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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 2925377" data-attributes="member: 18280">The idea that a setting cannot have the "setting knowledge" that actual peoples had in the real world is equally preposterous.  It really depends upon how much good information and ability to travel the average person in a setting has.  The average person doesn't have the whole plethora of divination spells; he either accepts authority or does not.  Wanderers might tell stories that are true, untrue, or a mixture of both (how often, even in the real world, do we mess up the stories that we tell, even dealing with known quantities?).It is only in recent times that animals like the gorilla and komodo dragon ceased to be traveller's tales.  Sailors used to turn a coin by stuffing monkies & fish together and selling them as mounted "mermaids" -- when the platypus was first discovered, the mounted specimens sent to Europe were thought to be made the same way."Setting information" even today is sometimes dim and murky.  Why should it be "well known" to the inhabitants of a fantasy kingdom that abberrations "could arise as composites of will, dreams, imaginations, mixed with environment, latent magic, and stray magical energies" when people in the modern world still argue about where we came from?  It was not so horribly long ago that people believed in spontaneous generation, and that could be a true theory within a given world (or a widely believed false theory).Yet, there is no case in a per-RAW D&D world where choosing a PC class is inferior to choosing an NPC class.  Yet, per RAW, nearly all the world chooses NPC classes.  So, either the RAW assumes that the average person makes sub-optimal choices, or that the average person is not actually making a choice.Objection!  Calls for supposition on the part of the witness.   <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /> Magic can move things forward, and if you subscribe to the idea of a benevolent universe with largely benevolent beings, sure it will.  OTOH, I note that no one ever bothered to respond to the bit about all the farmers being put out of work.  Or the part about creating an abundant food source (magical energy) for creatures that consume it, and the effects thereof.  Or, for that matter, how you then control the casters.You are correct when you suggest that all people want a reasonably good life, but IME people are not necessarily rational as individuals as to what that life is.  Moreover, when you get people together in groups, rationality can go out the window faster than Superman when he hears Lois Lane calling for help.  Realism takes not only progress into account, but also those things that stand in the way of progress -- including the fact that people often do not agree as to what "progress" means.  Hence organic farming.As said earlier, both are stylistic concerns.  You can create a world either way.  Neither one is necessarily more mature, and neither one is necessarily more rigorous in its realism.  As an example, Harry Potter is not realistic at all, IMHO, and it handwaves nearly all the consequences of the main premise.</blockquote>

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