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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1993325" data-attributes="member: 7240">mmadsen,Thanks for doing the math on this.You're using more favourable stats for kobolds and bugbears than you should. Use the average stats for the races not the warrior stats. Remember: kobold warrior stats in the MM are based on rolls of 13,11,12,10,9,8; the test case should be 10.5 across the board which, after the modifications, would come out to 6.5,12.5,8.5,10.5,10.5,10.5. DMH, I think you're working with a lot of fallacies. 1. I don't think that in most campaign worlds, there are thousands of adventurers pouring into monstrous humanoids' lands every year functioning as the principal check on their populations.2. The historical and literary records do not show that land hunger is the primary motivation for war. Your model assumes that war varies directly with population density. But, in fact, as I have already stated, when there have been significant ie. greater than 50% drops in population, people have actually responded by going to war more. As I mentioned, in every significant demographic collapse we know of, some populations have responded by becoming signficantly more warlike. This is not surprising because land hunger is not what drives war -- it drives migration. Migration sometimes results in war; war is sometimes caused by migration but more often than not, things other than migration cause war. Furthermore, depending on the type of disaster we are talking about, people's response to the disaster may be to relocate.3. Kobolds are not notorious raiders -- they are evil, cruel and cowardly but according to the MM, they rarely attack anything more than 10 miles outside their territory.4. The Monster Manual does not posit the same high birth rate for kobolds that Dragon does. According to the MM, there is a very high adult to child ratio.5. Surely the offensive value in combat of a kobold must have some statistical relevance. Otherwise, bacteria or ants or whatever would win because they multiply even faster. So you cannot argue that the number of hit points and damage per attack are "irrelevant." 6. Similar alignments are not the only factor in an alliance. Creatures of opposing alignments could still coordinate their activities if there existed an imminent, mutual deadly threat. This is a grossly simplistic argument there have been various contests at various times between agricultural civilizations and other types of civilizations such as pastoral and hunter-gatherer groups. Sometimes the agriculturalists lose these contests. The times when agriculturalists are most likely to lose these contests is when there has been a demographic collapse. In the Americas, demographic collapse caused a general increase in the territory occupied by hunter-gatherer peoples at the expense of agriculturalists. Similar things took place in the 6th century when agrarian societies were replaced by pastoral societies after a demographic collapse. Then there is the case of pastoralist Norse Greenlanders whose lands was conquerered by hunter-gatherers in the 14th century.Whoa there! I thought you said the most important factor was numbers. If you now acknowledge that superior force and offensive power may be the most important factor, you need to show how sorcerors are somehow a more offensively powerful class than any other. As I understand it, 3.5 is balanced so that every class is equally powerful. So, why would a race whose favoured class is fighter be less powerful than one whose favoured class is sorceror?Finally, you cite some statistics indicating that it takes 21 times longer for an elf to become capable of combat or reproduction than a kobold. Again, I must ask, how has the world as it exists now come into being if kobolds populations grow so absurdly quickly? You still have not show why conditions will be different if all populations decline by an equal proportion. The populations' relative strenghts after the disaster will all be equal to what they were before. The only argument you have presented is that somehow the disaster will inaugurate a period of peace; but you have come up with no evidence that this will be the case.I agree. Perhaps the original poster could give us a sense of things.</blockquote>

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