Do peasants in your fantasy setting grow potatoes?

On Veeky Forums, I recently saw someone go on an extended rant about how including potatoes in generic fantasy setting shows the GM is an awful worldbuilder because apparently the presence of potatoes should necessitate an agricultural revolution and a complete upheaval of the social order.

It was pretty dumb.

Depends on the culture. Rice and turnips are popular. And of course wheat.

Wheat rye barley oats various legumes.
White pea porridge with suspicious pink bits in it that might be pork with crusty bread and small beer is what passes for a staple meal in mine. But it is set in the early modern period so potatos are known but mostly associated with booze

If you have a fantasy world but you don't make up fantasy staple crops, then you're a bad DM.

What's this bread made out of? Wheat, you say? Fuck you, you unimaginative cunt.

Amaranth

Bread

It can be very nutritional

Of course. Where do you think vodka comes from? Wheat? Don't make me laugh.

Why not rye?

Wait, are you telling me that fiction is fake instead of reality? What is this bullshit?

My setting doesn't have peasants.

If you don't have peasants, then what do they make bread out of?

Kings, duh

Their bread equivalent is layed by duckaphants

They grow a variety of produce, and value variety in their diet.
As a cash crop, they grow wheat and barley.

>because apparently the presence of potatoes should necessitate an agricultural revolution and a complete upheaval of the social order.
Yeah, I always giggle at this because the premise is that potatoes exist IN A WORLD WHERE ANYONE WITH A WISDOM HIGHER THAN AVERAGE CAN LITERALLY CREATE FOOD FROM NOTHING ALMOST AT WILL.

But the vast majority of players will never care at all.

Can we get a doodle of a duckaphant? This is very important.

As with most bitching based on 'realism', it's extremely inconsistently applied and poorly thought out.

>complete upheaval of the social order
Potatoes do result in complete upheaval of the social order, because they allow individuals to be self-sufficient. Potatoes can be grown anywhere there's space and left in the ground until you eat them. There's no need for big fields, big organized harvests, centralized storage, centralized milling and baking, etc. Grain only works at scale.

Corn

>potatos are the direct cause of social upheaval
Not the magic?

Except they clearly didn't, because they're showing up in an ordinary fantasy setting.

I'm phone posting at the moment but if you're imagining a leathery elephant sized duck with a trunk and giant ears you're on the right track

Nearly everyone is self sufficient in anything above low fantasy settings anyway.
Food is basically never in crisis.

In some games people can use magic, low level magic to just straight up create food.

Depends on its availibility. Tippyshits always exaggerate how common magic is in D&D-like settings

Only a small minority of people ever interact with magic in most fantasy settings. There are still peasants, and if peasants have potatoes how are you supposed to tax them? Potatoes could be anywhere. There's no grain store you can empty.

Have you never heard of a little something called integrity? If your players don't care, if they don't - as a group - walk out on your stupid ass for putting fucking barley into your carefully crafted fantasy world, then you need to get better players. In fact, it's a good test. In the first session, mention potatoes being served at the inn, and if no one says anything, tell them all to fuck off.

But why is that the case? In the real world most villages had a witch or shaman hanging around. Sure, IRL they didn't do shit aside from basic herbal medicine, but in a fantasy world why wouldn't every small town have its hedge-mage?

What kind of world is this? Sounds kinda Dr. Seuss.

If you start considering those mechanics in your typical D&D-esque games, you end up with Tippyverse. The existence of magic traps leads to the tunnel that cures all diseases, feeds you for a day, and blesses your labor. That seems like it'd cause quite the economic revolution.

>walk out on your stupid ass for putting fucking barley into your carefully crafted fantasy world
What's wrong with barley? Barley was more common than wheat for most of history because it's easier to grow. Wheat was a luxury food.

They can't, because it's inconsistent with the standard pseudo-medieval setting. Magic has to be rare, which is fine, because it makes the PCs more special.

I'm sorry I don't play with super autists?

My players don't even care if food itself is ever brought up in game, let alone what type it is.

But that's just an assertion, not an argument. What's your basis for it, rather than just stating that it's the case?

Again, in medieval europe, magic wasn't that rare, even though it didn't exist. Village witches are a cliche for a reason, they actually existed and were pretty ubiquitous.

I quite like low fantasy, magic users are terrifying clerics treated like saints, ain't no such thing as bards, monks or rangers. It's pretty fun

Potatoes were not yet introduced to my setting's "main" continent, alto some travelers got to taste them in far away lands

Peasants meanwhile eat a shit ton of oats
and parsley

If they actually could do real magic then they wouldn't have been peasants.

Magic is one-in-a-thousand thing. Literally reserved for top 0.1%.
Everyone can have potato.

They grow meat. Not from any specific animal, just meat directly out of the ground. It's a fantasy setting so you can't say that's impossible.

Except you're still living on the king's soil. Assuming it's even an issue, instead of taking a percentage of total yield, he'll take a percentage of what would be expected from the land.

>If you start considering those mechanics in your typical D&D-esque games, you end up with Tippyverse
No you don't, because the Tippyverse is idiotic and taking conclusions that are baseless. Remember: Overgods are statless.

...How does that make any sense?

Why couldn't every village have its own minor spellcaster? Someone with a few basic weatherworking tricks, the ability to bless fields and crops or do some curing of common diseases, on top of herbal remedies or cures.

Like, y'know, medieval people believed witches and shamans actually did. Why is that completely impossible, in your mind?

Do you also make up all of the types of wood and metal used to make gear? Do make up fantasy beasts of burden and horse-replacements?

Like, you CAN do that, but at some point you need to ask if it's worth the trouble. More new stuff has novelty value and can be used to interesting effect, but it also makes the world increasingly foreign to the players and increases the amount of basic information they need to remember just to know what is going on.

Well, then you're playing wrong. I'm sorry to say it, but there it is. It's probably a shock to you, but I hope you'll recover and maybe improve yourself, or perhaps move to a more suitable hobby for your capabilities.

...So you fail to understand the point of the tippyverse?

>Being this fucking autistic over potatoes
Are you Irish or something?

there are people who will decry this that have never heard of meatpotatoes, and they need to get the hell off my Veeky Forums. it's like saying meatwheat isn't milled and baked into meatbread; it's just the sort of madness we need to excise like the tumor it is.

It has no relationship with D&D settings as a whole, because overgods are real things in most of them.

Because the core concept of pseudo-medieval fantasy is that life sucks for everybody except the elite few. It's the Monty Python dirt farmers scene everywhere. You can't have real magicians improving quality of life for commoners. The magic users are supposed to fuck things up for everybody and pretend they're doing good. If they actually did good then your setting would collapse.

...Since when is that the core concept of pseudo-medieval fantasy? That sounds more like gritty low fantasy.

>My way of fun is the only way!
Austists like you is the reason tabletop is so niche.

Much harder to enforce when your peasants don't have to band together for survival. Grain needs a whole village working together. A single man can feed himself alone with potatoes.

So, again, you miss the point. 'The GM can do otherwise' is beside the point, because the GM can do whatever they fucking like. It's a thought experiment trying to map out relatively logical extrapolations of the things that exist in the world. That a GM could make things work differently is basically irrelevant.

because people conflate the middle ages, dark ages, and medieval period to mean the same thing for some reason.

>Because the core concept of pseudo-medieval fantasy is that life sucks for everybody except the elite few.

No thanks, I'll keep playing my noblebright settings.

>Because the core concept of pseudo-medieval fantasy is that life sucks for everybody except the elite few.

Nah.

>being this baited
How far we have fallen.

Overgods are not the DM.

>only eat potatoes
Die from malnutrition.

>Why couldn't every village have its own minor spellcaster?
Sure it could if that's the kind of setting you want. Or maybe you want one where it's mostly like the real world, but occasionally what local wise man claims he can do actually works. Or you could make every other dude a mage. Up to you as a worldbuilder

Nope, but they exist as a function of the GM, and any action they take is at the behest of the GM. They're still entirely irrelevant.

Sorry, but REAL DM's plan out exactly how coasters are used in their setting.

Any rolls made on my antique table are at a -10 penalty if your fucking drink isn't on a coaster

I'm not saying it's the only way to do it, I was just quite confused at the other guy claiming you absolutely cannot do it.

This is why nobody will ever play with you
EVER

Find some wild fruits/vegetables, poach some animals. Nobody said it would be a healthy diet, but it will be a survivable one. You're a peasant, you're going to die young anyway.

Eh. Autism is autism

No, they exist as a function of the SETTING'S AUTHOR, you nitwit.

Pure potato diet is actually better for you than pure grain diet.

Given the topic of this thread, your picture made me think of Sampo

>poach some animals
Still king's forest and his animals

Only the social elites have access to magic, and maybe the occasional weirdo hiding deep inside the forest

>not making his own setting
Look at this pleb and laugh

But that's entirely irrelevant too

Because I want wheat

>I'll just ignore the setting to make the setting the way I want
Cool now you're not using the setting as it lay

>Still king's forest and his animals
Yes, but you have to get caught first. Potatoes are naturally suited to decentralization. Grains are not. This means potatoes weaken the power of the elite. Potatoes cause major social change. You can't just drop them into a setting and ignore this.

...

Who does?

Rye is easier to grow, and it can be infected with ergot and drive whole villages mad, which means it's better for storytelling purposes too.

How will your innawoodsy ass deal with lack of socialization? Talking to potatoes?

People who use non-custom settings like a large portion of D&D's fanbase.

...So you really did completely miss the point of the tippyverse?

It's not trying to say that literally every setting that operates on D&D mechanics should work that way. It's just a thought experiment extrapolating the things that exist within the D&D ruleset and setting and trying to figure out a way it'd all logically work. Your criticisms are literally entirely irrelevant.

>ain't no such thing as bards, monks or rangers
what do you have against those?

>Still king's forest and his animals
Don't go to the king's forest.

I don't think he personally owns all forests in the country

It's not like wheat can't be

You don't have to be hiding all the time. The king can't afford a huge police force because he's no longer getting so much grain tax.

based, delicious millet

Dukes, Counts and Barons are a thing too. Or Emperor actually does own everything if you're Chinese

Now, go back up the comment chain where said you would end up with the Tippyverse by considering mechanics and recognize context.

Of course he does, he's the king. He has 9th level spells and a whole bunch of bullshit artifacts. Might makes right, and the king has all of it.

...No? What they said is completely accurate. The Tippyverse is what happens if you start to think about the mechanics of specifically D&D 3.5 and take them to a set of logical conclusions. That's the point.