Hriston
Dungeon Master of Middle-earth (He/him)
No, I haven’t and don’t see any reason to. The followers tables, as you said, are specifically for generating followers for upper level characters. Perhaps I should state clearly that my intention with these tables is to provide a method for PC creation. PCs aren’t generally conceived of as followers of upper level characters, although I suppose they could be. And while it’s true that a member of any race could be a thief, the fact that for most demi-humans, Thief was one of a limited number of classes available, would lead to humans being underrepresented on a list of thieves when compared to the general population of adventurers, which is what we see on that table.
The rules for henchmen are interesting but depend on the DM‘s own breakdown of races that exist in a given area, and the class distribution specifically applies only to prospective henchmen, which is a subset of characters suitable for advancement, although it does seem pretty close to the distribution given in the Character Subtable.
I did take a look at the City/Town Encounters Matrix when preparing these tables, particularly the race breakdown, but again since my purpose is to generate a PC (or NPC) member of an adventuring party, I wasn’t particularly perturbed that demi-humans are found in higher proportions in urban environments than they are in adventuring parties.
The short answer is I’m not all that interested in the larger world-building questions that these sorts of comparisons bring up.
I tried to limit arbitrary decision making to a minimum. I’m not sure if I succeeded.
The Class table departs from the original in two respects. First, it gives half the fighter’s space to the barbarian, the basis of which was the barbarian’s history as a subclass of fighter. I had at first thought to only give the barbarian a spread equal to the ranger, but it seemed too arbitrary, so I finally settled on dividing the fighter’s spread evenly.
Second, I divided the former non-illusionist magic-user’s space evenly between the sorcerer, warlock, and non-illusionist wizard, conceiving of “magic-user” as formerly encompassing the concepts of all three 5E classes, however ineffectively. I had originally thought of giving the wizard enough of a spread that each subclass could have equal representation, but I found the result too arbitrary, especially as it impacted the space remaining to the sorcerer and warlock.
In practice, when using this table, once a class has been generated, if determining a subclass is desired and one of the two that appears on the table didn’t result, then I would make a second roll, if necessary, giving equal weight to each subclass of the resulting class. Without taking stock of how many subclasses each class has (I generally use the PHB only), I think a second roll wouldn’t be necessary for Barbarian, Wizard (Other), or Rogue (Other), but rather the spread of each result could be divided equally among the (remaining) subclasses.
The Race table was more straightforward. I kept the proportions between the existing races the same and gave dragonborn and Tieflings a value equal to the least represented race on the original table, half-orcs (coincidentally, perhaps, also a “monster race”). My thinking was influenced by the inclusion of these additional races in the PHB as “rare” races. After rounding, the extra 2% that these races take up essentially came out of the human’s share.
