Cities w 1 or more vampires assuming 1 for every 100,000 people. This look resonable, looks like you can play just about anywhere right, maybe even a few more places if I had included all the cities down to 50,000 or so right? This maps has 255 cities on it and there are another 20 MSAs wtih more than 50,000 pop. But now look at the next map.
Cities w 10 or more vampires assuming 1 for every 100,000 people. There are only 49 cities. 10 is a really small game, it may work for table top but I play live action, where we get at least 20 players. So lets look at 20.
Cities w 20 or more vampires assuming 1 for every 100,000 people. Down to 23 cities. This is getting unreasonalbe. Now we know they say all american cities are over crowded. Chicago for example has near 300 vampires, but only a population to support 91. That works out to 1 for every 30,000. Now assuming you need 20 v ampires for a game which cities are viable?
Cities w 20 or more vampires assuming 1 for every 30,000 people. Still only 49 cities. And I still dont live withing 200 miles of one and I'm in one of the most populous states in the Union.
Ok we hit another problem now however. With 1 for every 30,000 certain places get out of hand. New York for instance. 706 projected vampires. Se we start having to break up some MSAs now. Lets look at the MSAs on a map too.
Cities w 20 or more vampires assuming 1 for every 30,000 people, with MSAs. So now we have some urban ares, like the state of California. I know some of these are not really urban, take a drive west of Pheonix and Tuscon on either I-10 or I-8 and see what I mean but the census department considers the area econimically tied to the nearby city (ie. all the people go the the city for stuff making them potential prey for vampires). I have a problem breaking the MSA up into component cities however. The real city populations dont always total up to the MSA area. Who get the rest of the population? Divide it evenly? What if none of the core cities come close to 100,000 people on thier own but the MSA far exceeds that number?
| City/MSA | Population |
|---|---|
| Melbourne--Titusville--Palm Bay, FL MSA | 476,230 |
| Melbourne | 59,646 (1990) |
| Titusville | 39,394 (1990) |
| Palm Bay | 62,632 (1990) |
Sorry I had to use 1990 data for the cities but even in 2001 none of them exceed 100,000 people. A total core city pop of 161,672. 1 maybe 2 vampires according to doctrine, a whopping 5 by my 30,000 number. Yet the MSA has 4-5 or 15. Ok this one seems easy. Give a percentage of the MSA pop to each city based on its percentage of the core city pop.
| City/MSA | Population | Percentage | Projected human population | Vampires 1 for 100,000 | Vampires 1 for 30,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Melbourne | 59,646 (1990) | 37% | 176205 | 1-2 | 5-6 |
| Titusville | 39,394 (1990) | 24% | 114295 | 1 | 3-4 |
| Palm Bay | 62,632 (1990) | 39% | 185729 | 1-2 | 6 |
So we dont want to break up the smaller places cause they end up too small. How about the larger ones. The New York--Northern New Jersey--Long Island, NY--NJ--CT--PA CMSA has 21,199,865 million people. Even at the offical number thats playable at 210 vampires (ok maybe way to big but its been done before, the Atlanta game had 200+ at one point, hell I've had 80 in Tallahasse). but how do we break up population for Northern New Jersey? Is that one Prince's domain? What about Long Island? I found that the counties not part of New York, Nassau and Suffolk have 1.3 and 1.4 million people and over 300 communities. According to a 1998 report Hampstead in Nassau is the largest in the county with 726,000 and there are only 2 other towns in the county. At this rate I'm going to have to go through every town in 4 states to get the number I need to add up to 210. It aint going to work. Whoever heard of the Prince of Hempstead? The Census department hasn't, its not listed on their list of cities w 100,000 people or more (see above).
Another issue with using the MSA is places where we have 2 distinct cities wrapped up into one. The Prime example is the Baltimore-Washington MSA. Two very different cities seperated by 30-50 miles of suburbs/park, and I say park not woods or rural because it is so heavily populated. For this I think the solution is easy go down the list of cities each with 100,000 or more population and break them out of the MSA as seperate Princedoms.
