Goodman Games

As the title says, this is a "meaningless musing." That means that I'm not being serious, and the answer is not all that important. Nonetheless, I've had a long day, a good beverage, am relaxing by perusing the good ol' DCC RPG rulebook, and a question occurs to me. On pg. 359 under "Heroes" there is a helpful breakdown of population incidence per NPC level. These numbers don't add to 100%; there is a missing 1.9% (1.86749% for those who are taking this seriously ). Who are these missing 1.9%? What do they do? Where did they go? All theories are welcome...

Maybe the 1.9% are the Hypermagical. The only beings who can use ANY Magic and suffer absolutely NO negative effect, ever. Of course these beings (the 1.9% spread randomly across all races) do not all KNOW they have this power. After all, Many of the already rare beings never have anything to do with Magic in their lives. Not to many people out of the whole ever choose to make using Magic part of their life.

Yes, indeed, they are a small number, these Hypermagicals, but they can (obviously) be very, VERY powerful. MWAH HA HA HA!!!

Huh. Funny that I never noticed that; usually I'm one of the first guys with a calculator looking at numeric patterns and all...

RANDOM STUFF:

1. How did you handle "2-3 per epoch"?

2. When I crunched numbers I got a missing 1.68749% and wonder if you transposed a couple of digits. (I ignored the "epoch" dudes.)

3. Quick fix is to edit the first entry, 95% becomes 96.7% (or 96.68649% for the picky). It makes sense that the missing folks won't be at the top of the pyramid.

4. My favorite explanation is that the missing folk represent 0-level characters who are non-confirmed kills; you don't want to count MIA as actually alive or dead...

Haha... that gets my vote.

I would have thought the percentage for this would be higher than 1.9% though...

Thanks for the thoughtful answer finarvyn, and for checking my math! Let me address your questions/comments:
1. I ignored them, as you did.

2. Transposing digits is certainly possible, as it was a long day. Now that its another day, and my "good beverage" has worn off, let me do it again:
lvls = 3/100+1/1000+1/5000+1/10000+1/50000+1/250000+1/1e6+1/1e7
zeros = 100*(1.0-lvls) = 96.86749000
extra = zeros - 95 = 1.86749
That seems to be what I entered before. Perhaps my beverage wasn't strong enough, or I'm still suffering its effects. .

3. Yes, indeed, I made that edit in my book after I made the post.

4. Oh yes, I like that

I redid my calculations on Excel and now I get the same number you get. Strange, because I swear that I double-checked my numbers before posting.

Odd to be so close but slightly off. Now I want to reverse-engineer the whole thing to figure out where I went wrong ... twice.

No worries, finarvyn! The easiest way to get your number is to change "1/5000" to "1/500" for the level 4 NPCs.

This discussion, especially your "MIA" comment, has given me a fun idea for a campaign arc. I don't want to divulge it here, since some of my gaming group may see it. Nevertheless, the initial observation of the missing 1.9% didn't end up being "somewhat meaningless" after all.

Thanks! I did my work on an old cruddy calculatior and I'll bet one of the keys didn't type in well.