Riffing off Grumpy Wizards recent 'how many wizards' post I wanted to talk about how many I ended up calculating - using the 3.5e rules since there is enough in the rulebooks to model from there. My old go-to's were this 'Demographics of Heroism' post from Adventurer, Conqueror, King and this 'How special are you? A guideline for determining character rarity.' on r/DNDBehindTheScreen using ELO levels from chess to estimate progression rates. I suggest we can also use a third approach, taking the data from D&D Beyond, OGANM and AideDND character building tools which give us an indication of level progression among players.
The gameable Joesky tax is the table, the crunch of where it came from is at the bottom if you like. Assuming that 3% of your population has a 'rare' class (from the 3.5e DMG) then the following is your table that drops out for what level is that random adventurer, assuming it maps to player level progression stats:
| Level | d100 |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1-24 |
| 2 | 25-42 |
| 3 | 43-56 |
| 4 | 57-66 |
| 5 | 67-74 |
| 6 | 75-80 |
| 7 | 81-85 |
| 8 | 86-89 |
| 9 | 90-91 |
| 10 | 92-94 |
| 11 | 95-95 |
| 12 | 96-96 |
| 13 | 97-97 |
| 14 | 98-98 |
| 15 | 99-99 |
| 16+ | 100-100 |
Given how few are above 15th level our d100 fails us so we get to reroll on the table below for what level exactly this mighty hero is.
| Level | d100 |
|---|---|
| 16 | 1-32 |
| 17 | 33-56 |
| 18 | 57-75 |
| 19 | 76-89 |
| 20 | 90-100 |
This was calibrated on 3-13%. Looking at this as an odds for a person of a certain level being present - or how many folk in general need to be about before you find one of these:
| Level | 1 in X leveled population | 1 in X general population |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5 | 170 |
| 2 | 7 | 223 |
| 3 | 9 | 291 |
| 4 | 11 | 381 |
| 5 | 15 | 498 |
| 6 | 20 | 651 |
| 7 | 26 | 851 |
| 8 | 33 | 1112 |
| 9 | 44 | 1454 |
| 10 | 57 | 1901 |
| 11 | 75 | 2485 |
| 12 | 97 | 3248 |
| 13 | 127 | 4247 |
| 14 | 167 | 5552 |
| 15 | 218 | 7258 |
| 16 | 285 | 9488 |
| 17 | 372 | 12404 |
| 18 | 486 | 16216 |
| 19 | 636 | 21199 |
| 20 | 831 | 27714 |
Use the second column with whatever your levelled population is to tweak how high-powered your world is.
This looks a bit different from ACKS and ELO as you can see:
Characters of that level per million general population
Reading through the 3.5e DMG there are two possible cuts - everyone with a PC-type level (3% of total population) or all non-commoners (13% including things like Experts, Warriors, Aristocrats and the like.)
Characters of that level per million general population, log scale
The player data give a much reduced population of heroes - either with 3% for levelled characters only or 13% for all non-commoners but with a stronger Tier IV presence. 36 level 20 people per million is going to make a lot of noise.
To be useful, the table below is your d100 roll to for the level of a random member of the adventuring population, set the size of that population yourself - this was calibrated on 3-13%
I am not sure this radically changes the game or world building but it is interesting as a hook to justify the populations of high level people running around in your game. It also says the progression from low to high level in 5e is not as hard a drop-off as real life or old school gaming might assume which makes sense. Your average adventurer with access to healing magic is going to be a lot more survivable and have more chance to progress.
So depending on the world you want to have pick which curve you want.
The ACKS ratios give a lot of low level adventurers running around and a really hard drop off as you progress in levels. Tier III, IV are less than 1 in a million.
The ELO ratio gives only slightly less low level adventurers and a later tail off - effectively lots of Tier I, Tier II folk running around, some Tier III, few Tier IV.
The 5e player curve gives a lower population of low-level adventurers but higher population of high level adventurers.
| Classed, Levelled per million population | ELO | ACKS | Player Data (3% lvld) | Player Data (13% lvld) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 48594 | 83333 | 5868 | 25429 |
| 2 | 42255 | 25000 | 4489 | 19451 |
| 3 | 35469 | 10000 | 3434 | 14879 |
| 4 | 28255 | 5000 | 2626 | 11381 |
| 5 | 21839 | 2000 | 2009 | 8706 |
| 6 | 16426 | 500 | 1537 | 6659 |
| 7 | 12045 | 167 | 1176 | 5094 |
| 8 | 8653 | 100 | 899 | 3896 |
| 9 | 5943 | 33 | 688 | 2981 |
| 10 | 4117 | 10 | 526 | 2280 |
| 11 | 2625 | 2 | 402 | 1744 |
| 12 | 1632 | 1 | 308 | 1334 |
| 13 | 961 | 0 | 235 | 1020 |
| 14 | 591 | 0 | 180 | 781 |
| 15 | 295 | 0 | 138 | 597 |
| 16 | 159 | 0 | 105 | 457 |
| 17 | 84 | 0 | 81 | 349 |
| 18 | 40 | 0 | 62 | 267 |
| 19 | 15 | 0 | 47 | 204 |
| 20 | 3 | 0 | 36 | 156 |
Couple this with the data-driven Appendix P to find out what class and race this random adventurer is.
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