Fantasy Survival

So, how come people survive in fantasy worlds?

I've never seen this discussed on Veeky Forums, and it always bugs me. The world is filled with super dangerous monsters, yet somehow people still live in small villages in the middle of nowhere.

Without even getting into the weird super powered monsters, there is some pretty crazy shit running around. For example, the leucrotta, a super ugly stag thing which on top of being able to bend metal with its powerful bite has human-level intelligence and the ability to mimic sounds.
Or heck, the famous owlbear, which "attack prey on sight, always fighting to the death". They have similarly powerful attacks too, but at least they aren't intelligent.
There's also gorgons, that not only are massive metal murderbulls, they also exhale poison.
Now take into account that normally multiple of these creatures are encountered at a time, and that finding them isn't that rare (these three are as rare as dire wolves, which are only a step above in rarity to normal wolves).
Now imagine that an owlbear or two wander into a village by accident. It won't stop until everyone in there is dead.

And that's not even counting the innumerable tribes of random humanoids that will capture and torture you, the brain sucking psychic monstrosities, the life draining spectres, the floating laser eyes, the "literally unkillable unless you've got a flamethrower" trolls, the killer fungus, ...

And this is not just true in D&D, or even tabletop/video games. Check out LOTR or the Hobbit, where taking a wrong turn can lead to you getting nabbed by some fucking undead thing and ritually sacrificed, or taking a dip into the super-sleep-river, or coming face to face with a bunch of giant murderspiders....

It feels like people should be hiding in walled cities behind their hero-champions, not living in an idyllic pastoral village.

But in LotR they were hiding behind the heroes. Hobbits were able to live peaceful lives only because they were protected by the rangers of the north.

Go home Tippy.

>Able militias
>Tight communities
>Security measures especially around the forests
>Rural patrollers
>Army squad specialized in monster hunting, or monster hunting mercenaries becomes a viable profession

What about infectious undead apocalypses, like shadows?

>Able militias
Good luck getting experienced soldiers when 10 die for every monster you kill. Also, good luck getting people to even sign up for this shit.
>Tight communities
In many fantasy settings it is common to encounter tiny hamlets (2-8 houses) or even single longhouses in bumfuck nowhere. Even if these were very tight communities, they're still peasants against fucking murder-machines.
>Security measures especially around the forests
What, build a wall?
>Rural patrollers
Which get fucking shrek'd because these things likely can kill a dozen of men singlehandedly, and they never run away.
>Army squad specialized in monster hunting, or monster hunting mercenaries becomes a viable profession
Fair enough, though this solutions suffers from a problem similar to 1. And you rarely see these in stories, except for the Rangers, or Witchers.

>Wights are fierce and deadly foes in combat. When attacked, they are unharmed by any weapons that are not forged from silver or enchanted in some manner.

>The wight attacks with its jagged claws and powerful blows, inflicting 1-4 points of damage with each successful strike. In addition to this physical harm, the wight is able to feed on the life essence of its foes. Each blow that the wight lands drains one level from the victim, reducing Hit Dice, class bonuses, spell abilities, and so forth. Thus, a 9th-level wizard struck by a wight loses 1-4 hit points and becomes an 8th-level wizard; he has the spells and hit points of an 8th-level wizard and he fights as an 8th-level wizard.

>Persons who are slain by the energy draining powers of a wight are doomed to rise again as wights under the direct control of their slayer. In their new form, they have the powers and abilities of a normal wight but half their experience levels, class abilities, and Hit Dice. If the wight who “created” them is slain, they will instantly be freed of its control and gain a portion of its power, acquiring the normal 4+3 Hit Dice of their kind. Once a character becomes a wight, recovery is nearly impossible, requiring a special quest.

>Wights are unaffected by sleep, charm, hold or cold-based spells. In addition, they are not harmed by poisons or paralyzation attacks.

>Wights can be engaged and defeated by individuals who are well prepared for battle with them. Physical contact with holy water is deadly to wights and each vial splashed on one burns it for 2-8 points of damage. In addition, a raise dead spell becomes a powerful weapon if used against the wight. Such magic is instantly fatal to the creature, utterly annihilating it.

>Wights cannot tolerate bright light, including sunlight, and avoid it at all costs. It is important to note, however, that wights are not harmed by exposure to sunlight as vampires are.

>It feels like people should be hiding in walled cities behind their hero-champions, not living in an idyllic pastoral village.
Interesting idea. Someone should base the setting of a whole edition of D&D on this.

They survived the same way we survived lions and bears.

You put up a fucking fence and spray it with magical talisman to keep away the worst stuff. Then you just fuck a lot and have like nine children to ensure you have some spares that can inherit the farm.

Average age of the death for adults ends up being 30-40 years old because of the high mortality rate.

As in the real life:
1) carnivores are 10 times rarer than herbivores. animals that feeds by other animals must have something to eat, and therefore agressive animals must be very, very rare at the beginning
2) especially dangerous monsters like dragons and giants are known to prey in specific area and large human populations avoid settle there. if dragon is able to wipe entire army then it's really important worldbuilding feature and a lot of stories of given setting will relate; but this is not the case of typical high-fantasy when every major city has a level 16+ spellcaster (or dozens of)
3) humans can handle shyt like owlbears on their own. somebody will die, yeah, but this is the price of surviving. 10 owlbears can't pose a serious threat to 2000 men
4) even carnivores are not stupid or suicidal to attack large groups of other creatures. wolfs can hunt one single deer in pack of 10 and even then they will not attack until he's fully exausted by running (the reason they howl and feint around him is to make him scare and run away)

The original default DnD setting assumed that most of that shit was relatively rare. Encounter rates for monsters are the same as wolves once you get off the beaten path, but on that beaten path the fantastical shit doesn't turn up much.

Add to this that the entire reason you have a group of schmucks with superpowers running around doing errands is the prevention and resolution of times when said fantastical shit doesn't stick to its fucking corner of the world.

In later editions and settings the reason these things are allowed it because the default assumption is that there is at least one semi skilled person at given population levels. A level 1-5 ranger or druid or maybe cleric or fighter will be somewhere nearby most villages to deal with the every day stuff. And as populations get bigger you have higher level randos running around.

I've generally assumed the more fantastic stuff is actually quite rare. Bob the Farmer will probably never experience any of that stuff. Maybe if he's unlucky he'll get raped by orcs.

bumping

What threads do you visit that you’ve never seen this discussion here?

it could be he's never turned his thoughts to the problem before.

It's the Tippyverse. Google it.

Depends on the setting. Could be that murder beast are just uncommon. Could be that they're fought back with regular patrols and a well armed militia. Could be settlements are warded with magic by the local witch. Could be a a combination of the above. Could be just don't worry about it.

>as populations get bigger you have higher level randos running around.
But monster HD increase the other way around, leading to small populations getting crushed by super monsters

Why do you think humans pray to the Gods?

you don't have to be a military genius to get 30 of the village men, equip half with halberds and polearms and the other half can use their hunting bows or crossbows, get the melee troops at the front and the archers behind them, and shoot down the monster until it's dead or it charges your halberds and gets impaled by 10 pointy sticks at once

Same way we did in real life. Get every fucker with a bow to shoot at anything that comes near your palisade and make sure to lock the gate, if shit gets real bad call in the professionals, a merc squad, or a group of PC's. Even an animal will learn not to stick it's nose where it hurts, or that venturing off to certain parts of the world is likely to get them killed.
Travellers travel their paths and hire guards for this very reason, so an animal will stay off the road because humans, as it turns out, are not the best prey.

The only times this doesn't apply is if you've got something that very specifically hunts humans - in which case you send the professionals WITH your settlers to clean out the area and probably keep a few either literally there at all times, to check in every once in a while, or close enough a guy on horseback can get them to you real quick when you need them.
If something's hunting humans, it's not going to want more than one or two of them probably, so your settlement will still be viable even if losing Ms Jones' kid is a tragedy for her - life is tough on the frontier.

>Good luck getting experienced soldiers when 10 die for every monster you kill. Also, good luck getting people to even sign up for this shit.

On the first point it isn't about signing up for militia, it's understanding it's your duty and job or you and the people you know and love will die. This is something people in the IRL Middle Ages dealt with regularly.

>In many fantasy settings it is common to encounter tiny hamlets (2-8 houses) or even single longhouses in bumfuck nowhere. Even if these were very tight communities, they're still peasants against fucking murder-machines.

Most peasantry would still be pretty strong people or have strategies built for unsafe times, like a retreat or a nearby keep they would normally refuge in. Also if we're talking Early Middle Ages the churl system meant that all freedmen peasants also had weapons and weapon experience, and know how to fight in shield wall.

>What, build a wall?

No, stuff like watchmen, scouts, ranging parties into woods that had known threats. You just have a small watch camp on the edge of a forest that is close to town. Also with most small villages in the Middle Ages the land around them would be cleared for pasture or tillage, meaning that most forest was actually a few acres away. It also prevent forest dwelling critters from being too encouraged to attack a settlement because of sheer distance.

>Which get fucking shrek'd because these things likely can kill a dozen of men singlehandedly, and they never run away.

Most scouts know how to run first, fight second. They aren't gonna fucking fight it, they're gonna find a group of people who can. six fucksticks with spears can take down a skilled fighter if they know how to surround him and then stab him repeatedly.

Feudalism.

This unironically, it's how Europe survived giant packs of rabid wolves, large scale migrations of peoples into political bodies and the collapse of the Roman urban system.Not to mention plundering brigands, robber barons, pirates, civil and extraterritorial wars and god knows how many wolf attacks.

Bonus fact: Paris was actually besieged by wolves in 1450, when a pack of three hundred wolves attacked Paris. Killed 40 people before they were all killed by a mob of militia and peasants.

>Paris was besieged by 300 wolves
Sometimes I refuse to believe I live in reality. This is one of those times. How the fuck did 300 wolves conspire to BESIEGE a city?!

I mean, wolves are pack animals. And there were a whole lot more of them back then.

Sure, but a single pack of 300? That's nuts.

poetic overstatement I suspect.

more likely, during a bad year, many packs of wolves made forays into the city looking for any available food sources. trash, carriage horses, people.

To be fair France in general and specially Paris always had problems with wolf packs attacking cities and killing dozens of people.
IIRC the last recorded large scale wolf attack in Paris was in 1765.
There was a good reason wolves were extinct in France until after world war 2 when wild Italian wolves started migrating to France by unknow reasons.

Look up the siege of Verkhoyansk; that was just 4 years ago.

I meant an edition that's not shit.

too late

>400 wolves laid siege to a village
>FOUR HUNDRED
>Killed 30 horses
>The government was called in
>The locals mounted snowmobiles to hunt them back

What the actual fuck. Has anybody made a sacrifice to Gaia recently, I think we need to. Or Artemis maybe. Someone, fucking anyone, we've pissed whoever's in charge of nature off.

Wolves are assholes user

Sure but they're usually not 400 assholes strong and fucking up human settlements.
That's a fucking army of wolves, who's mobilising them, what did the Alpha do to get that together, is there some kind of Wolf NATO who got together?

This actually seems kind of cool but I've seen people on Veeky Forums talk shit about it. Is it actually cool, is it bad, or is it good but managed by a tight-assed autist?

People tend not to live next to the super dangerous monsters.

Lack of food pulls them into human settlements

>So, how come people survive in fantasy worlds?

It's a failure of perception on your part.

Because you see a certain number of monsters in certain regions, you assume, like most millennial fuckwits with shit tier educations, that the exception you're seeing is actually the rule.

The "two orders of magnitude" prey/predator relationship is the actual rule; i.e. ~10K plants feeding ~100 rabbits feeding ~1 fox.

>Like most millennial fuckwits
Hey now, was that really necessary, you're assuming something about the guy that might not even be correct just to throw a jab at something completely unrelated to the topic

Just call him an autistic faggot retard or something like everyone else, geez.

>Just call him an autistic faggot retard or something like everyone else, geez.

You're right. I should have just called him an autistic faggot retard with a shit tier education instead of a millennial fuckwit with a shit tier education.

My apologies to all the millennial fuckwits with shit tier educations out there.

>The world is filled with super dangerous monsters, yet somehow people still live in small villages in the middle of nowhere.

Fantasy humans arent real life humans

>You will never be that one guy a small village trusts to deal with monsters because you know basic medicine, tactics and killed an owlbear once through sheer dumb luck