Populations

[drothgery]

One thing that surprised me recently is how small cities in England are today. Ignoring London for a moment and the next largest city is smaller than 1 million (according to Wiki anyway) with most cities in the 300 k range. Now, there are quite a number of cities, but, still, I didn't realize how small most English cities really are.

Knowing nothing about how things actually are in .uk, I wonder if there are more than a few clusters of cities that are effectively the same metro area. The entire US west coast (California + Oregon + Washington state) has a population roughly similar to the UK in a much larger area (and with about half of its population in one metro area -- greater LA), and there are only two cities with a population of over a million (LA and San Diego). Granted, San Jose is just under a million, and both the San Fransisco Bay Area (SF/San Jose/Oakland and suburbs) and the Seattle metro area (Seattle plus suburbs) have well over a million people. And that's a fairly common pattern in the US. I know North American cities typically have substantially more suburban sprawl than their European counterparts, but it's still likely a factor.

 

[S'mon]

Yes, we have city clusters that are really just one city; notably Birmingham & its connected areas. Our 'actual' city sizes are a good bit larger than the numbers, in most cases.

 

[Huw]

Short of a nuclear holcaust or actual genocide wars won't empty cities, and if they did, a 90% uninhabited city would be a weird place. In the real world, a war like WW2 could wipe out up to about 10% of your population, mostly males of fighting age.

Ever heard of Stalingrad? The deaths were a lot more than 10%.

I believe Angkor went from about 1,000,000 people in the 12th century to less than 30,000 by the 16th. When the French "discovered" (it never really was lost) it in the 19th century, the inhabitants had no idea how big it used to be - most had been reclaimed by the jungle.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

My question is this: why are cities for roleplaying games so small?

You know, I don't think I've ever seen an RPG product that had realistic population numbers. Not so much cities - but more the national population figures. There was a huge thread on Eberron having out-of-whack size versus population numbers back when Eberron came out. The upshot that I took away from it was that no thought whatsoever was put into the logic of the population numbers.