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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5039504" data-attributes="member: 22779">Just a point here that has cropped up a couple of times.  Hippogriff's don't eat horses, griffons do.  At least, that's always been my understanding.  Even going back to B/E D&D, it was griffons that eat horses on sight, not hippogriff's.My point is, in this example, why on earth would the players be the first to figure out that having mobile, flying armies would absolutely dominate your neighbours?  That makes little sense to me.  Breeding hippogriffs, even only a half dozen or so, would drastically change warfare and economics.  Even if they were only used as spotters on the battlefield, much the way balloons were during Napoleonic times, the advantage would be massive.Anything that gives you that much of an advantage would be exploited or there needs to be a damn good reason why not.Naturalistic I would say.  Reducing fantastic creatures to just another animal, totally understandable from a modern Animal Planet point of view.  Heck, I would even argue with the consistent approach as well.  Why are all hippogriff's the same?  I guess my problem is, as The Shaman points out, "you can have your unimaginable Far Realms abominations and you can have monsters that function by basic ecological rules", all creatures that are non-planar creatures must conform to basic ecological rules.  Why is it only Far Realms creatures that have inconsistent "ecologies"?  Why does every non-planar creature have to be reduced to following basic ecological rules?  Orcs are just another hominid.  Giants are big hominids.  Hippogriffs are horses with eagle heads and wings that lay eggs.I think that reducing fantastic creatures to basic ecologies makes them a lot more boring.  They become resources to be exploited.  If the creatures have a basic ecology, then why aren't they being exploited in your setting?  By these creatures having basic ecologies, they make the whole setting far higher fantasy than I like.  Or, it makes the setting very inconsistent.  Yup, hippogriff eggs can be sold for 2000 gp, trainers charge 1000 gp to train one, but, for some reason, no city/nation states actually take advantage of them.</blockquote>

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