The Implications of Biology in D&D

[Barastrondo]

Replace "Myth" with "Pulp Fantasy LOTR Clone".

Or Robin Hood and King Arthur, Cinderella and Snow White. The concept of the "knight in shining armor" is more fully ingrained in modern culture than Aragorn is by a long shot. Most kids learn about fairies and castles and monsters long before they read LotR or Conan. I figure that also contributes to the tendency to have more emotional connection to things that feel like the stories you grew up with.

What most people see as "normal" for fantasy isn't all that related to an actual myth. Myth gets more and more replaced by what happens in fantasy books/movies which are nearly always LOTR clones (except for certain topics like Vampires).

There's also regional culture to consider. American fantasy can be notably different from European fantasy, for instance; D&D and Warhammer are very much products of American writers on one side and British writers on the other. That's instrumental to the formation of, say, "the modern American vampire myth" as opposed to "the 14th-century Balkan vampire myth" or "the 19th-century English vampire myth." And it's generally easier for an audience to buy into myths that are closer to their own culture.

Same with other fantasy creatures. Orks are green, stupid and evil, most gamers associate elves with how they appeared in LOTR and not with either small pixies or the nordic originals from the myth. Same with dwarves and them being short, axe or hammer wielding, bearded drunkards instead of small sprites with jelly bag caps.

It's a bit of sampling bias there, though, because most gamers started with D&D, and D&D featured elves as they appeared in LOTR, orcs that are green, stupid and evil, and short dwarves that use axes and hammers and are bearded drunkards. If the first and most influential RPG in the world establishes the same stereotypes that also exist in LOTR, well, yes. Therefore presenting D&D elves that are "sufficiently unlike" Tolkien's is a tricky sell, because they're also probably unlike Silverleaf, Mialee, Drizzt and Melf.

I would really like to witness an experiment when 3 people, one who has only read old folk tales, one who has only read LOTR & Clones and one grew up only with Conan books are tasked to create a fantasy world.

I'd be interested to see where such people could be found. How do you keep kids from being exposed to the more cleaned-up versions of fairy tales and keep them only to the old folk tales? I don't think you can subtract the place that culture in general plays in these things.

I think you could get a good world, though, if you had three people who each liked one thing in particular — but was open-minded about finding out what their collaborators liked about their particular preferences. If, on the other hand, each one hated stuff that wasn't their favorite, it would probably be a crummy world. It takes a lot of creative genius to make up for the kind of willful blindness that hate fosters.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

Monsters are monsters for different reasons. I think tend to divide them into two broad categories: the "little-M" monsters, and the "big-M" monsters:

Some monsters are really just "beasts" or "men", unfamiliar but understandable. They are monsters only in the sense that they are dangerous or different. I think this is where dwarves and hippogriffs fall in typical D&D settings. In a lot of settings, they are standard or common feature of the world, so it seems to me reasonable to make them consistent in an ecological sense. Whether dwarves come from storks, stone carvings, or bumpin' uglies is just a setting detail; but all these ways of making dwarf babies is a form of "biology". These are all just explanations for "how things work", as is any other myth or science.

Other monsters are monsters because they are stereotypes of the worst aspects of human nature. I think this is where the standard orc fits in: it's basically a stupid human that's filthy, ugly, brutish and cruel. And it is for exactly these reasons that it's ok to kill 'em and take their stuff. Likewise, I think a lot of monsters of myth fall into this class: satyrs epitomize lust, and sylphs beauty, dragons are avarice, necromancers are unchecked ambition, and so on. Effectively, we exaggerate and give shape to these human characteristics and call them "monsters".

I think these two kinds of monster-- call them the "little-M monsters"-- serve to define a world and give it consistency, as well as some way for players to relate to it. Note that this consistency need not resemble the real world, though. Whether a setting's ecology (and cultures and cosmology) is held together with physics and evolution or with magic and alchemy, isn't terribly important. What's important is that the setting has something that renders it somewhat predictable and logical, if only because the players are logical creatures! Otherwise, why even bother with rules?

The "big-M" monsters are the "true monsters", the ones that are monsters because they are not understandable, and are frightening for that reason. This is the realm of "unspeakable horrors" and incomprehensible motives, regardless of the form. These are the "real" monsters, the ones that strike fear into PCs' hearts. These are the ones that defy biology or psychology, and that stand out from the rest of the setting, because they are so horrible, calculating, evil, or inscrutable. In other words, these often are the BBEGs. It's these "true monsters" that define the real conflict in a world and are often the ultimate source of the strife the PCs overcome.

I think it's important to note here that such "big-M" monsters might begin incomprehensible, but slowly become understood over the course of an adventure or campaign-- effectively transforming into a "little-M" monster as the PCs gain knowledge. In fact, this is typically how most conflicts are structured: something horrible and frightening occurs, weird minions lurk in every shadow, and it's only through the process of finding clues, talking to mentors, discovering peculiar treasures, and following all the leads that the PCs eventually figure out wtf is going on and ultimately defeat the bad guy.


The most intersting thing about "big-M" and the types of "little-M" monsters is that the lines drawn between them are often in very different places in different settings. A common example is kobolds. In the "default" D&D setting, their just little wimpy scaly foul-tempered humans, the second kind of "little-M" monster in this taxonomy, as they are miserable, cowardly and spiteful-- attributes that humans simply don't like in other humans. However, I know a common re-imagining of kobolds is that they are cunning, sinister and malevolent, with a peculiar form of evil-- a lot more frightening than the normal kobold, and a little more "big-M".

So, yeah, I don't have much problem with a naturalist approach to "little-M" monsters, but I really like the "big-M" monsters to defy reason. At the same time, I think it's OK for one campaign to call trolls "little-M" monsters, and another campaign to call trolls "big-M" monsters. It just depends on the mood, feel and details of the campaign.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I like using unique monsters and fantastical creatures that have no explanation beyond myth and legend for thier origins.

When a given monster type starts becoming numerous enough to become a race, with a recognizable reproductive cycle then there begins to be "standard" traits that are shared by members of that race.

A monster doesn't need any explanation for its abilities or characteristics. I don't consider typical humanoids to be true monsters since they are sentient, and have an established culture. They may be in constant conflict with humanity and other races who may treat them as "monsters". After all, humans are capable of treating other humans of differing cultures that way in our world due to much smaller differences in appearance and/or values.

They way I approach it, a single minotaur is a monster (RAWR), but a city of minotaur inhabitants is evidence of a racial type.

It is certainly possible that there may be many monsters that appear the same with wildly different traits. If a creature is spawned by chaos with a random assortment of traits then it really isn't a racial type.

There is plenty of room for both fantastic racial types and monsters in the game.

 

[Celebrim]

(But as to other point, of course we --and by we I mean fiction writers of all stripes-- anthropomorphize mythical creatures, space aliens, and brave little toasters, we have to. Anything that serves as a character needs to be a person, a human being, beneath it's funny suit or crinkly nose-prosthesis. The minute you decide a dragon or an angel is going to be character, it, perforce, becomes a person, different in scope perhaps as you or I are from Achilles, but a person nonetheless).

I disagree entirely. What you get when you create an alien that is a character is something that is a fraction of a person and at the same time some fraction which is utterly inexplicable in some cases perhaps even to the author. It is a very modern view of the world that the actions of another actor should be comprehensible and understandable to the observer. Remember, we are talking about a world made of myth, and to the writers of the myths, the world was inexplicable. They couldn't look at the world and explain why it was. We can look at the world and say where the rain comes from and why the wind blows and why the sun shines. The writers of the myths used the myths to try to explain the utter incomprehensibility of these things, and so they created the concept that the wind, rain, and sun were alien beings with mental processes that were on some level inexplicable. The best you could hope for was to partly understand them: to be able to relate to them on some incomplete but functional level.

If you read alot of fairy tales, and I mean old fairy tales, not modern fairy tales or even 18th century literary fairy tales, over and over again you'll read about fey creatures acting according to a logic that is inexplicable. You can't come up with a reason for why fey act the way that they do. They have fey logic, fey reasoning, and fey culture. You aren't supposed to understand them. That's the point. The best you can do is learn enough about it to have a better chance against them than the ignorant, but there is no comprehensible why - only what and how.

Many of the monsters are literally personifications of forces of nature. Nature was inexplicable, cruel, incomprehensible and uncontrollable. The personifications of it were of necessity to alien to understand, motivated by desires quite foreign to human desires. They are only partially anthromorphic.

With a few exceptions, modern authors do a very bad job of this. HP Lovecraft gets it. 'The Alien Way' by Gordon R. Dickenson is one of the few sci-fi books I can think of that really gets it. His aliens aren't people with bumps on their head. Their alien. He doesn't try to teach in his story, 'Underneath the skin, we are all basically alike', which has a kernal of truth if we are talking about people, but is amazingly stupid when applied to something that isn't.

We very rapidly approaching a time in human history when it will become essential to understand that everything that is a character isn't human. As we begin to have the power to create non-human intelligences, it is arguably essential to human survival that we get away from the notion that intelligent implies human.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Gerald of Wales' treatise from the 12th century [ame="http://www.amazon.com/History-Topography-Ireland-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140444238/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261682700&sr=8-3"]The History and Topography of Ireland[/ame] has some interesting descriptions of "monsters" and strange geograpy.

Gerald of Wales was among the most dynamic and fascinating churchmen of the twelfth century. A member of one of the leading Norman families involved in the invasion of Ireland, he first visited there in 1183 and later returned in the entourage of Henry II. The resulting "Topographia Hiberniae" is an extraordinary account of his travels. Here he describes landscapes, fish, birds and animals; recounts the history of Ireland's rulers; and tells fantastical stories of magic wells and deadly whirlpools, strange creatures and evil spirits. Written from the point of view of an invader and reformer, this work has been rightly criticized for its portrait of a primitive land, yet it is also one of the most important sources for what is known of Ireland during the Middle Ages.

 

[Jack7]

I disagree entirely.

I think you're both right, to a degree. I think a lot depends upon who is doing the looking, and why.

With what CB said, this is true to the extent that a reader or audience is able to understand the enormous and unbridgeable gulf between the monster or alien or god and man. I see this analogously all the time while working cases.

The family of the victims, or someone else on the periphery of the case, or a rookie with no real experience of how these things work, will comment, "How could anybody kidnap and rape and torture and then strangle such a sweet and harmless little six year old girl, cut her body into pieces and then bury the remains twenty feet from his doorstep." People not familiar with this kind of thing and this kind of person (is that the wrong word? - well, yes it is, but it's what I got to use) think that if they just understood the thought and behavioral processes of the perp that they would magically establish a "link of understanding" between themselves and such a guy. That if they understood they could comprehend, and if they could comprehend it would all suddenly make sense.) But they never really will because the nature of such a subject, and the nature of those who fall prey to such people, are rarely the same type of natures. They both wear the suit of flesh that makes them appear to be men, but they behave in ways totally alien to one another, and have thought processes totally different. (I'm not talking about victim dis-similarities, but psychological dis-similarities.)

It's like Grendel in Beowulf. Sometimes Grendel is just Grendel. He doesn't behave as he does because that's what he has in common with the Geats, or doesn't have in common with men in general, but because that's the way he is. Grendel is Grendel, and maybe even he could change in the right set of circumstances, but he doesn't wanna change. That's what most people don't get. And don't wanna get. Grendel is the way he wants to be.

The Hussein brothers didn't rape teenage girls, tape their activates, and then feed the girls they had just raped to hungry war-dogs because of their high status in society, because of their educational background, or even because they were bored with nothing to do on a Saturday night. They did it because they could, that was their nature, and that's where they came from. There's nothing really to understand about it, other than the fact of how they operated. Not why they operated, but how. The why was entirely in them. And that's why they were the way they were, and why they wanted to be the way they were. Sometimes Grendel is just Grendel. You don't study Grendel to understand why Grendel is Grendel, you study him to understand how Grendel is Grendel. With the how of the matter it becomes easier to kill him, the why is never gonna lead anywhere but back to a lair peppered with bone-shards and pillowed with gore-pools.

But the point Mall was making (I think, but he was probably driving at it in a very different way than I'm going about it) is that the reader or audience, and especially the modern person, desires to understand, and honestly believes everything is understandable, because it comforts them to think this. Modern people actually think everything is resolvable, if you just understand enough about the subject, and that an acceptable resolution is always forthcoming from such understanding. That understanding someone naturally equates with resolution, acceptance, or similarity. The emphasis being of course that one stresses the idea that understanding will and can always occur. That it is a natural and inevitable result of the contact between what is alien, monstrous, and unknown. Therefore you stress what lies in common between audience and subject, even if it is small and subtle, not what is different, even if it is obvious and enormous. You don't wander too far away from the familiar, because the audience has either no desire to be reminded of the utterly alien, or just as importantly, doesn't really believe it is possible. And you can't convince anyone of anything they refuse to believe in, or assume to be impossible, a priori.

Personally I think the idea that man can reduce everything and everyone and every creature to human, or even decent or civilized understanding a ridiculous canard, and laughably naive. Juvenile in concept, and dangerously so. Nevertheless it is the rather ingrained and hard habit of the modern observer and of the educated modern man and woman, and even child, I would say. That it is so common and ubiquitous in our culture (including the assumption that Reason is a Universal God - but such assumptions are not standing positions in cultures like Somalia or Rwanda, where the idea that it is possible to understand everything, or even that one would want to do so, or that practice of this method leads to mutually beneficial conflict resolutions are viewed as alien - and I've personally seen everything but reason wielding machetes and butcher knives on unarmed dismembered civilians) that the idea is just accepted at face value as being unquestionably true regardless of circumstance, culture, time, or place.

It is sort of a sub-conscious facade, a mask derived from the constructs and beliefs of our own culture, which many of us place over our minds and through the lens of which we do color our assumptions about the world. But it is no more true, nor false, that those cultural and societal and psychological masks assumed by the Athenians during the Peloponnesian Wars. It is the way we see things, and the way most of us want to see things, regardless of the evidence.

Now that being said (and I think this is very much why our myths are all of Super-heroes like Superman and Spiderman and Batman, extremely naive and yet fundamanentally good and noble and well-meaning heroes, rather than of an Achilles or a Beowulf) a modern Author must play to his audience. Rarely would an Oedipus be accepted and understood and sympathized with in the way he was among the Greeks, nor a Cyrano among the French. You target the audience you possess, and you play to their values, and mores, and assumptions, and conceits, and psyches, not to the psyche of those who feel it is not necessary to understand the other, or who do not assume it is even possible or required.

So to me both points of view are right, it just depends at what point along the spectrum you are making your observations, and who is doing the looking, and what exactly he's looking at and why.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

If you read alot of fairy tales, and I mean old fairy tales, not modern fairy tales or even 18th century literary fairy tales, over and over again you'll read about fey creatures acting according to a logic that is inexplicable. You can't come up with a reason for why fey act the way that they do. They have fey logic, fey reasoning, and fey culture. You aren't supposed to understand them. That's the point. The best you can do is learn enough about it to have a better chance against them than the ignorant, but there is no comprehensible why - only what and how.

I don't agree with this. It seems to me that myth basically counts on the fact that human behavior is not fully understandable to explain why the natural and supernatural worlds are not understandable.

The fact that fey or any other agent in mythology is illogical is not the point of the myth. Rather, it's just that the logic of a given tale doesn't have to go any deeper than that superficial level. Making these agents in the form of men or animals, in fact, goes a long way toward removing the need for a logical explanation simply because the men and animals they're modelled on are themselves quite irrational! In other words, the inscrutable motives of men and beasts were sufficient to "explain" the inscrutable motives of everything else. After all, people back then were just as twisted, evil, generous, erratic, saintly, stupid, wrathful, ugly, lustful, as they are today.

By way of example, lightning is almost always attributed to an angry god; it wasn't important why he was angry. Just as people often act irrationally when angry, so do the gods, and no further explanation is necessary. Toadstools grow in circles after it rains because that's where the fairies danced; why they danced was unimportant, because there are lots of human reasons for dancing. Shoes buried in the threshold keep evil spirits away. Why is not important; it's enough to know that evil spirits don't like shoes, possibly in the same way people don't like latrines.

I don't think it was common practice to try to even ask "why" beyond that level of understanding. Not because there was some deep-seated dread about the fundamental incomprehensibility of the universe, but just because that casual "common sense" level of logic was enough for people who spent their days scraping by, plowing fields, being ill, carrying water, chopping wood, and trying to keep their kids alive long enough to work the farm in a few years.

And, not surprisingly, whenever mankind sat down and really started thinking about such things and trying to logically connect all these disparate facts described by myth, they ended up with civilization, agriculture, engineering, astrology, alchemy. And, eventually, science-- which, ironically, tells us that nature is much simpler that we ever dreamed.

As for Lovecraft, I really think his writings, were more a response to our own age of reason. He was harkening back to that time when people didn't understand things, and lived in ignorance, but starting at our level of understanding. The message was that we-- with all our science and technology-- are just as ignorant as the peasants of the middle ages with their fairy tales and superstitions. We are, in other words, still missing the Truth-- and, moreover, we can never comprehend it. This is directly in opposition to the old fairytales, in fact: while the ancients assumed things were understandable by appealing to human or animal motives, Lovecraft says the *real* universe is inherently and hopelessly incomprehensible, so don't even try. (At least that's what I get out of it; I've never read any critical analysis of his works, or his own notes on the topic.)

Anyway, that's 2cp, from someone who really hasn't delved into the subject as deeply as I'm sure a lot of others here have!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Unless a creature is the stuff of Chaos made flesh, I expect it to have motivations and characteristics that define it and drive it- a set of general facts about it that (roughly) get described in the MM entry. A "norm" to its biology.

Now, that biology may be entirely alien or supported by magic, but it should still be internally consistent within the species. If it doesn't eat or breathe, there should be reasons.

Chimaeric creatures may originate from magical origins, but if there are more than just a few exemplars in the world, there should be an explanation.

In Bender's Game, 2 characters had this exchange:

"Is that a Hobbit?"

"Nope- that's a Hobo and a Rabbit...but they're making a hobbit."

(Essentially, the same idea is in the Greek legend of The Minotaur.)

Something like that explains 1 critter, but not a species. Either they need to breed true, or there has to be some reason why Hobos and Rabbits keep making Hobbits.

 

[catsclaw227]

With a few exceptions, modern authors do a very bad job of this. HP Lovecraft gets it. 'The Alien Way' by Gordon R. Dickenson is one of the few sci-fi books I can think of that really gets it. His aliens aren't people with bumps on their head. Their alien. He doesn't try to teach in his story, 'Underneath the skin, we are all basically alike', which has a kernal of truth if we are talking about people, but is amazingly stupid when applied to something that isn't.

There is a book by Larry Niven called The Mote in God's Eye which has a pretty portrayal of an alien race, not just an anthropomorphic creature.

This topic has taken a bit of turn towards discussing the use of mythology in D&D games and whether a game is better for it or not.

I wonder then, for most gamers, if D&D has developed it's own mythology deeply enough that it doesn't require knowledge of historical or real-world mythology to feel as complete as a game that IS derived directly from real-world mythology. I am not just talking about LotR mythology that has become D&D mythology, but something deeper. Yes, I think D&D has taken liberties with many different real-world myths and some fictional mythology (Vancian magic, Tolkien elves, etc), but it could be said that it has created it's own mythology.

Drow, Beholders, Halflings, rust monsters, (and even dragons, one could argue) have a distinctive D&D feel to them enough that the source of these creatures can be pointed to D&D with only a wink-and-a-nod to their original source.

 

[Derren]

Drow, Beholders, Halflings, rust monsters, (and even dragons, one could argue) have a distinctive D&D feel to them enough that the source of these creatures can be pointed to D&D with only a wink-and-a-nod to their original source.

D&D certainly did develop its own mythology with Drow, Beholders, Tana'Ri or the colour coded dragon while other things were still LotR myths with a few changes (elves for example).
At least up till 3E. 4E removed or diminished most of the mythology D&D created during the previous editions.