It’s like a fantasy author that wrote himself into a corner.

"Hmm, i can’t have Jesus and God be different people because i already said there was only one god, but i can’t have them be the same person because then he’ll be sacrificing himself to himself.

Hm… Demigod maybe? Nah, too cliché, i’ll just leave it really vague and let the fans come up with something, maybe add a third character to make it seem intentional" - Some charlatan, 0BC

I really don’t understand what i said that ticked you off this much. I’ve started this whole discussion by agreeing with you to begin with, geology IS important, and it SHOULD be more prominent in game development. All i wanted to do was give you my input on why it isn’t more prevalent, and how things are done currently. In any case, here we go again:

you almost seem annoyed that I would suggest geology contains anything that might be of use to video game development

On the contraire, i like geology, i like your idea,and i agree with you. But when making a game you have 1000 of ideas that are just as good that you need to implement in a short amount of time, with a limited amount of money. Reinventing world generation, as interesting as it is, is simply not usually a priority. I do agree it could improve the game, but i don’t think it’s fair to act this appalled that it doesn’t exist yet the way you imagine.

…but yes… this whole landscape thing? It is obvious as fuck to a geologist, I’m sorry but it is. Treating open world design like it is this thing you have to build entirely by hand or with awkward algorithms that attempt to procedurally generate some unsettling landscape that has to be fixed by hand JUST as much one like this

In your other comment you asked for a tool that lets you model landscapes by hand, and automatically calculates how that affects tectonic plates. l’m not sure what you think i’m misinterpreting here, this is a complex program that would take several months to make. So either you’re asking a big company to make this, in which case, my comment of “most people wouldn’t notice/care” applies, as they’d only do that if there’s immediate profits, or you’re asking open source/independent devs, in which case, don’t.

Procedural generation has to be hemmed in by guard rails, Minecraft doesn’t just generate ores willy bully with no thought or check for game balance? No procedurally generated game worth its salt does and there are innumerable successful examples of those. Why would it be any different for building worlds with geologically inspired tools in a fashion I describe?

Okay, so do you think minecraft’s world generation is realistic? Because my point was that game balancing often interferes with realism.

Why would a map that reflected natural landscapes be more unintuitive than an awkwardly fabricated one that doesn’t reflect any landscape a person has seen looks like?

Mountain ranges blocking off high level areas, terrain elevation being changed to make sure certain landmarks are more visible/look better on camera, resources such as water/ores, etc needing to be close together for balancing reasons (For survival/crafting games), etc. Reality doesn’t always conform with one’s artistic vision.

There is no reason a sort of clay like modeling simulator couldn’t give you an artistically conveyed sense of two continental plates colliding, and if the tools were playful and immediate to use (like I pointed out, just being able to smash continents together by clicking and dragging them in different directions at each other like Besieged but for geology) it would be easier for world designers overwhelmed by a blank canvas to start because their canvas already has a story rather than suffocating blank space.

And my point is that shit is hard to make, doesn’t scale well with large maps (simulating the plates colliding like you said costs memory and processing power), and wouldn’t find an audience because most people can’t tell/don’t care about the difference.

Look, i’m sorry if i came out as rude, i know you don’t mean that every single little detail must be correct just to please you, i get it. My main gripe with your comment is just the “This is so obvious! Why hasn’t anyone made this?” attitude. Because it ignores the work that needs to go into each of these tools, often for almost no recognition/compensation.

On the game side of things, while i agree more realistic landscapes would be awesome, making games is really hard work and you need to be careful where you’ll invest your time in if you want to actually get anything finished. The truth is most people who are not geologists can’t tell the difference between a realistic landscape and an unrealistic one.

We have some tools for world generation, though i’m not sure how realistic they are. Mostly a mix of noise functions (Simplex, Perlin, etc) and erosion simulation. But i barely understand how that works, so your “geological sandbox” seems a lot less obvious to me.

Another thing to consider is that in game design, realism will always take a backseat for good gameplay. A map that naturally guides the players where they need to go is usually much more desirable than one that is realistic but unintuitive. Plus when you add magic, gods, or even enough sci-fi, the bar for what counts as a realistic landscape really goes out the window anyway.

We can’t keep astronauts aboard the ISS indefinitely, even with constant restocks from Earth, and we’re supposed to go even further out of our orbit to the moon or Mars and they’re going to be fully independent?

And even so, that might be the easiest part of the whole terraforming thing. It only gets worse from there.

I not great with estimating sizes, and i often have trouble converting things from feet to meters on the spot. Last session i presented the players a quest to slay a sea monster. They cleverly decided to scout first with a familiar, and i described the creature and its size. I ended up exaggerating the size i bit too much and they’ve decided to avoid it until they’re higher level. So what was supposed to be a simple “monster of the week” type of encounter has now turned into a late game boss fight.

Maybe those are the modifiers and Jerry has a fucking 24 Charisma.

My head-canon is that they have a shorter window of fertility. I mean humans have menopause as well.

Though it would make more sense if that happens later in their lives, otherwise you’re saying every adventurer has given up the possibility of raising kids. Also, i suppose if that’s the case they haven’t really matured in the sexual sense, so much as they’ve just grown enough to be independent.

I seem to remember some bit of lore saying dwarves only settle down to have kids near the end of their lives, but i can’t find that anywhere ( Might’ve just imagined it, lol).

Maybe adventuring across ages with different heirs of humans who go from weak to strong extremely fast while elves start strong and grow slowly?

That sounds cool but you’d need all your quests to span generations and leveling in general would be very slow. Probably harder to make it balanced as well.

Rules don’t apply to you when you’re a motherfucking dragon, lol. They’re so broken they don’t need to hurry up growing, cause they’re already at the top of the food chain at basically any stage in their lives.

Leveling in general gets more confusing the more you try to explain it.

Why has my old character never leveled up before i started playing them?

Why has my Elf/Dwarf/etc never leveled up in hundreds of years?

If i can level up from 1 to 20 in a matter of days, why isn’t every adventurer level 20 by now?

Also, even outside of level:

How isn’t there a massive overpopulation issue when these races have hundreds of years to procreate? Instead they always seem to be rarer than humans.

Why would any job ever hire humans when elves/dwarves exist? They could acummulate way more experience and be better at basically anything.

In fact, why aren’t Dwarves/Elves just better at everything? Do they learn things at a slower rate? But if that’s the case, how come they can level up so fast once we start playing them?

I mean, really, at some point we gotta draw a line in the sand and decide that some things just need to be handwaved for the sake of fantasy.

They grow into adulthood at the same rate as humans, but after that point they age at a slower rate.

As per the PHB, page 23:

“AIthough elves reach physical maturity at about the same age as humans, the elven understanding of adulthood goes beyond physical growth to encompass worldly experience. An elf typically claims adulthood and an adult name around the age of 100 and can live to be 750 years old”

And page 20:

“Dwarves mature at the same rate as humans, but they’re considered young until they reach the age of 50, On average, they live about 350 years.”

So i did get some things mixed up, for Dwarves it’s 50, not 100. Same idea though.

I know it sounds weird at first, but It actually makes a ton of sense. I mean, even outside of fantasy, the amount of time an animal takes to reach maturity isn’t really proportional to how long it lives, it has more to do with its intelligence, which is about the same for all D&D races. For a lot of animals, reaching full maturity only takes a couple of months tops. Turtles can live way longer than humans yet they mature in about 5 to 8 years depending on the species.

Humans are already pushing it with about 2 decades worth of growing, having to spend a literal century as a kid, especially in a world as dangerous as the forgotten realms would be insane.

Friendly reminder that although you can homebrew it to be like this if you want, in the official D&D 5e lore, Elves and Dwarves mature at the same rate as humans, so they’re all adults at 21.

Culturally is a little different, much like some older humans still view people in their 20s as “kids”, elves and dwarves will only consider themselves to be truly adults after at least 100 years or so, but that’s just a social stigma, not how they are biologically.

I used to have a problem with this as a DM, where i’d get kinda anxious if nothing is happening or no one’s talking and just start moving things too fast out of fear they’d be bored.

But moments of silence are an important part of it, especially if you want them to roleplay. Players usually don’t have stuff planned ahead of time like you do, so you gotta give them some time to think about what to say, lol. Plus if feels way more natural to have them speak to eachother on their own time instead of rapid-firing lines.

Ya also can’t force roleplay. Just give them some space, maybe some chill moments in between the action and they’ll take it if they feel like it. Though if they’re shy/new it can be good to start the convo with an NPC or simply ask them what’s going through their characters minds at the moment. I find that tends to help.

l mostly agree and i don’t really ever fudge, but i don’t really like instant death, as it’s mostly just luck. If they die from poor choices or failed death rolls i don’t mind, but like, i’ve had players at full healh “die” because the monster rolled a crit and the highest number on both damage rolls. I ended up just downing him and giving him a cool scar after he got up cause that’s bonkers and it was literally the first fight of the campaign, lol.

I might make changes to the number of monsters or their stats, but that’s always something i do before the fight, never during it. Homebrewing is alot different than fudging imo. Once the players have seen it, it’s set in stone.

Faeladelfia

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I mean, they are from down under…

Idk, that feels a bit too technical. Trying to apply real world physics to D&D breaks way more things than just this, so we gotta be careful when to do it. Gotta keep just enough believability and consistency, without letting it ruin the feel.

For me, the fact that “starwars lasers go pew pew” is enough reason to disregard how sound actually works in real life, lol.

That might just be what i was looking for, thanks! Gives an actual use to this relatives system without being too disruptive to the regular gameplay (I mean arguably being able to ask others to join might be kinda op, but it depends on how low that chance is, and i could always just limit myself to only asking relatives to join if i want to).

Or find any art for an unnatractive PC/NPC at all. Or at least one that doesn’t look like a supermodel.

Why is everyone hot?? Sometimes i just need an ugly pirate or something. Even the monstrous races all just look like attractive humans with a new coat of paint.