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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6123696" data-attributes="member: 8461">Recently, I was reading a thread over on a thread on the Paizo forums about <a href="http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2po1l?Population-and-Character-Levels" target="_blank">character populations and levels</a>, when someone posted about how they thought that an old Greyhawk supplement had said that one-half the population was 1st level, and that segment halved each time you went up a level. That meant that one-fourth of the population was 2nd-level, one-eighth of the population was 3rd-level, etc.He couldn't cite what Greyhawk book said this, and I suspect he's misremembering, but it struck me as a very cool way of calculating the relative ratio for character levels, especially higher-level and epic-level characters, against the background of the general population. Just for fun I decided to plug in some higher numbers.For example, let's calculate how many 30th-level characters exist in the world under this system.Since the denominator of this particular fraction (e.g. 1/X) needs to double each time it goes up a level, we'll need to figure out what it would be by the time we reach thirty places. Luckily, we can calculate that fairly easy as follows: X = 2^N, where N is the level we're inputting. Given that, the number we're searching for here is 1,073,741,824.Now that we know that, we can properly compute what we're looking for: only 1 person in every 1,073,741,824 is level 30. So we divide 1 by 1,073,741,824 and get 0.000000000931322574615478515625.Wow, that's a big, long, ugly number! It is, however, just a fraction (multiply it by 100 to turn it into a percentage) and so doesn't seem to have much practical value.The practical value comes from multiplying this fraction into the total population. Suppose that Greyhawk had a population equal to our own world, or seven billion. If we multiply 0.000000000931322574615478515625 with 7,000,000,000 we get a result of 6.5, which we'll round down to 6.Long story short, then, is that (using the above metric) there are six level 30 characters in a population of seven billion. That can be a fun sort of number to world-build (or just theory-craft) with, particularly if you use U_K's standard of assigning (in IH: Ascension) a link between divinity templates and equivalent levels - for example, Ascension tells us that level 30 is the minimum level needed to be a demigod. So out of a population of seven billion, only six people would ever ascend far enough to become demigods.Plug in higher levels (e.g. a level 100 greater deity) against a greater background population (let's say 700,000,000,000,000,000 for the population of an entire galaxy), and as soon as you get a non-fraction number, you can figure out the amount of people you'd need to get someone of that level (e.g. the ruler of that entire galaxy).Who says uber-epic levels aren't fun?</blockquote>

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