Legend
First Post
The other day, I was having a discussion with one of my players about how many NPCs of each level there would be in a city of 50,000 people. I mulled it over for a while and eventually produced a kludgy, meaningless equation that I felt generated sensible numbers. I was half way done transcribing the numbers into my campaign wiki when I realized that there might be a way to do it that would produce good numbers *and* make sense. Here's what I came up with... If you have any comments, please post them below. Furthermore, if there is any interest, I will post my spreadsheet with my equations on it on RPG Hoard.
First, I divided my population into groups of people. To keep things simple, I assumed that there were 3 groups: commoners, people with NPC classes (skilled workers, mercenaries, nobility, and such), and people with PC classes (adventurers, guild masters, some clergy, etc). For specific locations, there may be different groups, perhaps single classes could form a group, or race/class combinations. How complicated you want to get with this is entirely up to you. The important thing about a group is that if you have X people at some level, then you have X * Y people at one level higher (Y in this case is a percentage value below 100%, so you always have less people per level as the level rises).
Given the percentage of the population each group makes up, and the levelling rate of each group, you can determine how many people of each level there are in each group. For example:
Let's say that commoners make up 80% of my population. Artisans, nobles, and professionals make up anoter 19%. Finally, adventurer types make up the remaining 1%.
Assume that commoners have a 10% level rate, Artisans have a 45% level rate, and adventurers have a 90% level rate.
You end up with a chart that looks something like this:
Commoners:
1 72,000
2 7,200
3 720
4 72
5 7
6 1
NPC Classes:
1 10,450
2 4,703
3 2,116
4 952
5 429
6 193
7 87
8 39
9 18
10 8
11 4
12 2
13 1
Adventurers:
1 114
2 102
3 92
4 83
5 75
6 67
7 60
8 54
9 49
10 44
11 40
12 36
13 32
14 29
15 26
16 23
17 21
18 19
19 17
20 15
The trick to generating these numbers quickly and easily is to let a spreadsheet do it for you. The total population listed above adds up to precisely 100,000. The beauty is that if the numbers don't look right for your campaign, it's trivial to change the group proportions and level rates, and even add new groups of people.
I realize I may have gone way overboard on this, but it's becoming clear to me as my campaign world spans the years that demographics are imporant for maintaining internal consistency, especially for a campaign that centers around a city and may involve wars and such. It took me several hours to come up with all of this, which is why I decided to share it, on the off chance that it might save someone the effort (as well as possibly allow me to refine my calculations).
If anyone is interested in the spreadsheet, let me know and I'll clean it up and post it online, then link it here.
Comments?
First, I divided my population into groups of people. To keep things simple, I assumed that there were 3 groups: commoners, people with NPC classes (skilled workers, mercenaries, nobility, and such), and people with PC classes (adventurers, guild masters, some clergy, etc). For specific locations, there may be different groups, perhaps single classes could form a group, or race/class combinations. How complicated you want to get with this is entirely up to you. The important thing about a group is that if you have X people at some level, then you have X * Y people at one level higher (Y in this case is a percentage value below 100%, so you always have less people per level as the level rises).
Given the percentage of the population each group makes up, and the levelling rate of each group, you can determine how many people of each level there are in each group. For example:
Let's say that commoners make up 80% of my population. Artisans, nobles, and professionals make up anoter 19%. Finally, adventurer types make up the remaining 1%.
Assume that commoners have a 10% level rate, Artisans have a 45% level rate, and adventurers have a 90% level rate.
You end up with a chart that looks something like this:
Commoners:
1 72,000
2 7,200
3 720
4 72
5 7
6 1
NPC Classes:
1 10,450
2 4,703
3 2,116
4 952
5 429
6 193
7 87
8 39
9 18
10 8
11 4
12 2
13 1
Adventurers:
1 114
2 102
3 92
4 83
5 75
6 67
7 60
8 54
9 49
10 44
11 40
12 36
13 32
14 29
15 26
16 23
17 21
18 19
19 17
20 15
The trick to generating these numbers quickly and easily is to let a spreadsheet do it for you. The total population listed above adds up to precisely 100,000. The beauty is that if the numbers don't look right for your campaign, it's trivial to change the group proportions and level rates, and even add new groups of people.
I realize I may have gone way overboard on this, but it's becoming clear to me as my campaign world spans the years that demographics are imporant for maintaining internal consistency, especially for a campaign that centers around a city and may involve wars and such. It took me several hours to come up with all of this, which is why I decided to share it, on the off chance that it might save someone the effort (as well as possibly allow me to refine my calculations).
If anyone is interested in the spreadsheet, let me know and I'll clean it up and post it online, then link it here.
Comments?
