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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RyvenCedrylle" data-source="post: 4971284" data-attributes="member: 66726">The first and most important question here is "What are the consequences of all/some/none of the NPCs completing the journey?"  So far all you've given are benefits or penalties from having the NPCs following along.  If the result of getting all the refugees to the new place is "yay, we did it," I wouldn't even bother tracking live and dead.  If you're going to hand out XP or gold, scale treasure bundles or do some sort of worldbuilding/storybuilding based on living refugees at the end of the journey, then track population to your heart's content.  Otherwise, what does it matter?  If you're really dead set on doing it (heh heh), I would decide what actions or rolls constitute NPC mortality and roll a d6 or maybe d8 each time that happens to determine the body count rather than try complicated math (and I love complicated math).  NPC death should, of course, affect morale.On the other hand, I think morale is a much more useful and interesting thing to track and I would use the disease-track system because it gives the PCs more agency (thank you Mouseferatu).  You can always rule that certain events trigger specific movements along the track, but I think that if you base the movements on those events and the players take the idea in a totally different direction than you expected (as players are wont to do), it's more easily circumvented.</blockquote>