So a question that often pops up when considering a dnd world is: How rare are adventurers? How easy it it to get access to a 4th level spell? Would casters producing 3rd level magic own the economy of this world?
DMs for the most part handwave these questions, which is fine in the vast majority of games. However, if you like to be more detailed in your world, than this Excel could be of help to you.
What I have done is make a customizable spreadsheet that lets you tweak things to your world, to give you a rough approximation of how many of each type of class there are. Most importantly, the spellcasters will tell you the availability of spells.
How it works is that you set up your World Population, what % of people are specialists (aka not just digging in the ground to feed themselves), and how often do people "level"? A "2" setting as shown in this example means that if you have 100 1st level people, 50 of them will make it to 2nd level.... and of those 50, 25 will make it to 3rd, etc.
From there, you can set how common various classes are. If you run a nature heavy world, maybe druids are common. Maybe your world is very civilized, and barbarians are practically unheard of. You can just adjust the frequency of each class, and the sheet will handle the rest.
Now the meat are the spell slot tables. I assume that NPC classes don't contribute spell slots. For the most part they have very few, and most of them are used for their own purposes. For the rest, I provide the number of spell slots of each level based on the PC spell progression (aka 3rd level clerics contribute 3 slots to the 1st level pool, and 1 slot to the 2nd level pool.... and yes Arcane Recovery is included).
The last table is Spell "Demand". What I assumed is that 1st level spells are desired by everyone. Even your farmer could use a cure light wounds here and there. Anything higher is "desired" by specialists only. I mean sure a farmer would love a 3rd level spell, but he either doesn't have the means to get it, or doesn't know a caster that could do it for them. As a result, demand for higher level spells is defined by the number of specialists in the world. In our example, every 1st level Bard Spell is desired by 91 people.... but not every day! So its fairly easy to find access to it if your looking for it. But for a Bard 7th.... you are competing with over 30,000 specialists (aka people special just like you) for that slot..... its going to be hard to find, and its probably going to cost. This gives DMs a ballpark of how easy it is for their players to find various spells in the world.
The various values are customizable in the second tab, so you can adjust how rare "rare" actually is to your liking.
So that's the spiel. Feel free to give it a try and tell me what you think.
UPDATE: VERSION 2.1!
So a lot of people wanted to freedom to tweak things at every level. Maybe in your world even 1st level characters are rare, but at high levels you are basically expected to go to 20th, and so things at high levels get easier. Now you can do whatever combination you want. In this version, you tweak the promotion rating for every level. You no longer change the %, this is now a calculated value based on the promotion ratings you choose.... aka showing you the net result of your number. Enjoy!!
2.1 Update: I saw that a lot of people like to define their rarity as "1 in a million" or "1 in 10,000". So I have added in a orange line that will show that to you. So based on your numbers, you can see how each level is in terms of "1 in X"
Example: In the screen below, a "10" above level 1 means that 1 in every 10 people in the world are level 1. The "2" above the level 2 means there are one 2nd level person for every two 1st level people.
DMs for the most part handwave these questions, which is fine in the vast majority of games. However, if you like to be more detailed in your world, than this Excel could be of help to you.
What I have done is make a customizable spreadsheet that lets you tweak things to your world, to give you a rough approximation of how many of each type of class there are. Most importantly, the spellcasters will tell you the availability of spells.
How it works is that you set up your World Population, what % of people are specialists (aka not just digging in the ground to feed themselves), and how often do people "level"? A "2" setting as shown in this example means that if you have 100 1st level people, 50 of them will make it to 2nd level.... and of those 50, 25 will make it to 3rd, etc.
From there, you can set how common various classes are. If you run a nature heavy world, maybe druids are common. Maybe your world is very civilized, and barbarians are practically unheard of. You can just adjust the frequency of each class, and the sheet will handle the rest.
Now the meat are the spell slot tables. I assume that NPC classes don't contribute spell slots. For the most part they have very few, and most of them are used for their own purposes. For the rest, I provide the number of spell slots of each level based on the PC spell progression (aka 3rd level clerics contribute 3 slots to the 1st level pool, and 1 slot to the 2nd level pool.... and yes Arcane Recovery is included).
The last table is Spell "Demand". What I assumed is that 1st level spells are desired by everyone. Even your farmer could use a cure light wounds here and there. Anything higher is "desired" by specialists only. I mean sure a farmer would love a 3rd level spell, but he either doesn't have the means to get it, or doesn't know a caster that could do it for them. As a result, demand for higher level spells is defined by the number of specialists in the world. In our example, every 1st level Bard Spell is desired by 91 people.... but not every day! So its fairly easy to find access to it if your looking for it. But for a Bard 7th.... you are competing with over 30,000 specialists (aka people special just like you) for that slot..... its going to be hard to find, and its probably going to cost. This gives DMs a ballpark of how easy it is for their players to find various spells in the world.
The various values are customizable in the second tab, so you can adjust how rare "rare" actually is to your liking.
So that's the spiel. Feel free to give it a try and tell me what you think.
UPDATE: VERSION 2.1!
So a lot of people wanted to freedom to tweak things at every level. Maybe in your world even 1st level characters are rare, but at high levels you are basically expected to go to 20th, and so things at high levels get easier. Now you can do whatever combination you want. In this version, you tweak the promotion rating for every level. You no longer change the %, this is now a calculated value based on the promotion ratings you choose.... aka showing you the net result of your number. Enjoy!!
2.1 Update: I saw that a lot of people like to define their rarity as "1 in a million" or "1 in 10,000". So I have added in a orange line that will show that to you. So based on your numbers, you can see how each level is in terms of "1 in X"
Example: In the screen below, a "10" above level 1 means that 1 in every 10 people in the world are level 1. The "2" above the level 2 means there are one 2nd level person for every two 1st level people.
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