I’ve been thinking for a long time about how to split up populations. There are many possibilities: race, class, faction, alignment, level, profession (distinctly different from faction), and so on.
In D&D 3.x these appear to be handled pretty inconsistently.
Analysis
Before delving too deeply into solutions, let’s think a bit about what has come before.
Demographics in D&D 3.x
Racial demographics are handled by determining the degree of racial mix in the community. Taken from the D&D 3e Dungeon Master’s Guide (I think the 3.5 DMG is slightly different, but it’s upstairs).
| Isolated | Mixed | Integrated |
| 96% human | 79% human | 37% human |
| 2% halfling | 9% halfling | 20% halfling |
| 1% elf | 5% elf | 18% elf |
| 1% other races | 3% dwarf | 10% dwarf |
| 2% gnome | 7% gnome | |
| 1% half-elf | 5% half-elf | |
| 1% half-orc | 3% half-orc |
Of course, there are allowances for communities of other races. An ‘elven city’ wouldn’t be populated mostly by humans (oh, but it might! See below), so ‘elves’ move to the top entry by integration, humans are put in second place, then everything else settles down.
On the other hand, classes are determined by first finding the highest level character for each class, the calculating a ‘tree’ of lower-level characters of that class until you get to first level. Then you take whatever’s left of the community and divide that up by NPC class (91% commoners, 5% warriors, 3% experts, 0.5% aristocrats and 0.5% adepts), all first level.
There aren’t particular guidelines for determining faction or profession, and alignment is kind of iffy as well, having a single table for ‘power centre’ alignment but not much else.
This really isn’t to my taste. Too many pieces to remember, tables that are inconsistent, and I have decided in my advancing age that I no longer much care about single-digit percentage differences in application.
In analysis I might care, and you’ll see some fractional percentages soon, but in actual application I don’t want to bother.
