D&D General Humanoids...and world demographics

[Krachek]

I’m too visual of a person to cast things like this into numbers. Like, I’m going to watch the Super Bowl later, and the stadium will be packed with something like 70,000 people or so and if I look at that I think, okay that’s about how many people I think are enough for a big fantasy city. It’s the visual of that many people that sticks with me. It’s the same thing with quantifying distances. Telling me it’s a 30 foot deep crevasse means little to me. Telling me it’s about the height of a 3 story building, I have the visual reference now.

It is the way for me too.
To describe using common reference. The local stadium, carnival, shopping streets.
Once you describe the stadium, you let players imagine the rest of the city and country around.

 

[Chaltab]

Lizardmen, Rakasta, Tengu: 5% ish

Do you just use the standard Tabaxi or Leonin for the Rakasta or do you have something custom?

 

[SkidAce]

Do you just use the standard Tabaxi or Leonin for the Rakasta or do you have something custom?

I have custom rakasta for the baseline. Once Tabaxi and Leonin were published, I used them as species/cultural variations in different parts of the world.

 

[TwoSix]

For my 20th level Planescape game, I've specified that there are about 450 known Prime Material worlds, with a total of 550 billion souls. So about 1.2 billion per world, although there are 2 dozen or so that are 5 billion+, and at least half the worlds have less than 10 million.

 

[GreatestHonor]

For my 20th level Planescape game, I've specified that there are about 450 known Prime Material worlds, with a total of 550 billion souls. So about 1.2 billion per world, although there are 2 dozen or so that are 5 billion+, and at least half the worlds have less than 10 million.

Seems like something an in-setting bookkeeper would keep track of. Very nice

 

[pemerton]

I can't do an actual demographic breakdown because I don't work with real numbers.

That's OK - you can count populations just working with natural numbers!

 

[aco175]

Looking at the numbers of Earth in the timeline I thought that those are just humans. Now add the other races and all of a sudden there are 20 times the numbers. But add in combat, and maybe they are back to what was posted for just humans.

I do not worry about any of this myself. Any racial numbers will vary based on plot and the need for making a good game as I see it. I generally have humans as the default and throw in a handful of mostly halfling, dwarf, and elf to towns and villages. The rest of the PHB races are more rare with maybe 5% of encounters. There are tons of goblins and other 'fodder' races like lizardmen and gnolls based on need. Other monsters become less as the size and CR of the monster increases.

 

[Chaltab]

That's OK - you can count populations just working with natural numbers!

I mean since these are fantasy worlds doesnt' that mean its populations are imaginary numbers?

 

[pemerton]

I mean since these are fantasy worlds doesnt' that mean its populations are imaginary numbers?

And I thought mine was a bad joke!

 

[cole1312]

A chaos daemon invasion reduced the world's population down to the low millions, with most in a single city and scattered strongholds across the planet. The key theme of the setting is disparate people who used to be opposed to each other forced to work together. So a region could have what used to be a dwarf stronghold, but now there's drow and kobolds and giant beavers there too.

As such for the ancestries available it's probably something like this from most to least common

Humans (can have kids with anyone else because of genetic tampering by elves millions of years ago, so very populous and cosmopolitan)
Goblins (fungal aliens that hitched a ride to the planet with the elves, technically very few hivemind colonies but lots of bodies)
Halflings (very good at creating healthy communities because of magic they learned in the ice age)
Leshies (wood elves that turn into plants as they age, mixing into forests)
Orcs (blood elves that know ancient nomadic paths and are hard to kill)
Dwarfs (lack magic which is bad for protection, but they can eat anything and live underground)
Kobolds (scavengers that hitch their souls to powerful creatures or societies. look and act different based on that, big human populations make them look like dogs. with dwarfs they look like rocky little golems. etc)
Cursed (humans who don't know why they're supernatural, like vampires/werewolves/beastmen and assume it's because the forgotten gods cursed them)
Tieflings (lust elves, their carapaces shift and change to help them blend in and survive but they're mistrusted and often abused)
Goliaths (descendants of people taken as thralls by ancient giants, hardy but rarely accepted by the communities their forefathers once pillaged)
Drow (dark elves, they suffer from chaotic mutations that caused the ancient high elves to attempt mass murder against their own children)
Newborn Elves (the youngest race, elves in the past got speciated by the forgotten gods as revenge for their horrible crimes against the world to the four elves mentioned up above. only recently was that reversed when the elves helped the same gods beat back chaos, however...)
High Elves (almost none remain because for so long no new ones could be born, so despite their immortality they were functionally extinct. the reversal of their speciation came at the cost of that same immortality so now they're aging and dying out just as the first new generation is born)

This roughly goes down from millions to a few dozen.