D&D General Do genes exist in D&D?

[DammitVictor]

So tell us about your setting!

My setting's not even trying to make sense. It's a pre-industrial culture with handmade smartphones, automobiles, and rayguns.

You can die from pissing the Sun off, and looking at it-- not directly, which pisses it off-- entitles you to a Wisdom check to determine how it's feeling. One of my favorite adventures starts because the Sun hasn't risen in two weeks, it's bitter cold, and you have to go find the Sun and convince it to rise before the crops die.

 

[TheSword]

This comes down to the age old argument. If a tree falls down in a forest and there’s no one to hear, does it make a noise.

If there is no technology or scientific understanding capable of interpreting or recognizing genes in your world. Then de facto they do not exist. If some mage somewhere has invented the magical equivalent of an electron microscope... then fill your boots.

All technology suitably advanced appears like magic. You can fold it in to your word.

if on the other hand, you’re still at the point where infection is the touch of Asmodean then that’s a pretty groovy place to adventure.

My personal preference is for a world where professor Watson and professor Crick are about to be burnt at the stake for suggesting that dwarves were not forged by Moradin in the dawn forge. Professor Crick is your previous mentor and successfully detected and helped cure a congenital illness you had as a child, proving his theory. What do you do? ...

Particularly when it turns out Professor Crick’s castle is the source of the strange creatures that have been attacking farmsteads in the area?

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't think D&D even attempts to think of this question. It just isn't important to the genre

 

[Weiley31]

Yes there are Jeans, Genes, and Eugenes in DND.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

It's fruitless, frankly, to speculate on some universal truth of how genetics work in D&D. The answer is entirely dependent on the setting or game world developer(s).

 

[Lanefan]

I don't think D&D even attempts to think of this question. It just isn't important to the genre

Though it certainly can be, or become so, if one wants to expand on the idea of Half- or Part-races and interbreeding as part of determining PC ancestries (done this); and-or if the PCs are having children who might one day grow up to be the new generation of PCs (done this); and-or if one's plotline potentially involves offspring-producing trysts with deities or Dryads or shapeshifters (hasn't happened to a PC yet, but never say never).

All of this is exactly the sort of thing I was really hoping the 3e-era Book of Erotic Fantasy would deep-dive into. Major disappointment there.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

In my game the biohackers from Starfinder can use their powers in my fantasy worlds. The DNA and normal science can work, but it is unknown but by the deities. The modern sciencie is a powerful taboo to avoid evil cults creating massive destruction weapons.

Even maybe the fraals (the little gray men from d20 Future) can visit my fantasy worlds to investigate the DNA by the local life.

 

[DammitVictor]

In my game the biohackers from Starfinder can use their powers in my fantasy worlds. The DNA and normal science can work, but it is unknown but by the deities. The modern sciencie is a powerful taboo to avoid evil cults creating massive destruction weapons.

Even maybe the fraals (the little gray men from d20 Future) can visit my fantasy worlds to investigate the DNA by the local life.

This is metal as hell, and I approve.

 

[turnip_farmer]

The only things that “exist” in the game are the things talked about at the table. I seriously doubt many games of D&D involve roleplaying Gregor Mendel.

Indeed. I'm surprised how many have an opinion on this. I can see asking questions about whether certain laws of physics work the same way, as that can come up when a player does something stupid.

But how could the existence of genes affect anything? I'm struggling to imagine how this could come up.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Though it certainly can be, or become so, if one wants to expand on the idea of Half- or Part-races and interbreeding as part of determining PC ancestries (done this); and-or if the PCs are having children who might one day grow up to be the new generation of PCs (done this); and-or if one's plotline potentially involves offspring-producing trysts with deities or Dryads or shapeshifters (hasn't happened to a PC yet, but never say never).

All of this is exactly the sort of thing I was really hoping the 3e-era Book of Erotic Fantasy would deep-dive into. Major disappointment there.

Before humans knew or understood genes, it was understood children looked like their parents and shared traits of their parents. I think Dungeons and Dragons worlds generally operate under a cosmology informed by pre-science paradigms. When you start applying actual scientific thinking to a dungeons and dragons world, things tend to break down at certain points (a good example of this is the Mordenheim novel for Ravenloft where Victor Mordernheim tries to reconcile science and magic (which he calls 'new science'). Also races in D&D are not like races in the real world. Real world races are all contained within humans. Demihumans in D&D are closer to subspecies like Neanderthals or mythic peoples that ancient world geographers used to describe. In D&D the difference between a human and elf is greater than the difference between even the difference between a real world human and a neanderthal (and connected to cosmological forces in many D&D worlds, not to a concept like genetics).