how many of powerful beings and/or high-level characters do you think is appropriate in a typical fantasy world?

[Crimson Longinus]

So I don't have exact numbers, but I certainly have thought about how common NPCs of various levels are, and what do the level actually mean. I wanted to avoid the Faerûn effect, where there are high level NPCs hanging around every corner, and I also wanted to avoid the Warcraft effect of the world strangely scaling up with the characters. On Artra tier 4 NPCs are super rare. It might be illustrative that it is known that the Archmages of Shimbal are famed of their ability to cast spells of "all the eight circles of magic." Yes, people who are able to cast ninth level spells are rare enough that even the existence of such magic is considered a myth. There are of course handful of individuals of 17+ levels, but they're very rare legendary, or even mythic, individuals.

 

[RangerWickett]

My current campaign involves one nation. There are like eight 11th level priests, one 17th level one, and a couple angels kicking around and CR 13 monsters roaming the wastes and a lich gathering an army of the dead the next country over. Seems complex enough.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

A long time ago (1E era) I internalized a few general principles with regard to level demographics:

(1) PC-class characters comprise 1% of the population
(2) 50% of PC-classed characters are Fighter-types, 25% Rogue-types, 15% divine casters, 10% arcane casters
(3) The prevalence of any given level follows a geometric sequence with a common ratio of 0.5, i.e for every character of level n, there are half as many characters of level n+1.

So a population of a million might be expected to support a single 13th-level character.

Now, I realize that this is a very low incidence of high-level characters by modern standards. i think its main strength lies in the fact that such a world can be reasonably expected to follow the same kind of rules as our own: i.e. the prevalence of high-level characters (especially spellcasters) is not so much that it undermines the logical consistency of the setting.

 

[Joanna Geist]

You just did a drive by shooting with a meme and you think I'm the one not participating in good faith? I'm not sure that your posts are substantiative enough to count as participating, but I know they are not meant to provoke any sort of good faith discussion on technique or theory.

Which meme? What drive by shooting? What are you talking about?