>historically accurate
>fantasy

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>>97619409
I'm a harnworld player. So I like strong historical inspiration and internal consistency. I like rules and worlds that make sense. I like when the game has rules that make sense (even if "make sense" includes things like magic). This helps me "believe" the experience (immersion). I've only played one campaign that was strictly historical (a Mythras Rome campaign set during the Cimbric war) and it was phenomenal.

>>97619438

This.

I mean, in horror it can happen that we have "city X in period Y but there is a vampire!". Before said vampire does his shit, it's just an historical RPG and that means usual criteria apply.

But if we have "magic", doesn't that mean we're talking about something pretty big and you know, known in the setting? That means if nothing else to reconsider accuracy.

I guess there are some grey zones, but in general terms it's either magic or historical.

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>>97619438
>>97619827
>historicity and fantasy can't be reconciled
brainlet take
most fantasy settings would strike me as plainly medieval so it's fair to assume similar social structures and lifestyles exist at least with the non magical people. then we come to the question of how magic would interact with these daily experiences. literally draw from real life accounts of mysticism, it's not hard at all

if the magic/fantasy elements in your world only act as medieval wrapping of a quintessentially modern setting, you are a faggot and need to kys

>>97619977
>brainlet take
definitionally they cant
history doesnt have any orcs, elves, goblins, and dragons in it


>most fantasy settings would strike me as plainly medieval
fantasy worlds are a pastiche of medieval, renaissance, and mythology

>. literally draw from real life accounts of mysticism, it's not hard at all
fantasy can reflect historical events but it can never actually be history or historically accurate

>you are a faggot and need to kys
if you want historical accuracy so badly, go play a historical setting that takes place in 1400s england or france

>>97619792
Shout out to Godfrey, he was a true homie

>>97619977
>most fantasy settings would strike me as plainly medieval

You would be pretty dumb to think that, anon.

Also, I don't much play fantasy. When I do, shit is clearly non-historical.

>>97619998
you seem to assume the existence of something automatically changes life for everyone, even people not being aware of its existence at all. why does the standard fantasy default into medieval europe in looks, technology, politics but as soon as someone questions the implications it becomes that toyota in middle earth stupidity again?

>>97619409
Inherently, any campaign in which the players have agency to do things is going to be ahistorical.
Fantasy settings are even worse, in this regard, since they often don't even start from a historical basis: at best they're pseudo-historical, trying to get a vibe but not an accurate picture of a given time period because they fundamentally are not taking place in that time period.
>how does the magic (or lack there of) influence the immersion in your more historical settings?
It allows me to better ignore the inherent inconsistencies with real history, since the existence of magic means it's not real history.

>>97620035
>why does the standard fantasy default into medieval europe in looks
standard fantasy is a pastiche of all 3 periods of medieval europe and post-medieval europe combined into a single generic setting
it has late medieval plate armor next to early modern bodices on tavern wenches

>technology
again, all over the place
its clearly not just medieval europe but full-on schizo tech spanning hundreds of years of european history

>but as soon as someone questions the implications it becomes that toyota in middle earth stupidity again?
genuinely, a toyota is no more fantastical than a dragon in a stock fantasy setting
we just go by vibes about what does and doesnt belong, not anything grounded in reality

>>97620035
>looks

Not that much, but yes, there is window dressing.


>technology


Eh, depends really. I don't think it would stand up a close scrutiny, starting with demography.

>politics

Fuck no. Especially when you realize that politics are also religion.


Also, your usual heartbreaker fantasy setting is unispired slop. But it generally doesn't have the audacity to call itself "historical", even partially.

>>97619409
Adding fantastical elements would affect the setting too much to maintain historical accuracy unless you ignore all the ways those elements would affect society.

>>97620035
>you seem to assume the existence of something automatically changes life for everyone, even people not being aware of its existence at all
The existance of DIFFERENT SPECIES would radically alter the development of literally every culture on earth

>>97619409
In other peoples? Little.
In my own? Much.

>>97620365
It would also alter how different racial variations in each species engage with one another.
Black people and whites would be high-fiving while making catgirls work in the cottonfields.

>>97620393

Catgirls sound like the worst fantasy species to enslave. Have you TRIED giving orders to a cat?

>>97620402
I think the whites and blacks would be highfiving over keeping them pregnant, sadly, given catgirl supremacy in the modern era.

>>97620365
As would access to magic. And the existance of magical creatures. And the existance of other dimensions, gods, a proven afterlife, hell, if you pick any out of the stock fantasy tropes they would alone subvert society on a fundamental level. Just the existance of people who are simply more physically powerful then other people above a certain threshold alters the base assumption that everyone dies if they're stabbed or shot, which is core to the concept of a state or ruler as we know it.

>>97619409
>how much do you care about historically accurate portrayals in your fantasy settings?
None at all unless they're fantasy Earth like when we're playing VtM set in 1915 or the upcoming Bronze Age game I'm working on. And then "To the extent that the feel is right, but not enough that it stops me from bringing in whenever anachronisms I damn well please."
>how does the magic (or lack there of) influence the immersion in your more historical settings?
In the VtM "it's always been there and it shaped history" and in the bronze age "everything mythical is true." So a lot, I guess.


>>97619977
>most fantasy settings would strike me as plainly medieval
Probably because the closest thing to knowledge about medieval history you're familiar with is fantasy settings. The two aren't very closely related.

>>97619409
I don't give a rat's ass about historical accuracy in fantasy. It's called Fantasy. If I wanted to be boring and just copy real history, I'd just run historicals.

>>97620035
I'm pretty fucking sure a giant fire-breathing reptile that defies physics to fly and just the existence of magic itself (which breaks things like conservation of mass and basic physics by creating and destroying matter) count as things that would drastically change life for everyone.

Hell, other sapient creatures that are biologically superior to humanity (Stronger, better eyesight, longer lives, more numerous, literally in every single way with dragons) but just as smart or smarter than humans would be a death warrant for humans existing in any capacity if we're being realistic.

>>97619792
>I like strong historical inspiration and internal consistency
One does not require the other. A setting does not need to have any historical inspiration or realism to be internally consistent.

>>97619977
I guess it depends on how you bound fantasy but if you've got D&D magic then you've solved agriculture and the wagon train equation with shit like golems and warforged.

>>97620442
Uh, what?
You do know that the nobility (even back in the Bronze Age) was literally like a foot taller and 60 lbs heavier than the peasants?
They WERE that much bigger and stronger. Even putting aside their massive equipment differences (armor, weapons, training, etc.) just on pure physicality the nobility were a different level. It wasn't quite "How many toddlers could you take in a fist-fight" tier, but close. The average male height was just over 5'. In cities it may have been under.
To the average city peasant, a noble wearing his lamellar and wielding a composite bow with a draw weight more than your own weight zooming around on a chariot may as well been a 7 ft tall orc on a warg.

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>>97620834
Nta, in theory you're right but what other frame of reference could you employ other than our world history?

>>97619438
FPBP.
Fantasy can't be accurate to history in the same way that a drawing of a spider can't be accurate to human anatomy. If you draw a spider with human anatomy it isn't accurate.

>>97621603
Generally speaking the only way to shift the frame of reference from our natural history is to change the world or the history in some way that it is necessarily massive unhinged, such that what you borrow from real life is unrecognizable.

I really hate these 'accuracy' arguments, only because what's necessary for a compelling setting is not accuracy to real world events, but internal consistency.

Consider the following: In a world with dragons that ransack villages and kidnap princesses and hoard gold, dragon-slayers make sense in the same way bank robbers do in the modern day. However, dragon-slayers cannot be so effective that dragons are being hunted to extinction without also making dragon slayers obsolete and having the profession disappear. So if the world has dragons and dragon slayers, both need to be in moderate supply and one necessarily follows the other.

Contrast that with vampires: If vampires are real, vampire hunters probably exist too, but it's NOT a clear vocation, because vampires are dangerous and canny adversaries with great influence; any vampire hunting organization would need to be underground like an intelligence agency to operate and be effective. Still for either to exist there has to be enough of one and the other without a clear winner on either side.

For a less abstract example, lets consider 'adventuring economy'. What situation does there have to be for 'adventurer' to be a profession? Abundant dangerous ruins full of wealth is a good answer, so long as these haven't been tapped dry over centuries of looting; but you can expand that role with oddjobs like monsters that are dangerous but also have economic value in their hides, organs and bones. My personal favorite is having a guild-- NOT an adventurers guild-- but a cartographers guild which employs adventurers in droves to explore dangerous wilderness and return with drawings and stories from which they can map the world.

>>97619977
The pea-brained essentialists hated him because he told them the truth.

>>97620442
Humans even existing at all and not being outcompeted before they even create society is often something nobody considers either obviously.

>>97622004
It's unlikely that such a species would exist that it outcompetes every species everywhere.
Dwarves on an open plain are going to have a worse time than centaurs.

>>97619438

Fantasy isn't really anything goes. It is an unwritten contract with the audience to suspend some amount of disbelief. The amount depends on each fantasy setting. It's the reason why fantasy people can get pretty anal about canon violations despite the whole "fantasy" thing and call out asspulls.

>>97622004
because humans just find an ecological niche that elves or dwarves havent taken
and because pre-industrial societies take literally thousands of years to spread out and spreading itself requires thousands of years to wait for sea levels to rise or fall to allow passage between landmasses

humans might be isolated for tens of thousands of years before meeting another civilization and by then they could have already developed metallurgy and agriculture

>>97622168
>Fantasy isn't really anything goes. It is an unwritten contract with the audience to suspend some amount of disbelief.
which has absolutely nothing to do with historical accuracy because its not our history
nothing about orcs is historically accurate because we have no orcs in our history

>>97620365

In reality, the existence of other species would likely lead to extinction, especially if they fill the same niches. You cannot have super-elves and not dominate everything without very strong reasons.

>>97622183
its simple, elves dont occupy the same ecological niche
or by the time elven and human kingdoms meet, both of them are already at civilization level

>>97621574
PAST A CERTAIN THRESHOLD, dumbass. yes, nobles were stronger. but if a peasant stabbed a noble they probably died. this assumption has been a critical aspect of all human societies; all kings fear their subjects in SOME level. if this is no longer true- if the king is a superhuman who shrugs off arrows and breaks swords against his skin- literally everything changes. the existance of individuals who have regeneration or can fly or who can contest armies on their own is the problem, as it would fundamentally change the underpinnings of society.

One one hand, the existence of Magic would warp civilizations beyond recognition. On the other hand, Magic is only interesting because of what it can’t do. If a wizard can solve every problem with a snap of their fingers, there is no tension, no stakes, and no story. Historical background and knowledge is useful as baseline to bent and add details and sometimes it is more interesting than super-magical land with magic Zeppelins that fire lightning bolts.

Using a historical baseline allows the audience to use their real-world intuition. We know that an army needs to eat. When a writer ignores that because "magic," the world feels hollow. But when a writer shows an army struggling with supply lines, and then uses a specific, limited spell to spoil the enemy's grain that’s clever. It’s a tactical use of magic within a logical framework.

To make magic feel "real," you have to make the rest of the world feel ordinary.

>>97622215
>>97622215
>>97622215
literally the only one ITT who grasped the concept. it's exactly the believability that you described that makes or breaks the setting. limiting fantasy elements is essential to a good story

>>97622215
Magic of such powers would drive individuals to wipe out other magicians who could counter their magic, so, it'd likely create despots.

>>97619409
>how much do you care about historically accurate portrayals in your fantasy settings?
Generally speaking as long as there is internal consistency and it's possible to follow the setting's logic then it's all good as far as I am concerned.

To put it another way, if it calls itself fantasy then I don't really care about historical accuracy, ESPECIALLY for secondary worlds that don't even have a shared history with earth.

>>97619792
Godfrey was a real one, it's true.

>>97620035
What matters most is internal consistency and the question of simply whether the audience will buy it. The Toyota in Middle Earth is stupid because it's highly improbable, not because it's ahistorical. You could have the ancient demon lord Toi-Otaa create hellfire combustion engines and machine presses that shape steel into the exact form of a Toyota Highlander, but that'd be stupid and contrived, and if that explanation doesn't exist at all and the Toyota just exists out of nowhere while no other industrial technology exists, then it's complete nonsense because there's nothing that could ever make it exist. Objecting that it has no place in the setting because the Toyota Highlander wasn't invented until 2000 AD in a setting where there are no industrial machinese, no Japan, no Gregorian calendar, and teleportation or flying carpets or something make cars kind of pointless anyway is just a completely baffling, smoothbrain reason.

As another, more common example of comething "not historically accurate" that people harp on, consider the potato. Potatoes didn't exist in Europe until contact with the new world, so they wouldn't exist in historical European settings. But potatoes are members of the nightshade family, which is widely distributed across the whole planet, and starchy tubers exist in yams, taro, and other plants as well. There's nothing special about the Andean mountain specifically that makes it the only place potatoes could ever have evolved, and you could just drop them into your setting anyway even if that were the case, or the gods could be the source of all useful plants and give potatoes directly to mortals, and that'd all be perfectly internally consistent and sensible.

>>97619409
>how much do you care
Less about accuracy and more about decent reference and consistency adapted to easily recognizable notes players can engage with.
That there are pikes, arquebus and early modernism is good, not overly concerned if its mixing together things from the 15th-16th century.
>magic
>immersion
Oh, its bait.
Magic in the campaign isn't a totalized cohesive singular anything so I don't worry about it at all and just include things I think are cool.

>>97619998
>fantasy can reflect historical events but it can never actually be history or historically accurate
Why?

>>97622215
>historical accuracy means armies need food
You will never understand how retarded you are.

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>>97619409
Here, gram a (You), now go die in a ditch

>>97622898
Good post. It still blows my mind that potatoes are new world goods.

>>97622898
>>97623480
yeah that's literally one of these immersion things. if magic isn't capped or affords considerable effort you would be right but what kind of setting would that make? technology could still advance besides magic or even intertwined with it. having modern equivalents of veggies or fruit that got bred in the last 100-150 years of our time in a late medieval setting begs the question of how they got to that point. if magic can create food, the average quality wouldn't be comparable to today because said quality only improved out of necessity. I don't need nutritional grain if the mage just magics white bread into existence. and how would the logistics of magic even work? just waving any explanation away with "it's magic" is my biggest gripe with modern settings

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>>97619409
>This fucking thread once more

>>97622197
You are underestimating the efficacy or armor and superior weaponry. A peasant could not stab a noble. Their armor made them effectively invulnerable. Wearing a full suit of plate or dendra panoply makes arrows and makeshift peasant weapons break off of your (armor) skin.
Additionally, while they couldn't regenerate, the vastly increased quality of medical care and ability to rest mean that a fatal wound for a peasant was often a week of bedrest and recuperation for a noble.

>>97623480
So are tomatoes. Literally how did It*lians survive before Columbus abandoned them to work for Spain? They were just eating plain ass pasta with olive oil.

>>97623552
Potatoes were first cultivated 10000 years ago. They weren't quite the same as modern varieties, but they were still recognizably potatoes. But that's not even all that critical here. What's more important is that if your immersion is really broken by some green skinned, tusked man (trope invented less than 50 years ago) eating a potato (south american root vegetable) instead of sticking to carrots (eurasian root vegetable) because you expect fantasy to remain strictly bound to medieval european vegetables only, that's not a problem with the story or worldbuilding, you just have autism.

>>97624070
Potato is not a root vegetable, it's a starchy tuber.

>>97619977
Flintloque is a really good example of this. There's elves and undead, but a musket is a musket.
>>97619998
>history doesnt have any orcs, elves, goblins, and dragons in it
How would you feel if you didn't have breakfast this morning?

>>97620068
>genuinely, a toyota is no more fantastical than a dragon in a stock fantasy setting
>we just go by vibes about what does and doesnt belong, not anything grounded in reality
You type like a stupid person so I don't have to debunk you but there actually is a huge difference. Dragons are almost omnipresent in medieval mythology. They did not exist, but some people back then might have even thought they did.
It's just an utter failure to use your head. "if not real thing #1, then not real thing #2 bad" when their level of verisimilitude with medieval Europe is ENTIRELY different.
I partially blame D&D where everyone wants to shove their own stuff into it until it's entirely schizophrenic and I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to put cars into it at this point.

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>>97620035
>it becomes that toyota in middle earth stupidity again?
Am I the only one who thinks that would make for a fun game whenever it gets brought up

>>97619977
You CAN reconcile historical fiction and fantasy, but then it becomes speculative fiction.

>>97622191

So what do elves eat that humans don't? Grass? Bark?

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>>97619409
I like using and referencing real world historical behaviors, community patterns, and technologies so that the setting feels cohesive and coherent, but I don't stick to it hardcore. I'm perfectly fine also with mixing and matching aesthetic tech levels in ways that by right shouldn't appear anywhere near one another, like 2000 BC bronze age Egypt being next to 1300 medieval France.

It's not on some moral or authorial justification, really, just I like to make the world feel like it sort of fits together in a semi-sensible way so that the fantastical elements feel more distinct. If the entire society and ordinary life is completely abstracted and "modern day but with swords" then the magic sorta doesn't feel very impressive by comparison because it's not being appended to anything grounded.

Pic related for example armors that can all exist together in one setting for me, especially if weaponry is pretty abstracted anyway.

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>>97624182
>They did not exist, but some people back then might have even thought they did.
Most probably would. They didn't have fucking zoos. If some dude comes back from travelling and talks about elephants, which you've heard of, it's reasonable to believe a manticore or dragon might be out in the world somewhere too.
Consider how many people would know what a capybara was if it didn't have the fame of the internet. Do you know what this thing is?
It's totally expected there's animals you don't know about in an age where you can't google.

>>97619409
Not at all. Versimilitude is more important than realism.
My setting's technology is all over the place, but it makes sense in context.

>>97624182
>They did not exist, but some people back then might have even thought they did.
the point is neither are realistic, neither are grounded, and if you told people in the past about self-propelled carriages they might believe it too

>. "if not real thing #1, then not real thing #2 bad"
both things are not real, both things are historically inaccurate
we just decided one thing is fine and the other isnt

the line between dragons and toyotas is arbitrary, we just accept dragons because fantasy and myth have included them before so we accept them now

>>97624980
>Versimilitude [sic] is more important than realism.
Yes, but they go hand-in-hand. It's extremely difficult to have something that appears real without being at least mostly real.
Ever seen a photo of the sun and confused it for the real thing?
Ever seen a wood veneer and thought it was a genuine solid desk?
Ever seen a tranny and thought it was a real woman?

>>97625011
>the line between dragons and toyotas is arbitrary
>we just accept dragons because fantasy and myth have included them before
Impressive self-debunk.

>>97625056
>Impressive self-debunk.
the grandfather clause is, itself, an arbitrary exception to include dragons
there is no logical reason a dragon should be more or less realistic than a mecha, we are just used to it so we give it a pass

but if Hephaestus built an automatic carriage for the mortals and it was a toyota vios, it would be on the exact same level of realism as a dragon

>>97625080
I can't tell if you're trolling, severly autistic, or think that if you somehow win this the honda meme gets retroactively debunked and anachronistic modernslop is good again.

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For me its mostly autism about diversity, not even in a /pol/ way, literally just an autistic way. Like you'll have a fantasy setting that's set in a temperate or European style setting and you've got black people and white people as part of the same culture and populating the same area within that setting when the quantities of melanin people have in their skin is a product of adaptation to their environments, right? And while there was generally some movement across continents in medieval Europe (for example, some Ethiopian priests would visit Europe on diplomacy and even witnessed the burning of Jan Huss) it generally wasn't in numbers large enough to create a stable, self-sustaining population.

It's not even a "I don't want Black people in my medieval fantasy setting" I just want some worldbuilding explanation for it. I can't even talk about it that openly 'cause if I do some people will think I'm whining about "woke" shit when it's literally just me wanting some explanation for things. I don't care if Elves or Dwarves or Halflings are Black, it's literally not "Grr they made BLACK ELVES" Its just that its peppered in without any kind of explanation. George R.R. Martin explained that the Black people in Westeros were from the Summer Isles I think? Okay, boom, explanation, I'm satisfied. It's just when it's like "Here's black peasants in fantasy France" that I'm wondering how they got there. I'd be doing the same thing if this was like "White people in Fantasy China" or whatever.

>>97624182
>>97625108
the funniest thing is that plenty of fantasy settings include OOP modern/future tech and clones of famous historical characters, so the Toyota is hardly any more stupid.

>I partially blame D&D where everyone wants to shove their own stuff into it until it's entirely schizophrenic
Literally every setting has that, D&D just attracted a lot more people over decades.

>>97626284
Here's a specific example of how you can have cultural identical but racially different groups living together over a few hundred years without much admixture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Abkhazians#

Not perhaps something you'd want to have be the reason behind all population differences but an interesting historical note to keep in mind nonetheless.

>>97625108
>or think that if you somehow win this the honda meme gets retroactively debunked and anachronistic modernslop is good again.
again, on the face of it there is no real difference between dragons and mecha when it comes to realism
arguing that "we had dragons before so its okay" doesnt address that both of them are equally unrealistic

if you want to argue that dragons just fit the tone better than a toyota, thats fine
thats just a totally different argument than realism or even plausibility

>>97626284
>when the quantities of melanin people have in their skin is a product of adaptation to their environments


AKSHUALLY I don't think it's that direct in real life. Or to be more precise, Bantu-speaking people are very tan because they live in tropical condiction, but that's hardly the way it "would" end up anyway. People in Indonesia or the Amazon aren't.

That being said, I agree with you. My personal autism instance: in the Dune movies they made the Fremen very diverse if brown-ish, but amusingly enough the lore kinda makes it absurd: a isolated population that is connected between itself for millennia should end up relatively homogeneous in complex traits like skin color. Or at least have a gradient, not all in the same tribe - that is perfectly doable in scifi at least (have people from different planet just come together) but they dun goofed no less than the Velaryon in the HOD (I think they went into the direction of them being from overseas but never said it).
So... yeah, "diversity" is unironically fun to WB, but it's not a question of "just dump blacks, asians or whatever".

>>97623279
Having to supply your character/party with preferably varied food, grooming and cleaning utensils and a caravan to move all that stuff is already beyond most games.

>>97619409
Traditional games?

>>97619409
What the fuck is this busted ass attempt to wojackify elonk? Can't the left do anything right? I don't even like the guy, but this is just pisspoor.

>>97624147
>How would you feel if you didn't have breakfast this morning?
I ate three dragon eggs for dinner as my breakfast. It was very historically accurate.

I like taking inspiration to history for fantasy setting. It is particularly eye-opening to hear stuff like children having up to 50% mortality rate, 25%) of children died in their first year of life, and nearly half (around 46%) died before reaching puberty, until the 20th century.

>>97624070
That's not fair, I have played with autistics and even they don't give a shit about such things.
Dude is just a asshole who is looking for technicalities to annoy people with.

>>97627655
I wonder if magic medicine would help, but a lot more kids would be lost to monsters and the like so mortality would still be high.

>>97627732
>>97627655

This also applies to women during pregnancy and childbirth. It is estimated that 5 to 10 women died for every 1,000 births. Because women often had 6 to 10 pregnancies over a lifetime, their cumulative risk of dying in labor was roughly 1 in 10 to 1 in 20. Roughly the same as men going to war.

In ancient Sparta, the only people allowed to have their names inscribed on a tombstone were men who died in battle and women who died in childbirth. Also during the 18th, much like soldiers writing home before a big offensive, it was common for 18th-century women to write "farewell" letters or finalize their wills as soon as they realized they were pregnant.

Interestingly, it was often safer to give birth at home with a midwife than in a prestigious urban hospital. Hospitals had a nasty tendency to spread infections between patients until the late 1800s when people outside of midwifes finally learned to wash their hands.

It didn't help that Gaelic medicine dominated and had no anatomy drawings of the woman body for a long time (mostly guesses from pigs dissections). For centuries, the female internal anatomy was treated as a "black box." This lack of schematics wasn't just a Gaelic issue; it was a widespread limitation due to religious and cultural taboos against dissection.

Many early medical texts viewed the uterus as a wandering or independent organ. Without accurate diagrams of the pelvic bone structure or the positioning of the fetus, practitioners were essentially working in the dark.

Early "schematics" were often symbolic rather than functional. They looked more like religious icons than medical maps.

Crucially, the Gaelic "physicians" (the men with the books) rarely actually attended births. Childbirth was the domain of the "wise woman" or midwife. These women had immense practical experience but no access to formal anatomical study or "schematics," creating a divide between theoretical knowledge and the physical reality of labor.

>>97627753
lol no

>>97627903
>>97627753
whats up with the recent one-line "nahs" floating around recently?
some kind of bot?

>>97627911
Yeh

>>97627732

There's another possibility: if healing is prerogative of the gods, and only clerics can heal, then it is very possible that only the richest people can afford a full-time healer in town. This also gives religious figures a tremendous amount of power.

>>97627753
>It is estimated that 5 to 10 women died for every 1,000 births. Because women often had 6 to 10 pregnancies over a lifetime, their cumulative risk of dying in labor was roughly 1 in 10 to 1 in 20.
This is a super mathlet take; they are not independent events.
That is, if you have one successful birth, you're much less likely to die in later births, so you don't "stack" the chances like that. If you pump out a baby every year for long enough to drain your resources, that can increase risk. But the first child is by far the most dangerous, because things like your first labor and narrow pelvises are one time events, whether the mother survives or not.
It also means the number of children you have is super important. A noblewoman having a fourth child is MUCH safer than an emaciated peasant on her eighth. The distribution of "Number of children had" is multimodal with a fat right tail, nowhere near Gaussian.

>>97623953
>A peasant could not stab a noble. Their armor made them effectively invulnerable.
Nobles didn't walk and sit around fully covered from head to toe in plate armor 24/7, even near a battlefield. In fact they hardly even wore armor at all outside of some very specific eras and cultures. Replace "peasant" with "servant" if you can't immediately see the issue.

>>97627911
brevity is wit

>>97623953
The point that anon is making, retard, is that they're still mortal. They bleed and die. At least in some level, everyone shares the same base human assumptions. You need water to live. You need to breathe, and you need your organs intact. You die if you're hit in the head with a hammer or stabbed through the heart.

Removing this assumption would completely change society. If the king is an immortal wizard, he has nothing to fear from his vassals, so feudalism as a concept is fundamentally challenged. This is no longer a game where the monarch exchanges protection for power with the implicit assumption that this social contract can be broken if he no longer protects them. The monarch is a LARPer just as much as Clark Kent is LARPing as someone who needs to have a job and pay rent. The system now exists at his leisure, maybe at the leisure of other wizards and sorcerers and warlocks- maybe the king is ruling over magic-vassals who are collectively strong enough to take him on, but now we've just passed the problem to the lower rungs.

Either way, magic as a concept, superhumans as a concept, would completely reshape society as we know it. Hell, half of superhero stories are about how introducing superhumans into a society breaks it. A society that STARTS with them would be unrecognizable.

>>97621656
This type of terminal brainlet "world building" is exactly why /tg/'s creativity died.
>dragon-slayers cannot be so effective that dragons are being hunted to extinction
Yes, retard, yes they can! Things don't happen instantly across the world and what's true at one point in time (There are dragons being slain) might not be true in a century's time (There are no dragons to slay anymore). We have species that have been "going extinct" due to man-made causes for centuries and only get the last push into non-existence from a run of bad luck or a slight change in their ecology that's not even because of us.

You don't have actual criticisms, just pedantry.

>>97630733
>Nobles didn't walk and sit around fully covered from head to toe in plate armor 24/7, even near a battlefield
Yes anon they often did. You're also forgetting simple human psychology. There's a reason no peasant has ever killed a King, and certainly none has ever just walked up and stabbed one because he was unhappy. Even today, in the most armed country in the world, there are zero political assassinations where some lumpenprole decides he's had enough of being ruled by pedophiles.

>>97631178
>The point that anon is making, retard, is that they're still mortal. They bleed and die
They still would in a fantasy world.
>If the king is an immortal wizard,
Strawman detected, argument disregarded.
>Either way, magic as a concept, superhumans as a concept, would completely reshape society as we know it.
Kek no.

>>97631847

To be totally fair to that other anon, dragons were generally there for a long time in your usual fantasy heartbreaker, and so did heroes of the same kind that is living now (and being played by the players). So yeah, if killing dragons is relatively doable one would assume extinction of this particular megafauna would be an option mankind tried in the last millennia. Dwarfkind, elvenkind, whatever.

>>97631941
>But what about [Completely made up setting that wasn't relevant to the discussion]
Vibes-based fallacy, try again.

>>97631951

All the settings featuring dragonslayers that I can think of are like that.

>>97632093
See >>97631951

>>97631941

It isn't even hard. They are at the top of the food chain: an apex predator. You know how apex predators often go extinct? By messing with the environment that gives them food. If the climate suddenly causes a massive drop in livestock, then the dragons can no longer eat. Extinction rarely ends with a band. It ends with a whimper.

>>97627753
What is "gaelic" in this context? Are you trying to refer to Galen?

>>97631885
>Even today, in the most armed country in the world, there are zero political assassinations where some lumpenprole decides he's had enough of being ruled by pedophiles.
there was another assassination attempt against Trump this very week

>>97632809
An attempt is not the same as an actual assassination. You also can't prove beyond all doubt he's just some lumpenprole who's had enough of being ruled by pedophiles, because he isn't.

>>97626573
The orihinal bantu homeland is not only tropic it is also under a thin patch of ozone. so they have gotten extra sunroasted for centuries

File: Jacques_Clément.jpg (2.7 MB)

2.7 MB JPG

>>97631885
>Yes anon they often did.
What's the point in making up such outrageous lies?
Some nobles even famously got killed ON the battlefield for such carelessness, like Richard Lionheart who figured the castle he was besieging was too lightly defended to bother putting on his chainmail, he took a crossbow bolt from some kid who
>was renowned amongst the English attackers for his appearance: the castle was so ill-prepared for King Richard's siege that Basile was forced to defend the ramparts with cobbled-together armour and a makeshift shield constructed from a frying pan, much to the mirth of the English besiegers. It is perhaps this dismissive attitude that led to Richard taking little precaution on the day he was shot.

Other nobles got murdered on the way to or from a feast or other such social occasions, for example Conrad of Montferrat. Admittedly his assassins were literal Assassins, but somehow he was not immune to getting stabbed even though he was on his horse and traveling with bodyguards:
>As he turned down a narrow street, he saw two men sitting on either side of the road. As Conrad approached, they stood up and walked to meet him. One of them was holding a letter. Conrad was intrigued but did not dismount. Rather, he stretched down from his horse and reached out to take the letter. As he did so, the man holding the letter drew a knife and stabbed upwards, plunging the blade deep into Conrad's body. At the same time, the other man leaped onto the back of Conrad's horse and stabbed him in the side.

>no peasant has ever killed a King
Utter bullshit. Besides all those who fell in battle to some nameless peasant levy or primitive savage who was immediately hacked to death afterward, many died to commoners without any martial training. Ravaillac wasn't quite a peasant but he stabbed Henry IV to death all the same, Henry III was similarly murdered by a friar of base origin. The only reason Damiens failed to kill Louis XV is that he used a tiny knife.

>>97633923
>What's the point in making up such outrageous lies?
>Some nobles
Well you've already admitted what I stated was a truth if you have to say "Some" rather than "All" or "Most".
Sieges are also not battles, anon.

>Utter bullshit.
Well, I'll wait for an example.
>Besides all those who fell in battle to some nameless peasant levy
Waiting on an example.
>many died to commoners without any martial training.
Waiting on an example.
>Ravaillac wasn't quite a peasant
No peasant detected.
>Henry III was similarly murdered by a friar
No peasant detected.
>The only reason Damiens failed to kill
And another non-example.
If it's "Utter bullshit" why did you fail to provide a single example?

>>97632809
>>97631885

Because the illegally armed felons are almost exclusively using their arms against each other.

Because the LEGALLY armed citizens offend at lower rates than LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS.

America has never, ever had a gun problem.

America has, and regrettably will continue to have, a feral monster problem.
Sub 100 iq and the 'human' struggles to have an internal monologue. Becoming a reactive, NPC 'bot'.
Sub 80 and hypotheticals become impossible
>"how would you feel if you didn't have breakfast yesterday"
"BUT I DID HAF BRIKFIS! YOO SAYUN AHM PO?"
SUB 70 and the 'human' cannot perceive of others AS human, ego they cannot see how their actions might effect others as if they were themselves
>do unto others what?
Hell, at about 75 iq and under they cannot even plan for more than right now.

>>97634426
>Blah blah blah
The tl;dr is that your average mutt is a pussy who believes he's ruled by pedophiles but is so psychologically dominated by them that he won't lift a finger to fight back, no matter how much opportunity he has.
This was also true in history and would be true in fantasy worldbuilding. It doesn't matter if the leadership is literally strong enough that a common peasant can't hope to kill them alone: They never would anyways.

>>97634446
Ok commie.

>>97634474
Kek mad

>okay, so there is some king, some princess maybe, an evil warlock, a secret society that was actually behind the warlock, and the big bad guy is a literal demon
everything is well
>okay, so when an enemy wears full plate armour, your blunt weapons will deal bonus damage
it's time to violently attack the GM
>said blunt weapons will be weak against chainmail tho
BURN THE RETARD GM! DEATH TO HIS ENTIRE FAMILY

>>97631847
Nah, realistically if you go by how much of fantasy has the traits of their dragons set up it just comes down to human plot armor and author imposed weakness and incompetence on the dragons. Like they'll go and gas them up by saying the dragons have nigh impenetrable scales then have some hero kill one in a single blow to the throat with a toothpick that shouldn't even be able to penetrate far enough to draw blood.

>>97635141
>realistically if you go by how much of fantasy

>>97635154
Yes, you retard. If you're really going to pull that lamebrain pedantry you don't get to complain about a human female overpowering a male, or about a single human knight in armor overpowering an ogre or dragon in one on one combat instead of being smashed to paste.

>>97635141
>Nah, realistically if you go by how much of fantasy
Kek, argument already lost. Let's see how much worse it gets.
>Like they'll go and gas them up by saying the dragons have nigh impenetrable scales then have some hero kill one in a single blow to the throat with a toothpick that shouldn't even be able to penetrate far enough to draw blood.
Post three screencaps of this happening in a widely known fantasy novel.

>>97619409
I care so much I have a globe in my home office that I can bring to the table and say "Point to where the game takes place".

>>97635236
you need to read more if that's your takeaway. I genuinely can't remember the last time some large fantasy creature ever took written effort to kill instead of some convenient sudden death bs.

>>97637102
>you need to read more if that's your takeaway
You need to read a dictionary if you don't know what "realistic" and "fantasy" mean.
>I genuinely can't remember
Oh ok so no examples then, you were just full of shit all along. Concession accepted.

>>97637115
Pedantry again, let me guess, you would suddenly have no issue with the statement if I used believable or something? And it'd genuinely be easier to name stories where that doesn't happen.

>>97637133
>Pedantry
You should learn what that word means too, pedantry is what you're doing, not me.
>you would suddenly have no issue with the statement if I used believable
There would still be issues, just different ones.
>And it'd genuinely be easier to- [coping]
You have no examples, you've already implicitly admitted defeat.

>>97637152
You would just move goalposts or say those don't count, I can tell from how hostile you are to even the claim by itself as though it personally offends you.

>>97637207
>You would
Let's not talk about vague "woulds" and completely made up realities where you have examples to back up your ridiculous nonsense. Let's focus on the is. What is going to happen, is you're going to keep coping because you're wrong, and you regard anyone who questions your claims as "hostile".

Every time some faggot complains about historical accuracy in their fantasy setting, I add another band of norse themed niggers in my setting.

>>97637236
Smaug from the Hobbit is literally one of the most popular examples. Just because you choose to be obtuse/blind doesn't make your own disbelief valid while you hide behind needing evidence for what is common knowledge to the point of being seen as a common trope.

>>97637344
Smaug literally gets killed by a magic arrow in a breach in his armor that was firmly established like 10 chapters ago

>>97637344
>Smaug from the Hobbit
Goes entirely against your claims. Literally what >>97637359 said, plus Smaug intentionally tries to armor himself as much as possible to cover for his weakness.
Also going against your overall claims, Dragons actually go extinct in LOTR (or near extinct) and that's despite a lack of "Dragon slayers" as a profession.
So 0/3 examples found. You're bitching about a made up problem lmao

>>97637359
It was basically a plot device/cheat code to dispose of him as quickly as possible and sidestep a proper fight to move the plot to the more important humanoid characters because there is no way the plot can can deal with him otherwise.

>>97637397
>It was basically a plot device
Dragons having unarmored bellies isn't a plot device, it's believable biology.
You're not just a pedant but a bad one lmao

>>97637417
>Believable biology
>Dragons
Anon, you need to get your head out of your ass.

>>97637817
So you're devolving into the "fantasy genre means nothing has to make sense" argument.

>>97637817
Didn't realize creationists hadn't all killed themselves out of shame yet.

>>97637831
dragons stopped being believable when they could fly without having 200ft sized wingspans and could breathe fire hot enough to melt steel yet not harmful to themselves
the state of their armored bellies has nothing to do with how believable they are or not

>>97637862
Then why should it matter to you how armored or unarmored the belly is? If it's pure fantasy and nothing has to make sense, it can be as durable as an abrams' side armor or as soft as canvas.

>>97637872
>Then why should it matter to you how armored or unarmored the belly is?
it doesnt
but using the state of their belly as an argument for plausibility is not valid

> If it's pure fantasy and nothing has to make sense, it can be as durable as an abrams' side armor or as soft as canvas.
this is true
a dragon with a belly thats impervious to bullets makes as much sense as a dragon that can be killed with a sword strike to that region

we enter firmly into the realm of symbolism or just flat out game balance
a dragon has a weak underbelly because we associate underbellies with being weak or because we just expect a weakpoint on the dragon somewhere because the players need to be able to hurt it somehow
but if we had a dragon that had an iron clad belly but a weak neck, thats not any more or less realistic than a dragon with a weak belly

>>97637850
Fantasy worlds tend to have gods that actually do/did things, instead of inanimate matter figuring out how to become animate and replicate itself.
>>97637831
Internal consistency is what makes the nonsensical make sense. Wiggle your fingers and talk gibberish to throw a fireball? Sounds pretty nonsensical to me.

>>97637894
Let me ask a different question in the same way: why should it matter to you whether someone wants verisimilitude or internal consistency with the biology of fictitious animals? If it's all fantasy anyway, the presence of effort in these concepts works just the same as if there wasn't any thought put into it.

>>97637899
>Fantasy worlds tend to have [irrelevant nonsense]
Didn't ask don't care, you threw a fit because you don't think dinosaurs were real.

>>97637894
>it doesnt
Then why did you sperg out about it?

>>97637915
>why should it matter to you whether someone wants verisimilitude or internal consistency with the biology of fictitious animals?
it shouldnt

>If it's all fantasy anyway, the presence of effort in these concepts works just the same as if there wasn't any thought put into it.
put as much effort as you want, just dont "realism" or "plausibility" as excuses to justify why things are the way they are
if you want a dragon to have flammable venom thats ignited with a flint gland, just admit its because flaming liquid is cool or that just having an explanation is cool, not because infinite flaming venom is somehow more realistic than the flame just being fire magic

>>97637930
>just dont "realism" or "plausibility"
>or that just having an explanation is cool
Which is it? Don't [use] plausibility to explain or have an explanation that's somehow cool?

>>97637944
an explanation doesnt need to be realistic, most of the time they arent
saying that the dragons fire breathe is a result of eating the worlds matchstick supply until it altered them on a genetic level is certainly an explanation that can be given
its about as plausible as the aforementioned flaming venom gland

but the point isnt that the explanation makes it more realistic, because no explanation could ever explain away violations of thermodynamics
its because exercising your brain to come up with a reason, even one as dumb as their firebreath being weaponized halitosis, is just inherently fun

>>97637960
>an explanation doesnt need to be realistic
It does have to be believable though, and you were pissed off about that. It sounds like you got mindbroken by being asked for examples and are just trying to be as disingenuous as possible, kek

>>97637960
>doesn't need to be realistic
We're going in circles. Of course it doesn't NEED to be realistic. Nothing needs that in fiction. That's not the point. You argued in favor of exercising the brain as a part of the process. It's one of several possible amazing defenses against your own insult, that someone who wants "believable biology" for a dragon needs to pull their head out of their ass.
Or maybe it's just you going in circles. I like my verisimilitude just fine. You seem to have some kind of identity crisis with what level of it is tolerable.

>>97637975
>It does have to be believable though
no explanation is going to be believable
there is no version of a dragon that can be considered realistic unless its been so heavily modified to conform to reality that it is no longer a dragon

its fine to create reasons for why a dragon can breathe fire, just dont have a pretense of making it more believable or realistic because it will never be, there is no number you can multiply by zero to be any any other number

>and are just trying to be as disingenuous as possible, kek
the premise is that a dragon having a soft underbelly makes it more believable, realistic, plausible, or any other buzzword
but thats just not true, a dragon is a fantasy creature that can have its weakpoint wherever you want it to be

it would be more honest to say the dragon has a weak belly for symbolic or gameplay reasons, but to say its more realistic is non sense

>>97637998
>no explanation is going to be
Kek, yep you're just butthurt and disingenuous. You lost.

>>97638015
>yep you're just butthurt and disingenuous.
theres nothing disingenuous against pointing out that dragons having weak underbellies does not make them more realistic and that should not be your argument for having the underbelly be the weakpoint

its a fictional creature, why would they need a weakpoint at all?

>>97638029
Kek seethe loser

>it's another episode of 4chan posters thinking every response to their posts is the exact same person

>>97638039
>ah yes, my physics ignoring reptile is totally more believable than this physics ignoring reptile because it has 4 limbs instead of 6

>>97638060
Die mad :)