Small World

There is an interesting thing I've seen a few times now on the internet, where the world is shrunk down to 100 people. It then goes on to say how "only one person would own a toilet" or whatever. Now even though it's usually wrong (Snopes Says So Here), it does make an interesting read, and eliminates the "problem of scale" I keep talking about in this blog.

Now I want to use it to do something else. I want to use it to demonstrate disparity.
If the world was shrunk to two people. What would it look like? I would argue that the more distant these two people are, the less our world can claim to uphold "equality".

For example, if our world was divided into just two people.
One would expect to live till 60. One would expect to live till 77.
(This is a very rough estimate on my part, but you get the idea).

I would like to see income for one.
In 2000 according to this article it would be the following:
1 would own a total of $403.
1 would own a total of $39'919.

Another idea could be to divide it into 3. That way we get rich man, middle man, poor man.

Another good thing that we could use it for is demonstrating the scales of problems.
Example.
If we reduced the Muslim world to 1000 people, only 1 would be a terrorist.
Yet 6 would have been killed in Iraq. 11 seriously injured.
~70 women would be wearing a Burqa. The other 430 women wouldn't.

Trial Run DMing

Well I did a trial run of a dungeon today that I think went really well.

I put together a "maze" for a hack and slash dungeon crawl. Minimal storytelling. Just to see if I could get the numbers to work, and how easy it would be to guide the party around.

I managed to fit in 10 of the encounters I planned (out of 15), and definitely got all the interesting ones in.
Favourite encounter of mine was the hydra. I think we'll be seeing another one of those in the campaign. :)