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<blockquote data-quote="Blue Orange" data-source="post: 8780785" data-attributes="member: 7025997">Weeelll...it kind of fits our idea of the pacifist hippie, right? A lot of it (as I think Snarf Zagyg said elsewhere) was tied up in the 60s and 70s environmentalist movements, and even now a lot of environmentalists support veganism because it generates less carbon dioxide (it's inefficient to grow all that grain to feed the animal you then kill, plus the animals generate CO2 when they breathe and die, and methane when they fart--sounds dumb but it is apparently a serious issue). The avoidance of metal kind of fits with that--it's part of the whole 'artificial is bad' idea you see even now with those 'natural flavors'.But I always took the D&amp;D world to have an essentially premodern mindset--nature is red in tooth and claw. Druids live among and change into animals, and animals include predators. Most organisms have adaptations to avoid being eaten, or to eat other things themselves. I'd argue the druid is basically taking the place of the shaman as 'spellcaster for tribal, non-urbanized peoples', which is probably why you never saw shamans really take off as a class even before the current concerns about cultural appropriation. ('Spiritualist' might be a better word, though I think it still conjures up images of 19th-century spirit mediums...who might also be an interesting character concept, but a very different one.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Blue Orange, post: 8780785, member: 7025997"] Weeelll...it kind of fits our idea of the pacifist hippie, right? A lot of it (as I think Snarf Zagyg said elsewhere) was tied up in the 60s and 70s environmentalist movements, and even now a lot of environmentalists support veganism because it generates less carbon dioxide (it's inefficient to grow all that grain to feed the animal you then kill, plus the animals generate CO2 when they breathe and die, and methane when they fart--sounds dumb but it is apparently a serious issue). The avoidance of metal kind of fits with that--it's part of the whole 'artificial is bad' idea you see even now with those 'natural flavors'. But I always took the D&D world to have an essentially premodern mindset--nature is red in tooth and claw. Druids live among and change into animals, and animals include predators. Most organisms have adaptations to avoid being eaten, or to eat other things themselves. I'd argue the druid is basically taking the place of the shaman as 'spellcaster for tribal, non-urbanized peoples', which is probably why you never saw shamans really take off as a class even before the current concerns about cultural appropriation. ('Spiritualist' might be a better word, though I think it still conjures up images of 19th-century spirit mediums...who might [I]also[/I] be an interesting character concept, but a very different one.) [/QUOTE]

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