Quote from: LordVreeg;845297What affect did this have on things like healing and disease?  Of these level capable folk, how common was magic?

It's something I've calculated pretty finely, down to the point where I pretty much know where every NPC wizard (from first-week apprentices on up) in the world lives, to what order they belong and (very roughly) their power level.

For me, that's useful.  My all-mage group spent some time in the birth city of Master Holly, the party's fire wizard, staying with her family.  There are only eleven wizards of journeyman rank or better in the city -- which is no metropolis -- two of them masters.  Looking to pick up some extra coin, they put out their shingles.  One of them has a long-distance communication spell, and found that the only other wizard with that spell was under contract to Holly's grandmother, the city's leading shipbuilder, so he made a tidy sum hiring just that spell out to commercial interests who wanted within-the-hour contact with the national capital.

And so forth.  Following my standard rant on the subject, X number of wizards in a city doesn't translate to X number of wizards available to cater to the PCs' whims.  Of those eleven practicing wizards, one of the Masters juggles being the local guildmaster AND being a full-time enchanter AND doing repair work for the city (she's an Earth wizard).  The other is the Thaumatology Chair at the local university.  Of the nine journeymen, three belong to an order of nautical mages (this being a major port) and are hired out to sea most of the year.  One's the hired wizard to the baroness.  One's a secret agent who keeps a low profile.  One's a just-barely-qualified duffer who does low-level enchantments with the few spells he's got.

For practical purposes, there were only two wizards for hire in the city.  One's a necromancer overwhelmingly favoring spirit spells: if that's your problem, she's your gal.  The other's a generalist with a handful of spells in several different disciplines: a little bit of Knowledge, a little bit of Darkness, a little bit of Plant, a little bit of Spirit.

It's safe to say that the PCs cleaned up a bit.

But anyway, that's the game I play.  Obviously others just want the "eh, whatever, we'll swing with it" approach.  Nothing wrong with that.

Quote from: Ravenswing;845324It's something I've calculated pretty finely, down to the point where I pretty much know where every NPC wizard (from first-week apprentices on up) in the world lives, to what order they belong and (very roughly) their power level.

For me, that's useful.  My all-mage group spent some time in the birth city of Master Holly, the party's fire wizard, staying with her family.  There are only eleven wizards of journeyman rank or better in the city -- which is no metropolis -- two of them masters.  Looking to pick up some extra coin, they put out their shingles.  One of them has a long-distance communication spell, and found that the only other wizard with that spell was under contract to Holly's grandmother, the city's leading shipbuilder, so he made a tidy sum hiring just that spell out to commercial interests who wanted within-the-hour contact with the national capital.

And so forth.  Following my standard rant on the subject, X number of wizards in a city doesn't translate to X number of wizards available to cater to the PCs' whims.  Of those eleven practicing wizards, one of the Masters juggles being the local guildmaster AND being a full-time enchanter AND doing repair work for the city (she's an Earth wizard).  The other is the Thaumatology Chair at the local university.  Of the nine journeymen, three belong to an order of nautical mages (this being a major port) and are hired out to sea most of the year.  One's the hired wizard to the baroness.  One's a secret agent who keeps a low profile.  One's a just-barely-qualified duffer who does low-level enchantments with the few spells he's got.

For practical purposes, there were only two wizards for hire in the city.  One's a necromancer overwhelmingly favoring spirit spells: if that's your problem, she's your gal.  The other's a generalist with a handful of spells in several different disciplines: a little bit of Knowledge, a little bit of Darkness, a little bit of Plant, a little bit of Spirit.

It's safe to say that the PCs cleaned up a bit.

But anyway, that's the game I play.  Obviously others just want the "eh, whatever, we'll swing with it" approach.  Nothing wrong with that.

Well, that's sort of why I tried to standardize the terminology for it.

I think most of us, especially after a while, have to do it to some degree for congruence.  And the more I run games, the more this level of consistency helps everything.  Just calling it the frequency distribution of levels and magic seems to allow us all to kind of talk the same language.

Yours is a perfect example, since that frequency distribution of power and magic allows you to place everyone and the mercantile effects of that small port city.

Quote from: LordVreeg;845297And that counts.

I'm not REALLY thinking most people do a spreadsheet, it's just an exercise in really figuring what the frequency distribution is/would be.
Sounds like you eschewed the zero levels.

What affect did this have on things like healing and disease?  Of these level capable folk, how common was magic?

Mostly I ignored 0-level and treated normal people as D6 hit point people. Mostly I ignored mundane disease since it didn't show up much in inspirational sources like S&S fiction or Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series. Supernatural disease sources were less rare than level drain and neither was something ordinary people would see much of. About like the frequency of ordinary people encountering Nazgul in LotR before the Siege of Gondor.

Almost no one ran cleric PCs so not much magical healing. No raise dead or resurrection. One PC might have been reincarnated, I can't recall for sure. Clerics had religions based on where they were from. The gods were in pantheons with some variation of spells by deity.

A fair number of NPCs who were important would have magic items. But that was determined randomly so it might be magical leather armor or a +1 sword or it was some character appropriate tailored item I made up. One guy rode a wild ox. It wasn't magical though it was unusual. One brother out of a set of five could turn into a swan for some reason fitting some Celtic legend or other.

Quote from: Ravenswing;845324And so forth.  Following my standard rant on the subject, X number of wizards in a city doesn't translate to X number of wizards available to cater to the PCs' whims.  

What, NPCs who have agendas, jobs, and schedules of their own not based on what the players and PCs want right now. How dare they and you. Clearly you sir are another big meanie head, GM.

Quote from: Bren;845344Mostly I ignored 0-level and treated normal people as D6 hit point people. Mostly I ignored mundane disease since it didn't show up much in inspirational sources like S&S fiction or Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series. Supernatural disease sources were less rare than level drain and neither was something ordinary people would see much of. About like the frequency of ordinary people encountering Nazgul in LotR before the Siege of Gondor.

Almost no one ran cleric PCs so not much magical healing. No raise dead or resurrection. One PC might have been reincarnated, I can't recall for sure. Clerics had religions based on where they were from. The gods were in pantheons with some variation of spells by deity.

A fair number of NPCs who were important would have magic items. But that was determined randomly so it might be magical leather armor or a +1 sword or it was some character appropriate tailored item I made up. One guy rode a wild ox. It wasn't magical though it was unusual. One brother out of a set of five could turn into a swan for some reason fitting some Celtic legend or other.

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Yeah, the NPC healers and their availability has a huge affect on the tone and tenor of the game.    

And what % of the world was 0 level, and what % was level capable?

I forgot to even mention the magic items; good thing you did.  They can totally mess up any idea.

Quote from: LordVreeg;845329Yours is a perfect example, since that frequency distribution of power and magic allows you to place everyone and the mercantile effects of that small port city.

This is what I've worked out for magic distribution, and it plugs in neatly and easily to most campaigns, I figure.

There is one active, practicing mage per 3000 people.  Half of the mages in any district gravitate to the nearest national capital, major city, or large regional capital.  Approximately one mage in ten stays on as a "rural" mage.  The rest practice in towns and cities within their own province.

Of the above total, 40% are apprentices, 10% are senior apprentices, 40% are journeymen, 7% are Masters, and 3% are Senior Masters.  "Senior" apprentices are just wizards who never passed -- or never attempted -- the tests for a journeyman's license; you might get 70 year old "apprentices."  They have to practice under the direction of a journeyman, but otherwise make good livings lending energy to other wizards, assisting with enchantments and doing their magics within collectives.

For the rest, I have percentages based around my various wizardly orders, and leave 15-20% free for regional orders or for situations where one order or another should predominate.

For the aforementioned city, eleven journeymen-plus is pretty light, but it's not the provincial capital (even though it's a larger city), and the national capital is the third largest city in the world and a giant magnet for wizards: it has twenty times the number.

Quote from: LordVreeg;845381And what % of the world was 0 level, and what % was level capable?

I assumed everyone was capable. They just lacked the interest and opportunity.

Quote from: Bren;845413I assumed everyone was capable. They just lacked the interest and opportunity.

Interesting take.
MY OSR d20 games are sort of based on the fact that the 'level capable' are slightly different.  I mainly use these rules for very bronze age, heroic games.  It makes more sense to me when only a small proportion of the populace are touched by the gods.

My main fantasy games are skill based, so that everyone gains experience in what they are good at

Quote from: Bren;845295The difficulty arises when you or those you play with consider consistency and coherence part of the fun.

I've never run a frequency distribution either, but by 1975 or 76 I'd come up with a general idea of what the overall frequency distribution was for my D&D world. The vast majority of the people in the world were first level. Most important NPCs e.g. barons, counts, the local mage or head of a temple (if any) were around 3rd - 7th level. The higher level PCs were one or two levels lower than that.

Well, I actually got my BA in medieval history, so I can keep my world more or less running pretty easily.  I've always been more interested in how the world runs than my players have.  Converting coinage in my world to pence, shillings, and pounds was a failure.  Everybody hated it but me.

I don't have to run faster than the Balrog, I only have to run faster than the player characters.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;845422Converting coinage in my world to pence, shillings, and pounds was a failure.  Everybody hated it but me.

Of course pence, shillings, and pounds is a big simplification from historical currency (and I use the term currency loosely), so I can see why some players might disapprove of that, but using pence, shillings, and librum was one of the many things I liked about Pendragon.

QuoteI don't have to run faster than the Balrog, I only have to run faster than the player characters.

Indeed. It's why I never ran a PC who wore plate armor. You don't have to be faster than the gargoyles, wights, and wraiths, you just have to be faster than the dwarf or the heavy armored foot. One of the reasons my original D&D character survived and prospered was because, as an elf, he was as fast or faster than everyone else in the party (including the mule).

The analogy meaning, of course, that I don't have to know everything about the entire world, I just need to know more than the players.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;845433The analogy meaning, of course, that I don't have to know everything about the entire world, I just need to know more than the players.

I knew what you meant. I just like mentioning running away as an option since we used it a lot at low levels in OD&D to escape from monsters we couldn't beat or didn't want to fight. From many other threads, 'run away' seems to be a strategy that never occurs to some players. Does no one learn life lessons from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? anymore? Kids the Holy Grail isn't just for quoting random bits to derail an RPG session. Brave, Brave Sir Robin is the model for a first level character in the dungeon.

Heh, I think a lot of gamers would benefit from some action in a large combat LARP.  I can think of a number of times where I ran away or played dead, often sparked by that feeling I'd suddenly get in my gut: "Damn, the bad guys are ten seconds away from overrunning us."

I admit part of it had to do with me being the game's most powerful healer -- even if I was the only PC left alive, as long as I was stealthy and patient, I could raise a whole heap of dead -- but I managed to survive four TPKs (two with over a hundred PCs dead) that way.  Dragging other people away from a losing cause wasn't popular, and I wound up using a reasonably effective line a few times: "You're not going to rescue our buddies by adding our bodies to the heap.  You're going to rescue them by us getting back to where we can rally a force large enough to kick bad guy ass."

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;845433The analogy meaning, of course, that I don't have to know everything about the entire world, I just need to know more than the players.

"The 'Illusion of Preparedness' is critical for immersion; allowing the players to see where things are improvised or changed reminds them to think outside the setting, removing them forcibly from immersion. Whenever the players can see the hand of the GM, even when the GM needs to change things in their favor; it removes them from the immersed position. The ability to keep the information flow even and consistent to the players, and to keep the divide between prepared information and newly created information invisible is a critical GM ability."

I'm with you.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;845422Well, I actually got my BA in medieval history, so I can keep my world more or less running pretty easily.  I've always been more interested in how the world runs than my players have.  Converting coinage in my world to pence, shillings, and pounds was a failure.  Everybody hated it but me.
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History BA as well here (different area of focus though). This last bit is something I noticed in my own gaming as an important observation. I used to bring a lot more historical realism to my campaigns because that is a lot of fun for me personally, but on several occasions this backfired. In one instance I had an Middle East inspired campaign that was too historical to be familiar (they wanted the 7th Voyage of Sinbad but they got The Muqaddimah with footnotes). I toned down my historical realism for that group after that. Something similar happened to be not so long ago as well, where I realized the group I was running the game for wanted more real history than my previous group, but not as much as I ended up giving them. Now I try to read the group. I can spend a lot of time looking up little details regarding aspects of the setting in play. This is great if your players want that, but if they want more of a Robert E. Howard experience, I've learned that there is fun throwing history to the wind and letting your imagination have free reign.

Quote from: LordVreeg;845498"The 'Illusion of Preparedness' is critical for immersion; allowing the players to see where things are improvised or changed reminds them to think outside the setting, removing them forcibly from immersion. Whenever the players can see the hand of the GM, even when the GM needs to change things in their favor; it removes them from the immersed position. The ability to keep the information flow even and consistent to the players, and to keep the divide between prepared information and newly created information invisible is a critical GM ability."

I'm with you.

Indeed. If I thought the GM has prepared anything special, I'd be totally pulled out of immersion.
So I just trust them to be improvising:).
I'm with you as well.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;845500History BA as well here (different area of focus though). This last bit is something I noticed in my own gaming as an important observation. I used to bring a lot more historical realism to my campaigns because that is a lot of fun for me personally, but on several occasions this backfired. In one instance I had an Middle East inspired campaign that was too historical to be familiar (they wanted the 7th Voyage of Sinbad but they got The Muqaddimah with footnotes). I toned down my historical realism for that group after that. Something similar happened to be not so long ago as well, where I realized the group I was running the game for wanted more real history than my previous group, but not as much as I ended up giving them. Now I try to read the group. I can spend a lot of time looking up little details regarding aspects of the setting in play. This is great if your players want that, but if they want more of a Robert E. Howard experience, I've learned that there is fun throwing history to the wind and letting your imagination have free reign.

I'm not a historian, but found once that the game I'm running is too historical for the players' tastes.
I found other players;).