuff becomes available. We tend to assume that everything is available from the start, but there's not necessarily any reason to assume that. Can people become Wizards before the invention of writing? Can you become a stone age Artificer? You probably get a more interesting progression of "technology" if you assume that certain classes were developed later on. How individual characters gain abilities matters too. When a Sorcerer picks spells, is that innate potential they're unlocking, or are they selecting particular abilities? Because which of those it is has a big influence of how heavily you can integrate Sorcerers into your society. If you can train every Sorcerer to have Floating Disc, that makes it much easier to build up magical industry than it would if Sorcerers just get it essentially randomly.

One of the things that'd probably be interesting about the development of D&D, compared to real life, is the difference in the way technological accumulation functions. In the real world, we get better at building stuff. Modern agriculture and manufacturing are orders of magnitude more efficient than techniques from a couple hundred years ago. D&D doesn't really work like that. Producing magic items doesn't ever get any more efficient. A crafter can make 1,000 GP worth of magic item a day, but they can do that whether they're working with stone-age tools or the stuff from magitech settings like Eberron or Spelljammer. The way capital accumulation works in D&D is that stuff is just permanent. When you make an Eternal Wand, that won't eventually wear out, it's eternal. So instead of having stuff that will eventually wear out and be replaced by better stuff, you just have an ever-accumulating pile of stuff that is whatever baseline level of good it is.

In terms of early history, I'd expect the world to be dominated by powerful individuals (even more so than D&D typically is). There won't have been enough time to build up the resources that might allow a large group of low or mid level characters to oppose a higher level one, so powerful characters and monsters will be able to carve out domains of their own. This is exacerbated if you assume that classes like Wizard or Cleric that allow you to train people with consistent abilities are absent or underrepresented, as those would tend to be the ones that civilizations would need to rely on to develop magical infrastructure.

[Quertus]

A few things:

Iirc, fluff-wise, Sorcerers are descended from Dragons? So, you can't get Sorcerers until humanity meets (and has likely been enslaved by) Dragons.

Really, most lore I recall talks of how *something* (gods, Dragons) taught Magic to humans / elves / whatever.

And I tend to run generally "suboptimal", low-magic-proliferation/awareness worlds.

In any event, my intention was to look first at "what can muggles do". So, the entire world might as well live inside an antimagic bubble, at least for my *initial* run of "what does an optimized timeline look like?".

The "putting the Eternal in Eternal Wands" bit actually matters for mundane equipment - how many tools (shelter, clothes, weapons, etc, in addition to "tool" tools) does civilization need, and how often do they need to be replaced? That seems like it might greatly cut into the efficiency of the "optimized" society, that only needed, what, 5/38 members on food duty?

My *real* intention is to run it like a videogame - to have pricing and "upgrades" and resource allocation, and see what the "optimal build order" for civilization looks like under various settings.

("Farming" seems an amazing (and cheap) upgrade to "Hunter/Gatherer", for example, whereas I'm not sure if a true optimizer would bother with Create Food and Water traps, even if they can get those to come online)

Clear as mud?

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Iirc, fluff-wise, Sorcerers are descended from Dragons? So, you can't get Sorcerers until humanity meets (and has likely been enslaved by) Dragons.

That's an in-setting claim, not a definite truth:


Some sorcerers claim that the blood of dragons courses through their veins. That claim may even be true in some cases—it is common knowledge that certain powerful dragons can take humanoid form and even have humanoid lovers, and it’s difficult to prove that a given sorcerer does not have a dragon ancestor. It’s true that sorcerers often have striking good looks, usually with a touch of the exotic that hints at an unusual heritage. Others hold that the claim is either an unsubstantiated boast on the part of certain sorcerers or envious gossip on the part of those who lack the sorcerer’s gift.

So there's no particular constraint on when in history sorcery could manifest.


In any event, my intention was to look first at "what can muggles do". So, the entire world might as well live inside an antimagic bubble, at least for my *initial* run of "what does an optimized timeline look like?".
[...]
My *real* intention is to run it like a videogame - to have pricing and "upgrades" and resource allocation, and see what the "optimal build order" for civilization looks like under various settings.

Now that's a griffon of an entirely different color...and quite difficult to figure out, since the determination of when exactly you flip the switch and allow magic has a massive impact on how things look, and if you figure out the entire tech tree without flipping the magic switch then it's immediately obviated as soon as magic enters the picture.


("Farming" seems an amazing (and cheap) upgrade to "Hunter/Gatherer", for example, whereas I'm not sure if a true optimizer would bother with Create Food and Water traps, even if they can get those to come online)

Traps of create food and water are generally brought up in the context of feeding large cities, not thorps. If 3 full-time farmers can keep 37 people fed by producing 450 gp wheat/year, as per the calculations above, then of course a 7,500 gp trap isn't worth the investment because it doesn't break even for ~8.3 years...but if you have a metropolis of 25,000 people, you'd need ~2,027 full-time farmers producing ~304,054 gp wheat/year to keep everyone fed, in which case a single create food and water trap is a great help because it fills the entire city's daily food needs in ~2.7 hours per day and frees up those 2,707 people to do other things.

But note that even in the 37-person-thorp scenario, if you have 25 people generate 150 gp of wealth for a year, you can then craft a create food and water trap and free up those people as well as the initial 3 farmers every year thereafter, which could make a big difference depending on the growth rate you're looking at. If a whole settlement worships a fertility god and every couple in it decides to have 6 children over a 6-year period, to use an extreme example, the farming-only settlement is dealing with a quadrupled population after those 6 years and has to allocate 12 more people to farming every year but the trap-using settlement doesn't, giving the latter a definite advantage in person-years of labor and wealth.

[Yahzi Coyote]

I did these kinds of calculations in Lords of Prime (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/217953/Lords-of-Prime). I started with the assumption 1 lb of wheat = 1 cp, and worked out everything else. And it hangs together pretty well!

I model XP as a resource, like wheat, that is produced by peasants. That tells me what rank the rulers are (based on how many peasants they have). And because peasants make XP, the rulers have a vested interest in protecting them. But because a single high level character is more powerful than several low level characters, the rulers tend to focus all of the XP on a handful of people who defend the realm with the help of common soldiers to serve as cannon fodder. In other words... classic feudalism. Not the historical middle ages but rather the romantic version: the ruling class really is better than the commoners because they have class levels.

Farmers make 20-40 gp a year and lead miserable lives. At least half and usually 3/4s of your population has to be farmers; the rest are craftsmen who make ~100 gp a year. A tiny percentage are nobles, being paid 400+ gp a year per level for their defense of the community.

I also wrote a program, Sandbox World Generator (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/217951/Sandbox-World-Generator), that creates continents full of these kingdoms. It's all free if you're interested.

[Doctor Despair]

I model XP as a resource, like wheat, that is produced by peasants. That tells me what rank the rulers are (based on how many peasants they have). And because peasants make XP, the rulers have a vested interest in protecting them. But because a single high level character is more powerful than several low level characters, the rulers tend to focus all of the XP on a handful of people who defend the realm with the help of common soldiers to serve as cannon fodder. In other words... classic feudalism. Not the historical middle ages but rather the romantic version: the ruling class really is better than the commoners because they have class levels.



I have to admit, I like the idea of the upper class's better access to education actually yielding some sort of benefit, although it does minimize the effect an angry mob can have on the corrupt nobleman, possibly leading to more severe class stratification than otherwise might have existed in a different system (as the ruling class only needs the peasants alive and working, not happy)

[Nifft]

As the title says. So, I'm wanting to look at math for, "when does it become viable for a settlement / village / town / city / whatever to do X", except that I'm not sure how to set the baselines.

Let me explain.

Using pure RAW, most D&D creatures are extinct. They simply cannot consistently make the Survival / Wilderness Lore rolls to consistently feed themselves, let alone their offspring (which, by RAW, can start making their own Survival rolls ~6 seconds after birth / hatching / whatever?).

For purposes of this thread, we're looking at the world with that level of pedantry. At sufficient pedantry, there are no calculations necessary, because there is no civilization.

There is no civilization because the entry for chaos beast (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/chaosBeast.htm) says that they are solitary.

You are hereby and forevermore legally unbound from that level of pedantry. Enjoy your new freedom.


I did these kinds of calculations in Lords of Prime (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/217953/Lords-of-Prime). I started with the assumption 1 lb of wheat = 1 cp, and worked out everything else. And it hangs together pretty well!

I model XP as a resource, like wheat, that is produced by peasants. That tells me what rank the rulers are (based on how many peasants they have). And because peasants make XP, the rulers have a vested interest in protecting them. But because a single high level character is more powerful than several low level characters, the rulers tend to focus all of the XP on a handful of people who defend the realm with the help of common soldiers to serve as cannon fodder. In other words... classic feudalism. Not the historical middle ages but rather the romantic version: the ruling class really is better than the commoners because they have class levels.

That's all fine & dandy until the XProletariat wake up and seize the means of XProduction.

Imagine what level Robespierre would be after beheading all those high-level NPCs....

[Yahzi Coyote]

Imagine what level Robespierre would be after beheading all those high-level NPCs....
I actually wrote up the process for a peasant rebellion in this world:

From Lords of Prime (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/217953/Lords-of-Prime):


Peasant Rebellions
In the worst case, when no other leader is available, six villages will band together in a terrible pact. Each will have a contest or election to select a village champion. The champion, his wife (he will be provided with one if necessary), and the village headman leave the village in secrecy to meet the other village delegations.

At the chosen place, the champions don crude masks chosen at random, each representing a different Elder god. A series of duels to the death will follow, starting with the opposed alignments (Yellow vs Green, etc.). The surviving three will draw straws to determine the next duel. The final two will then fight to the death.

Once a winner has been determined, he murders the wives and headmen of the other champions. This, plus the tael from the defeated champions, elevates him to first rank. He returns to his own village where the men bow and pledge fealty to him.

The men of the village then dress in the colors and costumes of their old lord. In this crude disguise they visit the other villages, murdering every adult. The children are generally left to fend for themselves. No resistance is offered by the other villages; they have lost their headman, their champion, and the will of the gods, and in any case they have already accepted imminent destruction: nothing less would have made them agree to the pact in the first place.

With the tael thus gained, the victorious champion promotes himself to 5th rank of a Primitive class (usually Warrior), and 100 village men to 1st rank. The men burn the old costumes in a nighttime ritual designed to divert the blame for their atrocities, don new colors, proclaim their new lord, and now the rebellion has its usurper and his army.

[Curelomosaurus]

If we're going by strict RAW, people gain NPC or PC class levels simply by being in a large enough settlement, as per DMG demographics. As such, there are going to be wizards, sorcerers, adepts, clerics, and the like basically anywhere a significant number of people are gathered. Once you get cities (not too hard, with how productive a 1st-level farmer can be), your standard D&D world takes shape pretty quickly, since you now have minor creation, fabricate, wall of [surprisingly valuable raw material], and the like to support rapid societal advancement.


So, one pound of bread can be crafted into 1.5 pounds of French Toast, and 1 pound of French Toast can be crafted into 1.5 pounds of edible French Toast sculpture, raising our grain to food efficiency another 125%! So, one newborn farmer (or "farming kitten", since they need not be human, and smaller creatures eat less (and RAW cats are deadly)) can keep at least 83 people fed by his first birthday… with the help of some cooks.

French Toast sculptures are hard, and I can only make French Toast because I have a +2 "studied under a French Toast Master" circumstance bonus, so let's go back to the original 37 number.

...I don't know where this came from, but I like it.