Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerakSpielman" data-source="post: 2143144" data-attributes="member: 7464">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 <a href="http://www.iga.ucdavis.edu/files/clarkpaper.pdf" target="_blank">this</a> 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?</blockquote>

Verification