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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Dwarf in the Playground
     
    EvilClericGuy

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    Question Average death rate and lifespan of non-adventurer NPCs?

    ***ILLUMINARIUM CAMPAIGN STAY OUT***

    General Question: Campaign Independent

    What is the average death rate and lifespan of non-adventuring NPCs? In a town and region that has only been settled for 50-60 years, how many people will have died during that time frame? The average lifespan of a Human PC is about 100 years old, if the PC does not die while adventuring. But, surely, the average citizen does not live that long when factoring in diseases, injuries, crime, wildlife, etc. What about for High Elf NPCs who live their life in the city?

    A quick Google search confirms my suspicion that living to your maximum species life expectancy is unrealistic even for Royal Families: Life Expectancy in the Middle Ages. Should I use the same percentage rates (26%-67%) for High Elves?

    Specific Issue: My Campaign

    Spoiler: The Island Continent
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    My homebrewed campaign is going to take place on a large Island Continent of about 590,625 square miles (about the size of Peru or Mongolia; about four times larger than Japan or California). For narrative purposes, I would like The Isle to have only been recently settled (about 50-60 years ago) by the nations of my world. Using census data of the USA, you can see that population grew from 350 in 1610, to 50,368 in 1650 (40 years later) to 75,058 in 1660 (10 years after that). So, immigration rates explode vary rapidly.


    Spoiler: The City of True Democracy
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    One of the cities in my world has enacted "True Democracy." In this type of government, everyone who has ever lived in the region of the island is eligible to vote. By a mistake in the bylaws, this includes the dead. Thus, the dead start voting to become "alive" again and become sentient undead. For narrative purposes, I want somewhere between 30%-60% of the population of this city to be self-voted undead. But for this to work, I need a high level death rate to have occurred between the settling of this City (which started shortly after the settling of the Isle). So, I need to achieve a number of dead citizens without disrupting the history of my World or Isle too badly.


    Spoiler: Possible Solutions?
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    (1) Make the land harsh and hostile. Famines, wild animals, etc. that frequent kill NPCs before the full lifespan of NPCs is reached. But, then wouldn't they simply high more soldiers, guards, and/or PCs? Or, at the very least stop settling in that city?

    (2) Create a Great Plague that wipes out about half of the population of The Isle? If so, do I make The Plague unique to The Isle? Or, do I make The Plague a global pandemic. The pros of The Plague solution is that it neatly makes my numbers align, so that The City of True Democracy has the highest population on the Isle (as it has both the living and the undead as citizens). The cons of The Plague solution is that the PCs may believe that solving The Mystery of the Plague is a key component of the Campaign, when it is not. If I do go this route, I'll borrow some ideas form 2D8HP's Adventures in the wake of a plague? thread.

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    Bugbear in the Playground
     
    jqavins's Avatar

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    Default Re: Average death rate and lifespan of non-adventurer NPCs?

    (I haven't read the campaign specific information; perhaps I'll come back to it. My reply is generic.)

    For humans: you've got a source, so if you find it credible use it. Unless the average folk have access to healing and curing magic, in which case increase lifespan accordingly; a little if access is spare, a lot if access is copious.

    Elves (and other long lived races) are trickier. If they have the same vulnerability to disease, starvation, and violence as humans then they should die off at about the same rate in deaths per capita per year. But that would just make living to their racial maximum ages very, very uncommon and give a real average lifespan barely longer than humans. Using the same fractions of racial lifespans as humans achieve would seem to make sense, but they need a correspondingly better ability to avoid early death by assorted causes. That's not too hard in their traditional environments, but you might say that elves who move to human dominated cities end up having human-like life expectancies. On the third hand, since elves mature slower, roughly proportionally to their racial life spans, dying at human ages would mean that practically no city elf lives to adulthood. So I guess they need super-human disease resistance and accident survivability. Or perhaps this is something best not examined too closely.
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  3. - Top - End - #3
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    EvilClericGuy

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    Default Re: Average death rate and lifespan of non-adventurer NPCs?

    Quote Originally Posted by jqavins View Post
    Elves (and other long lived races) are trickier. If...same rate in deaths per capita per year. ...Using the same fractions of racial lifespans as humans achieve would seem to make sense, but they need a correspondingly better ability to avoid early death by assorted causes. ...On the third hand, since elves mature slower, roughly proportionally to their racial life spans, dying at human ages would mean that practically no city elf lives to adulthood. So I guess they need super-human disease resistance and accident survivability. Or perhaps this is something best not examined too closely.
    All really great ideas. Maybe its a combination. Elven societies are better at avoiding early death AND they do not typically leave their native society until the reach the age of adulthood (i.e., 100 years-old, per 5e's PHP). After adulthood, if they remain in their native land, they reach their maximum life span of 750 as often as Humans reach 80-90 in their native lands. However, if an Elf should leave their native land upon reaching adulthood, then they then have the remaining life expectancy as the dominant society (because of environmental risk factors). So, a typical Elf who leaves their homeland at 100 and migrates to a Human city would live to 180 (100+80). Similarly, an Elf who leaves their native homeland at 300 and migrates to a Human city would live to 380 (300+80).

    For anyone who's interested, the term that I was searching for in my original post is "crude death rate," which is the rate at which people die per 1,000. Below are some useful historical data. In short, the crude death rate was about 40 in 1700 (USA Colonial), 18 in 1960 (World) and about 8 in 2010 (World). So, in the 1700s, White Americans died at a rate of 4%. The crude death rate in the world of D&D and other RPGs would probably be much higher with monsters running around and raiding villages.

    Death rate, crude (per 1,000 people) {1960-2016 World}

    Birth and Death Rates in The Colonial Period

    I also found some data elsewhere that the life expectancy was about 40 in Ancient Egypt and late-50s in Ancient Rome.

    Demography of the Roman Empire: Mortality

    The people of ancient Egypt:Mortality, life expectancy, literacy

    Life Expectancy by Age, 1850–2011

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    Barbarian in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Average death rate and lifespan of non-adventurer NPCs?

    Another possibility if you want to explain a high mortality rate among long-lived races without resorting to a Great Plague event or monsters preying on colonists could be as simple as colonists having difficulty with unfamiliar weather patterns in the island. Early colonization efforts are just about guaranteed to run into some sort of unexpected hiccups. For example, maybe the region occasionally gets early-autumn snowstorms - not every year, but maybe once every 15-20 years or so. Such an event would be devastating to a young colony that didn't have much by way of food reserves yet, leading to a spike in starvation deaths as huge portions of the harvest are destroyed. After the first time it happened, the survivors would know to prepare for such a thing, but people who were unlucky or underprepared would still be at risk in future cycles.

    This has an advantage over a plague in that it doesn't imply any more plot significance than that one extreme of the El Nino cycle tends to send more cold, wet air over the region early in the season. No great mysteries to solve, just a meteorological quirk that results in more dead elves and dwarves than one might otherwise expect for such a young settlement.
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    Default Re: Average death rate and lifespan of non-adventurer NPCs?

    Don't overlook the fact that the average life expectancies are typically at birth. Once you get past early childhood, it went up dramatically for just about every society from Ogg and his cave-tribe on up. The age of sixty or so is a pretty good rule of thumb for a pre-scientific medicine human culture.
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    Default Re: Average death rate and lifespan of non-adventurer NPCs?

    First point - mean death rate and mean life span are just two ways of showing the same data. It's a straightforward inverse relationship, plus possibly some mild complications in terms of translating death rate into units other than per year.

    This lets you use just actuarial data. If you have just a big list of ages of death you can relatively easily generate life expectancy at a given age by using the truncated data set starting at that age, up until it starts getting a bit thin.
    Last edited by Knaight; 2017-11-27 at 06:20 AM.

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    Default Re: Average death rate and lifespan of non-adventurer NPCs?

    Quote Originally Posted by Knaight View Post
    First point - mean death rate and mean life span are just two ways of showing the same data. It's a straightforward inverse relationship, plus possibly some mild complications in terms of translating death rate into units other than per year.
    True, but...
    This lets you use just actuarial data. If you have just a big list of ages...
    ... I would be amazed if such data exist for the general masses of the medieval period of any given society (except maybe China).
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    Default Re: Average death rate and lifespan of non-adventurer NPCs?

    Quote Originally Posted by jqavins View Post
    True, but...
    ... I would be amazed if such data exist for the general masses of the medieval period of any given society (except maybe China).
    There's some rough approximations that can be accessed (e.g. the work done by the linked author, plus their somewhat questionable assumptions for why that's an upper bound).

    Plus, if the data does exist for China (and it wouldn't surprise me at all if there was at least some prefecture somewhere which had local data) that's not a terrible approximation for elsewhere. There also might be a way to extract information from the Domesday book, but I'm not too familiar with the details of that source.

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    Barbarian in the Playground
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    Default Re: Average death rate and lifespan of non-adventurer NPCs?

    There are a few issues that will affect the lifespan and Death rate significantly:

    1) What is the level of medicine ? How frequent and easily attainable are Cure Disease spells, have divinations etc. led to the germ theory of disease, sterilization etc ?
    Cure Disease spells is going to cause a population explosion by themselves if they are easy to get. Enough of them may induce herd immunity and stop epidemics cold. If the population have easy access to good quality medicine, its going to push lifespan up towards modern levels.

    2) What is the frequency or density of powerful apex predators that prey on humans? Such as Trolls, Dragons, Aboleths, Illithids etc.

    3) How is the food production, and are humans crowded in their ecological niche by other humanoids?

    Given the stress of a D&D world, I don't see any demographic transition coming on, so anything that pushes for high lifespans will also lead to rapid population growth, which will probably mean that competing races push back.

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