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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hellcow" data-source="post: 1651938" data-attributes="member: 15800">First off, please don't take these questions or comments the wrong way -- I'm just trying to cast things in the light of the setting. Out of honest curiosity, where are you getting this figure? Remember that population numbers for a community "represent the adult population". So once you rule out children, in D&D, how old do you have to be before you're unable to fight? Remember that in Khorvaire in particular, we're just coming off of a century of war, so they'll be stretching the limits. By the time you reach middle age (and the -2 modifier) you'll be less useful -- but there is also the question of average lifespan, and whether most people do become venerable at some point (especially in a wartorn world). I realize you're talking in general terms, not specifically about Eberron. In Khorvaire, this is pretty much a given until recently. Agreed there. Of course, Sharn has 211,000 people, so we weren't saying it could. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> And Sharn is dependent on the agricultural communities in the surrounding areas to provide food for the population.  The rest of your points here are good, but they're about a Sharn-sized city with a small population, which we've never claimed exists. Hence the "there's lots of space with no people at all", allowing for a reasonable concentration of people within the cities and villages that do exist. And, as I've said, a nation like Breland is effective a collection of city-states. My point is that I'm not going to defend it as logical. I'm going to defend it as something that supports adventuring. Looking to what *I* see as logical, large areas of unsettled space are the only way you should be able to get dangerous monsters; otherwise, if civilization has been established for an extended period of time, these creatures should have been hunted down and destroyed by the rulers of the community. Likewise for dungeons. Khorvaire accounts for the presence of dungeons, with the existance of Dhakaani ruins, remnants of the War of the Mark or the Age of Demons, and Khyber. But if you've had a village in the area for 300 years, why hasn't someone explored it already? You're not the first group of adventurers in the history of the world (though with that said, in Sharn the ruins were only partially explored before being sealed off). Open space allows for adventure. Continuous urban spread, as logical as it may be from a real-world perspective, is going to be less exciting. We've always said that it's a pulp setting, so look to Conan: the emphasis is on what works best for the story. When Conan is wandering in the wilderness and finds a lost temple -- well, I as a reader didn't think "So why aren't there a few villages nearby?"Again, it is not my intention to dismiss your concerns if this *does* bother you. I'm just saying that this is the purpose the space serves in the setting, and if you don't like it you should change it. But Khorvaire is not supposed to be fully settled from head to toe, and that's not something that will change. Actually, in this thread alone I've said that magic *is* used for communication, and that it could be used for the long-distance preservation of food (though what I've also said is that you don't have a magic refrigerator in every house). Magic is used for irrigation and healing -- though again within limits, so it's not as though ever person in the world can afford cure disease vacinations. Magic is used for transportation -- but it's not as widespread as it might be. Lightning rails do link the main cities, and while personal transport may be expensive, House Orien certainly deals in different prices for freight -- so if the farmers around Sharn have a huge surplus, enterprising merchants could buy it up and sell it in Starilaskur. It is neither as widespread or generally as effective as *21st century technology* The average house does not have a magic phone, a magic TV, and 1.5 magic cars. But it is used for many of the purposes technology has been used for in the past.  Actually, intelligent humanoids (who are not necessarily going to be evil) will generally have created civilizations of their own, as found in Darguun and Droaam. Eating random passerby may not be top of their list. With that say, you may be refering to the "lost city of grimlocks" I suggested earlier, for which I had my previous Conan example in mind. Even there, my thought was "dungeon with small population of degenerate grimlocks", not "highly organized militant nation of grimlocks". There may be populations of goblinoids or orcs hidden away from the days of Dhakaan -- most of the population of Darguun was lurking in the mountains and marshes before being called out by the war -- but again, a goblin enclave in the middle of Breland is unlikely to go looking for a fight. When I mentioned monsters in the wastelands, I was thinking more of the wandering gray render, the pack of manticores that has just recently settled around the road, things like that. Not the intelligent monsters that should form their own civilizations -- but the animals and magical beasts that could pose a threat to adventurers. Hmm, just like in The Hobbit when the trolls "come down from the mountains" - the issue is not "why on earth do people ever travel when trolls and stone giants are out there".... but rather, there exists the chance that if you travel, you might encounter a troll or a giant, because they haven't all been hunted down and destroyed. Because, as I said, in the case of the missing BAB no-one can use the class until it is fixed... and if you make the wrong fix the class is unbalanced and provides a quantifiable advantage or disadvantage compared to other classes, as compared to population numbers which most people will say "there's as many people as I want for purposes of this scene". If a spell is too powerful and will cause written adventures to be too easy, it needs to be addressed. But if the issue in question has no quantifiable impact on most people's adventures, it does not *need* to be addressed. I am not arguing that certain people feel "well if I use these numbers as stand, they *would* have a quantifiable impact!" -- but that's only because you've gone to the trouble of figuring out precisely what those numbers should mean, deciding that the world needs to have a consisted spread to be logical, and enforcing those on the scene... and even then, if you pick up a published adventure, it's not going to say "use population denisty to determine the number of monsters in this scene." It is something that may make people uncomfortable in the world, but it will not prevent them from using game materials. And the less errata the better, because again, not everyone will have access to the errata in the first place. If you don't have to contradict what's been published, it's always better not to. In this case, people CAN adjust the population numbers to whatever they are comfortable with, and there's no danger that you'll make the population TOO dense and oh, that's going to ruin that printed adventure as well.   I respect your opinion on this, and as I said, I'm not the one who came up with these final numbers. But they don't bother me. I am content with the explanations that are provided. On the other hand, I don't read The Hobbit and say "Now, why are the dwarves sneaking into the troll's campsite? Shouldn't there be a village along the road, or at least an inn?" And, of course, you could try to come up with an explanation for how a system of city-states could come about. As I've said before, we never wanted a fully populated colonial sprawl. We're not going to change Khorvaire to be that. So it falls to you to either find a way to reconcile that to your worldview, or to decide that you just can't play Eberron if that's how things are.  Sure, KoK. But did it have all of that in the very first book that came out? More importantly, that's not what Eberron is about. We've said all along: we're pulp adventure. Find a Conan book where he gets into a discussion of the grain harvest. If you want that level of realism, either add it in, or play KoK. We *will* be adding more detail as time goes by. But while I respect the views of the simulationist, Eberron is first and foremost designed as a world for adventure, and that is always going to come first. I respect that. And as I've said, Eberron's *not going to be the game for everyone*. It may be that it's simply not the right world for the hard-core simulationist. I'm sorry if that is the case, as it's not my intention to dismiss anyone's views. But Eberron was designed as for pulp adventure -- not deep realism. Well, as I said, I'm not remotely in charge of what WotC will do: I'm just guessing.</blockquote>

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