It’s possible to look at populations and geography at any scale: globally, nationally, territorially, locally. In a role-playing game, having the scale communicate information is important. If you talk about the United States as a whole, you can’t be anything but vague. It’s important to use regions that are small enough to seem different. You could use regions that correspond to states; you could use regions that correspond to regions; you could even use areas that correspond to statistical areas. The problem is that the scale of some of those regions do an insufficient job of maintaining conservation of detail.
Previously, you suggested that “New York is probably like 8 domains that are all physically small and jam packed with humanity”. New York is a big place and it has a lot of interesting things going on, so clearly breaking it up into ‘digestible chunks’ seems like a good idea. As previously discussed, there are 8.6 Million people in New York City. That population is roughly equal to the entire population of neighboring state of New Jersey. The population of the statistical area is over 20 million – it’s so big that they call it the Tristate Area even though it includes one county in a fourth state. More than half of New Jersey is included and nearly half of Conneticut. Even though Long Island is included, it is a very different place than Manhattan – it’s primarily rural farms. Any description of New York City that has to talk about the important of dairy farming to the region is missing the point. In order to talk about the New York that matters for gaming purposes, you need to tighten your focus. Even if you include just the actual City of New York, it may be too big a setting to do justice with a single book. To address that, you most likely want to further subdivide the city into manageable chunks that themselves have meaning. The differences between Manhattan and the Bronx are not only generally well understood by people OUTSIDE the city, they’re defining features of life inside the city. While there are variations WITHIN each borough, the fact that you can characterize them easily and make them distinct contributes to the benefit of setting your game in one over the other.
Clearly, if you set a game in the Bronx, you aren’t particularly far from what happens in Queens, and you might roll over and participate. But there’s still a benefit to keeping the game in a definable area that can be easily grokked by your players. What’s interesting is that the areas that have cultural cachet are primarily cities. My wife spends a lot of time in France. When we lived in Iowa City, Iowa, she would get blank stares. When she said it was next to Illinois, she would get blank stares. When she said it was near Chicago, people understood what that meant.
Now, just like New York is a huge city, the entire Bay Area is a hug area – in fact the population of the San Jose-SanFrancisco-Oakland CSA is close to the population of New York. But just as you want to have a chance to distinguish the boroughs, it makes sense to break up this region in understandable and easily differentiated sections. You want to be able to compare and contrast San Francisco and Oakland and it’s not hard to do. For instance, San Francisco is roughly 50% white and only 6% black; Oakland is significantly more racially diverse with more than half the population black or Latino and only 1/3 white.
If you set a game in San Francisco (as opposed to Oakland), you have plenty of material to build your game around. You literally can spill ink indefinitely without running out of things to say. You can talk about Chinatown and the Financial District, and you’re going to be able to make the city come alive with the level of detail you can delve into by breaking into something manageable.
Now, New Orleans is where things MIGHT make sense in the statistical area, but I remain unconvinced. New Orleans has a population of under 400k; the statistical area is around 1.3 Million. If it makes sense to break up New York into areas of less than 2 million; and it makes sense to break up the Bay Area into chunks that are less than 2 million, it might make sense to take an area of Louisiana with less than 2 million people.
On the other hand, an even distribution would have 2/3 of the supernatural population outside of New Orleans. Did you know that the New Orleans statistical area is officially the ‘New Orleans – Metairie – Hammond combined statistical area’? If I was pitching my game and I said we were going to be based in Hammond, would that mean anything to you? New Orleans is a world-renowned destination – there is so much happening there that of course you’re going to want to make it your focus. The French Quarter has cachet all on its own. Bourbon Street is internationally recognized – there are few cities where you the name of a street is nearly as famous as the city itself! If you set a game in New Orleans, sure, you’re going to spend a few paragraphs talking about the surrounding area (like mentioning the junk-strewn property that they dump 50-gallon drums filled with the bodies of the dead). But that doesn’t mean ‘swamps near New Orleans’ will need the same amount of descriptive text as the city – where factions are based and politics and potential combat tends to happen…
But rather than address anything I’ve laid out here, there’s a really easy way to find out or prove me wrong. You started breaking out the supernatural presence in New Orleans.
Why don’t you continue developing your model of New Orleans – show me how you expect those 40 vampires to have factions and lairs. I contend that you haven’t allotted enough to fill out the roles that you want to cover for a game set in New Orleans. I further contend that if you allocate your luminaries evenly (ie, 1 per 10k, meaning fewer than 1/3 are in the City proper), you’re going to find it is even more obvious. Keep in mind, we’re proposing a game where Vampires are REAL and exist in the fabric of our society. With vampires being a fancy, New Orleans has quite a few well-known Vampire stories, as well as other supernaturals. If these are the ones who nearly broke the Masquerade, how many more must exist in the shadows?”Frank Trollman” wrote:The expected number of Luminaries for such a region is 145, and since this is our model domain, that's exactly the number we are going with. Locally, the most common kin are Vampires and Witches (40 each), followed by Lycanthropes and Leviathan (20 each), with "others" making up the rest. With just a handful of Animates and Transhumans, you have about 10 Steves - various Demons, Ghosts, Elves, Ancient Tree Spirits, and so on.
The next important thing is what Orion calls "Trash Tier Supernaturals." These are important, because we're talking about New Orleans and obviously we want to have a significant Zombie and Fairy population. Nevertheless, there don't need to be more than twenty or thirty of any of these guys. Between Zombies, Fairies, Goblins, Haunts, and a bare handful of Vampire Spawn and cannibal Mutants, you have 50-60 of these creatures.
The next important thing are what Blade calls "Familiars" and what Masquerade called "Ghouls." That is: humans who explicitly work for supernatural society. Some of them are Fausts, people who are "in the know" and have special and marketable skills that make them valuable to the Kin. Some are Renfields, people who have been dominated by some supernatural creature and either gifted with some magic benefit or just enslaved into depravity. Maybe a bit of both. And finally, some are just fanatics - people who follow one or more supernatural because they are a bit unhinged. All in all, I see there being like 600 of these people, split between the powerful and influential and just randos that have been scooped off the street to be used as sex slaves or thug #3.
