Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8373469" data-attributes="member: 6790260">It honestly baffles me how people struggle so hard with this question. Developing realistic differences between physiologically-distinct beings is just a matter of asking, "What would this physiology do, and how would that scale up?"I like dragonborn for discussing this example, both because I like them a bunch and therefore have thought about them more, and because dragonborn have very clear physiological differences that can be met with specific responses and some traditional cultural-value differences that can be parleyed for interesting results.First: Dragonborn have a dragon breath. Even if it's not a universal feature, having the ability to belch some kind of elemental effect repeatedly? Yeah, that's gonna have some meaningful impact on a bunch of stuff, because now any given citizen may have the equivalent of a blowtorch or a bottle of aqua regia on hand at all times. For starters, prisons and detainment. You can't rely on metal cages. Dragonborn prisons likely rely more on pits and passive detainment, and probably need regular maintenance even given that. Likewise, violence in the streets is more likely to cause grievous injury--so there are probably social rules or even hard laws about inappropriate uses of breath weapons. Some locations may even require that individuals actively expend their breath weapon before entry.On the more positive side, there's all sorts of stuff you can do with the ability to (say) burn stuff really fast, or freeze things, or whatever--artistic works that can only be made by careful application of dragon breath, or performance art that relies on evocative display of fire or lightning or whatever. A culture that expects a significant portion of its population to have elemental breath will differ in both its physical artifacts and its accepted behaviors.Next: Development and maturity. Dragonborn develop shockingly quickly. They're able to walk almost immediately after hatching, and can speak fairly fluently within their first year (they have "the mental and physical development of a 3-year-old human child" at that point). They reach adult height by about 12, are mentally and physically mature at 15, and are specifically said to "mature quickly throughout [their] youthful development." Just to unpack some of that: at an age where human children are just beginning to say their first words and can take a couple of unsupported steps without falling, dragonborn children can string multiple sentences together, climb and run easily, play make-believe, and correctly use relatively complex objects like books and tricycles. And they continue quickly developing all the way to age 12, at which point they spend a few years rounding out their development.It's a bit difficult to explain how quick this is. Imagine if most children could start pre-school education at 1-2 years old, finish elementary school by age 6-7, and be ready for college by age 12-13. One of the more humorous ways I've phrased this is: Dragonborn actually do live by "anime protagonist" rules, where a five-year-old could genuinely (if rarely) be a prodigy with swordplay and someone leading armies at age 12 would be unusual but not shockingly unrealistic. (Consider: Alexander the Great had his first military command at age 16.) Couple that with having comparable maximum lifespans, and you have a recipe for a race that develops at a breakneck pace. And on top of that, female dragonborn lay eggs, so they don't stay pregnant for long, and wean their children within the first few months of life.This is going to have enormous impacts on all sorts of things. Firstly, women are unlikely to be as sequestered/secluded as they are in human societies because any female can breastfeed a child and they don't deal with several months of precarious pregnancy. That alone is a nearly incalculable difference from human societies--the focus shifts away from protecting the women to protecting the nest. Secondly, early childhood is gone in a flash for them--"baby's first steps" isn't really a milestone when most children walk the day they're hatched. I would expect a lot of impact on the metaphor and symbolism associated with innocence, childhood, maturity, etc. to differ, because these things are incredibly ephemeral for dragonborn. Third and finally, if you can churn out a new generation in ~15 years when it takes humans ~20 years, you're going to get some serious population dynamics differences. In the time span it takes humans to have three generations (60 years), dragonborn have four generations (60/15 = 4). So they have a meaningful percentage of increased able-bodied individuals (women are built very similarly to men, don't spend lots of time pregnant or nursing) and their population innately grows faster by about 1.16% per year (an extra doubling every 60 years). The advantages conferred by faster development and reduced strain on mothers are enormous.And that's just two things. I could easily go into other stuff, like how having scales vs. skin (and lacking sweat glands) affects stuff like clothing (high variability there), how their likelihood of having internal genitalia may affect nudity taboos (if there's not really anything to see, there's less need to cover up), or the whole question of interspecies romance when it seems plausible that "half-dragonborn" don't happen. You can do similar things with every species, they're just less narrowly-detailed so you have fewer hard points to riff off of. But you can very easily do similar stuff.</blockquote>

Verification