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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8622914" data-attributes="member: 18">I don't think it even needs to be full-on specialist training. Some people have minds that work in such a way that they spot things that are missing or don't make sense more naturally, where others might never, and sometimes just seeing something once can forever change how you see things. For a crude example, loos (toilets or "bathrooms" to Americans). The first ever D&D adventure I read had a large house in it, and house had loos. Ever since then, I'm unable to take dungeons/mansions/etc. seriously or really believe in them if they're missing loos. And not just loos - refuse pits/piles, food storage and preparation areas (where appropriate), sleeping areas, etc. Access to water for humanoids. A lot of adventure writers manage to remember that, say, kitchens and bedrooms exist, but to forget that loos do, and forget that you kind of hard-need access to water or similar for humanoids to live somewhere.I need to know where the smoke is going from that big fire they have. Where do they poop? Where does their trash go? How do they get food in? What do they do with dead bodies? etc.This isn't something I was trained for - well it kind of is (as I did archaeology academically), but that came later and just reinforced it (indeed the mindset is beneficial to have as an archaeologist) - even as a kid, this stuff really concerned me, and it became obvious that there was this sharp split among adventure writers, where some of them always thought of at least 90% of this stuff (nobody remembers everything all the time), and others basically didn't think about this sort of logic at all, except occasionally as an afterthought, and things were just there because they were "cool" or to hold an encounter or whatever.Bizarrely, over time, it feels like the second lot, who I expected to become less of a thing, have become the main group, and adventure writers who do think stuff through have become relegated to 3PPs and so on. Maybe that's totally fine, but it absolutely supports your contention that D&D works because people don't think about it too hard.</blockquote>

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