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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7953012" data-attributes="member: 29398">Good post [USER=59082]@Mercurius[/USER] , with a lot of thought put into it.Just a few notes and observations...The variable this ignores, however, is magic.  Life expectancy is the biggest cause of population growth/shrinkage after resource availability, and magic could both extend it (via curative and support magics) and reduce it (by making it easier to kill lots of people at once).  How a society approaches and-or regulates magic will make a big difference to that society's growth rate, and thus to that of the world as a whole.This also means that by the time you get to Early Industrial you're diverging rapidly from the real world, as some if not all of that industry would be replaced with magic (particularly if the setting denies the existence or creation of gunpowder or similar, as many do).Never mind direct life-extension magics which, though rare, can make a difference; as can progression into immortality and-or intelligent undeadness.You're assuming that training has to come from someone else, right?  But what about self-training?The farmer in the militia who gets a taste for it and spends every evening practicing on her own with sword and bow is almost inevitably going to learn some things from doing so.  The lone woodsman who eventually learns enough about woodscraft (probably through trial and painful error!) is going to slowly become a low-grade Ranger.  And so on.Spellcasting classes are different.  I could see a Cleric self-training with guidance from its deity, or a spontaneous caster self-training with guidance from its patron or whatever; but book mages are probably out of luck - they'd need external training.Given all that... ...my world would probably be somewhere between these two on average, though the actual numbers would vary widely depending on culture.  For example it's quite possible that 3 Elves out of every 4 are levelled now or have been at some point during their lives, where it's also possible that of a community of 1000 Hobbits you'd be lucky to find one with any levels at all.The one factor that really blows up all these sort of formulae (and I've yet to see or think of a mathematical workaround) is - of all things - PC adventuring parties and, if such exist, their NPC counterparts.Why is this?  Because a typical adventuring party, along with any associates, represents a number of people all rising together in level in a rather short time; and the presence of that "bubble" at any level throws off all the numbers.  So if your played party of 5 PCs make it to 20th level you've now got 6/65000 rather than 1/65000; and this forces the question of how many other parties have done this in the setting's history and of those, how many members yet survive.Further, and this would come down to individual DM preference in some ways, in order to challenge your 19th-level PCs and get 'em to 20th there always has to be a bigger fish; and not every DM wants to look off-world to find said fish.  This means that there's likely to be a number of very high level people out there who are villains-in-waiting: mad wizards, liches, small-w warlords, etc., and these have to be factored in as well.My incomplete thoughts on this lead me to conclude that the shape of the distribution isn't a nice neat triangle with low level at the bottom and high at the top, but more like a beaker: triangular-ish at the bottom but morphing into almost a narrow tapering tube or cylinder at the top, with a very high upper extreme.Put another way, while at lower levels 1 of every 2 (or even 2 of every 3 at extremely low level) might drop off per level, at higher levels (in 5e, I'd guess 10th+) the dropoff rate might be more like 1 in 3 and by 15th you might only lose 1 in 10.  Game mechanics would expect a significant dropoff between 20th and 21st, but from there it's open-ended (aside: I don't believe in hard level caps in any system) to aloow for levelled entities powerful enough to be a challenge for those 19th-level PCs. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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