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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 9051730" data-attributes="member: 9254">There are demographics and there are demographics.  How many can be soldiers vs farmers/craftsmen/etc?  Rome in the 100s could field 1 soldier per 200 total people. (380k soldiers in a population under 76M) This is in part due to the climate, part to the engineering projects and lastly to their accumulated skill & knowledge. Move to a different climate, have fewer functional aquaducts, or lose knowledge to plagues/wars and that many troops can't be fed.  By the same token, Rome had a lot of very skilled crafters who made a lot of chain mail. So much that no one is sure how they made all of it. But if they couldn't make all of it, they wouldn't have had as effective troops.  So that's a direct way demographics (and climate and history) affects things conventionally. (Links below for Rome numbers)Now let's think PC classes. How many of the population are special?  If 1% are PCs, Rome would have had 760k PCs. How many are 20th level? How many are 1st?  Some use a binary distribution (i.e. 1 20th, 2 19th, 4 18th......500k  1st) which means that with 12 classes they generally stop at a single 15th level character and 32k 1st level characters. Change to a linear distrubution (1x 20th.....20x 1st) and now there are 300 20th level characters of every class and 6,000 1st level of every class.  I doubt either is right for your game but only you can decide. [URL unfurl="true"]Https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Size_of_the_Roman_army[/URL][URL unfurl="true"]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empire[/URL]</blockquote>

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