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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 2955047" data-attributes="member: 32740">Forgive me, but forget the data points of the "RAW".  They're not useful.  Be VERY aware of just what those tables in the DMG are for:  "When the PC's come into a town and you need to generate facts about that town quickly[...].  To randomly determine the size of a community, roll on table 5-2 below."  Emphasis mine.  These tables are for when you either can't or won't provide the information they generate on your own.  RANDOMLY determining the size of your game worlds population on a regular basis is a BAD way to go about it.  Even using charts and formulae on a regular basis for this stuff rather than your own good judgement is a bad way to go about it.  Those charts in the DMG are HIGHLY simplistic and as such are just about guaranteed to produce results so skewed that it would be amazing that they actually work as a model of demographics for anyone.I've used them of course, but eventually I saw that they were not going to produce results that worked consistently from one of my campaigns to the next much less for any given campaign I might be running.  For example, by those charts 50% of all communities are under 1000 population.  IMO that's as it should be.  But who in their right mind randomly generates a population of 25,000 or more for a campaign and says, "Yeah.  That fits?"  Or what if you're running a specific setting like the Forgotten Realms which has a LOT of large cities sprinkled across it, some of which have populations in the HUNDREDS of thousands and even 1,000,000 or more?  The tables take no account of cities that may be abnormally wealthy or poor, that have seasonal population shifts, that have other cultural or sociological factors at work like the DM intentionally running a low-magic campaign, or a nation recovering from a protracted and bloody war.  A basic consideration is that certain population centers will simply blow the formula because it does become a center of power, a center of culture, a center of trade, or the like that a simple % roll cannot account for.Personally, I think the old 1E demographic suggestion of 1 in 100 even being capable of level advancement is probably closer to what would be useful and desireable for more campaigns.  But I could be wrong on that one. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I think the real problem is that for ANY tables or formulae to work you need to have a grasp of what the sizes of your population centers ARE, not determine them randomly.  Then you need to have an idea of what kind of representation of leveled characters you want FIRST, before you derive a formula that will provide an array for a given population level.  Then you have to be willing to ignore the results anyway and just decide what you want despite what the "formula" tells you should be there.YMMV</blockquote>

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