No doubt that the cause and effect of a situation need not be engendered naturalistically. Your caution is well noted.
Could you expound more fully on the relationship of that blogpost to the tangent I am fostering? Although the dwarves in that blogpost are not natural in the same manner as humans are assumed (in that blogpost) to be natural, there does seem to be a naturalistic explanation of their inherent imparatives.
Absolutely.
It is actually in this case (the gradual elimination of race as class, first by instituting level limits, and eventually by the removal of said limits) that the 'make sense' paradigm is most blatantly displayed.
First, in the assumption that since human intelligence is the only one we are familiar with, anything intelligent must be intelligent in the same way. This leading to the eventual situation of humans in funny hats, and a bunch of people running around lacking the imagination to accept race as class, because they can't conceive of anything but a naturalistic (i.e. modern and science based) conception of the world.
Basically, the assumptions a hypothetical you (and me - when I was 14) were making about the
way things had to make sense were in fact, only the most basic and limited way that they could.
This is a fantasy game - of the fantastic.
I, upon a closer examination of your original point, see that the problem is I failed to communicate clearly in the original document. I should replace the phrase "make sense" with what I really intended, which was the focus on things being designed and created from our limited naturalistic modern scientific viewpoint. I didn't elaborate this, because I assumed that the example about the caloric content and larger predators, plus the examples of thinking behind the general conception of the underworld made it clear. Clearly I overestimated my audience. Two failures on my part I will be sure to correct in an updated release.
As far as a direct response to your comment - in the same breath I say it doesn't matter the reasons why, i provide several examples that show that it's trivial of anyone of any degree of imagination to come up with an explanation to sustain the suspension of disbelief. And I quote:
"The dungeon itself might be hundreds of thousands of years old! Just think of who could have owned it during all that time."