How does the average peasant manage to survive in fantasy worlds?
From a purely crunch perspective most villages, no matter how large, would be completely wiped off the face of the planet if even a medium to low level monster happens to walk into it.
I'm talking about a couple of rats destroying the whole village unless an adventurer happens to be in town, or even worse if something like an elemental or something wonders in. Yet the world's are usually thriving despite being unable to walk a mile without running into some kind of horrible monster that wants to do nothing but kill you.
How the fuck does trade, field work, travel, or anything else happen if the entire world is deadly to the average non-PC?
>How does the average peasant manage to survive in fantasy worlds?
By not being in D&D. In any other systems, peasants can survive house cat attacks and falling into thorny bushes after all.
Xavier Brooks
DnD is a bad system.
Leo White
Veteran soldiers/guards can be level 6, give or take, and monsters with a higher CR than that are rare.
The real scary thing is Shadows, which ignore armor, can't be hit with normal weapons, and turn every peasant they kill into another Shadow
Carson Evans
Most villages and towns would be walled or entirely underground.
Jacob Campbell
They may even take entirely different unconventional approaches to defend themselves.
Brody White
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Christopher Cox
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Dominic Cox
In early D&D, there were a number of important assumptions about how the world worked that got lost in later editions. To start with, the world is old, like really, really old. There are ancient ruins all over the place, often buried just below the ground. The world has gone through periodic cataclysms and disasters that have cause the collapse of ancient civilization, often very quickly. The game starts after one such cataclysm, on the frontier of a burgeoning new civilization. The players are based out of a frontier town, walled and guarded against the dangerous wilderness -- further to the east or whatever, the wilds are tamed and the lands are safe for people to walk openly, but that's not true here. Here, peasants sleep behind the walls, and heavily guarded caravans pass from town to safehouse to town, because you don't want to be outside the safety of well guarded walls after dark. Players, on the other hand, are lunatics who rove out into the untamed wilds, delve into monster-haunted ruins, and look for the lost treasures of these dead civilizations to bring them back, in hopes of getting rich rather than dead. An insane way to make a living, suited for the desperate and the insane.
This is why prices are high. This is why the wilderness encounter tables are a TPK waiting to happen. This is why there's gold in dungeons.
Incidentally, high level NPCs are all over the place, from knights in castles to wizards in towers, each defending their loyal subjects from monsters and beasts, and potentially laying demands on trespassing bands of PCs.
Grayson Fisher
I wonder how many peasants would wear armor if they knew that every day that they went out to till the soil some random Roc or Dragon or Aarakocra might swoop in and grab 'em.
Gabriel Butler
Probably about the same as the number of people who put on bulletproof vests to go grocery shopping. There's any number of things that could kill you at any given moment. People tend to only worry about the ones they're not used to living with
Ryder Wood
Armor isn't going to do much if you're out in the fields alone and a fucking dragon decides to attack.
John Davis
>I clearly hate D&D but can't be bothered to learn about a single other system, so I'm just going to whine about it on teej Who are you people? Why are there so many of you?
Alexander Brown
Spells won't do much either.
You'd better have both or everyone dies.
I love how everyone forgets dragons are a combination of martial and magical killing machine.
"Antimagic. You are now an ape. I am still a dragon. Die."
Camden Gomez
Generally they don't find themselves facing the sort of things adventurers face, and they are willing to pay handsomely for adventurers to handle it for them when they do.
Most of what they're going to face are beasts, not proper monsters, and they aren't going to be facing beasts that are going to be fighting to the death or seeking to maximize the death toll and property damage so much as looking for easy meals or escape.
So things like Sewer Rot are a bigger threat than wildlife encounters, and while the occasional one-off death happens, particularly to children, it's not an everyday thing.
Remember: PCs are extraordinary people who take extraordinary risks for extraordinary rewards. NPCs are ordinary people who take ordinary risks for ordinary rewards.
Grayson Scott
I dunno faggot, you're the dm, you figure it out
Last time I checked the corebook doesn't have any rules for peasant birth/attrition rates or describe their lives in any context.
Why do you even fucking care? If you want to play a city builder rpg use a city builder system instead of DnD
Sebastian Smith
By being supersticous and prejiduced against strangers.
Nolan Lopez
Well yes, but even fantasy negros and white Americans aren't as deadly or bloodthirsty as any old animal in D&D. Such as it is, cocks probably offer the corpses of the peasants they slayed to hens to nest in.
Nolan Anderson
Housecats do kill people, though.
Now, after hiding the kneejerkists...
People can be above level 1 in Commoner.
Gabriel Allen
It's like three people. Calm down.
Matthew Torres
>god's invisible vacuum cleaner.png
Christian Nelson
>twf you learn your cleverly set up setting is just basic DnD
Kevin Sanchez
>Housecats do kill people, though.
Yeah, but they generally don't best them in open combat in a ring of equals.
>In early D&D, there were a number of important assumptions about how the world worked that got lost in later editions.
This is a good post, but something more should be added: encounter frequency. Most village-ending monsters were listed as "rare" or "very rare", which meant they were almost never encountered. Most random encounters within the "civilized lands" in early D&D were with mundane animals or low-level threats. There was no challenge rating - a party of 20th-level adventurers could easily encounter a pack of mundane foxes if the DM was phoning it in.
I've got an excellent PDF that discusses what a badass metal fantasy setting the basic D&D setting is. I can post it in a couple hours.
Caleb Wright
>I've got an excellent PDF that discusses what a badass metal fantasy setting the basic D&D setting is. I can post it in a couple hours.
That would be highly appreciated. Thank you.
Ian Price
bump and pre-thank you
Ryder Bennett
Here ya go!
Hunter Morales
They group up, grab pitchfotks and torches and start angrilly walking towards the bad thing.
Never underestimate the power of large mobs of peasants, theyve made vampire counts and high level undead constructs run tail between their legs.
Also dnd is a bad system.
Ryder Wright
Our thanks :)
Henry Rivera
>In any other systems, peasants can survive house cat attacks and falling into thorny bushes after all. t:Dog
Owen Thomas
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Julian Walker
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Jonathan King
Have you never lived with a cat?
As shows, the only defence against cats is being faster over long distances and operating technology. There is a reason that any given housecat can kill any given lv1 commoner. Medieval cats weren't pampered pet kitties, they were semi-feral farm cats that exterminated vermin for a living in exchange for shelter and use of the stored food as bait for vermin to eat.
Oooh! Thank you!
Landon Ross
wtf i love d&d now
Justin Davis
Yeah, no. I agree that a big housecat could inflict some severe scratches, reduce your eyes to a bloody mess and maybe even tear your throat open with its fangs. But an average grown man can crush any bone of a cat he can grab with one hand. You keep seeing videos of people getting rekt by their pets, but that's because we don't really want to harm our pets. In a straight out battle for your life, one cat is not a big threat.
(Medium-to-large dogs are a whole other story though)
David Bell
Ooh hey my thread is still alive
Also to all you people saying >Hurf durf D&D, you make it sound like D&D is the only system with level scaling encounters.
As long as level scaling exists, villages would be obliterated by anything reasonably high level.
James Bennett
And if level scaling didn't exist, a village would be obliterated by any monster big enough.
Monsters destroying villages is a dirt-common fantasy trope. It isn't a bug, it's a feature.
Christian Gonzalez
The whole premise assumes that the rules describe universal laws, instead of just being a handy set of rules for interacting with an imaginary world.
Mason Sullivan
Yeah, Housecats are like, Skill 4 and Stamina 2, to use Fighting Fantasy standards. A good punt will end a cat.
Elijah Allen
Interesting, this suggests that 4e has the most "D&D" standard setting.
Lucas Lopez
More or less, yeah, the 4e standard "points of light" setting was in many ways a callback to the early years of OD&D, Basic, and 1e.
Liam Martin
>tfw all the best settings are actually just original D&D
