D&D 5E How common are magic, monsters, and NPC's with class levels anyways?

[James Gasik]

Something that comes up a lot in discussions on this forum is exactly how common some things are in D&D worlds. In one thread, I'll postulate that trade, as we know it on Earth, would be impossible due to the presence of monsters constantly sacking caravans, or sea travel being insanely difficult due to the large number of intelligent creatures that lurk in the world's oceans (especially since D&D ships are designed just like real-world ships, and aren't particularly well suited to fending off, say, a Kraken or Dragon Turtle trying to capsize them).

In another thread, I see someone saying that the reason technology doesn't advance in D&D worlds is because the world is lousy with 3rd-5th level characters.

One person will claim that characters like the PC's are rare. Another will say adventurers are all over the place and make civilization possible.

A typical army is made up of 1-2 HD NPC's, yet town guards can take out 7th level PC's.

High-level magic is rare, but somehow a Dragon doesn't just roll up on a kingdom and destroy it utterly, Lonely Mountain style.

I know a lot of this depends on the campaign- Eberron has prevalent low level magic, but few high-level magic users, and the Forgotten Realms, despite a large population of adventurers, seems to be the reverse- there's no low level casters making huge advances in society, but the setting is lousy with powerful archmages and liches.

But it makes discussing the game difficult since everyone has a different idea of how common or uncommon these things are. Is it possible to reach some kind of consensus here?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think the short answer is no, you won't be able to reach a consensus. This sort of thing has to be worked out by individual groups, provided they care about the answers at all (I suspect many don't).

I tend to use large polities that are mostly free of those kinds of monsters, usually separated by swathes of wilderness. Adventurers of all levels are reasonably rare but not unique to just the PCs, and their actions do change the world.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Something that comes up a lot in discussions on this forum is exactly how common some things are in D&D worlds. In one thread, I'll postulate that trade, as we know it on Earth, would be impossible due to the presence of monsters constantly sacking caravans, or sea travel being insanely difficult due to the large number of intelligent creatures that lurk in the world's oceans (especially since D&D ships are designed just like real-world ships, and aren't particularly well suited to fending off, say, a Kraken or Dragon Turtle trying to capsize them).

In another thread, I see someone saying that the reason technology doesn't advance in D&D worlds is because the world is lousy with 3rd-5th level characters.

One person will claim that characters like the PC's are rare. Another will say adventurers are all over the place and make civilization possible.

A typical army is made up of 1-2 HD NPC's, yet town guards can take out 7th level PC's.

High-level magic is rare, but somehow a Dragon doesn't just roll up on a kingdom and destroy it utterly, Lonely Mountain style.

I know a lot of this depends on the campaign- Eberron has prevalent low level magic, but few high-level magic users, and the Forgotten Realms, despite a large population of adventurers, seems to be the reverse- there's no low level casters making huge advances in society, but the setting is lousy with powerful archmages and liches.

But it makes discussing the game difficult since everyone has a different idea of how common or uncommon these things are. Is it possible to reach some kind of consensus here?

3rd Edition (the real sim edition) had actual rules on demographics. You could consult a table and determine not just the highest level (insert class here) for a city, village, etc, but how many PC-classed characters there are there. I'm not sure what you mean by town guards taking on 7th-level PCs, that is pretty rare in any edition I've dealt with town guards in. IIRC they tend to vary from 1st to 3rd level (depending on the edition). Are 5e town guards badass?

A dragon has little reason to destroy a kingdom. Why do that when you could harvest one instead? Furthermore the typical kingdom is kind of large. Sure a dragon could torch a lot of farmland, but that takes time. You might torch a town, but torched towns can be rebuilt, and time torching one town is time not torching another town. Taking on a castle is actually difficult even for a dragon. It could kill an entire army packed together so, um, don't send an army against a dragon. A party of high level adventurers might work though. I suspect there aren't that many dragons or other powerful creatures like that. No numbers for dragons, but IIRC there are only 13 pit fiends, and each is given a specific task to do. There might only be a few elder wyrms in existence at any one time.

Different settings are where things start to fall apart. The Forgotten Realms has so many high-level good-aligned wizards that, yes, the setting doesn't really make sense. That's one reason it got spellplagued. Sure Elminster is still around, but his (in-game 4e stats) are a far cry from his 2e heyday.

For my own setting, I put things in the early 1300s, since I'm a fan of the Hundred Years War, and also don't want to deal with explosives or hand-held firearms. Sure, the setting may advance a hundred years in a hundred years, but my campaign will not last that long, so I don't need to worry about it. Of course Forgotten Realms and some other settings have histories going back thousands of years where nothing changed. I don't think the demographics are the issue, but the frequent Realms Shaking Events.

 

[Oofta]

It's very dependent on taste and campaign style. In my campaign world fairly powerful NPCs are not uncommon, although they do tend to max out in the low double digits. I wouldn't bother putting an actual percentage on it, but the elite guardians of a city are probably around level 10-ish at least. The number of 20th level NPCs running around is few, even if many are PCs from previous campaigns.

With bounded accuracy, a large number of even low level troops can do significant damage to most high level monsters. Add in thing like ballista that are specifically designed to take down dragons that we never invented because we didn't have a reason to, a bit of magic here and there, and voila cities can be defended. The world has always been a dangerous place. Historically the danger came from other people, not monsters.

 

[eight194i]

The world has always been a dangerous place. Historically the danger came from other people, not monsters.

 

[James Gasik]

3rd Edition (the real sim edition) had actual rules on demographics. You could consult a table and determine not just the highest level (insert class here) for a city, village, etc, but how many PC-classed characters there are there. I'm not sure what you mean by town guards taking on 7th-level PCs, that is pretty rare in any edition I've dealt with town guards in. IIRC they tend to vary from 1st to 3rd level (depending on the edition). Are 5e town guards badass?

A dragon has little reason to destroy a kingdom. Why do that when you could harvest one instead? Furthermore the typical kingdom is kind of large. Sure a dragon could torch a lot of farmland, but that takes time. You might torch a town, but torched towns can be rebuilt, and time torching one town is time not torching another town. Taking on a castle is actually difficult even for a dragon. It could kill an entire army packed together so, um, don't send an army against a dragon. A party of high level adventurers might work though. I suspect there aren't that many dragons or other powerful creatures like that. No numbers for dragons, but IIRC there are only 13 pit fiends, and each is given a specific task to do. There might only be a few elder wyrms in existence at any one time.

Different settings are where things start to fall apart. The Forgotten Realms has so many high-level good-aligned wizards that, yes, the setting doesn't really make sense. That's one reason it got spellplagued. Sure Elminster is still around, but his (in-game 4e stats) are a far cry from his 2e heyday.

For my own setting, I put things in the early 1300s, since I'm a fan of the Hundred Years War, and also don't want to deal with explosives or hand-held firearms. Sure, the setting may advance a hundred years in a hundred years, but my campaign will not last that long, so I don't need to worry about it. Of course Forgotten Realms and some other settings have histories going back thousands of years where nothing changed. I don't think the demographics are the issue, but the frequent Realms Shaking Events.

The super guards are kind of a joke, but I have seen games where DM's abjectly refuse to let players just run amok, regardless of how weird it is to have super guards like old school CRPG's (Ultima III requires you to rob a chest in a town, and then you have to try and avoid endlessly spawning guards who can totally murder your party).

And yes, I'm aware that humans are a big problem in our own history, but there's no shortage of regular bandits and raiders in D&D before you take into account humanoids and rampaging monsters.

As for Dragon vs. town, no, I don't imagine the average dragon is going to be like Smaug and try to burn a town to the ground (though don't forget, he almost succeeded!), they have more efficient ways to deal with annoying humans and the like, but there are big monsters that are basically immune to normal people's ability to harm them. The dragonfear of a big old dragon alone can be impossible for non-adventurers to save against, after all.

Again though, this thread is simply a reaction to how everyone has a different view of how things occur in a D&D world. One guy says "high level characters are rare", great, fantastic, so why don't monsters run amok? Another guy says "well monsters are rare", to which my response is, then how to the PC's keep running into them?

To which yet another individual replies "there are no monsters near major centers of population". Ok, but why?

"Well that's because of high level characters."

Wait...didn't we establish those don't exist? LOL. And yes, I know, that's not the same person saying both things, but in aggregate, any time you have a discussion about these things, someone is going to show up saying "you're wrong, it's not like that because...", as if the way they see the game is the only possible viewpoint, and the rest of us are madmen.

Oh wait. Maybe I am a madman after all!

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

but there are big monsters that are basically immune to normal people's ability to harm them. The dragonfear of a big old dragon alone can be impossible for non-adventurers to save against, after all.

This reminds me of a post on an Eberron forum, where a demon (or devil) with Teleport Without Error (at will) and Dominate Person (at will) could literally take over the entire setting.

I don't think there's a "fix" for the varying viewpoints issue, but I use the 3e demographics table as a "starting point".

 

[TwoSix]

But it makes discussing the game difficult since everyone has a different idea of how common or uncommon these things are. Is it possible to reach some kind of consensus here?

I don't think it's possible to reach a consensus, and I don't even think it's desirable to reach a consensus. I've run different campaigns with those values at very different levels to achieve the feel I want for each particular campaign.

Trying to achieve a baseline to facilitate forum discussion doesn't seem like a particularly worthy goal over giving people freedom to determine the playstyle they want for their games.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In my Jewel of the Desert game...it's a bit difficult to nail down precisely.

Formally, by Dungeon World rules, there is only one Wizard, and it is the party's Wizard. There is only one Paladin, and it is the party's Paladin. Etc. I find this excessively limiting. But I do take seriously the idea that the player characters are special in some way--and have worked to build up appropriately special characteristics for each of them.

So, in the Tarrakhuna, there are many rawuna (bards), but only Tajah al-Abayya is a half-human, half-devil, half-demon (it's complicated and magic is involved) hybrid Bard/Druid/Cleric/soon-to-be-Swordmage who has been revealed (or declared, depending on your perspective) as the messiah-like figure, the Lord of the Ravens, for a murder cult, which he is now using his "living prophet" status to reform from within. (He's slowly winning converts from the skeptical faction--the cult naturally split into internecine conflict over whether Taj IS the Lord of the Ravens or a flashy false prophet--but on pure numbers alone, his faction would still lose if they resorted to open warfare. Given they are all effectively ninjas, they have not resorted to open warfare...but it's not off the table.)

In the Tarrakhuna, there are many Safiqi priests (in principle, Clerics) and their Temple Knights (Paladins), but none are proper character-class Paladins. The way I view this, protagonist-hood falls upon someone perhaps by chance, perhaps by fate/destiny/heritage, perhaps by unremitting ambition (technically, all three of these are present in our current party). Ironically, we don't have any Clerics or Paladins, but at this point, four different characters have chosen to at least learn from the priesthood, taking some amount of formal lessons (in order of chronology, the now-absent Wizard, the Bard, the currently-hiatus'd Ranger, and the recently-returned Druid have all sought some amount of Cleric training, with the Ranger and Druid seeking to become proper priests in addition to their other focuses.)

More or less, the "camera" only "focuses on" the PCs because there's something worth focusing on, but sometimes why that is isn't clear initially. We build it up together. But ultimately, no one in the world could ever quite be what these folks are, whether because luck doesn't strike twice, destiny is choosy about its champions, or no one else has quite the ambition these folks do. (The latter mostly because the typical ambitions are not "get really good at doing super dangerous things for occasional rewards" and instead are usually "become incredibly rich and retire to a life of luxury and parties in my private villa.")

 

[Stormonu]

I've gone by this advice from the DM's option: High Level Campaigns for years:

High-level characters don’t just spring into existence overnight. It takes an exceptional person just to survive the rigors of an adventuring life,
and characters who make it to the top should be both rare and famous.

Just how rare are high-level characters? Let’s assume, for purposes of this example, that the minimum requirement for an adventurer is having an ability score of 15 or better in a prime requisite in one of the four character classes (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Wisdom), a Constitution score of at least 9, and no other score lower than an 8. About one person in 10 meets these requirements if ability scores are rolled using the standard method of rolling 3d6 once for each ability score. (If your campaign uses an alternate method for rolling ability scores, what you’re really doing is making sure your PCs fall into the top 10%, non-adventurers are still assumed to use the standard method).

Now, let’s assume that out of every group of adventures only half actually make it to the next level (the remainder either die, retire, or just haven’t yet accumulated enoughexperience to advance). This last assumption is an oversimplification, of course, but a little arithmetic produces some instructive results:

There is only one 10th level character in a general population of 5,000. The actual numbers are summarized in Table 1.

An 18th level character of any class is truly a one-in-a-million individual. Only .2% of the population (1 in 500) qualifies to be a paladin. Other subclasses with strict ability score requirements (such as bards, rangers, and druids) are equally rare. Keep these numbers in mind when creating NPCs for your campaign. Your world not only becomes more believable if it isn’t overrun with super characters, but your players
have a greater sense of accomplishment when they realize just what they have achieved.

Be sure to keep important NPCs alive when possible—it can take a generation to replace a high-level character.

Table 1	Demographics
General Population	Character Level	Approx. No. in 1,000,000
10​	1 1st	133,120​
20​	1 2nd	66,560​
40​	1 3rd	33,280​
80​	1 4th	16,640​
160​	1 5th	8,320​
320​	1 6th	4,120​
640​	1 7th	2,080​
1,380​	1 8th	1,040​
2,560​	1 9th	512​
5,120​	1 10th	256​
10,240​	1 11th	128​
20,480​	1 12th	64​
40,960​	1 13th	32​
81,920​	1 14th	16​
163,840​	1 15th	8​
326,680​	1 16th	4​
655,360​	1 17th	2​
1,310,720​	1 18th	1​

As shorthand, I treat a war veteran as about a 3rd level character, a "master" character (such as wizard or drill sergeant) whose competent enough to train apprentices as 5th and an experienced warlord/king/master craftsman - anyone at the peak of their skill - as 9th level. Anyone above 9th is a mythical sort of character who is famous in song and tale.