Town Generation

[Huckster42]

I'm having difficulty reconciling the rules and examples given in the DMG 3.5 (p.138-139) for calculating the number of characters from each class and the highest level character in a typical community. For instance, according to the tables you calculate the highest level Adepts, Bards, Clerics etc. based on the formula 1d6 + community modifier. By my calculations this would mean that on higest level adept, bard and cleric in a hamlet (-2 community modifier) would typically be either lvl 1 or 2. In the example given in the DMG a hamlet would have a lvl 1 adept and bard but a lvl 3 cleric! Is the formula for clerics supposed to be 1d8 + community modifier?

Also, the DMG states that if the highest level fighter is 5th level, the community will have two 3rd-level fighters, and four 1st level fighters. Shouldn't it be two 2nd-level fighters and four 1st-level fighters (rounding down)?

I didn't see anything in the errata sheet on this. Should I follow the examples or the tables and rules?

Cheers,

Huck

 

[Arkhandus]

There could be a typo in the 3.5 DMG. They left out some important lines of text from the 3.0 DMG and changed the wording of many sections.

....But in this particular case, it's just a typo from the 3.0 DMG that was never fixed, heh. Yes, it should say one 5th-level fighter, two 2nd-level fighters (not 3rd-level), and four 1st-level fighters.

And yeah, that calculation on adepts/clerics/bards is right. The average hamlet will have a single adept of 1st or 2nd level, a single bard of 1st or 2nd level, a single cleric of 1st or 2nd level, and maybe a single druid of 1st or 2nd level (or, depending on the region/hamlet, it may be a druid of 2nd or 3rd level, or of 11th, 12th, or 13th level). And it will have maybe two additional adepts, bards, clerics, and/or druids of 1st-level. Even more druids if the +10 modifier got rolled on percentile dice for the highest-level druid.

Hamlets, thorps and such just aren't likely to have much in the way of capable healers and such. Most of their healers will actually just be low-level commoners, experts, and such with ranks in the Heal skill. By the DMG's numbers, anyway.

Just keep in mind that the DMG's numbers and such are just there as a rough guideline for quickly rolling up a town. Like when the PCs decide in the middle of a session to head into a nearby town that you didn't work on details for previously. Exercise your own judgment and all when working on a town ahead of time or the like.

 

[Huckster42]

Thanks for the feedback. I thought that they were probably typos but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.

Cheers

Huck

 

[eamon]

The highest level cleric is 1d6 -2 for a hamlet, since a hamlet's community modifier is -2. That means 1/3 of the hamlets have no clerics (rolls of 1 or 2), and the other 2/3 are evenly distributed between 1, 2, 3, and 4th level clerics.

As a highest level cleric, a 3rd level cleric is no less typical than a 2nd or 4th level cleric, using the DMG's distribution.

A typical hamlet that has a cleric at all, has a highest level cleric of 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th level.

But, don't sweat it. As long as the distribution you come up with has many more lower level NPC's than higher-level NPC's, you'll be mostly fine. In a slightly high-powered campaign (in which even random NPC's might be high-level) I generated random NPC's: For a random NPC, I've used a distribution of 6d6 pick lowest 3, subtract 3 as their level (and on a roll of 0 it's a helpless NPC such as a child, maimed victim or a very old & weak NPC). That doesn't produce a distribution anything like the DMG's, and yet it's still playable.

The DMG distribution would never produce a large town with a wizard of 6th and 4th level, for instance - it's too "chunky". In other words, the distribution is meant to give a roughly representative image of what a community should look like, not actually make any sense - why can't a town have a wizard of 6th and 4th, when it can have a 7th and 3rd level wizard?

There's nothing wrong with using the DMG method to make a community, but it's a rough sketch; don't worry about a level here or a level there - the model just isn't accurate enough to make that matter.