Population Model

[TippetsTX]

Love the use of the 'Six Sigma Rule' (former GE-certified greenbelt here... woo).

I prefer different demographic assumptions for my campaign world, but otherwise this is all great stuff. The Legacy Edition restricts the model in unnatural ways IMO (by limiting attribute progression beyond 40 or so). I think the world makes more sense when you ignore those constraints and to that end I put my population into the following broad groups...

NUISANCE - 30 or less
NOVICE - 31 to 36
VETERAN - 37 to 42
LEGENDARY - 43 to 48
MYTHIC - 48 and higher

Then I apply a variation of the 80/20 rule to abstract my population breakdown (obviously this is hominid-centric). 80% of NPCs will fall into the 'nuisance' category, for example, then 16% in 'novice', 3% in 'veteran', and 1% in 'legendary'. NPCs in the 'mythic' tier are not statistically relevant since they only exist as needed by the campaign.

P.S. People in the 'nuisance' category don't like that term for some reason. They prefer to be called 'normal'.

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

Thanks, TippetsTX.

I don't hold a belt in Six Sigma, but I have been exposed to the principles, a little. Green belt sounds like an accomplishment to be proud of. Congrats!

The 80/20 rule seems to hold merit, too.

After digging into it a bit further, I made an Excel sheet to generate one million random attribute totals with a mean of 30 and a standard deviation of 4. From that, I created a field to give me the count of the values >=48, for candidates for Tollkenar.

After generating over 100 random datasets, I found that most of the datasets, but not all, had at least one character with at least 48 attribute points. None of the datasets had over ten such characters. And, the maximum attribute total rarely went over 50 and never over 54.

So, I'm definitely in agreement with characters with 48 or more attribute points being mythic and only appearing as the story demands it. Never randomly.

And, for what it's worth, I consistently got around 410,000 individuals with 31 or more attribute points. So, I'm thinking that most of those are dying, retiring, or choosing another career path without making it into the 20% cut.

For interested parties, I started with these instructions to build my initial Excel sample sheet:
https://www.statology.org/generate-n...tion-in-excel/

Then, I added a couple of other fields to get the maximum value in the sample and a count of values greater than or equal to 48 and 31.

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

Another thought on the population model by attribute points.

According to the random encounter tables for dungeon adventuring in TFT:ITL on page 48, adventurers are just as likely to encounter a 40-poing wizard as they are a 40-point warrior.

Given that wizards are rare on Cidri, only amounting to 1 out of every 300 persons, this seems to say to me that most non-wizards would have very poor odds for surviving to 40-points.

Most probably choose other careers, though. So, maybe that is why the odds of encountering a 40-point adventuring warrior are about the same as encountering a 40-point adventuring wizard?

[Axly Suregrip]

1 in 300 are wizards, and yet on page 14, on a roll of 1 or 2 on 1d6 you are a wizard. 1 in 3.

I think wizards are much more likely to become adventurers than the rest of the population. So, your chances of finding a wizard in a cavern will be far from 1 out of 300 humanoids.

I think the page 48 example tables are just that, examples. I don't think any GM wants a trap to set off a petard (see bottom of page 49).

PS. I like you icon. Is that a Frank Frazetta art work?

[Shostak]

Originally Posted by Hrothgar Rannúlfr

Resolving My Doubts
Given the size of Cidri as well as alternate Cidri's, it's likely that the standard deviation on each Cidri varies somewhat. A truly mythical high fantasy area of Cidri probably has a standard deviation of 4 while a more gritty area of Cidri might have a standard deviation of 3 or even possibly even 2.

If Cidri is infinite in size (a possibility if it is separate worlds connected by gates), all models are meaningless since every observation sample, regardless of how large, will effectively be zero.

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

Originally Posted by Axly Suregrip

1 in 300 are wizards, and yet on page 14, on a roll of 1 or 2 on 1d6 you are a wizard. 1 in 3.

I think wizards are much more likely to become adventurers than the rest of the population. So, your chances of finding a wizard in a cavern will be far from 1 out of 300 humanoids.

I think the page 48 example tables are just that, examples. I don't think any GM wants a trap to set off a petard (see bottom of page 49).

PS. I like you icon. Is that a Frank Frazetta art work?

I think you are right about wizards being more likely to become adventurers than members of the general population.

I haven't given a lot of thought to the frequency of traps, yet. I do think that petard traps ought to be very rare.

Yes, it's a snippet from one of Frazetta's Death Dealer paintings. It's not the same colorization that Frazetta used, however.

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

Originally Posted by Shostak

If Cidri is infinite in size (a possibility if it is separate worlds connected by gates), all models are meaningless since every observation sample, regardless of how large, will effectively be zero.

That's a scary thought, but you are right.

The population models would only be meaningful for the area of Cidri in question. Local mean and standard deviation will vary from the default expectations, depending upon the GM of that portion/version of Cidri.

I think the default mean is 30 and the default standard deviation is probably 4. But, that standard deviation is, at best, a guess. Earlier incarnations of Cidri probably had a much higher standard deviation, given the changes in the XP requirements between the current printing and the earliest versions of the game.

[FireHorse]

Here's a notion.

Character Point Totals (ITL 16) says…

28: Low average
30: Exactly average
32: High average
34: Very high average
36: Above average
38: Superior
40: Formidable

…but that's all the range it covers. If we mirror everything downward from the average of 30 though, we can extrapolate…

20: Harmless
22: Inferior
24: Below Average
26: Very low average

Note that everything from 26 to 34 is within the range of "average" — only at 6 points of difference does it become "below" or "above".

So if 30 is the mean, then maybe the standard deviation here is 5, like so…

≤15: -3σ
16-20: -2σ
21-25:-1σ
26-34: "average" range (exact μ=30)
35-39: +1σ
40-44: +2σ
≥45: +3σ

This would mean that Tollenkar (or anyone else with 45 or more points) is in the top 0.135% of the whole population.

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

If 30 is the mean and the standard deviation is 5, that would mean that characters like Tollenkar are more common than I've anticipated.

It would also mean (assuming the Six Sigma Rule) that about 3.4 persons per million could be expected to be 60 point characters.

The potential for that many 60 point characters existing at any given time seems much too high, for my own tastes. Especially, if the XP requirements to achieve that attribute point total is taken into account along with the tales that earning such experience points would generate. I'd imagine that just one person earning over 8.38 billion XP would be known throughout all Cidri, as far as news could conceivably travel (including gates between worlds, etc...).

To me, it's too extreme to consider that 3.4 persons per million will earn 8.38 billion XP (or more). Therefore, the standard deviation, at least for my tastes, must be less than 5.

Additionally, if the standard deviations is 5, then 3.4 persons per million would possibly have an attribute point total of 0 or less. This, too, seems unrealistic, to me.

[Shostak]

The thing about games like TFT is that the rules for advancement explain how things work for the player characters. It does not follow that the rules for character advancement apply to the general population. It might be interesting, from game design and world-building perspectives, to see what the rules would imply about the general population as if the rules applied in those situations, but these are purely academic exercises.