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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vanveen" data-source="post: 7785453" data-attributes="member: 6874262">And as an aside--it's a truism that D & D has too many apex predators. Like the nerd that I am, I wondered about that. So I did a little digging.Around 1875--I'm trying to remember the source--a British explorer on an African river steamer counted 2,000 Nile crocodiles along a one-mile stretch of river, the Zambezi IIRC. There's also this:  <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-trouble-with-tiger-numbers/" target="_blank">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-trouble-with-tiger-numbers/</a> This is a modern, if underdeveloped, tiger habitat. Working with the numbers in the article, I tried to extrapolate them to one of those 30-mile-wide "sandbox" campaign hexes. The results were...interesting.Such a hex could potentially support 140,000 prey animals, although 75,000 is probably a better estimate. That's tiger prey animals like deer, NOT stuff like rabbits and squirrels. You get an unimaginable number of those too. The hex could support around 75 tigers with that density and with their average territory size, assuming a tiger eats  about 75 pounds of a 100-pound deer roughly every week. (These are mainly sikh deer, a bit smaller than American whitetails, but whitetails have incredible population density too.)Tiger territories are far smaller than generally supposed; tigers also lose about 20% of their numbers each year, almost exclusively to other tigers. Their reproduction rate is such that they bounce back. So I suddenly have a lot easier time believing in the apex predators in a fantasy environment. We have a lot more fantasy species, but then they'd probably tend to keep the overall numbers down by eating each other or just killing each other. (Tigers are unusually violent; they have been known to attack and kill even large predators such as brown bears on "principle." See Vaillant's excellent The Tiger. Most animals will scuffle but not try to kill; animal wounds are often fatal in the wilderness; so meanie fantasy monsters might take even more losses than in our world.) Fantasy monsters might even eat less than a tiger in some cases, although they might not have to. We really have very little idea of how many animals used to be on this planet. When explorers arrived on the Chesapeake about 1640, they reported the seawater was glass-clear to a depth of forty feet or so, in part because of the estimated 16 billion oysters in the estuary. They also saw hundreds of five-foot-long cod, which is how big they grow if you give them thirty or forty years to do it in instead of catching them as infants.</blockquote>

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