Something that made me mad about the latest book.

[billd91]

See succubus, chimera, medusa - those were names given to fantasy creatures by latin/greek/whatever writers and storytellers and sound like it. Tyranosaurus Rex sounds like it was named by a committee of scientists.

I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything - this is my opinion and experience speaking - no one elses'.

Fair enough. I think your distaste for the scientific cobbling together of old languages to form a descriptive name is a variation to distaste for cobbling together modern English descriptives like macetail. It's kind of interesting. I wonder how distaste for one but not the other shakes out among people.

 

[gdmcbride]

In my perfect world, D&D entries for dinosaurs and similar beasts would have both.

They would be listed under their actual names like 'Utahraptor' and then somewhere in the article, the author would give us a half-dozen common names that people actually living beside the beasts might call them like Leap-deaths, grey shadows, The-Death-Seen-Too-Late, Jumpclaw behemoths and Knife-lizards.

Then you could pick a name for when you spring it on your PCs. "Don't go into the long grass! That's where the Leap-deaths dwell!"

Gary McBride
Fire Mountain Games

 

[gamerprinter]

I only need one name, so I can find it in alphabetical order in the bestiary. Preferably with a name like I know, like velociraptor, and not anything more descriptive than that. Once I find it, names become unimportant. I will describe it to the PCs and their imaginations will let them figure out what it is, right or wrong.

 

[Holy Bovine]

You're talking about one of the argument points in the Edition Wars that went on FREAKIN' FOREVER.

"It's a dumb name." "No, it's an awesome name." "Is not" "Is too!"

AAAARGH!

Heh. I remember that going on. Of course everyone seemed to forget that names like Macetail Behemoth started appearing in MM II in 3E.

Me, immersion be darned, I still like the real or pop culture names because they are easier to hang a mental picture on. Stereotypes are bad in real life, but they're darned useful in literature and gaming.

For that matter, a brontosaurus doesn't even belong in the list, if you want to inject fact into the picture.

Who said anything about facts? I try to imagine a name people would give to a 20 foot tall bird-lizard with tiny forearms and a head the size of a wagon filled with teeth the size of swords - other that 'OH &^%$!!!" that is

 

[N'raac]

Me, immersion be darned, I still like the real or pop culture names because they are easier to hang a mental picture on. Stereotypes are bad in real life, but they're darned useful in literature and gaming.

For that matter, a brontosaurus doesn't even belong in the list, if you want to inject fact into the picture.

Yup. We worry about whether the Dimetrodon is properly classified in a book that includes other planar beings, Lovecraftian horrors and the walking dead...

As for the brontosaurus, he fits in perfectly - see Giant In the Playground Games

In my perfect world, D&D entries for dinosaurs and similar beasts would have both.

They would be listed under their actual names like 'Utahraptor' and then somewhere in the article, the author would give us a half-dozen common names that people actually living beside the beasts might call them like Leap-deaths, grey shadows, The-Death-Seen-Too-Late, Jumpclaw behemoths and Knife-lizards.

Then you could pick a name for when you spring it on your PCs. "Don't go into the long grass! That's where the Leap-deaths dwell!"

There's no reason this would be restricted to dinosaurs, is there? Umber hulks, illithids (commonly "Mind Flayers" - precedent!), etc. could all have a variety of local names.

 

[gdmcbride]

There's no reason this would be restricted to dinosaurs, is there? Umber hulks, illithids (commonly "Mind Flayers" - precedent!), etc. could all have a variety of local names.

No reason at all! I would love it if monster books had a half-dozen alternate names for every monster. That way, even tried and true beasties could be freshened up with a new name.

Yes, I can come up with them on my own, but wouldn't be nice if that work was already taken care of for you?

Gary McBride
Fire Mountain Games

 

[Rampant]

Well let's have some fun then

Alternative names for the Chimera:

Jigsaw that walks
Bedlam Beast
Six eyed death

 

[James Jacobs]

The dimetrodon is NOT a dinosaur.

I'm gonna RISK IT ALL and post a reply to this before reading the rest of the thread...

I certainly know dimetrodon isn't a dinosaur. Just as I know that neither is the pteranodon or the elasmosaurus (both of whom appeared in the first bestiary) and the tylosaurus (which appeared in Bestiary 2). All of those contain SOME language that either says "this is not a dinosaur" or "this is a reptile" or something like that.

Complicating things is the fact that since we usually try to fit two animals on a page rather than one, the art can often wreak havoc on the flavor text. For Bestiary 3, we actually moved the druid animal companion info OUT of the actual monster entries and into the appendix to help fix this problem, but that iguanodon illustration on page 78 still managed to work some magic to make the entry for the dimetrodon need some layout and word-flow kung-fu to fit... and one of the the cuts that happened to ensure that was the phrase "this is not a dinosaur."

THAT SAID... thematically and niche-wise and monster type-wise and so on, the dimetrodon (and things like pteranodon and tylosaurus) fit very well in with the other dinosaurs, and that's good, because if they didn't, we'd likely end up not being able to put a dimetrodon into the game in the first place and that would suck worse than the kludge of filing them under "Dinosaur."

(Why wouldn't we have put a dimetrodon in as a single critter with its own page? Because animals are relatively simple, and their "flavor text" when stripped of world settings is often just identical to "flavor text" you can get reading a book or website about that animal, and as a result we would rather save our limited opportunities to do monsters that need that space for things like festrogs, moon-beasts, and dragonnes, who do need more like a page of content.)

 

[James Jacobs]

Since Dimetrodon is more closely related to mammals than true reptiles, why does it only have an intelligence of 1?

Because they're more primitive than dinosaurs, true mammals, and true reptiles. And one way we model "more primitive" in that regard is a slightly lower intelligence.

 

[James Jacobs]

I personally would love to see PF (and D&D) do away with the latin naming conventions of dinosaurs.

'Thunder Lizard' sounds 10X cooler than Tyranosaurus Rex

As long as I'm at Paizo, this won't happen. And if I'm not at Paizo, the company loses their biggest dinosaur fan and the bestiaries are significantly likely to not have dinosaurs at all.

I've never understood the "dinosaur latin names break game verisimiltude," because, if anything, Latin is MORE appropriate for a medieval-style game than English. And the game already has plenty of creatures in the game whose names are words in real-world languages—like coyotes, or oni, or the Tarrasque, or tengu, or medusa, and so on.

The fact that dinosaur names are actually relatively well-known... ESPECIALLY among the typical gamer... means that abandoning those names is bad for the game. Being able to say, "The tyrannosaurus lunges forward to attack" is not as cool to me as saying "The tyrant lizard lunges forward to attack." In the same way saying "The panicked horse rears up in fright," is better than saying "The panicked whinny clopper rears up in fright."

And for those who might argue that "whinny clopper" is a silly name... some of those dinosaur names, when translated, are a lot more silly than that.