D&D 5E Real city sizes are so different in DND! Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter compared.

[DND_Reborn]

I think that is a pretty wide for some ancient cities. I have been in the old "Medina" in Fez Morocco and I could spread my hands and touch the buildings on both sides of the street simultaneously.

Sure, but is that really a "street" or an alley???

Even so, that was why I commented some were just 6-8 feet. I would imagine your arms spread out is probably 5-6 feet?

 

[Hussar]

Heh, it really is an issue where the confluence of realism and playability don't really match up. Like you say, a realistic street map looks like crap. When you have 5 foot squares and kinda the assumption of 10 foot corridors - it doesn't really match up with reality.

 

[DND_Reborn]

It works okay for battle maps, but otherwise, not really...

The scale I generally work with means I use narrow paths for streets and just "thick" lines for alleyways.

 

[Ixal]

D&D cities have a lot of problems with population density and especially the amount of farmland surrounding them, but them being smaller than modern metropolises is not one of them.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

FWIW, if anyone is interested, this is the size comparison for the ancient cities, all at the same scale:

View attachment 259700

Populations (estimated) near their "peaks":

Athens: 350-500,000 (includes women, children, and slaves--who could number as much as 80% of the population!)
Constantinople: 200-800,000 (in varies widely over the centuries, often about 400-500,000)
London: 50-80,000 (depending on era)
Paris: 200-300,000 during the middle ages
Rome: 1,000,000 (reported as high as 4-5 million, but reports contradict on just who was counted: men only, citizens only, females and children, even slaves...?)
York: 10-15,000

Obviously, this isn't exact, but it can give you an idea of how crowded much of these cities were. Rome, for example, would starve without the wheat crops brought in, and Paris has a history of famine due to loss of crops. I think it is important to note this largest cities in ancient to medieval times could not survive without the influx of trade and food (much like our large modern cities, of course!).

Fire (due to how close buildings were), disease (due to lack of general health care in many cases, population crowding, and exposure), and famine (crop failures, etc.) were the primary fears, along with invasion by rival cities (both in the region and from abroad).

Wow. I did ancient history at degree level and I never realized just how much of a goddamn whopper Constantinople was. That's massive!

Rome I was aware of the some fairly wild claims re: it's size but they've never been substantiated/supported by the archaeology, which puts it a lot smaller than that. It's more like they were counting an entire region than just the actual city and environs.

There was a city in ancient China, I forget when but it was pretty far back that's fairly well substantiated as being about 2 million (archaeology supports it being the size to actually fit that many people too), but I have completely forgotten its name.

 

[Umbran]

I mean, MIT and Harvard are nearby, but not in Boston.
I, however, did go to Tufts.

 

[Yaarel]

The modern city of Cairo is amazing.

Most of the famous ancient Egyptian cities are today a neighborhood somewhere in Cairo.

 

[Aldarc]

One issue though with comparing the size of cities in D&D with those in the Middle Ages is well... magic. In Eberron, for example, there are weather mages (i.e., the Raincallers Guild of House Lyrandar) who assist with agriculture, irrigation, and dams. This is not to mention magical hospitals (i.e., House Jorasco) and other magical public works (e.g., House Cannith, House Orien) that could impact urbanization. Obviously there are other issues, such as magical versions of plagues, famines, wild beasts, etc. to deal with, but D&D magic (and its scale of prevalence) is a big unknown in how it would affect urbanization.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Magic is certainly an unknown factor, but for myself the cities I design and the world I make doesn't have magic on that scale generally. I know a lot of groups have healing houses with magic, but for me those are incredibly rare (and often expensive). So, I just have to assume any magical benefit is cancelled out by magical hinderances and make it a zero-sum factor.

 

[cbwjm]

I try to think of things like aupport towns and villages around my cities to supply them, but it's generally just a general idea. Definitely nowhere near the sizes of cities nowadays in either physical space or population, well, maybe some of the smaller cities of the world. They do tend to be somewhat nebulous when it comes to overall population, maybe the largest of them are around the size of Tauranga, 141km2 and a population of 155,000 according to Wikipedia. That seems like a nice size for a large city in a fantasy game world.