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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SKyOdin" data-source="post: 5392180" data-attributes="member: 57939">In my book, the only adventurers likely to exist are the PCs, who only exist because of the peculiar circumstances that drive the campaign. NPCs rarely get over 4th or 5th level (in 4E terms). There might be only a few dozen level 10+ NPCs in the entire setting (depending on the needs of the campaign), and even they are probably not on par with equal leveled PCs. So for my notions of D&D demographics, the idea of a military unit of even mid level characters is ludicrous. Of course, my preference in D&D leans towards a major focus on the importance of the PCs. I see no reason why NPCs need to gain experience or otherwise follow the rules PCs do, since D&D rules are not natural laws. People with other preferences will probably produce different demographics.As for your previous post:Remember that in a pre-industrial society where more than 90% of people need to live off the land, it is extremely uncommon for someone to even have the opportunity to learn how to read, let alone acquire higher knowledge. In medieval villages, there were only a handful of literate people. The only people who had access to any kind of real education were the wealthy elite. There was no place in the world where this wasn't true up until the 19th century. If we assume that magic is a particularly difficult subject, at least on par with a college education, then there would be no way a peasant could learn magic without very special circumstances, and there would only be a few skilled mages even among the wealthy elite.Remember, magic and alchemy were considered legitimate fields of study through most of human history. It is possible to get a pretty reasonable idea of how many mages might exist in a historically based setting by looking at the demographics of real world wizards and alchemists. There definitely wasn't one or two in every town and village. Of course, randomly occurring appearances of sorcerers might skew these estimates, but there is no guarantee they would know any useful magic.This discussion is getting way off topic. Maybe we should fork it off into another thread, again.</blockquote>

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