"Ankh-Morpork is built on black loam, broadly, but is mostly built on itself; pragmatic citizens simply built on top of the existing buildings when the sediment grew too high as the river flooded, rather than excavate them out." in reference to your Capital is mostly built on Capital quote that you made on your stream.
@@lucaswalker6498 That's also just what people have done since forever. Waterways were the highways of past, so it stands to reason that a good, fertile place is a... good place to build your settlement, be it the first time or the sixth.
5:18 Holy crap, you worked on Mercenaries? Probably my favorite single player game ever. Driving C4 laden Sungri Scout Jeeps I stole, full speed into NK tanks, jumping out and popping them off is one of the best memories I have of a video game, ever. I launched a jeep into a reactor cooling tower with C4 once, probably 15 years ago and it's one of my all time *gaming* highs, heh. Good work Colville.
One thing I would recommend for people to do is to look at cities in the American South, like Houston, Atlanta, and such. They started off segregated, were de-segregated, and then grew like weeds after Air Conditioning was invented (seriously). So they make good object lessons for people trying to work out demographics in their D&D setting.
As someone from and living in Atlanta, it was incredibly complex and this description isn't even close to being accurate. It is used as an example of the grandfather clock theory. The more extreme the bell tolls, it will swing back as extreme as before.
Lol. Over a minute in to the discussion, half-way through your sentence: "Hey everybody. Matt Colville here..." This is the pinnacle of polish and expertise. I love this channel.
I initially thought he said his undercity was called "The Lairs". After watching the twitch stream I realized he is actually saying Layers. Much better.
I truly appreciate the window Into your mind, you so clearly enunciate a thesis. I would love to play a game with you as DM. I always hope to bump into you somewhere in south OC!
I watched the stream and wondered how you were going to edit that mess. And i struggled with the digressions. What you said about how twitch and you tube being for different people who wanted different things finally clicked in my head, and i realized i had the wrong understanding of what i was doing, i was participating in something. And about the last hour i was able to enjoy The cut and trust of the conversation instead of being annoyed at the other people in the theater for talking over the movie. So thanks for opening my eyes on that. Here's hoping for an amazing 2019 (2018 sucked) and congratulations on living the dream.
Running an evil campaign where my players will be slowly working to take over a city, so i'm trying to really develop a single city for them to explore. This might be good idea to help with the demographics of the city.
Loving Strongholds and Followers! I know it would take awhile, but for someone who isn't on Twitch, I would love to see the streams here on RUclips. Obviously that is totally up to you and whether you want to devote that much time to editing. Thanks for everything Matt!
I'm finishing a city based campaign right now and i did things like this, called this island city "Acadia" and there were 4 layers to this city each going from prime streets, to a under city, then slums, then the pits where there was no natural light might have done a bit better with this extra info when i first made it. Over all another great video
After watching the whole stream on Saturday this was definitely a great lesson to pull out as a standalone video. It's always a good idea to think about how systems will be used -- and in the case of tabletop RPGs, the user is always a person just trying to understand an implement rules, so it behooves us to make those rules easy to understand. Great video!
Matt you add so much awesomeness to my dnd experience. Just watching your enthusiasm has made me want to be the very best i can at dming. You really make my favorite hobby even cooler. Thanks man
Just finished playing in my first D&D 5e session as DM. Was pretty awkward, but everyone seemed to have fun and I pretty much ran Matt's Dealean Tomb + the beginning to Out of the Abyss.
This is so much better than what happened on the stream. The hour long argument about the population of Rome was not at all necessary. Definitely will be using this for the creation of future cities.
Huge thanks for making this video! My crew of players is on their way to a big city, and this is giving me lots of ideas for fleshing it out. Your tips always coincide with what I'm planning, which makes life a lot easier for me as a DM xD
I was watching the stream as I could, and this format on RUclips is infinitely preferable to an edited stream one, much easier to distill the lessons from.
This was exactly what i needed to watch, hit a block whilst building a small city for my group and wanted to do a fresh take on demographic. Super inspiring as always. Thanks Matt 🙂
Matt, I dont generally watch your world building videos because they are so long and tend to cover so much. I just dont have time alone to sit down and do that. This video was perfect. A simple quick synopsis. I loved it
I like these kinds of videos much better than watching the "best moments" of a 3-hour long stream. Just a summary and a condensed video about what happened is much more watchable and entertaining.
As you said, I believed this was a RtG with a mistaken title until you said something... that being said, I believe this 'recap' format of the livestreams is useful to the RtG crowd and a very good idea.
I was designing a homebrew race that you rolled to find the subrace (because some were more powerful than others and therefore rarer). I didn't end up using this race, but I remembered it just now because I started off using percentages and then decided to instead use a d20 roll and say that different numbers you roll are different subraces. Like I said, not a great concept overall but I noticed the simplicity of using a d20 similar to what you were saying.
Matt, I'm running my first campaign, which is a sandbox. All this prep is causing me to miss most of your new videos. I will watch all of them! Thanks for making these!
I did something like what you did a couple months back with the different Races of a City in my game, except I used Item Rarity labels from games like Diablo and Borderlands. It has now made me realize how dehumanizing those terms might be seen if I were to show them to anyone else haha!
Wow. That’s really nice. It’s gonna be really useful for my Storytellers products and Chronicles besides D&D campaigns of course. It’s that writing mentality that really works for rpgs. It’s the what you see, and not what is computed or dictated arbitrarily. It’s the good way to explain what is seen and felt, like dungeon rooms, it should have more of a feel than a metric
0:00 - The d20 is an unsung hero. Stand aside percentiles, you nasty fucks 1:14 - Hey Everybody, this is not the droid you were looking for 1:45 - Livestreams are better than Deadstreams 2:24 - The Major Breakthrough; percentiles you nasty fucks 5:01 - Background change 5:01 - Humans are Doms 6:00 - The Minority Report 6:14 - Infernal Enclave et al. 6:49 - Groups, individuals, and the last of the Time Lords 8:18 - Taxonomies are useful. Stand aside percentiles, you nasty fucks 9:16 - We got to L, Tune in on Saturday for Mindflayers 9:39 - Matt puts Jerry on a hook 10:34 - Follow Matt on Twitch 11:08 - This content is brought to you by Strongholds & Followers 12:09 - Next video is about your moral character
For conversational purposes and in game descriptions your categories are perfect. If you want to create any sort of random NPC roller, or even do a comparison between this city and another the % would be useful. IMHO
Thank you for doing a summary video with a clear message and focus. I always skip the edited Twitch streams and feel like a summary like this would be a far better use of your time, as opposed to editing for hours.
Now I just wa. A go watch the VOD. I've never seen someone go through the MM like this and I feel it would be a good learning experience for me as dm. Cheers for the video Matt, as always a pleasure learning.
Hey Matt! Love your videos. Been watching for quite some time. Wanted to throw this into the mix. The demographics and population of cities (especially really large, cosmopolitan ones) tends to change based on the time of day and time of year. I live in NYC, and the population balloons by an estimated 1.5M due to people making day trips for tourism, commuting into work, and other edge cases. We're also, essentially, the biggest college town in the world. So when summer comes around, the city's population drops significantly due to the tens of thousands of students who go home for the summer. How would this translate to a fantasy city? Well, think about the types of folks who would live in the surrounding areas. Who are the farmers and the merchants? Chances are good that they don't live in Capital. It's possible even that the folks performing clerical tasks at a local guild or library may commute in and out of the city. This means that there's certain kinds of people you'll be more likely to find enjoying a drink at the tavern or dancing in the square after dark compared to the kinds of people you'll see doing business during the day. You would apply the same sort of thinking for the seasons as well. Those farmers won't be coming in as often during the winter, and it may be that if your world has important holidays or things like that the apprentices and low level priests and such might be headed back to their local villages. Employing these sorts of real-life, dynamic population models should help your setting feel even more lived in as the players continue to interact with the city throughout a long, ongoing campaign.
Matt, thank you. You are just such a positive entity in the community and i am always left feeling uplifted and happy after your vids. Keep doing your awesome work man. We support you.
Yeah, The Layers sound really cool and as soon as the players were on the promenade and Matt said this subway entrance thingy is one of the entrances to The Layers I was stoked. But nobody took the bait, bit on the worm, pulled the lever.
I was watching the stream and the "EUREKA!" moment of the dominant, minority, etc. labels was amazing to me. Never think that your first idea is your best idea! Great lesson for game design and life in general.
As a Pathfinder GM, I made a d1000 custom Reincarnation chart that has 86 racial outcomes, weighted by rarity. Adding their percentages together, there's a 50% chance of getting 1 of the 10 "regular" fantasy humanoids, but there's also, for instance, a .1% chance of getting Drider, and a .2% of getting Medusa. I do agree with your reasoning on just setting arbitrary categories for actual city-building though. Cultural pressures tend to prevent there being a random melting pot.
@@warrenokuma7264 Sure, here's a Dropbox link to the Excel file. =] www.dropbox.com/s/wtp2oczxmzu9w7s/Reincarnation%20Chart.xlsx?dl=0 The reason for the staggered formatting was to avoid situations where "the d1000 started with a 2, so I know it's one of these 2 races, oh well". It also includes a page for Starfinder, but that one doesn't include Alien Archive 2 yet. The page marked Classes is for rolling NPC's. I hope it's somewhat interesting/useful. =]
I definitely like this version of the twitch recap, its much more efficient than editing down the stream (better signal to noise). And besides, anyone can watch the twitch stream on VoD!
I think Mass Effect did something similar. There are council races, and non-council races. A couple of the non-council races have embassies, which sort of elevates them to a position of power. It's basically 3 categories of races and I think it worked really well to set the tone for racial interactions in the game.
THANK YOU SO MUCH STOLEN AF Been worldbuilding for a new campaign, never done demographics before but this time I wanted to put in the effort, and I was also stuck at percentages, knowing as I did it that it was fundamentally useless information that would be nigh-impossible to actually apply anywhere. I ended up just (what I now understand was) going over the map declaring which would be the dominant race in that area. Thanks for the extra categories, I love outsourcing the creation of useful ideas.
This is great. I can't connect with the long streams but a short summary is so good. Thank you for caring about your content quality to such an extent.
This is a great video! I really enjoy the paired down VODs, so I hope we still get those as well. But I like this format for whenever the streams are too unwieldy to deal with.
That was a fun stream, but I think you've refactored it wonderfully with this format. Good Job Matt, and thanks for really putting your back into your content creation
Copy-Paste into your notes: Categories Dominant (Typically human) They can be found anywhere in the city. In any district you will be able to find the dominant species and they are meaningfully involved in the politics of the city. Minorities (Typically Elves, dwarves and halflings) Minorities can still be found, like the dominant species, anywhere in the city, in any district. They just don't have as much political power as the dominant species. And that can be for a number of reasons. Enclave (Could be any exotic race that tend to live in communities) An enclave is a group of a given species that can only be found in one district of the city. It could be one neighborhood. In that place, all of the signs could be in a different language to the rest of the city. They may be refugees. Groups (Could be any exotic race that tend to live in communities) Groups are smaller than enclaves. There could be 12 of them. They are located together and all know each other. These may act as representatives for a larger populace in another location outside of the city. Individuals (Dragonborn, tortle, firbolg, triton, goliath or drow wanderers for example or unusual births like Aasimar or Tieflings with two human parents) Folks who can be found in the city but they're each there for their own reasons. So they don't represent any kind of larger demographic population in the city. These individuals might not typically have a neighborhood or embassy in the city. Singular (perhaps extra-planar visitors like aarakocra, angel or genasi or powerful monsters like an aboleth, beholder, vampire or dragon) There is literally only one of these.
1) While I can see the way you're talking about the demographics of Capital is great and useful, I will note that as a sociologist I have worked with social statistics, so there are ways that for people like me that percentage can be useful as well. I would prefer percentages for work by me for me, but your approach is great for DMs and players in general. 2) Personally I love the world building VODS, but pretty much can't do Twitch. 3) I have paid for Strongholds & Followers, am excited to get PDF access, but still do not have it. :( 4) The accomplishments of you and your team are stellar. Godspeed sir.
You say the d20 is the 'unsung' hero but from my experience, it is idolized and characterized at the table by all players so I would in fact say it is sung :P
I did kinda the same thing when I designed my world's main city. Its basically the main city of the empire (now its peace time in the empire, which means adventuring is at its golden age right now). The city is at the the coast of a big inland sea, so ships that have to go through from the sea have to pass the city. Basically its a big trading and cultural melting pot... I made groups like that with some differences. But basically the same style. Groups that go from the largest to the smallest, different ethnicities (did I write this word right...?). So basically when I first introduced my city to my players I just had to look at the my chart and after some rolls I could accurately describe the diversity of a specific spot on the map. For example the docks, where they had some pretty messed up quest (was intended for waaay later, and a bit out of their league but I was like... okay, you can try...). I didnt really work on the docks yet, but looking at my charts I could get an accurate description of the people who were there at the time.
Wow this is a revelation, I’ve been having a hard time with world building and developing a believable culture. Demographic will be easier now with thinking like this
Really cool concept, still would have liked to see the cut down stream, but I agree that editing time would be brutal :D I think I'll steal that system for my upcoming Campaign, but I would want to add percentages to the categories, just so I can quickly check for random NPCs. Thank's Matt :D
I like coming up with percentages so if they are in a tavern and the players ask "are there any *insert race* in this tavern?" I can roll a percentile to determine it
I think the main point is when you are determining the sizes to not think in percents, then later, you can assign percents to the groups based on their size assignments if needed.
Hey Matt. I tried looking back through your videos for the specific one, but I think I lost it. In one of your videos you mention the idea of "having nostalgia for a time you didn't live in" or something to that effect. The concept really interested me and after a little digging I found The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows; a website and soon to be book, created by John Koenig in an attempt to fill in the holes in the English language when it comes to emotions we don't have words for. You can find the website here www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/ He coined the word "anemoia" to describe "Nostalgia For A Time You’ve Never Known". I just found it very interesting and thought you might too. Any way, have a good day.
I know that you meant your comment to Matt, but I checked out your link and was kind of blown away a little bit. I came to "midding". I just... want to tell you that that place seems really good. Thank you. This is exactly the kind of thing that I, with all my heart, either finds and becomes transfixed or would partially try doing. Again, thank you.
I am glad you looked into it and found it so interesting. There are so many feelings that we have that we don't have names for. Plus it is nice to read the descriptions and realise other people have had the same experiences as me.
At the peak, estimates indicate about 1 million persons in Rome, the city, in ancient times. At the time of the Emperor Augustus, Rome was the largest city in the world: with a population of about one million people.
I Am LOVING Strongholds and Followers. Currently a GM for a heavily modified 5eD&D campaign of Lost Mines of Phandelver, designed to take players from level 1 to level 20 if I'm lucky and they all humor me for that long, ha ha. Party is about level 6 now and has pushed passed the main story of Lost Mines into the second act. They've found a resource rich mine and want to set up a defensive position and keep the money flowing, they've allied themselves with Neverwinter, and the Lords alliance has signed them on as full members within the guild of Mining, Masonry, Gem work and Allocation of Mineral resources. The Copper, Silver, Gold and even the small bit of Platinum from their mine is in the process of being cast and minted into trade bars and coin. They are sitting on the borderline of being too rich, but they've gotten a good taste of Unit Combat and Warfare, they seem to like it. They've had 2 smaller skirmishes before this one but basically a noble who thinks the mine is technically on his land has mustered an army (technically without any official authority, and also technically without anything being traced back to him) to try and assault the mine and it was a HOOT. The party reached out and hired some mercenary Dwarfs and some siege equipment, they've surprised me, even asking if they could try to bribe a local legend to help them. A particular Banshee who is involved briefly as a side quest in the standard adventure of Lost Mines. Long story short, the managed to establish themselves not only as wealthy individuals but as fearsome land owners. Also there's now a rumor that they can summon undead so that's going to be a fun story note for me to expand on.
awwww I really loved the one-hour-ish cut! I get why you won't necessarily do it anymore, guess I'll go watch the full 4 hours! 12 minutes just isn't enough Colville for me^^
Well, the categories is a great idea! I've always hated the percentages in published adventures, they just never tell me anything. Especially using them as a way to explain political influence or how cohesive they are, I love that
On the note of getting better at your skills as you play: Skyrim did that and it's one of the most popular video game rpgs ever made, although that system is obviously only one factor.
I am much more partial to this format vs. Twitch,. I can watch RUclips at work, but Twitch is blacklisted. Take that as ya will, but I gotta get paid so I can afford pizza for game night. Rock on Matt, love your content.
I like this idea a lot and I'll use this when presenting the world to my players. I'd still give it a percentage though, as I like to roll a percentage die to see what kind of species someone is when I have no preset idea for it. That makes my setting much more diverse (otherwise it's almost all humans all the time). It'd be something for me personally, not the players.
The difference between 68% and 69% chance to hit is that one of the players will make a bad joke every time they attack for the latter one.
Nice
Nice.
Nice
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Nice
Those are cat scratches. I'd know those marks from a mile away.
The inflamed and perfectly accurate slash is a dead giveaway 😆
@@Acewarren Puppy scratches in contrast are somewhat wanting in their precision and symmetry.
Lol I got like 6 of them on my hand right now
What do you mean? That is the scar he bears from his battle with a fierce feline warrior, to call it a mere scratch is very insulting.
This really cuts through some of the boring fluff that slows down my world building, thanks Matt
Second!
@@Tye-Power Third!
Fourth !! Amazing.
So are we not gonna talk about the xenomorph that was...hanging out... on the set for the first 5 mins of the video?
I was literally looking at him as he vanished. My theory is he was humping the wall, hence the 'he' and , well, got bored after a while...
It was only polite for him to move out of the way of the words on the screen
5:01 for anyone looking for the disappearance
It spooked me :O
The film student in me is raging at the beach of shot continuity on that one.
"Ankh-Morpork is built on black loam, broadly, but is mostly built on itself; pragmatic citizens simply built on top of the existing buildings when the sediment grew too high as the river flooded, rather than excavate them out." in reference to your Capital is mostly built on Capital quote that you made on your stream.
Matt has said before that he's a fan of Pratchett - I definitely saw that here.
@@lucaswalker6498 That's also just what people have done since forever. Waterways were the highways of past, so it stands to reason that a good, fertile place is a... good place to build your settlement, be it the first time or the sixth.
5:18 Holy crap, you worked on Mercenaries? Probably my favorite single player game ever. Driving C4 laden Sungri Scout Jeeps I stole, full speed into NK tanks, jumping out and popping them off is one of the best memories I have of a video game, ever. I launched a jeep into a reactor cooling tower with C4 once, probably 15 years ago and it's one of my all time *gaming* highs, heh.
Good work Colville.
Nothing to add. Just supporting the channel. Awesome work again Mat
One thing I would recommend for people to do is to look at cities in the American South, like Houston, Atlanta, and such. They started off segregated, were de-segregated, and then grew like weeds after Air Conditioning was invented (seriously).
So they make good object lessons for people trying to work out demographics in their D&D setting.
As someone from and living in Atlanta, it was incredibly complex and this description isn't even close to being accurate. It is used as an example of the grandfather clock theory. The more extreme the bell tolls, it will swing back as extreme as before.
Lol. Over a minute in to the discussion, half-way through your sentence: "Hey everybody. Matt Colville here..." This is the pinnacle of polish and expertise. I love this channel.
I initially thought he said his undercity was called "The Lairs". After watching the twitch stream I realized he is actually saying Layers. Much better.
For some reason the idea of an aboleth owning it's own company by enslaving workers with it's charming ability seems really apealling to me.
"I don't know why, I just think that'd be cool" sounds like 90% of my worldbuilding
"Pagh! ...all true Riojans despise that city!" Capital - not the greatest city of this or any age but a symbol of oppression.
The categories are SO MUCH BETTER. And, I love the idea of the the undercity being called the Layers. Thank you to the chat person who suggested that.
I truly appreciate the window Into your mind, you so clearly enunciate a thesis. I would love to play a game with you as DM. I always hope to bump into you somewhere in south OC!
I watched the stream and wondered how you were going to edit that mess. And i struggled with the digressions. What you said about how twitch and you tube being for different people who wanted different things finally clicked in my head, and i realized i had the wrong understanding of what i was doing, i was participating in something. And about the last hour i was able to enjoy The cut and trust of the conversation instead of being annoyed at the other people in the theater for talking over the movie. So thanks for opening my eyes on that. Here's hoping for an amazing 2019 (2018 sucked) and congratulations on living the dream.
Running an evil campaign where my players will be slowly working to take over a city, so i'm trying to really develop a single city for them to explore. This might be good idea to help with the demographics of the city.
Loving Strongholds and Followers! I know it would take awhile, but for someone who isn't on Twitch, I would love to see the streams here on RUclips. Obviously that is totally up to you and whether you want to devote that much time to editing. Thanks for everything Matt!
Matt, thank you for the amazing content you and MCDM put out. It is greatly appreciated by the community you have grown here. Peace... out!
I'm finishing a city based campaign right now and i did things like this, called this island city "Acadia" and there were 4 layers to this city each going from prime streets, to a under city, then slums, then the pits where there was no natural light might have done a bit better with this extra info when i first made it. Over all another great video
After watching the whole stream on Saturday this was definitely a great lesson to pull out as a standalone video. It's always a good idea to think about how systems will be used -- and in the case of tabletop RPGs, the user is always a person just trying to understand an implement rules, so it behooves us to make those rules easy to understand.
Great video!
Matt you add so much awesomeness to my dnd experience. Just watching your enthusiasm has made me want to be the very best i can at dming. You really make my favorite hobby even cooler. Thanks man
Anyone else notice the Xenomorph dissapear at 5:01 ?
Was scrolling down the comments, to see if anyone noticed that as well, haha
Just finished playing in my first D&D 5e session as DM. Was pretty awkward, but everyone seemed to have fun and I pretty much ran Matt's Dealean Tomb + the beginning to Out of the Abyss.
9:23 the best depiction of the creative process
This is so much better than what happened on the stream. The hour long argument about the population of Rome was not at all necessary. Definitely will be using this for the creation of future cities.
Huge thanks for making this video! My crew of players is on their way to a big city, and this is giving me lots of ideas for fleshing it out. Your tips always coincide with what I'm planning, which makes life a lot easier for me as a DM xD
I've never really cared for the whole streaming dnd thing, but the campaign you're setting up just keeps getting more and more interesting.
I was watching the stream as I could, and this format on RUclips is infinitely preferable to an edited stream one, much easier to distill the lessons from.
1:19 I was just thinking "I wonder if this is a stream recap"
I'm gunna steal yo $hit. Thanks.
It is not stealing if he is giving it to you =p
This was exactly what i needed to watch, hit a block whilst building a small city for my group and wanted to do a fresh take on demographic. Super inspiring as always. Thanks Matt 🙂
Your videos have helped me become a better DM. Thanks for all the tips and tricks :)
Matt, I dont generally watch your world building videos because they are so long and tend to cover so much. I just dont have time alone to sit down and do that. This video was perfect. A simple quick synopsis.
I loved it
I like these kinds of videos much better than watching the "best moments" of a 3-hour long stream. Just a summary and a condensed video about what happened is much more watchable and entertaining.
As you said, I believed this was a RtG with a mistaken title until you said something... that being said, I believe this 'recap' format of the livestreams is useful to the RtG crowd and a very good idea.
This walk throuhg of how to build a world is an amazing source. Thanks Matt!
I was designing a homebrew race that you rolled to find the subrace (because some were more powerful than others and therefore rarer). I didn't end up using this race, but I remembered it just now because I started off using percentages and then decided to instead use a d20 roll and say that different numbers you roll are different subraces. Like I said, not a great concept overall but I noticed the simplicity of using a d20 similar to what you were saying.
Matt, I'm running my first campaign, which is a sandbox. All this prep is causing me to miss most of your new videos. I will watch all of them! Thanks for making these!
I did something like what you did a couple months back with the different Races of a City in my game, except I used Item Rarity labels from games like Diablo and Borderlands. It has now made me realize how dehumanizing those terms might be seen if I were to show them to anyone else haha!
Wow. That’s really nice. It’s gonna be really useful for my Storytellers products and Chronicles besides D&D campaigns of course.
It’s that writing mentality that really works for rpgs. It’s the what you see, and not what is computed or dictated arbitrarily. It’s the good way to explain what is seen and felt, like dungeon rooms, it should have more of a feel than a metric
0:00 - The d20 is an unsung hero. Stand aside percentiles, you nasty fucks
1:14 - Hey Everybody, this is not the droid you were looking for
1:45 - Livestreams are better than Deadstreams
2:24 - The Major Breakthrough; percentiles you nasty fucks
5:01 - Background change
5:01 - Humans are Doms
6:00 - The Minority Report
6:14 - Infernal Enclave et al.
6:49 - Groups, individuals, and the last of the Time Lords
8:18 - Taxonomies are useful. Stand aside percentiles, you nasty fucks
9:16 - We got to L, Tune in on Saturday for Mindflayers
9:39 - Matt puts Jerry on a hook
10:34 - Follow Matt on Twitch
11:08 - This content is brought to you by Strongholds & Followers
12:09 - Next video is about your moral character
For conversational purposes and in game descriptions your categories are perfect. If you want to create any sort of random NPC roller, or even do a comparison between this city and another the % would be useful. IMHO
It wasn't the essay on economic systems of medieval fantasy/non-human economies I was expecting, but still, neat. 👍
Thank you for doing a summary video with a clear message and focus. I always skip the edited Twitch streams and feel like a summary like this would be a far better use of your time, as opposed to editing for hours.
Now I just wa. A go watch the VOD. I've never seen someone go through the MM like this and I feel it would be a good learning experience for me as dm. Cheers for the video Matt, as always a pleasure learning.
Hey Matt! Love your videos. Been watching for quite some time. Wanted to throw this into the mix. The demographics and population of cities (especially really large, cosmopolitan ones) tends to change based on the time of day and time of year.
I live in NYC, and the population balloons by an estimated 1.5M due to people making day trips for tourism, commuting into work, and other edge cases. We're also, essentially, the biggest college town in the world. So when summer comes around, the city's population drops significantly due to the tens of thousands of students who go home for the summer.
How would this translate to a fantasy city? Well, think about the types of folks who would live in the surrounding areas. Who are the farmers and the merchants? Chances are good that they don't live in Capital. It's possible even that the folks performing clerical tasks at a local guild or library may commute in and out of the city. This means that there's certain kinds of people you'll be more likely to find enjoying a drink at the tavern or dancing in the square after dark compared to the kinds of people you'll see doing business during the day. You would apply the same sort of thinking for the seasons as well. Those farmers won't be coming in as often during the winter, and it may be that if your world has important holidays or things like that the apprentices and low level priests and such might be headed back to their local villages.
Employing these sorts of real-life, dynamic population models should help your setting feel even more lived in as the players continue to interact with the city throughout a long, ongoing campaign.
Matt, thank you. You are just such a positive entity in the community and i am always left feeling uplifted and happy after your vids. Keep doing your awesome work man. We support you.
Yeah, The Layers sound really cool and as soon as the players were on the promenade and Matt said this subway entrance thingy is one of the entrances to The Layers I was stoked. But nobody took the bait, bit on the worm, pulled the lever.
I was watching the stream and the "EUREKA!" moment of the dominant, minority, etc. labels was amazing to me. Never think that your first idea is your best idea! Great lesson for game design and life in general.
I found this more enjoyable than the usual edited stream
One of your most useful videos in a while! Keep it up, and thank you!
As a Pathfinder GM, I made a d1000 custom Reincarnation chart that has 86 racial outcomes, weighted by rarity. Adding their percentages together, there's a 50% chance of getting 1 of the 10 "regular" fantasy humanoids, but there's also, for instance, a .1% chance of getting Drider, and a .2% of getting Medusa.
I do agree with your reasoning on just setting arbitrary categories for actual city-building though. Cultural pressures tend to prevent there being a random melting pot.
Can you post this table somewhere? I would love to see that.
@@warrenokuma7264 Sure, here's a Dropbox link to the Excel file. =]
www.dropbox.com/s/wtp2oczxmzu9w7s/Reincarnation%20Chart.xlsx?dl=0
The reason for the staggered formatting was to avoid situations where "the d1000 started with a 2, so I know it's one of these 2 races, oh well". It also includes a page for Starfinder, but that one doesn't include Alien Archive 2 yet. The page marked Classes is for rolling NPC's. I hope it's somewhat interesting/useful. =]
The d20: unsung hero of "The d20 System"
I definitely like this version of the twitch recap, its much more efficient than editing down the stream (better signal to noise). And besides, anyone can watch the twitch stream on VoD!
Really loving how Capital is coming together! Thanks for the lesson in not getting caught in the minutiae
I think Mass Effect did something similar. There are council races, and non-council races. A couple of the non-council races have embassies, which sort of elevates them to a position of power. It's basically 3 categories of races and I think it worked really well to set the tone for racial interactions in the game.
THANK YOU SO MUCH
STOLEN AF
Been worldbuilding for a new campaign, never done demographics before but this time I wanted to put in the effort, and I was also stuck at percentages, knowing as I did it that it was fundamentally useless information that would be nigh-impossible to actually apply anywhere. I ended up just (what I now understand was) going over the map declaring which would be the dominant race in that area. Thanks for the extra categories, I love outsourcing the creation of useful ideas.
This is great. I can't connect with the long streams but a short summary is so good. Thank you for caring about your content quality to such an extent.
This is a great video! I really enjoy the paired down VODs, so I hope we still get those as well. But I like this format for whenever the streams are too unwieldy to deal with.
Very useful and fun way to look at worldbuilding!
That was a fun stream, but I think you've refactored it wonderfully with this format. Good Job Matt, and thanks for really putting your back into your content creation
Copy-Paste into your notes:
Categories
Dominant
(Typically human)
They can be found anywhere in the city. In any district you will be able to find the dominant species and they are meaningfully involved in the politics of the city.
Minorities
(Typically Elves, dwarves and halflings)
Minorities can still be found, like the dominant species, anywhere in the city, in any district. They just don't have as much political power as the dominant species. And that can be for a number of reasons.
Enclave
(Could be any exotic race that tend to live in communities)
An enclave is a group of a given species that can only be found in one district of the city. It could be one neighborhood. In that place, all of the signs could be in a different language to the rest of the city. They may be refugees.
Groups
(Could be any exotic race that tend to live in communities)
Groups are smaller than enclaves. There could be 12 of them. They are located together and all know each other. These may act as representatives for a larger populace in another location outside of the city.
Individuals
(Dragonborn, tortle, firbolg, triton, goliath or drow wanderers for example or unusual births like Aasimar or Tieflings with two human parents)
Folks who can be found in the city but they're each there for their own reasons. So they don't represent any kind of larger demographic population in the city. These individuals might not typically have a neighborhood or embassy in the city.
Singular
(perhaps extra-planar visitors like aarakocra, angel or genasi or powerful monsters like an aboleth, beholder, vampire or dragon)
There is literally only one of these.
1) While I can see the way you're talking about the demographics of Capital is great and useful, I will note that as a sociologist I have worked with social statistics, so there are ways that for people like me that percentage can be useful as well. I would prefer percentages for work by me for me, but your approach is great for DMs and players in general.
2) Personally I love the world building VODS, but pretty much can't do Twitch.
3) I have paid for Strongholds & Followers, am excited to get PDF access, but still do not have it. :(
4) The accomplishments of you and your team are stellar. Godspeed sir.
So Capital is like an onion...it's got Layers 😂
Why not cake, a cake has layers?
@@TheSuperKi11z cause it's an 18 year old joke about ogres :)
Bruh in the movie Donkey says that line to Shrek lmao
More like a parfait.
Because everyone likes parfaits.
This has got to be one of the best world building guides ever
Tuned into twitch for the first time last worldbuilding stream. I am loving it!
You say the d20 is the 'unsung' hero but from my experience, it is idolized and characterized at the table by all players so I would in fact say it is sung :P
I did kinda the same thing when I designed my world's main city. Its basically the main city of the empire (now its peace time in the empire, which means adventuring is at its golden age right now). The city is at the the coast of a big inland sea, so ships that have to go through from the sea have to pass the city.
Basically its a big trading and cultural melting pot...
I made groups like that with some differences. But basically the same style. Groups that go from the largest to the smallest, different ethnicities (did I write this word right...?). So basically when I first introduced my city to my players I just had to look at the my chart and after some rolls I could accurately describe the diversity of a specific spot on the map.
For example the docks, where they had some pretty messed up quest (was intended for waaay later, and a bit out of their league but I was like... okay, you can try...). I didnt really work on the docks yet, but looking at my charts I could get an accurate description of the people who were there at the time.
Wow this is a revelation, I’ve been having a hard time with world building and developing a believable culture. Demographic will be easier now with thinking like this
Really cool concept, still would have liked to see the cut down stream, but I agree that editing time would be brutal :D I think I'll steal that system for my upcoming Campaign, but I would want to add percentages to the categories, just so I can quickly check for random NPCs. Thank's Matt :D
You've outdone yourself again Matt. Thanks.
I like coming up with percentages so if they are in a tavern and the players ask "are there any *insert race* in this tavern?" I can roll a percentile to determine it
I think the main point is when you are determining the sizes to not think in percents, then later, you can assign percents to the groups based on their size assignments if needed.
I was just about to flesh out a capital my players are heading to. Thank you so much this was very educational.
Thanks for all you do, you keep my DMing fun and me sane!
I also like the term "Smattering" - roughly the same number as groups, but not connected.
Hey Matt. I tried looking back through your videos for the specific one, but I think I lost it. In one of your videos you mention the idea of "having nostalgia for a time you didn't live in" or something to that effect. The concept really interested me and after a little digging I found The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows; a website and soon to be book, created by John Koenig in an attempt to fill in the holes in the English language when it comes to emotions we don't have words for. You can find the website here www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/
He coined the word "anemoia" to describe "Nostalgia For A Time You’ve Never Known". I just found it very interesting and thought you might too. Any way, have a good day.
I know that you meant your comment to Matt, but I checked out your link and was kind of blown away a little bit. I came to "midding". I just... want to tell you that that place seems really good. Thank you. This is exactly the kind of thing that I, with all my heart, either finds and becomes transfixed or would partially try doing. Again, thank you.
I am glad you looked into it and found it so interesting. There are so many feelings that we have that we don't have names for. Plus it is nice to read the descriptions and realise other people have had the same experiences as me.
Thanks Matt!
Its awesome as i'm just starting to have a problem with a thing, Matt has a video on it. Love it dude, keep up the quality work
Yeah! First video of the new year!
Fat Sam’s Grand Slam T-shirt ftw.
makes me wonder if there is a Bugsy Malone RPG
This is one of those channels where I instantly subscribe.
Honestly, Id watch an entire stream. Dont worry about editing it, ill consume all of it
At the peak, estimates indicate about 1 million persons in Rome, the city, in ancient times. At the time of the Emperor Augustus, Rome was the largest city in the world: with a population of about one million people.
I Am LOVING Strongholds and Followers. Currently a GM for a heavily modified 5eD&D campaign of Lost Mines of Phandelver, designed to take players from level 1 to level 20 if I'm lucky and they all humor me for that long, ha ha. Party is about level 6 now and has pushed passed the main story of Lost Mines into the second act. They've found a resource rich mine and want to set up a defensive position and keep the money flowing, they've allied themselves with Neverwinter, and the Lords alliance has signed them on as full members within the guild of Mining, Masonry, Gem work and Allocation of Mineral resources. The Copper, Silver, Gold and even the small bit of Platinum from their mine is in the process of being cast and minted into trade bars and coin. They are sitting on the borderline of being too rich, but they've gotten a good taste of Unit Combat and Warfare, they seem to like it.
They've had 2 smaller skirmishes before this one but basically a noble who thinks the mine is technically on his land has mustered an army (technically without any official authority, and also technically without anything being traced back to him) to try and assault the mine and it was a HOOT. The party reached out and hired some mercenary Dwarfs and some siege equipment, they've surprised me, even asking if they could try to bribe a local legend to help them. A particular Banshee who is involved briefly as a side quest in the standard adventure of Lost Mines. Long story short, the managed to establish themselves not only as wealthy individuals but as fearsome land owners. Also there's now a rumor that they can summon undead so that's going to be a fun story note for me to expand on.
awwww I really loved the one-hour-ish cut! I get why you won't necessarily do it anymore, guess I'll go watch the full 4 hours! 12 minutes just isn't enough Colville for me^^
Well, the categories is a great idea! I've always hated the percentages in published adventures, they just never tell me anything. Especially using them as a way to explain political influence or how cohesive they are, I love that
this was so useful! thank you so much.
On the note of getting better at your skills as you play: Skyrim did that and it's one of the most popular video game rpgs ever made, although that system is obviously only one factor.
I am much more partial to this format vs. Twitch,. I can watch RUclips at work, but Twitch is blacklisted. Take that as ya will, but I gotta get paid so I can afford pizza for game night. Rock on Matt, love your content.
Great advice and thank you for the "tools" to apply.
lovin' the Atari font. Thanks Matt!
Always insightful and inspiring! Thanks Mr Colville
Rolemaster isn't a "percentile system". Call of Chthulu is an example of a "percentile system". (In case any of you are looking for said system)
Love this format better. 😍😍
Great content Matt! Love your videos. This will definitely help me flesh out my cities a bit more :)
I like this idea a lot and I'll use this when presenting the world to my players.
I'd still give it a percentage though, as I like to roll a percentage die to see what kind of species someone is when I have no preset idea for it. That makes my setting much more diverse (otherwise it's almost all humans all the time). It'd be something for me personally, not the players.
@ Matthew Colville, love Space Master, great game.
Another great and concise video. Super helpful!
"I don't know why, I just think that'd be cool" - My guiding star