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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7953352" data-attributes="member: 29398">All quite true.I go a step further even than that: Drow are taught arcane casting in school just like we're taught to read and write and count.  The only ones who drop these skills later are those who go on to become full-time Clerics.Yes, that'd represent part of the drop-off at low levels, along with deaths.That said, I tend to think more that those adventurers who don't do so well in their early days (their party collapses in the fiction to reflect their players' campaign failing) don't all necessarily retire; some instead find others who wish to keep going, form a new party, and carry on.This assumes two things, if I'm reading it right: a) that every adventurer at some point has a player attached, and b) that the character would always retire if-when its player drops off it.I don't agree with either of these assumptions when it comes to populating my own game world, though I could see the point if trying to populate a common-use setting e.g. Greyhawk or FR by using all the PCs who have adventured there as a baseline.Again I think it'd be a lot less steep of a dropoff at higher levels.  IME most campaigns, if they're gonna fail, do it fast - usually within the first half-dozen sessions while the PCs are still 1st or 2nd level.So it might go more like1 million at 1st tier (1st-4th, with about half of those being 1st and another 1/3 being 2nd)10,000 at 2nd tier (5th-10th, with not much dropoff per level)5,000 at 3rd tier (11th-15th, ditto)3,000 at 4th tier or above (16th level and higher, open-ended; the majority of which are and always were NPCs including mentors, villains, guild masters, master artificers*, and so forth)* - someone has to make all those magic items, and I'm sure as hell not gonna go all 3e on this and have the PCs doing it! <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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