PoL & population density

[The Ubbergeek]

1) Pre-modern agriculture is extremely inefficient.
3) Pre-modern forms of food preservation were often unreliable.

1. Actually, there was progress in knowledges on farming in middle age - it was not modern era's successes with sciences, but in peacefull times, they where not that famished.

3. They had no science, but they knew how to keep food as they could.



It was not as dark as though.

 

[Clavis]

1) Pre-modern agriculture is extremely inefficient.
3) Pre-modern forms of food preservation were often unreliable.

1. Actually, there was progress in knowledges on farming in middle age - it was not modern era's successes with sciences, but in peacefull times, they where not that famished.

You're right. They weren't generally famished, and in good times could actually eat pretty well. But existing medieval documents make it clear that the agricultural population was very large relative to the urban population.

3. They had no science, but they knew how to keep food as they could.

Right again. But beacuse they didn't actually know why sealing in fat, salting and smoking preserved food, things like botulism were far more frequent than they are now. Plus, the preservation process made food more expensive. It was safer to eat fresh food if you could, and the most reliable way to have fresh food was to have the farms close to where the urban population lived. That's more true for fruits and vegetables. Grain can travel some distance, and in fact old flour is better for bread making than new flour is (modern flour is bleached with chlorine to replicate age). Many families also kept a pig or two, and would slaughter it at Christmas time as a source of income and meat. Things weren't always dire, but people were far more aware of how precarious their food supply was.

 

[Irda Ranger]

The average settlement shouldn't be much larger than maybe 1500 people, and there should be no major contact with other settlements. Knowing that there's another town a week's travel in XYZ direction is fine, but there shouldn't be any well-traveled roads between the two. Again, that's an average settlement; there can be "kingdoms" that consist of a decent-sized city connected to several outlying farming villages, but that "kingdom" shouldn't patrol more than maybe 2 days from the "capital".

Zurai, I am sure your campaign and players will benefit from your strong conception of what is appropriate and average, but I think you have mistaken a correct (and internally consistent) model for the correct (and internally consistent) model. I'm going to disagree in particular with what you think the correct average population of a settlement should be, since that is highly dependent on so many factors that there can be no "average." In fact population seems to follow a power law "long tail / high spike" distribution which is defined by a lack of average and no variance.

And that's based on "pure emulation" before we even get to "changes I've made because it makes the game more fun."

"Blobs of Light" pretty much sums up what real medieval settlement patterns were like... Medieval settlement patterns were dictated by 3 facts:

1) Pre-modern agriculture is extremely inefficient.
2) Pre-modern forms of transportation are very slow
3) Pre-modern forms of food preservation were often unreliable.

... A small overall population supporting lots of fighter-types is impossible. If a stronghold is guarded by 100 men, it means there are at least 800 nearby farmers to support them.

Correct about real-world Medieval settlement patterns. Before we get to "because it's more fun this way" world design, there are some D&D-world ("DDW") only facts which will change how D&D-settlement patterns may look:

1) DDW has a much longer history than RW. Although firearms have not been developed, DDW farmers may have inherited advanced techniques or carefully bred germ lines that boost farming productivity from RW-medieval levels.
2) Magic; it changes everything. The spells, gods and magic items in the PHB and DMG is a mere sub-set of what the world has to offer. It's the list of "things useful to adventurers" and does not include magical plows and forge-hammers, rituals to cure blight, restore nutrients to the soil or relieve drought, alchemical processes to substitute one resource for another or keep meat unspoilt for months at a time, etc.
3) Farming may not a year-round thing in DDW, allowing farmers to gear up in the off-season and go on "cave clearing missions" en masse every now and then. Seeing how a longsword and chainmail shirt will often survive its owner the "used kit" market may allow every farmer and his mum to have a full kit in the attic for the January "orc hunt."

These factors can change the farmer/non-farmer ratios. So, what's possible for a RW-medieval settlement and a DDW settlement do not have to be the same.


To keep the conversation fresh though, I have a question:

The darkness is absence of information ...

How do you square this with the Halfling and Dragonborn fluff? If the entire Halfling society consists of traveling caravan groups, and Dragonborn was all always-traveling mercenaries, then presumably they have a decent collection of knowledge on where to go and the safe ways to get there? Do they horde this information and not share it with people?

I still think that, as presented, POL has more to do with the lack of man-power to control the Wilds between settlements, not about a lack of information. I certainly did not mean to infer from my posts that every square inch of forest between one town and the next was chock full o' monsters, but rather that the possibility of monsters/bandits/cultists exists at all points beyond a certain "point of light's" borders. 200+ strong groups of armed Dragonborn are just too much trouble for most of them to bother with, and presumably human merchants pay a fee to travel in their company.

Honestly I'm not sure how the Halflings get through regularly, but honestly an "empty darkness" doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, how many merchants have to come through and say "There are no monsters on the road" before the people start believing them? I can't imagine its really that many.

 

[helium3]

I'm going to disagree in particular with what you think the correct average population of a settlement should be, since that is highly dependent on so many factors that there can be no "average." In fact population seems to follow a power law "long tail / high spike" distribution which is defined by a lack of average and no variance.

Can you clarify what you mean here? I'm not sure what you're trying to say? Are you talking about population as a function of time?

1) DDW has a much longer history than RW. Although firearms have not been developed, DDW farmers may have inherited advanced techniques or carefully bred germ lines that boost farming productivity from RW-medieval levels.
2) Magic; it changes everything. The spells, gods and magic items in the PHB and DMG is a mere sub-set of what the world has to offer. It's the list of "things useful to adventurers" and does not include magical plows and forge-hammers, rituals to cure blight, restore nutrients to the soil or relieve drought, alchemical processes to substitute one resource for another or keep meat unspoilt for months at a time, etc.
3) Farming may not a year-round thing in DDW, allowing farmers to gear up in the off-season and go on "cave clearing missions" en masse every now and then. Seeing how a longsword and chainmail shirt will often survive its owner the "used kit" market may allow every farmer and his mum to have a full kit in the attic for the January "orc hunt."

These are awesome examples of setting-specific explanations for how a particular world manages to look the way it does when you start messing with the basic assumptions. There are a lot of others that people have come up with in the thread that are just as stellar.

That being said, the more you change the assumptions the harder it is for players to immerse themselves in the setting and suspend disbelief.

The concern I have with PoL as it's been described so far is that I suspect it will be hard for players who aren't solely interested in hack-and-slash dungeon crawls to not start asking questions about just how a town of 1000 people manages to even survive when it's surrounded by a week's worth of monster infested wilderness in every direction.

Some posters in this thread have suggested some ways to deal with this, but the idea of every village, town and city being dominated/protected by a single individual or organization that's an order of magnitude more powerful than the rest of the populace just doesn't sit well with me. I can see that there's a lot of material to work with there, but it just seems like it'd get repetitive once you've run through all the possible iterations.

Perhaps the problem is that the Designers haven't provided much in the way of details about how PoL really works. Perhaps the second preview book will be better.

Of course, I really don't care one way or the other about the PoL concept, as long as it isn't somehow hard-wired into the rules such that a non-PoL game is nearly impossible to run.

How do you square this with the Halfling and Dragonborn fluff? If the entire Halfling society consists of traveling caravan groups, and Dragonborn was all always-traveling mercenaries, then presumably they have a decent collection of knowledge on where to go and the safe ways to get there? Do they horde this information and not share it with people?

Maybe they hoard the info (which wouldn't be the first time that a group with that sort of knowledge did that) or maybe whatever's in the "darkness" is more dangerous to stationary settlements than roving bands of merchants and mercenaries. That would sort of imply that many monsters tend to wander around a lot, sort of like many predators do.

I think part of the discussion of PoL comes from the info-dumps failing to also tell the reader that a PoL setting is by default also a post-apocalyptic setting. Civilization has fallen on seriously hard times, but given enough time it will transform back into a BoL setting. There's a lot of mention in the R&C preview of a variety of fallen empires of different racial derivation, but no overt statements about it.

 

[Irda Ranger]

Can you clarify what you mean here? I'm not sure what you're trying to say? Are you talking about population as a function of time?

Sure. I just meant that pop size can be affected by food supply, attrition from wandering monsters, lifespan/reproduction statistics, tech & magic available and other factors I'm probably not thinking of. And all of those things are effected by a dozen other factors (e.g., food is effected by arability of land, grain-types available, natural food sources, magical spells like Plant Growth, fresh water access and more). Pile on all of those variables and you could get an equilibrium population density from 10 per square mile to 1,000 per square mile.

And yeah, as the underlying factors change over time the equilibrium population varies over time. For instance, the population of medieval northern Europe and China swung up and down with the length of wheat's growing season (which changed from century to century).

That being said, the more you change the assumptions the harder it is for players to immerse themselves in the setting and suspend disbelief.

True; but an overly similar world to our own medieval one would leave little room for adventuring careers as we expect them in D&D. And our medieval world never had to deal with monsters or magic, so you have to expect some differences.

The concern I have with PoL as it's been described so far is that I suspect it will be hard for players who aren't solely interested in hack-and-slash dungeon crawls to not start asking questions about just how a town of 1000 people manages to even survive when it's surrounded by a week's worth of monster infested wilderness in every direction.

Some posters in this thread have suggested some ways to deal with this, but the idea of every village, town and city being dominated/protected by a single individual or organization that's an order of magnitude more powerful than the rest of the populace just doesn't sit well with me.

It doesn't sit well with me either. That's why in my worlds I have certain tropes I rely on that assume that fixed position magical structures (like Stonehenge or enchanted castle walls) are a low-level magic that require a lot of time and money to construct and are non-portable, but allow defenders who are primarily levels 1-3 to defend themselves from bigger baddies. They still need the PC's to venture out into The Wild or to defend the town from dragons, but low level threats (like orc raids) can be handled reliably and with little danger.

A favorite of mine, if you're interested, is the assumption that a perfect circle of silver (of any size) will hold a Protection From Evil Spell, X' Radius (where X is the size of the silver) and spell for 1 year. A town with a circular stone wall with silver built into the foundation will thus be off-limits to demons and (IMC) teleporters (another house rule - you can't teleport through a magic circle). Building such a perfect circle is expensive in material components and a real architectural / surveying challenge, but once accomplished a low-level caster needs only renew the protections once a year.

Perhaps the problem is that the Designers haven't provided much in the way of details about how PoL really works. Perhaps the second preview book will be better.

Perhaps. Is is "Worlds & Monsters", so it's topical, and I think the Amazon description said something about world-building.

 

[Hairfoot]

Some posters in this thread have suggested some ways to deal with this, but the idea of every village, town and city being dominated/protected by a single individual or organization that's an order of magnitude more powerful than the rest of the populace just doesn't sit well with me.

I think the appeal of that setup is largely related to another classic D&D debate: how powerful is a hero? For me, a PC is more talented than the average person, and attains levels through luck, determination and taking risks, so a level 4 guard captain doesn't represent a towering heroic figure who keeps the darkness at bay. He's simply a rugged professional doing a tough job.

After all, isn't that how the real world works? All people are not equal, and the talented tend to contribute more than others. Our society is moderated by people who have powerful vehicles, weapons and equipment, the training to use them, and wield authority by popular consent. They are an "order of magnitude more powerful than the rest of the populace", but we call them cops, not heroes of legend.

On the other hand, some people prefer their PCs to be clearly exceptional and uniquely powerful, which renders all of that moot.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I think its worth pointing out that the sample town in the DMG is a trading town.

 

[HeinorNY]

Something tells me that the "feel" of the PoL has nothing to do with Diablo 2, but to Middle-earth.
Before someone jumps at me, I don't think ME is a PoL setting, because PoL isn't just a type of setting, but more than that, it's a way to handle and build a setting, from a very metagame perspective, IMHO. Tolkien didn't use the WotC's PoL design philosophy.

But the overall feeling from the in-game perspective, in a setting created used the PoL idea has a little of the ME's flavor.

The Shire, Bree, Rivendell, they are PoLs. Beyond their gates it's no man's land. There is no government, kingdom, no law, nothing. The roads and distant borders are guarded by rangers (PCs in a possible game), and other individuals that a clearly are not commoners, and most commoners usually are not even aware about the outside dangers, they just live their lifes.

Let's take a look at the description of Bree from Wikipedia (not that the source is that great, but the description reminds me of the PoL article):
"Bree was a very ancient settlement of men in Eriador, long established by the time of the Third Age of Middle-earth. After the collapse of the kingdom of Arthedain, Bree continued to thrive without any central authority or government for many centuries. As Bree lies at the meeting of two large roadways, the Great East Road and the (now disused) Greenway, it had for centuries been a centre of trade and a stopping place for travellers, though as Arnor in the north waned its prosperity and size declined."

From the PoL article:
"The centers of civilization are few and far between, and the world isn’t carved up between nation-states that jealously enforce their borders. A few difficult and dangerous roads tenuously link neighboring cities together..."

Now take this paragraph and read it thinking about the Shire:
"The common folk of the world look upon the wild lands with dread. Few people are widely traveled—even the most ambitious merchant is careful to stick to better-known roads. The lands between towns or homesteads are wide and empty. It might be safe enough within a day’s ride of a city or an hour’s walk of a village, but go beyond that and you are taking your life into your hands. People are scared of what might be waiting in the old forest or beyond the barren hills at the far end of the valley, because whatever is out there is most likely hungry and hostile. Striking off into untraveled lands is something only heroes and adventurers do." (and baggins)

So my point is, if you want to get some of the feel of what a PoL setting could be (using the PoL design philosophy), think about ME, or at least, Eriador.

 

[Clavis]

I think its worth pointing out that the sample town in the DMG is a trading town.

Which makes little less sense in a POL setting. Trading towns assume lots of traffic on well-protected roads.

I haven't seen the DMG yet, but I feel safe making some predictions about the starting town:

The designers forgot to put enough (or any) farm land around the town
The streets are laid out like a modern American suburban development, not the 5-10 foot narrow alleys of a medieval town.
The houses are spaced apart from each other, not built next to each other like in real medieval towns.
There's no mention of wandering pigs, dogs, cats, and desperate children.
There's no random prostitute table (the worst sin!)

 

[Irda Ranger]

The designers forgot to put enough (or any) farm land around the town
100% likely

The streets are laid out like a modern American suburban development, not the 5-10 foot narrow alleys of a medieval town.
80% likely, but not 100% wrong. D&D world may have learned the benefits of two-way traffic on the same street.

The houses are spaced apart from each other, not built next to each other like in real medieval towns.
50% likely. I have seen a number of WotC maps that get the spacing "correctly urban."

There's no mention of wandering pigs, dogs, cats, and desperate children.
That's what the farms are for! Oh, wait ...

And desperate children? Maybe it's accurate, but hardly fun ...

There's no random prostitute table (the worst sin!)
A longstanding problem.