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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6985885" data-attributes="member: 37579">There's a couple things going on in the OP. It really comes down to "verisimilitude in RPGs" more than "fairy tales vs naturalism" as there's not much that conforms to the structure or tropes of fairy tales in most early D&D adventures or settings, Ecology in fantasy worlds is fairly new. C.S. Lewis had intelligent talking animals all over Narnia but people still ate meat and hunted somehow. And Middle Earth stood in the middle ground between high fantasy and fairy tale, starting as one via the Hobbit and evolving into the other during Lord of the Rings. Things like "verisimilitude" or "logical world design" weren't a thing as imaginary worlds were still a fairly new concept. Arguably, one of the first genre novels to really deal with ecology was Dune in 1965. But that was published fifteen years after LotR was written. Regardless, most fantasy worlds tend to be pretty illogical in one way or another, either having nonsensical ecologies or cities or economies or terrain (rivers flowing uphill or branching is a common flaw).It might have something to do with the creators of fantasy worlds being writers rather than economists, ecologists, geologistsLogic in fantasy campaign settings was also pretty new. Mostly because, in a pre-Internet age, gaining a working or even casual knowledge of a subject for worldbuilding required hours at a sizable library. Now, if a worldbuilder want to learn about air currents and wind cells it just takes 30 minutes on wikipedia. From a D&D perspective... does it matter? I've never had my players question where the food an inn has comes from, and unless there's an adventure hook involved in the "why" the DM often doesn't need to know. In adventures, pages and text spent explaining the unique ecology of the dungeon is time that could be spent describing NPC roleplaying or adding details to rooms or fleshing out the plot. Nonsensical ecologies are nice to have explained though (such as not having living things in a tomb sealed for eons) but often that gets overlooked. How many people questioned why there were so many snakes in the Ark's chamber in Raiders of the Lost Ark? What were they eating? Or drinking? What kept them from all leaving?</blockquote>

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