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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9363315" data-attributes="member: 7035894">Agreed. I find it difficult to think in evolutionary terms because the D&D biome is so completely unhinged that it is impossible to realistically speculate about the sorts of evolutionary pressures that a specific species would have faced. On top of which, it is a trope for D&D settings to have faced massive, cataclysmic upheavals in the recent past that, realistically, would have wiped out most species and created the sort of evolutionary bottleneck that life on earth took millions of years to recover from. And then you've got other worlds, planes of existence, powerful entities all interfering.On Earth, only one species that we know of has gained full sapience (us), and current thinking suggests we wiped out or assimilated all of our close rivals along the way. The Monster Manual alone includes hundreds of distinct sapient species. How does that evolve, especially in just the few thousand years that a lot of D&D timelines suggest?Yeah, this certainly seems like a case study for unnatural selection. Supernatural selection?I basically play all of my creatures as people, which means more or less like humans, because it's what I know. I try to take into account how their long life and great power might affect a dragon's perspective, or how the typical appetites plus lack of human empathy of a demon might affect theirs, or the warlike culture of duergar, etc., but ultimately I am largely confined to my human point of view.</blockquote>

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