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Hero
If you have to factor in magic or clerical power, you are better off picking a number out of a hat.....
Population growth
- Thread starter Nathal
- Start date
The_Universe
First Post
A ".3 child" is just a head, with a hand growing out of the bottom of his or her neck. They excrete what little waste they produce through their ears.Nathal said:Damn, that's funny. I believe in 1800 the average woman had 7 children in her lifetime. Today that number is down to 4.3
...that .3 child must have a funny face.
Proven fact.
Seriously.
*shifty eye*
Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
die_kluge said:
My great grandfather (of whom my above mentioned grandmother was a daughter) had 58 children to 3 wives + 1 extra. So thats an average of 14 per wife
and as I said my grandparents had 19 children - not an impossible figure in a world with healing magic...
Nathal
Explorer
MerakSpielman said:
Let's say that there are clerics around that equal our modern medicine. And so, assume an infant mortality rate equal to today's Singapore: 2.28 deaths/1,000 live births. That would mean less than a one percent chance of infant death in child birth until the population exceeded 500 people. Isn't that right? Or if I based it on todays United States we would have over 3 deaths in 500 people (6.63 deaths/1,000 live births). Each kid would then have a 0.6% chance of dying at birth by causes natural. Damn, I can't roll that on my D10s. Wow...that's kinda terrible that we don't do as well as Singapore, but that's too off topic to go into...
I figure even with clerics running around, if there are only a few of them they can't be everywhere at once. I'll assume raising the dead doesn't work if the death were by "natural causes", i.e. not caused by violence, foul magic, etc. I treat such things the same way I do old age in a fantasy world. Some things magic can't help because, well, the gods decide.
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MerakSpielman
First Post
I'm not thinking they'll raise the dead, but all those diseases that you can die from in early childhood that we currently vaccinate against, or genetic diseases, could all be fixed instantly by a Cure Disease. That right there will increase population growth dramatically.
Citing page 6 of this paper, in the early 1600s in England, a woman who married at 25 years old would produce only 2 children who survived to adulthood. The actual average is slightly higher - 2.3 or some such. Some families got lucky and had 3 children survive to reproductive age, allowing for population growth. (Marrying younger produced fewer surviving children, as did marrying older.) You have to understand that these women are getting pregnant and having babies as quickly as nature will allow them, and high infant mortality, as well as death during later childhood, are making it so that only 2 of their numerous births live long enough to reproduce themselves.
A tremendous number of the deaths were caused by illness or injury. I'd wager that very few deaths are so quick that, in a D&D world (yes, now we transition to fantasy), there would be time to bring the afflicted child to the local cleric who, being good, will cure the child for free.
Imagine a situation where the population is barely growing because, in her entire reproducting time, a woman having upwards of 15 babies only has 2 survive to adulthood. Now imagine that the majority of those deaths are avoidable through magic.
The population boom would be enormous.
No wonder D&D worlds require tons of seemingly nonsensical rampaging monsters - they're required to keep the population from exploding. I'm assuming that this paradise land has no hordes of rampaging monsters? I could easily see the figures that have the population doubling every 25 years being accurate.
And if the population doubles every 25 years for 200 years... and you start with 100 people... that's 25,600 people. If they get another 200 years, thats 6,553,600 people.
Ultimately, as the DM, it's going to be up to you to figure out the average population growth for a magical society. How prevalent is clerical magic? How young do they marry and start having kids? Do they practice any sort of birth control?
Citing page 6 of this paper, in the early 1600s in England, a woman who married at 25 years old would produce only 2 children who survived to adulthood. The actual average is slightly higher - 2.3 or some such. Some families got lucky and had 3 children survive to reproductive age, allowing for population growth. (Marrying younger produced fewer surviving children, as did marrying older.) You have to understand that these women are getting pregnant and having babies as quickly as nature will allow them, and high infant mortality, as well as death during later childhood, are making it so that only 2 of their numerous births live long enough to reproduce themselves.
A tremendous number of the deaths were caused by illness or injury. I'd wager that very few deaths are so quick that, in a D&D world (yes, now we transition to fantasy), there would be time to bring the afflicted child to the local cleric who, being good, will cure the child for free.
Imagine a situation where the population is barely growing because, in her entire reproducting time, a woman having upwards of 15 babies only has 2 survive to adulthood. Now imagine that the majority of those deaths are avoidable through magic.
The population boom would be enormous.
No wonder D&D worlds require tons of seemingly nonsensical rampaging monsters - they're required to keep the population from exploding. I'm assuming that this paradise land has no hordes of rampaging monsters? I could easily see the figures that have the population doubling every 25 years being accurate.
And if the population doubles every 25 years for 200 years... and you start with 100 people... that's 25,600 people. If they get another 200 years, thats 6,553,600 people.
Ultimately, as the DM, it's going to be up to you to figure out the average population growth for a magical society. How prevalent is clerical magic? How young do they marry and start having kids? Do they practice any sort of birth control?
TerraDave
5ever, or until 2024
Building on the Malthus, and the UNESCO data...for most of human history while birthrates where high overal population growth very, very low.
the idea with Malthus is that in a period of abundance, or in a land of milk and honey, pop would grow very rapidly until per capita food suplies got low, pushing up deathrates from diseases related to malnurishment--and perhaps altering behaviour, for example by raising age at marriage--until a new equilibrium was reached. Malthus's theory was pretty pessimistic: increased abundance would be transitory, and humanity would return to the same state of poverty as before. It also seems to fit most of human history, until the Industrial revolution (ironically when Malthus was writting).
In your land of milk and honey, famillies could be huge, age at marriage low, deathrates low, and population growth downright explosive.
factoring in D&D...as suggested magic may lower mortality and allow for faster pop growth, but competition with other species could offset that. It also very easy to imagine that Adepts or Druids could help parents control more precisly how many children they would want, with much lower birth rates combined with much higher survival rates, not accounting for those other species.
Actually, pretty much anything you want to do could work...the 100 could strugle just to maintain there numbers, or everyone could each have 10 kids and in a few generations you have 1000's instead of a hundred. It is all equally plausible.
the idea with Malthus is that in a period of abundance, or in a land of milk and honey, pop would grow very rapidly until per capita food suplies got low, pushing up deathrates from diseases related to malnurishment--and perhaps altering behaviour, for example by raising age at marriage--until a new equilibrium was reached. Malthus's theory was pretty pessimistic: increased abundance would be transitory, and humanity would return to the same state of poverty as before. It also seems to fit most of human history, until the Industrial revolution (ironically when Malthus was writting).
In your land of milk and honey, famillies could be huge, age at marriage low, deathrates low, and population growth downright explosive.
factoring in D&D...as suggested magic may lower mortality and allow for faster pop growth, but competition with other species could offset that. It also very easy to imagine that Adepts or Druids could help parents control more precisly how many children they would want, with much lower birth rates combined with much higher survival rates, not accounting for those other species.
Actually, pretty much anything you want to do could work...the 100 could strugle just to maintain there numbers, or everyone could each have 10 kids and in a few generations you have 1000's instead of a hundred. It is all equally plausible.
Nathal
Explorer
MerakSpielman said:
Good point. Magic could very well bring the natural infant mortality rate to zero if there are enough clerics.
Ordinarily, in a typical fantasy world, the population gets to be such that clerical magic becomes available for only the most important members of society, unless you have the stray cleric wandering around healing the poor, which I'd imagine to be infrequent. But in my model, with so few people, people would be living probably as long as nature allowed. Your points are well taken. Looks like I'll need to increase the number of monsters
You're especially correct in this point when we consider how small the population is in my model, at first. As the population grows, the rules change and society would become more stratified, causing more injustice toward the less advantaged, bringing the death rates up for the poor when clerics were too few to heal everybody.
It's not a paradise. It's sort of a mythical earth, a parallel universe like GURPs Yrth. The numbers sure do vary with each method of approaching the question. I suppose I could come up with any number between 600 and 25,000 and provide some explanation. I'd favor the higher numbers allowing for magic.
I don't think I've ever seen this exact question covered in a book. It would be a great addition to a world building software program, wouldn't it? But you're right. This convo has been really interesting...
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