Why are people so against having potatoes in fantasy settings?

Actually I am all for them, they are pretty neat. But to be fair, if I remember correctly, the peoble most using them in one setting I like the play are the russians, for obvious reasons.

Nobody likes potato guns

>The Aztecs grew em for centuries.
Not really. The Inca's did, and it was the very reason why they managed to create cities of nearly million people 2000+ meters above sea level. The Aztec's relied almost entirely on wheat, which they grew in an almost hydroponic gardens. Potatoes would rot in such an environment.
Otherwise, you are not entirely wrong.

The bottom line is that high-efficiency crops mess with demographics, and when people are trying to emulate that romantic medieval feeling, demographics are part of it.

A good different lessons on how food can mess up with demographics would be the introduction of sweet potatoes into New Guinea highlands. Resulted in stone-age cultures suddenly being able to maintain population density comparable to 18th century Europe: and the result was not fucking pretty.

>The Aztec's relied almost entirely on wheat
No they didn't. No-one in the new world grew wheat until Europeans came along.

>the result was not fucking pretty.
Where can I read more about this?

Probably referring to the '97 drought.

Canbage is new world too

Pretty sure he meant corn

when DID potatoes reach europe?

also, someone tell the story of how french farmers were tricked into potato

You are right, my brain skipped a beat there. Corn, god dammit.

>Where can I read more about this?
I just recently started discovering these things, mostly through lectures of an anthropologist that spend several years doing field research and decades doing history research on New Guinea. He has an EXTENSIVE book on the subject, but it has not been translated into english, and I don't know many english sources yet. That said, just do some research on New Guinea Highland cultures and you are bound to come across something interesting.

No, I'm refering to the warrior cultures of pre-opening New Guinea inlands.

>when DID potatoes reach europe?
1550s or 1580 they are described as exotic but known and grown plants in multiple European countries, but it took a while for them to catch on. There are famous stories about first people introduced to Potatoes ending up all poisoned because they ate the fruit, not the undeground parts of them.

It took a good while for them to become common-place though (around mid 17th century) and even more to become the go-to-food for poor people, that took another almost hundred years.

A more interesting crop is pineapple. It was such an expensive novelty that it became one of the most popular subject of paintings, and wealthy people would rent them by the hour just to display on a table. Most poor people never saw one in person, and most rich people had never tried eating them because the cost of actually buying one required even the rich to take out a loan.

I wonder what the reaction of Europeans was when they first saw pineapples.

>1550s
>Be me
>Most exotic food I've ever seen was a slightly deformed turnip
>Guy comes back with a basket full of these things
>They're the size of a man's head and covered in spines like a fucking porcupine
>Says nah man, you can totally eat it
>Fuck that, I'll stick to my turnips

Most crops are not even close to theit natural wild versions. We selectively breed them for generatioms until they look like truly monstruous versions of their wild counterparts. Sometimes, they even change taste in the process.

It leads to having potato guns, and we all know how this ends.

How do they compare with carrots and rutabagas on a macro level like that?

Nah, Cabbage has been in Europe for thousands of years, first domesticated by Celts and eaten in at least Roman Egypt

As I heard it (so this is likely wrong/a story about stupid peasants) farmers didn't want this tuber, so a noble (maybe the king) put out a big announcement/law that only he was growing them, and made a big show about having a plot of them, and had them "guarded".
Naturally they got mostly stolen as people wanted to see what all the fuss was about (or just because "being told they can't have X = wants X") and lo potatoes were introduced to the peasants

People were well familiar with all kinds of strange plants and berries back in the day. Things like octopus stinghorn mushroom, cloudberries, artichokes (which are fucking variants of thistles): people had seen an eaten weirder shit than pineapples all over Europe.

Also, people for some reason think turnips were the go-to universal vegetable of middle ages. They were not. Cabbage and peas were.

Carrots have SIGNIFICANLTY lower yields than potatoes per square matter and are also a little more picky on the quality of soil and temperature.

Rutabagas - I'm not entirely sure about their yields, but they are like 80% fucking water with very little starch, which makes them really low on nutrition values. Nowhere close to potatoes.

Really, potatoes are OP. In temperate or high altitutude regions, the only thing that compares to potatoes are sweet potatoes.

>Canbage is new world too
I hope you are kidding.
Cabage is literally the most european-originating food in the world. It was actually domesticated in northern Europe, then spread to China from there.
It's also arguably the most varied agricultural core plant in the world. The amount of different varians we produced from a single original north-european weed is absolutely astonishing.

i refuse to believe that strictly better vegetables exist in real life
surely the universe had some competitive balance in play, even if it ended up dominating the meta

only weakness that comes to mind is that they dont last long
even with refrigeration they last a few months at best

That's not even a weakness. They start to grow roots and then you cut them up and plant them and from one bad potato you get 12+ fresh potato before long. And then 12 potato go bad and you plant 144+ fresh potato.

You can't pretend they're swords.

>even with refrigeration they last a few months at best
That's not as good as some dry grains, but those are so much more work to get in the first place. And as other user says, potatoes left alone just makes more potatoes. Literally the worst thing about potatoes is that if you are dumb or desperate you'll over-rely on them because they're so fucking good, and if they get a blight then you're fucked.

Potatoes are just better.

I'd still have them in fantasy settings though, if anything they encourage isolated settlements, populations with less farmers proportionally (and thus more doing interesting shit), and bigger cities almost equally.

>they're so fucking good
Found the Irishman.

Pineapples were stuck on posts in ports as a sign of hospitality
Lots of coastal areas still have pineapple decorations in architecture

Too OP. You can boil 'em, mash 'em, AND stick 'em in a stew.

Potatos are underpowered in d20.

Are potatoes the elves of vegetables?

No, I said it unironically. I knew that cabbage (according to google what you anglos apparently call squash to be more specific) was a part of the mesoamerican triad and one of the first domesticated vegetals there, so I guess I assumed it didn't exist elsewhere. I was wrong, my bad.

Yes. From now on, potatoes are gonna be the secret elf crop of my settings. They're apparently so superior mostly because they have the Chad Potato as their main food.

Dude, you’re a genius.
Gonna go make that now...

what about bananas?
some varieties are starchy as potatoes
they obviously don't last, but there is no winter in the tropics
how do you confuse cabbage with squash? those are completely different plants

>Millions of people were forced to leave Ireland because they were dependent on spuds and couldn't grow them anymore.
The cause of the famine was not so much the potato crop failing but the English taking all the other food.

I called the irish dumbfucks, I'm just acknowledging the superior crop

That is a massive, massive and very weird confusion

>what about bananas?
Only grow in rather special climate. The advantage of potatoes is mainly the fact that they grow in relatively meager soil and relatively cold weather, which is why they can be grown even in higher altitudes in temperate regions (and in extremely high altitudes in tropic regions): that is their "magic" and why they played such a crucial role in European demographic history. You can't grow bananas on Irish hilltops.

>no winter in the tropics
Sorta. The main issue with tropical winter isn't the temperature drop (generally it goes from 30 C to 15/10 C), it's the humidity. During winter, for most of the tropics, air humidity plummets and you don't have nearly as much rain. Which suddenly makes growing bananas a lot more complex.

Po-TA-TOES! Boil them, chop them, mash them into a stew.

Okay, keep in mind the issues that specifically come with having potatoes in a PLAYER-DRIVEN fantasy setting.

As a DM, one of your central tasks is keeping things engaging when your players are acting as sauciers. And when that happens, dealing with adding too much salt to a sauce is the CORE mechanical impetus to make your players be careful.

If you add potatoes to your world, then any player could just add two halves of a whole potato to an oversalinated sauce. The potato would absorb most of the salt, the potato could be fished out, and boom. No consequences for player actions. The whole game falls apart.

If you want potatoes in your setting, you're going to need to either establish some serious house rules or restructure your game accordingly.

You can literally grow potatoes year round in a barrel full of dirt in the back room. Shelf life isn't a deal breaker.

>maybe boil them if you want them hot
>maybe

What kind of animal eats potatoes raw? What the fuck, don't you get sick from that?

Because apparently THAT'S not realistic, not, you know, the fact that a goblin can shout "Sim sala bim sala do sala dim!" and shoot lightning out his arse at the half-elf who can shapeshift into a bear.

The Simsala Chant, AKA ButtThunder, has been field-tested and scientifically studied for generations. If you still doubt it, you're being a Luddite.

>Thinks you can desalinate a sauce with potatoes
Spotted the nevercooker

Anything can be desalinated to proper levels if you change the recipe to "Salty Potato Soup"

They taste fucking gross. How the hell people trick themselves into thinking mashed potatoes taste good I will never know. Fight me

Are you talking about DM-ing or cooking? I think I lost the metaphor.

What metaphor? When did I start making a metaphor?

Why the hell are you eating mashed potatoes?

>tfw your players are all sweet potato casuals
They say anything you can make with potatoes you can do with sweet potatoes, but it's a FUCKING LIE
We're talking about potato and pasta RPGs, user, what this board is for. I'm not sure I understand your question

...

i will never understand the irish