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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7596262" data-attributes="member: 82106">Now, see, I am a very completist kind of person and can easily imagine 100's, or even 1000's of similar details which could be, but never are, filled in about a community in a D&D game. Where do people's barrels come from? What are they made of? Who and where is the cooper? Does the blacksmith burn charcoal, and where does he get it from? How many animals does the village have, and what kinds? Where are they housed? Who cares for them? Do they get diseases? If a horse dies is there a knackerman and who does he sell to? Is there a tanner? Miller? What sort of mill is it? I mean, I could literally go on for HOURS. None of these questions are likely to be answered and most of them are not even answerable, as it would require a vast array of questions about exactly what technology is available in this place and time, open up questions about how magical spell availability would change some of these professions, etc. etc. etc. These become very complex questions very fast and cannot really be answered except in a very cursory fashion which instantly makes me think that someone 'just made up some stuff.' Obviously that IS what happened, so what's really interesting about it? Anything a GM describes is "just explaining it away" because there's no way they wrote out millions of lines of explanations, generated economic and social models, and did the 1000 man-lifetimes of work it would take to truly explicate and analyze everything in that village down to brass tacks. Even if you did, all the inputs to those calculations and explications would still have to be invented largely from whole cloth, since magic and etc. don't actually exist and have such a huge impact on things.Heck, read some really in-depth material about everyday life in Europe ca. 950 AD. Even for the real world when you go back 1000 years we know so very little about most of the details that our ideas of how things were is mostly guesswork. We are proven radically wrong constantly too, as perusal of any archeology/history journals will very quickly show. That's for the real world, but your fantasy world is 1000's of times less detailed. Just make stuff up! Its the best we can do.</blockquote>

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