Knights & Knaves Alehouse

Just curious if anyone has ever envisioned his...or her...entire campaign setting to the extent of establishing the world population and then back-determing the # of possible PCs/NPCs that could be floating around.

I know this discussion has surfaced at other forums, but thought it might be interesting to examine here, in a more "calm" environment.

I believe Gary Gygax often referred to the player-character as extremely rare, with figures ranging anywhere from a whopping 10% to as little as 1/10th of 1% of the entire population of a "world".

Okay, well, is the PC the rare bird? or the NCP? or both? Because I can imagine a world of say, oh, 5,000,000 to 15,000,000 (think medieval europe)easily being totally subjugated by a large band of PCs of name level.

But, if that's all it would take, then why, for garsh-sake, isn't the world setting being totally annihilated by all the viscious beasties, or totally enslaved by a handful of demons?

Levels (mid to high), and populations vs. monsters is a formula I have not, yet, been able to reconcile.

What are your thoughts, if any, on the subject?

That ratio varies considerably, depending on when you visit my world.

There have been times when there were large numbers of name-level agents of fortune around... usually followed by large wars and clashes, with lots of magic being thrown around.

This is followed by the horror times... where the survivors try to pick up the pieces of their shattered world while fighting off the creatures created/summoned/unleashed/attracted during and by those wars.

Then there is a time of rest, after the nastys have been beaten back into little-visited corners of the world, and when civilization and trade are beginning to flourish again.

This is followed by increasing unrest, with rivalries and the like causing scope for more adventuring (as opposed to the raw survival of the first two phases), which leads to... large numbers of name-level agents of fortune around...

There have been several of these cycles... no one knows how many.

Thus, not only the total population varies considerably, but also the percentage of that population which would count as "PC material". Both these also vary widely by the specific area of my world you look at at any particular time.



I don't use any published campaign world... my world is my creation, and its strongest influence (and one of spirit and philosophy rather than detail and organization) is Andre Norton's Witch World.

I did some mental/back-of-envelope calculations once to determine how many class/leveled NPCs were in various villages and towns, and how large a population center you'd need to go to to find various higher-level NPCs. I always assumed the PCs, and the various NPCs who hang out in dungeons or have castles in the wilderness, or are leading groups of bandits, are in addition to those numbers. I don't think I wrote this down, and no longer remember all the details (and FWIW I was thinking in terms of OD&D rather than AD&D when I did it), but IIRC I came up with a village of 500 having probably 4 fighters (say 3 1st level, 1 2nd) and a 1st level cleric, a town of 1000 having most likely either a 4th level fighter or a 3rd level cleric is its most powerful NPC, clerics of 7th+ level only being found in large cities, only a handful of level 12 mages alive in the world at any given time (which means they probably all know each other), and a level 18 mage being something that only occurs once every several generations (meaning they're likely all legendary figures who are spoken of in awed whispers -- not least because they may still be around as liches!).

I liked the feel of this, because it meant the PCs, even at fairly low levels, would still be seen as important movers and shakers in the world -- not like the Forgotten Realms where the PCs are always overshadowed by a cabal of uber-powerful NPCs, and every tiny village probably has a few NPCs of 9th+ level hanging around, mostly it seems for the sake of forcing PCs to run errands and perform missions that are too petty for them to bother themselves with. Even venerable B2 has a bit too much of this for my taste -- the notion that The Keep is full of enough tough NPCs that they could pretty easily wipe out the entire Caves of Chaos, but they can't be bothered to, so they'll let some schmucky PCs do it for them, as long as they don't get too drunk and disorderly in the tavern or mouth off to the gate guard -- so last time I re-read that module I went through with my pencil and dropped almost all the NPCs in the Keep by 1-2 levels (so most of the sergeants, etc. are 1st level characters and the Castellan himself is only 4th level, meaning that by the time a group of PCs clears out the Caves they're probably tough enough that they could also clear out the Keep if they so chose -- but why would they?).

I realize this is totally at odds with the dungeon and wilderness encounter charts that have the world crawling with name-level NPCs and massive quantities of roving monster-hordes, but I don't let that bother me, because I tend to think of both the dungeons and the wilderness as being "beyond the fields we know" (in the words of Lord Dunsany, probably my favorite fantasy author) where the rules don't apply in the same way as they do in the mundane world (i.e. "town," civilized kingdoms off the edge of the map where the PCs are assumed to have originated from before going off to become adventurers). There there are probably a few character-types of 1st-3rd level in positions of authority, and if you wander in the woods you might run across a wild boar or a rattlesnake, a mad hermit or an encampment of a couple dozen bandits, a bobcat or maybe (if you're really unlucky) a bear, but nothing much beyond that. However, once you've crossed that threshold to adventure (see Joseph Campbell) by either entering the dungeon or traveling beyond the fields we know (which I have in mind, though I can't recall if it comes from OD&D or AD&D, as 20 miles from the nearest settlement -- based on that being the amount of territory a Lord is able to patrol around his castle to prevent monsters from taking up lairs within it) things work differently, and you're now likely to meet encampments of hundreds of bandits (or goblins or orcs or worse), whole families of griffons and dragons, and the landscape is dotted with castles rules by name-level NPCs whose hospitality may well take the form of a Geas spell or a poisoned dinner and a one-way trip to the lightless dungeons beneath.

The normal folks (including their class-leveled leaders) want nothing to do with those places, so they stay in town and lock the doors at night and tell their children horrible stories about the time Farmer Hamish took the wrong turn at the fork on the way home from market. But for the adventurers, which is to say the PCs, it's their job to go to such places -- to loot them of their treasures, gain fame and fortune, and eventually push the barriers of the wilderness back a little further.

Literal-minded people, number-crunchers, and so-called "Gygaxian naturalists" won't like this and will claim it's just motivated by laziness and unwillingness to apply true intellectual rigor, but I don't mind because I'm not after what they're after -- my fantasy world doesn't need to operate on "realistic" logic, because it's a dream-world -- literally, it doesn't actually exist, we're all just making it up.

I assume that levelled characters are relatively rare, and that the vast majority are fighter types, but I do not worry about the precise implementation, partly because classes and levels are mainly just for player characters, serving as a shorthand to describe non-player characters when useful. An elite unit of the ducal guard might be made up of characters equal to first level fighters, but I would not count them against the total, since they are not expected to advance like player characters would, they are just "veterans".

I've only done this for Continuum, where the ratio of spanners to levelers on any given level is about 1:1000. Given the population of a locality, I can estimate the number of spanners who live in it. I have even explored the ratios of spanners of various spans, given that every spanner exists at every span below his maximum span.

Well, I'm sure its just me being anal about things...

but I've always been fascinated with the idea of constructing a setting that tried to pin down as precisely as possible, who all these high level PC/NPCs were and where they were.

Why?

Only for my own anal reasoning.

One point being: in a game-world, where fantasy rules, and monsters exist for no true reason or rhyme and players get to frolic about looting treasure and magic until they are bored to th teeth! I see the "mechanic" of this as possibly being a nice tool to pit against the players to make the characters work harder, and be more conscious of the "actual" world around them.

Ex.
If a player decides to become a MU, and the lowly mentor in his town/village is only L3, then the player is going to have to find the higher ups to get spells from. If the higher ups are few and far between, it makes the struggle to obtain more power/spells have a greater sense of value, than just handing the player the book and saying, "Oh, just pick out the next bunch you want!"

Same would apply to training, gaining levels, etc.

Sure, I'm being anal about this. What group of players has time to really invest in a "working world"? when all they want to do is run through the henhouse like salivating foxes?

Okay. End of blog.

As generic as possibly thinking without any regard for my current campaign, I see it as big level NPCs are "not playing D&D" and the world of monsters is sometimes better left for "independents" to deal with. Alignment I think was made strictly for adventurers and the big level NPCs never played D&D they played some weird boring game that isnt about adventuring but has made them who they are today, etc.

I did a "census" of Ratik 3 or 4 years ago.

It's right here: http://knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/view ... =40&t=1300

I wonder if there's any correlation between the increase in "uber-NPCs" and the pushing of good alignment PCs as the only way to play AD&D in the mid to late 80's. After all, in a world where the PCs are the special ones, only their ethics prevents them from taking advantage of their unusual power. And some PCs might decide to take advantage of the situation in a way that would be considered "evil" or "non-heroic". But if all they can ever hope for is to be the mid-power kids on the block, than there is no reason to be non-heroic, because the game world has an auto-correction feature built into it that the PCs can't beat.

It actually cheapens the decision to be a hero.

Eye of the Beholder wrote:I wonder if there's any correlation between the increase in "uber-NPCs" and the pushing of good alignment PCs as the only way to play AD&D in the mid to late 80's. After all, in a world where the PCs are the special ones, only their ethics prevents them from taking advantage of their unusual power. And some PCs might decide to take advantage of the situation in a way that would be considered "evil" or "non-heroic". But if all they can ever hope for is to be the mid-power kids on the block, than there is no reason to be non-heroic, because the game world has an auto-correction feature built into it that the PCs can't beat.

It actually cheapens the decision to be a hero.

Good point. I'm pretty sure the idea of having every town ruled by high-level NPCs was motivated by a desire to keep evil PCs "in line" and prevent them from behaving badly in town -- robbing and murdering and raping and so on. That this leads to a paradigm in which the PCs are good-aligned and doing heroic deeds not because they choose to but because if they don't some uber-NPC will smack them down was presumably unintentional, but is true nonetheless, and it does cheapen the decision and (at least IMO) kills the spirit of the game. I remember tons of adventures in the late 80s/early 90s when my character was being forced to perform some heroic mission (to rescue a prisoner or prevent a war or something) by threat that if I didn't go some way-higher-level NPC would punish me, and I always resented it

I don't buy that only their Good alignment, or the proliferation of high-level NPCs, keeps PCs in-line. This theory falls apart for games w/o alignments (RQ, TFT & RM as examples). Even though PCs are a cut above the Joe Schmo, there are many other factors that keep them from taking over the whole show. Often, the players' own common sense (even if subconsciously) prevents the game from turning into Let's Rule The World. That scenario is usually not the focus of a game, and it's not what the DM signed up for (certainly not after spending Lord knows how many hours creating cool dungeons). Partly related to this last reason, and partly related to the fact that the PCs are really a miniscule force when you consider the scope of an entire world, there's at least another attenuator. Sure, you might be a badass high level M-U, but when you get too far out of line, the generals, captains, lieutenants and sergeants of the ARMY! that's assembled to take you down do not have to be any higher than 0-level to get the job done. Remember the angry mob rule?

OTOH, what if the PCs want to lord it over a village or two, a town or GASP! even a city? Why not let them? Let 'em have their fun, because soon enough, they'll probably discover that playing papers and paychecks and watching their backs every single second is probably more dangerous, not to mention pretty boring, than adventuring.

TheRedPriest wrote:OTOH, what if the PCs want to lord it over a village or two, a town or GASP! even a city? Why not let them? Let 'em have their fun, because soon enough, they'll probably discover that playing papers and paychecks and watching their backs every single second is probably more dangerous, not to mention pretty boring, than adventuring.

Just ask Kull and Conan.

TheRedPriest wrote:I don't buy that only their Good alignment, or the proliferation of high-level NPCs, keeps PCs in-line. This theory falls apart for games w/o alignments (RQ, TFT & RM as examples). Even though PCs are a cut above the Joe Schmo, there are many other factors that keep them from taking over the whole show. Often, the players' own common sense (even if subconsciously) prevents the game from turning into Let's Rule The World. That scenario is usually not the focus of a game, and it's not what the DM signed up for (certainly not after spending Lord knows how many hours creating cool dungeons). Partly related to this last reason, and partly related to the fact that the PCs are really a miniscule force when you consider the scope of an entire world, there's at least another attenuator. Sure, you might be a badass high level M-U, but when you get too far out of line, the generals, captains, lieutenants and sergeants of the ARMY! that's assembled to take you down do not have to be any higher than 0-level to get the job done. Remember the angry mob rule?

OTOH, what if the PCs want to lord it over a village or two, a town or GASP! even a city? Why not let them? Let 'em have their fun, because soon enough, they'll probably discover that playing papers and paychecks and watching their backs every single second is probably more dangerous, not to mention pretty boring, than adventuring.

I agree with every word of this. Why weren't you telling this to all the people writing modules in the 80s and 90s?!

T. Foster wrote:

TheRedPriest wrote:I don't buy that only their Good alignment, or the proliferation of high-level NPCs, keeps PCs in-line. blah blah blah ...

I agree with every word of this. Why weren't you telling this to all the people writing modules in the 80s and 90s?!

I did.

The newest TSR modules I own are the A-series. Wait. Maybe Beyond The Crystal Cave is newer than the slavers. Anyway. You get the idea.

Didn't a number of Gygax's modules start off with the whole "The characters are agents of good and they must go thwart the eeeeval or else face the headman's axe" pitch?

- Wheggi