Demographics of Level

[Mercurius]

The thread in the 4E forum on "The Slow Death of Epic Tier" got me thinking about, for lack of a better or more accurate term, the "demographics of level."

While I'd like to keep this open to players of every edition of D&D, I'm going to use 4E vernacular. In your campaign world, what percentage of player character races (speaking, intelligent, civilized people that are generally accepted in the market of a major city) are leveled? What percentage of PC races are Heroic tier? Paragon tier? Epic tier? What's the ratio of, say, Epic tier characters to Paragon tier, to various levels of Heroic tier?

I'm going to try figuring this out for my own campaign world as I write. There are roughly a million inhabitants in the region of my campaign, an area roughly a third the size of the United States. It is very much a "points of light" style setting, meaning it is (obviously) sparsely inhabited, with vast stretches of wilderness, very few settled regions, and a high percentage of adventurers. I'm going to make this up as I write, but I figure:

total population of region: 1 million
lower Heroic tier (1-5 level): 50-100,000
upper Heroic tier (6-10): 5-10,000
lower Paragon tier (11-15): 200-500
upper Paragon tier (16-20): 100-200
Epic tier (21+): <50

That means that about 5-10% of the total population is equivalent to a leveled character; roughly 10% of 1st level characters either survive or advance to 6th level, and less than 1% survive or advance to Paragon tier, and less than 1-in-1,000 make it to Epic tier.

How does that sound? Again, I just made those numbers up on the fly (except for the million total population), so am not attached to them if they make little sense.

(I vaguely remenber writing a thread like this some years ago, either here or on RPG.Net but I forget the details and don't have a link)

 

[Alzrius]

Using the population tables in the 3.5 DMG, and some guesswork inspired by a similar essay I saw elsewhere, I attempted to chart the population of a game world - as well as the number of spells that exist in the world - in this post on my EN World blog.

It's pretty dry throughout the middle (where I'm just listing statistics for the different types of communities), but the beginning and end were, in my opinion, not so bad.

Looking back, I think it could probably use some tuning up. If I were to do this now, I'd increase the global population total five- or six-fold, and make it clear that I was talking about all creatures of the Humanoid type.

 

[Bluenose]

A vague demographic rule I work with is to have twice as many people at one level as there are at one level higher. So of your million people, half a million are effectively first level, a quarter of a million are second, etc. Which would give me 30,000 in upper heroic, 946 in lower paragon, 30 in upper paragon, and 1 epic.

At lower levels, I'd suggest at most 5-10% of those would have proper classes, rising to nearly everyone by paragon tier.

 

[kitsune9]

I'd say that Mercurius' figures pretty much match mine for in my Pathfinder game.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I might apply a normal distribution. Say that 1-sigma worth of the population (68%) are non-levelled commoners and others. To the 2-sigma point (95%) you have lower heroic tier, and to the 3-sigma point (99.7%) you have upper heroic tier. Lower and upper paragon tier are 4- and 5-sigma, with Epic tier being 6-sigma and beyond.

So with a million population, that gives, approximately:

682,700 commoner/non-levelled types
271,800 1st to 5th levels
42,800 5th to 10th levels
2,600 10th to 15th levels
99 15th to 20th levels
1 20th + level

(some fudge factors included for rounding)

 

[renau1g]

And that 1 20th level is the demi-lich who betrayed and killed the rest of his party to rise to lichdom

 

[Celebrim]

Assuming a population of humans, my campaign assumes:

0th level (mostly children): 33%
1st level: 16%
2nd level: 20%
3rd level: 16%
4th level: 12%
5th level: 2%
6th level: ~1%
7th level: ~0.1%

Above 7th level is a pretty vanishingly small number. In my current campaign, so far as I know, the entire nation contains only one 9th level character. There is only 2 characters I know at 8th level in the capital (40,000 people). That indicates that 9th level characters are probably somewhere between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 100,000.

(I'm more free with 7th-9th level NPC classed characters, especially elderly commoners. However, in terms of ability an elderly commoner is usually effectively only 2nd level or less in everything but skills. Grandma may be 9th level, but her CR is 1 at best.)

 

[Stormonu]

The old 2e High Level Campaign Payer's Option had a discussion of this topic in it. It had the math computed out for a population with a stat range of 3-18 distribution how likely a character would be an adventurer and how likely an individual was to attain a given level (if of adventuring quality).

I forget the exact numbers, but someone of over 5th level was somewhere in the odds of 1 in 1000 and I think someone of over 10th level was in the order of 1 in a million (though it could very well be 20th level was 1 in a million - it been a while since I cracked the book, and I can't get to it here).

 

[the Jester]

Heh.

4e really complicates demographic matters, since a creature's "level" is treated not as an independent thing in its own right, but an explicitly gamist convention that might change relative to the pcs.

In other words, when the pcs face off against the sheriff of Pellinsia at 1st level, he's a 2nd level solo; when they fight him at 6th level, he is a 7th level elite; when he accompanies them on a mission at 10th level, he's a 9th level 'standard'; and when they come back to Pellinsia after months abroad at 16th level, he's a 15th level minion.

That said...

My basic approach in years past was basically a 10/50% rule. You have the population of "0-levels"? You have 1/10 that in 1st level npcs. Then you have half the number of 1st-levels at 2nd level, half that again for 3rd level, etc. This doesn't include exceptional characters, either pc or npc (most exceptional npcs are either not tied to a location or have grown in power alongside the pcs over time).

So if I had an area with a population of approx 1 million, I'd end up ballparking a little and having one of the following results. Note that neither yields precisely a population of one million, but they're close enough for me.

Result 1: One Million 0-Levels

0 level: 1,000,000
1st level: 100,000
2nd level: 50,000
3rd level: 25,000
4th level: 12,500
5th level: 6,250
6th level: 3,125
7th level: 1,562
8th level: 781
9th level: 390
10th level: 195
11th level: 97
12th level: 48
13th level: 24
14th level: 12
15th level: 6
16th level: 3
17th level: 1

Total Pop. 1,200,024


Result 2: Population (Approx.) One Million Total

0 level: 820,000
1st level: 82,000
2nd level: 41,000
3rd level: 20,500
4th level: 10,250
5th level: 5,125
6th level: 2,562
7th level: 1,281
8th level: 640
9th level: 320
10th level: 160
11th level: 80
12th level: 40
13th level: 20
14th level: 10
15th level: 5
16th level: 2
17th level: 1

Total Pop. 983,996

 

[Lanefan]

Disclaimer: my game is 1e-based, so the level range doesn't go as high.

I've never really thought deeply about it, but have always kind of assumed there'd be lots of low-ish level types (militia, acolytes, petty thieves, etc.; the 0-2 range), a fair number of mid-level types (adventurers, veterans, stay-at-home clerics and guild wizards, etc.; the 3-5 range), and a reasonable smattering of high-level sorts (temple and guild higher-ups, some nobility, adventurers, etc.; the 6-9 range). Only at and after 10th level would it start to really thin out, as most normal people would retire by that point. I've never put hard numbers to it, though.

That said, I've taken most limits off most class-race combinations and so in my game it's possible to run into a 27th-level Elf Cleric or a 30th-level insane Illusionist; both have already occurred.

Lanefan