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TooManySecrets
2011-11-07, 09:24 PM
WARNING: This is mostly just a written account of what I've been thinking about recently. It meanders, makes a couple of logical jumps, and I can't guarantee that it will have a nice payoff. Oh well.

What does this ...

http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/126/owlbear.jpg
have to do with this?

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/3315/eniac.gif
I'll tell you in a bit, but first, let me digress.

It's often been said that the difference between science fiction and fantasy is that one has robots and the other has dragons and magic. In many senses this is true. The appeal of science and fantasy is in taking a world in which something is different from are own - be it the existence of magic or faster than light travel or something else - and imagining what living in such a world would be like. A very handy umbrella term for this type of story is "speculative fiction".

The great schism in speculative fiction is in how "hard" or "soft" you want the story to be. Soft speculative fiction would be something like Star Trek - in one episode they use the transporters to beam a bomb into the enemy's ship but in the next episode they don't (if the writers notice the inconsistency, they might throw in some technobabble - "There's a stream of tachyon radiation locking down our transporters, Captain!" - to spackle over the plot hole). On the other hand, you have stories like Asimov's Nightfall, where Asimov actually did out the appropriate astronomical equations to create a world where night happens only once every 2049 years. Most fantasy falls on the soft side of things, though that's mostly a stylistic choice. Neither type of story is inherently "better", they're just different. Variety is the spice of life, after all, and it's nice to have choices.

And this is where Dungeons & Dragons come in.

D&D, as I hope you know, is a fantasy roleplaying game that has it's roots deeply embedded in wargaming. As a result, it falls very much on the "soft" side of things. Gygax and Arneson were long on exploration and challenges but short on explanations. Why is there a tribe of goblins living right next to a androsphinx lair? Because it's just a game and you shouldn't worry too much about it.

This brings us back to our friend the owlbear.


http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/126/owlbear.jpg

Do you know where owlbears come from? Wizards. That's been the explanation since the 1970s and hasn't changed since then.

Forget being able to shoot fireballs out of your hands or being able to summon monsters from another dimension, wizards in D&D are able to create new lifeforms. D&D is pretty soft so it pretty much ignores the implications of this. Which is probably a good thing, since something like this brought to it's ultimate conclusion would be world-changing.

Let's start with something simple, like solving world hunger in the game. All it would take is crossing over a herd animal - say a cow - with a creature that breeds faster and matures quicker - say a mouse. Sure, the meat might taste funny, but I'm sure that beef tastes funny to somebody who's never tasted it before. A small price to pay for ending world hunger.

Or maybe they're looking for some sort of protection. After all, D&D NPCs live in a world where rampaging hordes of sentient Always Chaotic Evil monsters burn down villages everyday. Wouldn't having a dogbear - a creature with the loyalty of a dog and the power of a bear - help out a lot?

One of the great advantages of these creatures over, say, a magic item is that the vast majority of the peasants in the D&D world are capable of raising animals. Bending the forces of nature to create an animal hybrid never seen before would take years - if not decades - of study, but once you get a pair of them they can be bred like anything else.

Now, sure, something like this wouldn't happen overnight. However, in the real world, mankind was able to make dogs out wolves and we didn't have the help of magic at all. The people in such a world has the means and motive to start creating weird animal hybrids.

"Aha!" I hear you say, "There's no rules for creating such animal hybrids. Comparable creatures - golems, et al - require high level casters to create and mountains of gold, all of which are in short supply." This is the route taken by many DMs who don't want to see their world awash in dogbears and cowmice, but I find the answer unsatisfying. And it's because of this:


http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/3315/eniac.gif

This is a picture of ENIAC, the world's first electronic computer. It was built in 1946 and cost $6 million (inflation adjusted). It weighed 30 tons, took up over 1800 sq ft of space, and the first program run on it required over a million punch cards.

The laptop that I used to write this post is over 340,000,000 times faster and cost about 0.016% of the price. And it certainly doesn't weight 30 tons.

The world of D&D should see a huge growth in the simplification of creating animal hybrids and the like. (Sidebar: Magic items should also see the same sort of progress, but you can't breed magic items and you can breed mix-and-match critters, which would make the critters even cheaper and more accessible.) If it takes a number of expensive components to create the animal hybrids, than people would find ways of either finding less expensive components or of finding ways to get components cheaper. If it takes high-level casters to do it, than people would find ways of easing the burden, perhaps through the use of rituals instead of a single caster or of simplifying the forces involved even if that reduces the effect ("Sure, we can't make an owlbear. But we can create a hybrid of these two breeds of sheep in a week instead of ten generations").

Now, what are some reasons to explain why all this isn't happening?

1. Knowledge is power and nobody likes to share power willingly. Perhaps all of the high-level casters are grumpy misanthropes who don't want to share the secrets of magical animal hybridization. Or perhaps they're all off busy saving the world or exploring the elemental planes or whatever else it is that keeps high-level casters busy.

This solution works ... for a while. However, all it takes is one high-level caster who's willing to start creating helpful hybrids. To prevent that from happening, you can't have the other high-level casters just sit passively by, they would have to be actively killing/mind controlling anybody who wants to start mix-and-matching. And it can't just be one caster doing this policing, it has to be a bunch of them, so you have a conspiracy of wizards and sorcerers actively hunting down anybody trying to create even something as innocuous as a duckbunny.

2. Too unpredictable Maybe when you mix and owl and a bear it doesn't always come out the same. Sometimes it's a bear with owl arms and head, sometimes it's an owl with a bear head, maybe sometimes it's a bear with two owl heads.

However, this only slows down the creation of useful hybrids, but it doesn't stop it entirely. Once you have a pair of them, you can just breed them like normal (owlbears, for instance, are apparently true breeding in the default D&D campaign world).

Of course, this means that anybody persistent enough to keep breeding monsters is going to create a bucketload of failed experiments. Most of them are going to either be destroyed by the creator or not last very long (a catfish that doesn't have legs but does have lungs, for instance) or both, but a small number would still escape every so often.

3. Too creepy Let's say a wizard creates a trollcow. It regenerates, so you can get as many hamburgers as you want from a single cow. However, it's an ugly, green and warty cow. How many people would want to eat from such a thing?

Sorry, that sounded like a rhetorical question. The answer is that eventually pretty much everybody would eat trollcowburgers. All it takes is one famine and people would start eating anything. If your choices come down to dying or using something creepy, most people would take the creepy option.

Like number 2 above, this would slow down the creation of monsters, but it wouldn't stop it completely. And, of course, once the majority of your products start coming from "creepy" creatures, what's considered "creepy" changes entirely.

Up to this point, I've confined the speculation to hybridization of animals with other animals (and trolls, I guess). However, this overlooks two big things. First, is the hybridization of hybrids with other hybrids. An owlbear needs to fight, flee, feed, and ... mate like every other animal. It breeds true, as well. By every measure, it is a mundane animal after being created. So why can't it be mixed with other creatures?


http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/5139/magiclp.jpg

The other thing that's being overlooked it the hybridization of man and an animal. Of course, forcing a hybridization would be an evil act, however, that doesn't mean that the evil kingdoms are going to be the only group with dogsoldiers (or bearsoldiers or what have you). Soldiers are prepared to give their lives for their country, so why wouldn't a significant portion of them be willing to undergo magical experimentation to become even better soldiers? If a good kingdom is faced with asking it's soldiers to become hybrids or be destroyed, it's going to start asking around for volunteers.

Even if a kingdom is completely opposed to using such magical experimentation and would never do it no matter what, that doesn't mean that they wouldn't have hybrid soldiers. After all, when the good kingdom annexes the evil kingdom, the good kingdom certainly isn't going to commit genocide on the dogsoldiers. All those hybrids breed true and they're going to have litters of dogpeople. One way or another, every kingdom is going to end up with hybrid people unless they specifically go out of there way not to ("We must maintain human purity at any cost!").

It doesn't end at creating the perfect killing machine, of course. Why not start creating hybrids that excel at farming or crafting ... or magic? At that point, you start getting a positive feedback loop. You can create better hybrids that are able to create even better hybrids.

Way at the beginning, I said that speculative fiction is all about imaging what would happen in a world that was different from ours. What would happen in a feudal society which felt that nobility had divine blood running through their veins discovering the means of magical animal hybridization? Would the aristocracy forcibly mutate their serfs? The nobles already view them as chattel, so it wouldn't be a great leap. How would medieval laws define "person" as it refers to a population that is increasingly non-human? Truthfully, I don't know, but I'm having fun trying to reason it out.

Anyways, that's what I've been thinking about recently. Thoughts?

EDIT: Oh, also, if somebody could explain why there aren't Pun-Puns running around in D&D, that would be great.

Gavinfoxx
2011-11-07, 09:39 PM
If solving world hunger were a problem of producing enough food for given resources, it would be done by now.

Really.

You know there are foods that, for a very very very small amount of energy investment, produce plants and proteins sufficient to feed everyone. We just have to switch from producing things like cows to producing things that produce high quantities of protein per acre of plant invested...

That doesn't happen because people like and can pay for their luxuries. But the main problem with your idea of just getting weird animals is that, such a thing probably won't really solve food problems that are based on entirely different factors than how much a society can farm.

OracleofWuffing
2011-11-07, 10:23 PM
This solution works ... for a while. However, all it takes is one high-level caster who's willing to start creating helpful hybrids. To prevent that from happening, you can't have the other high-level casters just sit passively by, they would have to be actively killing/mind controlling anybody who wants to start mix-and-matching. And it can't just be one caster doing this policing, it has to be a bunch of them, so you have a conspiracy of wizards and sorcerers actively hunting down anybody trying to create even something as innocuous as a duckbunny.
For what it's worth, I remember a D&D 3.5 Tippyverse-based fan setting where this secret police of high-level Wizards (if I recall correctly, being a Sorcerer was like being a court jester or a mime- and not the good kind- due to your inferior magic) was actually a thing, doing mind-control shenanigans and instant deaths to guarantee that people wouldn't try to upset or usurp the balance of the god-wizard. That said, that's in a world where food and water is created from scratch on demand, so the incentives to hybrid creatures are much lower.


What would happen in a feudal society which felt that nobility had divine blood running through their veins discovering the means of magical animal hybridization? Would the aristocracy forcibly mutate their serfs?
Well, okay, I'll admit this is a stretch, but seeing as how history tells us European Royalty continued spreading and carrying Haemophilia for itself (granted, this was more of an unwilling accident), I might be inclined to say that they'd hybrid with little regard for taboo- regardless of caste. Eugenics themselves go back as far as Plato, apparently, and I think we've all seen the relevant scenes in 300 for an overmelodramatized take from Ancient Hollywood Sparta's point of view. Only difference between those and this is that this is happening magically, and I guess animals being involved might be important at some point. But, considering how half-human-half-animal deities and deity-like-figures appear in various religions, it just takes a good politician to spin that around to say that such figures are blessed by $deity.

Chilingsworth
2011-11-07, 10:49 PM
In Sandstorm, there's information on the remaining breeding experiments of a race called the Marru. They probably did what you're suggesting, until they tried breeding a raceof demigods. They succeeded, but their creations destroyed them. Maybe that has something to do with industrial crossbreeding isn't more common?

Also, Eberon has the magebred animal template, in that setting, such creatures are fairly common. And in one of the Monster Manuals, there's the... battle titian (I think that's the name) dinosaur, a giant crossbred monstorsity of a warmount specially bred by major nations. There are other examples of crossbreeding projects in various sourcebooks. I'd say that there's definately evidence of what you're suggesting having happened to some extent.

TooManySecrets
2011-11-07, 11:00 PM
If solving world hunger were a problem of producing enough food for given resources, it would be done by now.

Really.

You know there are foods that, for a very very very small amount of energy investment, produce plants and proteins sufficient to feed everyone. We just have to switch from producing things like cows to producing things that produce high quantities of protein per acre of plant invested...

You know what would be better than cows or rice? How about continually regenerating meat? Heck, Order of the Stick had this as part of a joke a while back.


http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/7261/hydraheadbbq.gif

Trollcows, hydrapigs, the sky's the limit. Now, this obviously violates thermodynamics, so how does regeneration even work? Well, we could just say "magic" and be done with it.


http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/5139/magiclp.jpg

But once again that's an unsatisfying answer. Regeneration is an extraordinary ability so it continues to work in an antimagic field and it can't be dispelled. For that matter, though, undead and golems are explicatively magical but still operate fine in antimagic fields (though losing any supernatural or spell-like abilities as normal). Perhaps all of the above act like magical sinks? Undead are sinks of negative energy, golems are sinks of elemental energy, and regenerating creatures are sinks of positive energy.

Of course, all of the above still work when they have dimensional anchor cast of them, which we can either ignore or do something fiddly with the concept of a sink or say that wizards are somehow able to create non-magical sources of everlasting power. To say that the third option opens up a redonkulous can of worms (even more than magical animal hybrids) is putting it lightly. I don't want to just ignore things, so let's go with the fiddly option. The above creatures are essentially non-magical sinks for certain types of energy. They can still work with a dimensional anchor because they're the target of the energy, rather than moving through dimensions themselves.

They could probably work.


Well, okay, I'll admit this is a stretch, but seeing as how history tells us European Royalty continued spreading and carrying Haemophilia for itself (granted, this was more of an unwilling accident), I might be inclined to say that they'd hybrid with little regard for taboo- regardless of caste.

I personally think the aristocracy would try to keep themselves outwardly human or at least different. It would be a sign of having to work for a living to have a "degenerate" form. ("Oh, I see that you're bred for field work. And yet you still think you're good enough to come to my party. How droll.")

Plus, the haemophilia (and other hereditary diseases) were usually seen as a curse. For instance, Charles II of Spain was so inbred that he would have been less inbred if he was the product of a brother-sister breeding. He was born with numerous mental and physical disabilities which were thought to be the result of a witch, which is why he was also known as Charles the Hexed.

That being said, I'm thinking about making a campaign world, not a single country. There's no reason I can't do all of the above.


But, considering how half-human-half-animal deities and deity-like-figures appear in various religions, it just takes a good politician to spin that around to say that such figures are blessed by $deity.

Hmmm, I like this since it appeals to my love of Lovecraftian horror with dark cults. Good-aligned groups would be open about it, but evil ones would convince people with half-truths and lies. ("The process is entirely reversible. If you don't like it, we can change you back. But I know you'll love it") This isn't even mentioning cult-like groups springing up who worship mutation itself.

Speaking of which, I just realized something: the yuan-ti are already doing something like this. Except, you know, only focused on snakes. That's probably why they don't have a bigger presence. ("Yesssss, everybody lovesssss sssssnakessssss. We'll be the mossssst popular group ever!")

EDIT:

In Sandstorm, there's information on the remaining breeding experiments of a race called the Marru. They probably did what you're suggesting, until they tried breeding a raceof demigods. They succeeded, but their creations destroyed them. Maybe that has something to do with industrial crossbreeding isn't more common?

That's sort of like the same answer given to why we haven't made contact with aliens: every civilization destroys itself before it can talk to anybody else.

Anyways, that doesn't really solve the problem. After all, the race of demigods would presumably survive and keep working. A civilization would have to create a race that destroys them, but also destroys itself or is otherwise incapable of continuing experimentation. A green goo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecophagy) scenario, for instance.


Also, Eberon has the magebred animal template, in that setting, such creatures are fairly common. And in one of the Monster Manuals, there's the... battle titian (I think that's the name) dinosaur, a giant crossbred monstorsity of a warmount specially bred by major nations. There are other examples of crossbreeding projects in various sourcebooks. I'd say that there's definately evidence of what you're suggesting having happened to some extent.

Well, as I said, mankind turned wolves into dogs. The main difference is (a) control of traits and (b) speed.

Let's go back to ENIAC. Is there anything that ENIAC (or my laptop) can do that a person can't do? No. A person could do, by hand, absolutely everything that is done on a computer. However, this would be extremely slow (to say the least).

It takes thousands of years to breed new traits. It took about 10,000 years to domesticate dogs (the numbers vary widely, since finding specifics of that type of information is very hard). Being able to create a dog-cat hybrid in a lifetime, even if it takes decades, is a huge leap in breeding technology by several orders of magnitude.

Makiru
2011-11-07, 11:17 PM
I remember reading the Encyclopedia Arcane that had to do with cross-breeding, and it was incredibly meticulous. The Spellcraft check for the ritual goes up by leaps and bounds depending on the types of the creatures to be combined, how many are to be combined at once (in the case of chimeras and other such monstrosities), how many abilities of each creature you want to carry over, if you're attempting to crossbreed with yourself as a component, and so forth. A frog with a snake tail, which is supposed to be babby's first freak of nature, had a check at least in the 30s. I believe it was implied that this method was also the best that Vancian magic would be able to do, that the fundamental process of wielding magic would have to be changed to get better results.

Long story short: even breeding simple things is hard and takes practice and would probably exist as a one-off event. Breeding on the level of the owlbear and chuul would take large groups of epic level mages that have better things to do with their time than mucking with animals, like stopping the next Pun-pun.

Arbane
2011-11-07, 11:59 PM
Why not start creating hybrids that excel at farming or crafting ... or magic?

I'd argue they could exist in standard D&D: they're called "Halflings", "Dwarves", and "Elves".

TooManySecrets
2011-11-08, 12:05 AM
Long story short: even breeding simple things is hard and takes practice and would probably exist as a one-off event. Breeding on the level of the owlbear and chuul would take large groups of epic level mages that have better things to do with their time than mucking with animals, like stopping the next Pun-pun.

Huh, I'll have to check out Encyclopedia Arcane. Sounds interesting.

Anyways, it took 3 years to build ENIAC during the height of World War II and took the combined engineering and science of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, the US Army, and Los Alamos. The only people who could afford computers and had a use for them were governments and some universities which did work for governments. The phone in your pocket is far faster than ENIAC (around the 100 million range, depending on what it is).

Automobiles used to be made by hand by a team craftsmen, took months to complete, and only the richest people could afford even one. Today, it takes about 18 hours to build a car from the time the order is first placed. Almost every family owns a car.

The history of humanity is of making complicated, expensive things simple and cheap.

Now, I guess, you could just claim that magical animal hybridization falls under the same category as the aeolipile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile), the world's first steam engine. It never amounted to anything. It's inventor either never saw a use for it or, perhaps worse, realized the potential but didn't see a use for it in a world where slave labor was cheap and plentiful.

Animal husbandry, however, has a long and fruitful history. If somebody discovered a means of making it better, they would do so. The fact that it would be difficult is rather inconsequential - we're humans; we climb mountains because they're there. I could see somebody who lives in a world where they've never heard of "gears" not figuring out a use for the first steam engine. It's harder to imagine the same for somebody who grew up in a world where animal breeding is a big thing.

Basically, when you get down to it, the DCs are set arbitrarily to control what sort of game the DM wants. If they want D&D biopunk, then the DCs are in the teens. If they don't, then the DCs go to the 30s and 40s.

EDIT: Wait, does Encyclopedia Arcane assume that you get skill booster items? 'Cause if it doesn't, that means that it expects you to be around 8th or so to reliably hit a DC 30. That means that it is equally as easy to give a frog a snake's tail as it is to stitch together the limbs and body parts of six different dead people and then bring it back to a semblance of life except immune to most magic and under your command. (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Flesh_Golem)

That ... seems off.

OracleofWuffing
2011-11-08, 12:24 AM
I personally think the aristocracy would try to keep themselves outwardly human or at least different. It would be a sign of having to work for a living to have a "degenerate" form.
Well, I suppose it is all about context. In a world that would value pureblooded-humanity (for whatever that would be in a high-fantasy world :smalltongue:), calling Richard I "Lion-hearted" would be an insult, wouldn't it? Regardless, it'd also be worthwhile to check out idioms and similes which compare something to animals... "Strong as a bull moose" comes to mind.

Note to self: Stat up Richard I as a half-lion dragon.

TooManySecrets
2011-11-08, 12:49 AM
Well, I suppose it is all about context. In a world that would value pureblooded-humanity (for whatever that would be in a high-fantasy world :smalltongue:), calling Richard I "Lion-hearted" would be an insult, wouldn't it? Regardless, it'd also be worthwhile to check out idioms and similes which compare something to animals... "Strong as a bull moose" comes to mind.

Note to self: Stat up Richard I as a half-lion dragon.

Most of those idioms either originated in or were used as evidence for physiognomy.

http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/1773/physiognomy3.jpg

Physiognomy started out as a pretend science around the 14th century. I won't get into the details, but it was basically used as an excuse to denigrate ugly people and racial minorities. You might think that there was something to it beyond just stuff like "You look like a pig. You must be sloppy and brutish". You would be wrong however.

Anyways, I think the aristocracy would basically schism in two directions. One, would be the group that sees any sort of non-human hybridization as "low brow". Serfs get changed because they do work. Aristocrats are above such things, thus they don't need to get hybridized. This is the same reason it used to be fashionable to be fat - if you were fat, it meant that you could afford to eat well and you didn't do work.

The other group would basically revel in being the top dog, as it were. This group would be obsessed at being the best at everything - the fastest, the strongest, the toughest. You'd get a lot of predator-metaphors. You'd probably also get rumors that some aristocrats ate people. Some of the rumors might actually be true.

Both group would probably have their own version of physiognomy. ("Ugh, look at him. That drooping ears, the downturned nose, the growing bald spot. It's obvious that he has a pig in his line.")

Another problem previously unmentioned is of finding jobs for everybody. There's only so much farm work that can be done, and if the serfs are all becoming individually more effective, you reach a point when serfs start leaving to go to the city (which can now exist since there is excess food to spare). In real life, this lead to the growth of the middle class and increased civil liberties. Of course, it doesn't have to go this way in this world (and given that, in the real world, part of the reason that the aristocrats eventually accepted the middle class was because the Black Death killed tons of people and made the remaining workers more valuable there's reason to suspect that it wouldn't go that way).

Arminius
2011-11-08, 11:33 AM
I am not so sure this would be useful as a food source. Wouldn't banks of create food traps be more effective, especially for places like cities?

The real promise here is that we could create a slave race that would be able to replace peasants as the main labour force and source of soldiers. The main problem is, giving such a race the intelligence required for them to be useful is also dangerous. Once they realise they exist only to work while their masters play, that might lead to an uprising, by superstrong and resilient mutants. Letting them reproduce freely may simplify their production, but it also means that if they do ever break away, they may become a long term threat to their creator's civilization. A more secure, but also more labour intensive route would be to make them sterile and figure out how to mass produce them. Some kind of mindrape would also be good to ensure loyalty. It would also be possible to introduce an additional safeguard, like the Jem'Hadar's need for ketracel white into them, so that any rebellion would die quickly.

This does give rise to the question of what to do with the peasants. They could simply be abandoned to their villages, but this also might mean they would become a threat to the civilization because they will want in on it's benefits. A more evil option is to exterminate the peasants, leaving only the ruling class. They peasants could also be integrated into the civilization, but this will require educating them, which will create it's own problems. The good news is, however you do it, the remaining humans will have a good shot at a post scarcity society.

The ruling class will probably focus on mental improvements for themselves(though the furries would probably do a bit more extensive tinkering). Their power as wizards is based on their intelligence, so that is an obvious thing to improve. Even in a military or engineering capacity, they will be leaders not soldiers/labourers They do not need to be particularly strong, but they do need to be intelligent, so they can effectively command their mutant armies. Mental attributes in general will probably be emphasized, since the physical ones are no longer really needed except by the slaves.

It is also good to know, that while this plan would require cat-girls to possibly go extinct, it would also give us the means to re-create them.

supermonkeyjoe
2011-11-08, 12:31 PM
Interesting discussion but consider this; where in any D&D sourcebook does it say that famine is ever a problem in a setting? I certainly can't recall it being a problem in the Eberron setting except in Karrnath during the war (at which point it would be prudent to burn all your enemies trollcows). It seems that everyone automatically assigns a medieval English level of advancement to the setting and come up with the same level of destitution that goes with it for the peasant class, it's perfectly reasonable for them to still be poor in a world with magical hybrid creatures but they don't necessarily have to be hungry.

TooManySecrets
2011-11-08, 03:12 PM
Interesting discussion but consider this; where in any D&D sourcebook does it say that famine is ever a problem in a setting? I certainly can't recall it being a problem in the Eberron setting except in Karrnath during the war (at which point it would be prudent to burn all your enemies trollcows). It seems that everyone automatically assigns a medieval English level of advancement to the setting and come up with the same level of destitution that goes with it for the peasant class, it's perfectly reasonable for them to still be poor in a world with magical hybrid creatures but they don't necessarily have to be hungry.

Part of the problem is that D&D just doesn't exist in any real historical setting. For instance, from what I've read, in the Middle Ages, it took about 10 farmers to provide enough food for 1 urban dweller. You have stuff from the 14th and 15th century butting heads with stuff from the 8th century. It's high fantasy, probably the softest fantasy around.

Which, once again, isn't a bad thing in itself. There are very few people who want to run actuarial tables to determine the age and gender composition of Adventure Town #3,091 in order to run a strictly realistic game. It does mean, however, that it completely glosses over the famines, plagues, floods, and fires that completely shaped society at the time (plus dozens of other things that I haven't mentioned).


I am not so sure this would be useful as a food source. Wouldn't banks of create food traps be more effective, especially for places like cities?

Truthfully, (a) I chose D&D as the default area of discussion because it's what most people are familiar with and (b) it has a relatively consistent setting that goes across editions. Create Food and Water traps, for instance, are a quirk of 3.5. They don't exist in official publications and a GM could say "None of this now. It just doesn't work." and it wouldn't be contradicted in any edition.

However, if a GM were to say "Owlbears can't be created by magic." that's well within his or her prerogative to do so but owlbears being the product of magical experimentation has been consistent across over almost every edition (though, it should be noted, I haven't found any specifics of the process).

Now, if it makes it easier, I could have just as easily said "What would happen to a medieval society that discovered a means of mix-and-match critters similar to how owlbears were created in Dungeons & Dragons?". That's probably the better way of stating it, since it doesn't carry the rest of the baggage of D&D e.g. "Why would anybody bother making magical animal hybrids when all the kobolds are turning into Pun-Pun?".


The real promise here is that we could create a slave race that would be able to replace peasants as the main labour force and source of soldiers. The main problem is, giving such a race the intelligence required for them to be useful is also dangerous. Once they realise they exist only to work while their masters play, that might lead to an uprising, by superstrong and resilient mutants. Letting them reproduce freely may simplify their production, but it also means that if they do ever break away, they may become a long term threat to their creator's civilization. [...] Some kind of mindrape would also be good to ensure loyalty.

The neogi actually do something like this already. They created the umber hulks to be a slave race, specifically bodyguards. While umber hulks do get free every so often, they're very weak against the form of mind control used by the neogi.

Part of the solution to preventing a slave uprising is making it part of the culture. The neogi, for instance, believe that everybody is owned by somebody else (except possibly for a single neogi). Neogi own other neogi who, in turn, own other slaves. Sometimes you even get circles of ownership where A owns B owns C owns A. None of the neogi want to rock the boat, even though each one is a slave, because they all own their own slaves.

Also, as a sidenote, I think you're missing a most-interesting issue with developing slave races - what happens when the group that created the slave race is conquered? Going back to the good kingdom annexing the evil kingdom with hybrid soldiers, the good kingdom is now faced with the issue of letting the hybrids work for them (thereby profiting from evil) or killing them off (which is obviously evil). The good group can't even just ask the former-slave race what it wants to do if it's been mind controlled to be subservient - they're obviously going to answer that they want to be ruled.


A more secure, but also more labour intensive route would be to make them sterile and figure out how to mass produce them.

Making them sterile ignores the whole point of making them organic, though. Perhaps such a group would try to hybridize in ant-style growth, with a few fertile males and females and a bunch of sterile workers.


It would also be possible to introduce an additional safeguard, like the Jem'Hadar's need for ketracel white into them, so that any rebellion would die quickly.

Who, exactly, is going to get the specific chemical, though? You can't let the created slave race get it, so you have to use your own people to do it. Anybody who gets the chemical would have to be trusted completely because they effectively have control of your race of super-strong, resilient mutants.


This does give rise to the question of what to do with the peasants. They could simply be abandoned to their villages, but this also might mean they would become a threat to the civilization because they will want in on it's benefits. A more evil option is to exterminate the peasants, leaving only the ruling class. They peasants could also be integrated into the civilization, but this will require educating them, which will create it's own problems. The good news is, however you do it, the remaining humans will have a good shot at a post scarcity society.

That's a modern view of looking at it. In the real world, the aristocrats pretty much saw the serfs as sub-humans already. There were numerous peasants revolts throughout history, all of which were put down violently and with very little concessions being made. In areas where aristocrats had less power, the people who had power were the plutocrats - rich merchants, mostly. They're certainly not going to want to hob-nob with dirty peasants.

Basically, it depends on where the discovery is made. If it's before the 14th or 15th-century equivalent, there are going to be lots and lots of problems.


Sidenote: I think that Spacejammer had as part of it's backstory a bio-war between elves and orcs. I seem to remember something called Midnight Marauders.

nedz
2011-11-08, 04:27 PM
Owlbears: I thought they just applied the Half-Owl template to a Bear, or was it the Half-Bear template to an Owl ?

Slighty more seriously: I always thought that the explaination was "Magic we just don't talk about".

Beleriphon
2011-11-08, 07:50 PM
It takes thousands of years to breed new traits. It took about 10,000 years to domesticate dogs (the numbers vary widely, since finding specifics of that type of information is very hard). Being able to create a dog-cat hybrid in a lifetime, even if it takes decades, is a huge leap in breeding technology by several orders of magnitude.

Perhaps, but new research from Russia suggests that domestication only takes around 50 generations of the target species. In the specific study using foxes we're talking about 25 to 30 years. With some dedication early human likely domesticated wolves inside of two human life times.

Breeding animals for specific traits actually doesn't take that long, if you know what you are doing. There are number of dog breeds that have only existed for around 100 years, admittably they aren't exactly going from chihuahuas to great danes but the point still stands that it doesn't take a super long time.

Getting a viable cross species breeding program is more difficult. Rather than cats and dogs living together (being the end of the world and all) you'd be better to go with something like house cats and lions. Then at least the new animal realisticall should be able to kill a bog standard commoner, or 1st level wizard.

Gavinfoxx
2011-11-08, 08:01 PM
God, I want one of those pet domesticated foxes...

http://www.sibfox.com/

TooManySecrets
2011-11-09, 01:22 AM
Slighty more seriously: I always thought that the explaination was "Magic we just don't talk about".

Well, actually, the real reason is "If we say how the wizards did it, we'll have to write up additional rules for it, and we don't want players creating a bunch of monsters for giggles". It's sort of the same reason golems and undead show up absolutely everywhere in dungeon crawls even though they're usually so expensive that no player would ever actually make one.


Getting a viable cross species breeding program is more difficult. Rather than cats and dogs living together (being the end of the world and all) you'd be better to go with something like house cats and lions. Then at least the new animal realisticall should be able to kill a bog standard commoner, or 1st level wizard.

Well, house cats can already kill commoners and wizards-without-spells. (Ah, the joys of most playtesting being at 5th level)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that magical animal hybridization allows for dramatic changes quickly. Taking an animal that is already a great hunter in the wild and breeding in traits that would allow it to hunt, say, puffins underwater isn't a huge, dramatic change. Making it breathe fire is.

TheCountAlucard
2011-11-09, 07:31 AM
It's sort of the same reason golems and undead show up absolutely everywhere in dungeon crawls even though they're usually so expensive that no player would ever actually make one.Ye gods the Dread Guard! :smallyuk: Hailing from Monster Manual 2, the Dread Guard is CR 2, has an attack bonus appropriate to such, and (despite the fact that its Intelligence score is better than that of some PCs I've seen) is only intelligent enough to understand the simplest of commands. Its cost? Forty thousand gold pieces, not counting the base price of the armor, weapon, and shield you need to provide.

At least golems are immune to most spells and have an energy type that heals them... hell, I'd rather go with a Shield Guardian - I could make two of them, for that price. :smallannoyed:

(Of course, we all know the Nimblewright is the pimp-daddy of constructs. :smallamused:)

The Succubus
2011-11-09, 09:07 AM
Let's start with something simple, like solving world hunger in the game. All it would take is crossing over a herd animal - say a cow - with a creature that breeds faster and matures quicker - say a mouse. Sure, the meat might taste funny, but I'm sure that beef tastes funny to somebody who's never tasted it before. A small price to pay for ending world hunger.

Not really beneficial as you'd have a creature that would devour the cheese it produces.

jseah
2011-11-09, 09:26 AM
Psychological engineering?
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=219642

Magical breeding ought to do it a whole lot faster.

The Reverend
2011-11-09, 10:45 AM
The problem of minions of some type is a constent issue in games. For example in a warhammer fantasy role playing game I played a halfling circus performer and had a pack of five large dogs. I trained them to attack as a group and rolled thru the first few encounters our dm had setup. I think the idea of mass magical crossbreeds would fit into a game of BirthRight very well. I did play a campaign in 3.5 where every character had their own horde of minions. Basically what I'm saying is you are right in every point, but unless a group decides on how it should work I would stay away from it.


Famines historically and in modern times only occur when two factors coincide: crop failure and mass governmental stupidity or a active malice

Edit thpp

The house cat commoner problem leads to some interesting ideas
Summon swarm of house cats
Cat a pult

Kalirren
2011-11-09, 10:53 AM
TooManySecrets, I must recommend the Geneforge series of cRPGs by Spiderweb Software to you. Jeff Vogel (Spiderweb's lead designer) does an excellent job of exploring the implications of exactly the type of magical society you are contemplating.

Saph
2011-11-09, 11:11 AM
Well, a possible answer as to why you don't have vast numbers of cross-bred hybrids might be found in the basic game mechanics. In the long run, what tends to make a more effective character?

1) A monster class with a bunch of RHD and a lot of LA?
2) A "powerful" humanoid race with no RHD but a few points of LA?
3) A basic PHB humanoid?

The answer is 3. And the best PHB race is generally considered to be . . . the basic human, even though they have no obviously funky racial features like ability boosts or heightened senses.

So the D&D wizards who create hybrids are the equivalent of the wannabe power-gamer player who builds a Half-Dragon Centaur Fighter/Wizard/Dragon Shaman/Rogue with whatever other templates he can convince the DM to give him. Sure, it looks scary to a new DM . . . but an experienced DM knows that the guy sitting at the table next to him with a simple Human Druid is going to be more effective in the long run.

Or you could look at real-life biology. Why don't humans have six arms, enhanced muscles, super-longevity, retractable claws, chameleon skin, and the ability to spit poison?

Answer: because in general, it's not worth it.

Zombimode
2011-11-09, 12:29 PM
Now, what are some reasons to explain why all this isn't happening?

It seems to me that the centerpiece of your reasoning is the assumption that magic is based on the same premises as technology and adheres to the same mechanisms. While that is a fair interpretation, it is not a neccesary one and is certainly not widespread throughout fairy tales and mythology where the notion of "magic" is coined.

It would be equaly viable to say that magic and technology are different.



Answer: because in general, it's not worth it.

That, too.

I would say you can create a believeable fantasy world where you have cowmice and stuff. But you also can create a believeable fantasy world that has olwbears but no owlbeardogs. It all depends on the initial premises. And the ability to define those premises is what seperates fiction from non-fiction :smallsmile:

Another_Poet
2011-11-09, 12:37 PM
TooManySecrets, all I can say is I wish I could click "like" on your post.

It should be reprinted in the worldbuilding section of every GM manual for every fantasy RPG out there.

TooManySecrets
2011-11-09, 07:04 PM
Ye gods the Dread Guard! :smallyuk: [...]

(Of course, we all know the Nimblewright is the pimp-daddy of constructs. :smallamused:)

Yeah, the Dread Guard is terrible and the Nimblewright is great. Another really good golem is the Prismatic Golem. It's from MMIII. It's CR 18 and can be made at caster level 17. Incorporeal, 2 touch attacks that deal 5d6 damage of random type (or insanity or 10d6 damage, but the last two allow saves), auto-blinds creatures of 8HD or less, damages any creature that touches it, is immune to all magic (except for prismatic spells, in which case it gets healed and ends the effect, including prismatic walls), and has a bunch of other minor bonuses. The Juggernaut from MMII is also really good, but that's mostly because it can cast forecage
- one of the more broken spells around - at will.

In short, there are some good golems around, but the vast majority are overpriced and underpowered.


Not really beneficial as you'd have a creature that would devour the cheese it produces.


http://img860.imageshack.us/img860/6453/ohyou.jpg


Psychological engineering?
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=219642

Magical breeding ought to do it a whole lot faster.

Speaking of looking at stuff that people on the forums have done, any campaign and/or system I would run based on this concept would also draw a lot from Kellus's excellent xenoalchemy grafts (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=205119).


The problem of minions of some type is a constent issue in games. For example in a warhammer fantasy role playing game I played a halfling circus performer and had a pack of five large dogs. I trained them to attack as a group and rolled thru the first few encounters our dm had setup. I think the idea of mass magical crossbreeds would fit into a game of BirthRight very well. I did play a campaign in 3.5 where every character had their own horde of minions. Basically what I'm saying is you are right in every point, but unless a group decides on how it should work I would stay away from it.

Of course, whatever I decide upon has to be right for the group I'm playing with or running a game for. That pretty much goes without saying. Sometimes, rules and common sense need to be bent in favor of playing a game that's actually enjoyable.

I haven't given much thought to running battles where players potentially have a lot of minions. In one game, a player ran an artificer which we nicknamed the Lagificer because he had like 5 golems. Since I didn't run many encounters in that game and it was face to face, it went pretty quickly anyways and didn't really matter.

Realistically, I'm not really worried about it right now. This is just the high-level stuff. It's not time for the nitty-gritty of designing a system or changing an existing system.


TooManySecrets, I must recommend the Geneforge series of cRPGs by Spiderweb Software to you. Jeff Vogel (Spiderweb's lead designer) does an excellent job of exploring the implications of exactly the type of magical society you are contemplating.

I liked Exile and Avernum, but I never got around to playing Geneforge. I'll see if I can do it someday.


Well, a possible answer as to why you don't have vast numbers of cross-bred hybrids might be found in the basic game mechanics. In the long run, what tends to make a more effective character?

1) A monster class with a bunch of RHD and a lot of LA?
2) A "powerful" humanoid race with no RHD but a few points of LA?
3) A basic PHB humanoid?

The answer is 3. And the best PHB race is generally considered to be . . . the basic human, even though they have no obviously funky racial features like ability boosts or heightened senses.

Yeah, but see here - there's a difference between game mechanics and game story. Once again, why isn't the multiverse being run by Pun-Pun? After all, the mechanics allow it. (Incidentally, kobolds aren't basic PHB humanoids)

Here's the thing: I have consistently, in this thread, not cared about exact edition. Specific rules are pretty much inconsequential. That's part of the reason why I've chose the owlbear - it's fluff has remained consistent as far back as 1st edition.



http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/846/owlbearmm.jpg
"The horrible owlbear is probably the result of genetic experimentation by some insane wizard."

What I'm considering here is creating a consistent and compelling chronicle of a creation that is completely fictional. Rules come and go, but fluff is eternal (at least if it's interesting). Besides, if I'm going to GM a game, the rules are at my mercy, not the other way around.


Not to mention the fact that in your example this is assuming that all the numbers on each side. One monsters vs. one monster w/classes vs. one humanoid w/classes. However, that's not always going to be the case. If I create a fast-breeding race of monsters, the fact that each monster is only CR 3 isn't going to really matter if I have two-thousand of them and more being born every day.

This is also ignoring the fact that, from the perspective of a magical hybrid breeder, it's not a case of either-or, where you can either grow a servitor race or you can be a high-level wizard. In fact, the assumption had always been that the initial breeder was a high-level wizard. In a battle between a CL 16 wizard vs. a CL 15 wizard with two-thousand regenerating flying dogs, I'd go with the CL 15 wizard.


Or you could look at real-life biology. Why don't humans have six arms, enhanced muscles, super-longevity, retractable claws, chameleon skin, and the ability to spit poison?

Answer: because in general, it's not worth it.

Well, actually, that's not a complete answer. Natural selection is a "dumb" process. It has no means of prognosticating about the future because it doesn't have any intelligence behind it. Human beings are constantly choking to death because our air passage is the same one that is used for food. Saying that it's "not worth it" implies that there was any choice in the matter, which there wasn't.

A better, more complete answer is because (a) evolution takes many generations (which translates into a long-time for pretty much any sapient species), (b) traits either have to be pre-existing or mutate into the population (both of which take a long time), and (c) natural selection is weighted to favor traits that use the minimum amount of energy required to insure reproduction.

Slight diversion: there is a physical mutation in some animals (and sometimes even humans) that prevents the production of myostatin (or prevents myostatin from binding). Animals with this mutation look like this:


http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/4918/wendyc.jpg

In a very simplified version, myostatin is a chemical signal to your muscles that tell them when stop growing. This is a good thing in the wild. Wendy, the whippet here, experiences a host of heart and bone-related problems. Her muscles might be the Hulk's, but her heart and bones are still the same as every other whippet. In the wild, being able to benchpress an entire tree doesn't really mean much if your heart can't handle the strain, your bones break, and you need to eat four times as much as everybody else.

None of these are problems, however, in a servitor species.

If you're going to produce as many hybrid shock troops as possible, it doesn't matter if they're going to die of a heart attack at 30 if they're going to die in combat long before then anyways. In this case, natural selection is no longer what is driving the creation of the species, but guided selection. It's happening with whippets like Wendy right now. Dogs like her are able to easily reach speeds of 35 mphs and since the whippet dog breeders are interested in speed, there's getting to be more and more of these "bully whippets" (which, by the by, is named because of there similarity in shape to pit bulls, not because of temperament).


It seems to me that the centerpiece of your reasoning is the assumption that magic is based on the same premises as technology and adheres to the same mechanisms. While that is a fair interpretation, it is not a neccesary one and is certainly not widespread throughout fairy tales and mythology where the notion of "magic" is coined.

It would be equaly viable to say that magic and technology are different.

I'm going to have to disagree with you here. Magic is treated far more like a technology than randomness in D&D. Wizards have books of spell formulas and are able to research new spells. Eberron, for instance, fully embraced "magic as tech" paradigm, but even earlier editions had it to a smaller extent as well. Of course, sorcerers treat magic in a different way, but it's sufficient to show that it can be treated as a tech.

Now, yes, if I was a player and went to my DM going "Hey, why can't I start mass-producing owlbears and why hasn't anybody done it before?", the DM can say "Well, magic isn't the same as technology" and that would be fine ("You could, but it would be too disruptive to play, so please don't" would also be appropriate). However, I've been approaching this from the perspective of a GM who would run a game set in such a world or, at minimum, as a game designer who wants to create a campaign setting.


That, too.

I would say you can create a believeable fantasy world where you have cowmice and stuff. But you also can create a believeable fantasy world that has olwbears but no owlbeardogs. It all depends on the initial premises. And the ability to define those premises is what seperates fiction from non-fiction :smallsmile:

Well, what technically separates fiction from non-fiction is that fiction isn't real. http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/4061/emotawesome.gif

Anyways, if you can have owlbears and owldogs and what have you, that would be self-consistent. If you can have owlbears but no owldogs due to a set of rules that are applied evenly, that would also be self-consistent. If you can have owlbears but no owldogs due to the fact that shut up, that's not self-consistent and breaks immersion (and usually leads to confused and angry players).

Now, definitely, you can have worlds that fall on the poetic-side of things. Fables and mythology are usually very low on explanations. Doing that however is hard. Very hard. Especially in a situation like a roleplaying game where players need to make choices. If I can't use rationality to reason out what's going to happen when I make a choice, it's probably going to leave me feeling very unsatisfied.


TooManySecrets, all I can say is I wish I could click "like" on your post.

It should be reprinted in the worldbuilding section of every GM manual for every fantasy RPG out there.

Thanks for the approval. http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/5016/emotshobon.gif

Worlds without a consistent set of rules (in the "physical laws" sense, not "game design" sense) is one of my big pet-peeves. Now, like pretty much everything, there are great examples where breaking the rules make it more fun - Paranoia is a great RPG because, not in spite, of it, for example - but this needs to be a conscious decision on the part of the game designer, not a convenient excuse trotted out whenever somebody starts poking holes in your setting. Saying stuff like ...


http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/5139/magiclp.jpg

... should never be necessary. If you've created a consistent setting, you don't need to say it, and if you've created a setting that is purposefully inconsistent, the players should know that before they start playing. It's a cop-out.

Saph
2011-11-09, 07:16 PM
Yeah, but see here - there's a difference between game mechanics and game story. Once again, why isn't the multiverse being run by Pun-Pun? After all, the mechanics allow it.

There are several interesting and quite consistent answers to that, actually. But it's off-topic.

Point is, you asked "Why isn't the D&D world filled with a bajillion specialised hybrids like owlbears?" And I gave you a logical answer that's supported by the game rules: in the long run, an adaptable generalist race is better.

Now you obviously don't like that answer, but it's a perfectly sensible one. :smalltongue:

TheCountAlucard
2011-11-09, 07:34 PM
Not really beneficial as you'd have a creature that would devour the cheese it produces.Mice have general preferences for what they will eat.

Cheese is unbelievably-low on that list.

nedz
2011-11-09, 08:24 PM
Slighty more seriously: I always thought that the explaination was "Magic we just don't talk about".Well, actually, the real reason is "If we say how the wizards did it, we'll have to write up additional rules for it, and we don't want players creating a bunch of monsters for giggles". It's sort of the same reason golems and undead show up absolutely everywhere in dungeon crawls even though they're usually so expensive that no player would ever actually make one.


You're over-analysing. In those days people just made up monsters for the fun of it. Take a look at the 1E FF sometime, most of the monsters in that book came from a magasine column where people would send in their ideas. The're almost all homebrew. OwlBear is 1E MM of course, but someone at TSR just had a zany idea one day and the OwlBear was born. Monsters in those days where an exercise in creativity upon which the rules were loosely draped.

Coidzor
2011-11-09, 09:00 PM
I've had a number of similar thoughts myself and consider the subject pretty fascinating. :smallsmile:

Doorhandle
2011-11-10, 01:50 AM
*BRILLAINCE* Thoughts?


Yeah, just one.


Zoofights.

The Succubus
2011-11-10, 05:48 AM
Mice have general preferences for what they will eat.

Cheese is unbelievably-low on that list.

Wait, what? Tom & Jerry *LIED* to me?!

*runs away crying at having his childhood illusions cruelly shattered* :smallfrown::smallfrown::smallfrown:

TheCountAlucard
2011-11-10, 06:50 AM
Wait, what? Tom & Jerry *LIED* to me?!

*runs away crying at having his childhood illusions cruelly shattered*(turns to address the fourth wall)

Wait 'til I tell him rabbits ain't too fond of carrots, either. :smallamused:

Zombimode
2011-11-10, 06:51 AM
Fist, sorry for cutting your posting into quote bits.



I'm going to have to disagree with you here. Magic is treated far more like a technology than randomness in D&D. Wizards have books of spell formulas and are able to research new spells. Eberron, for instance, fully embraced "magic as tech" paradigm, but even earlier editions had it to a smaller extent as well. Of course, sorcerers treat magic in a different way, but it's sufficient to show that it can be treated as a tech.

1. Please watch your words. I havent used "random" in my posting, and for a reason. Saying that magic equals randomness is a positive definition, while used a negative one.

2. Eberron is Eberron. One of the specific premises of the setting is that magic is technology. This doesnt hold true for other settings, ie. my homebrew one.

3. Yes, Wizards have a spell book, and they need it to prepare spells. So what? Anyone else other then the specific wizard also cant understand whats "writen" in this spell book. They need magic to comprehend it.
And in 3.5 at least there are LOTS of magic systems, "arcane preperation" beeing only one of them.
Form all this no conclusion if magic is technological or not can be made with certainty. And I think thats intentional.

Please note that I dont say that magic can't be seen as technology. I'm saying that this is neither a necessary, nor a automaticly desirable nor a strongly implied conclusion.



Now, yes, if I was a player and went to my DM going "Hey, why can't I start mass-producing owlbears and why hasn't anybody done it before?", the DM can say "Well, magic isn't the same as technology" and that would be fine ("You could, but it would be too disruptive to play, so please don't" would also be appropriate). Emphasis mine.

Now, see thats somehow the problem I have with the tone of your postings. While there is no gramatical conection, the way your response is structured strongly implies that the bolded parts are correlated.

This is A) wrong. Magic as something mystical and esoterical (I dare to say "magical") is a conscious desing choice, just like treating magic as technology or anything else.

And B) it is a form of passive-aggressive posting behaviour I would kindly ask you to stop.

This is reenforced by the picture of the DungeonMaster you keep posting. The caption says "Its magic. I dont need to explain." This is ignorant to the fact that saying something along the lines "its magic" CAN be an explanation. Its an explanation you obviously dont like, but thats just your personal preferences in setting premises.



Well, what technically separates fiction from non-fiction is that fiction isn't real. http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/4061/emotawesome.gif

No. Fiction is a certain type of media.
Also I would advise to staying away from terms like "real" in definitions. If you define something using "real" you dive deep into Ontology. And believe me thats not pretty even if you know what your doing (= be a philosopher).


Anyways, if you can have owlbears and owldogs and what have you, that would be self-consistent. If you can have owlbears but no owldogs due to a set of rules that are applied evenly, that would also be self-consistent.

Yes. And my point is, that you can have this while not treating magic as technology.


If you can have owlbears but no owldogs due to the fact that shut up, that's not self-consistent and breaks immersion (and usually leads to confused and angry players).

See above.


If I can't use rationality to reason out what's going to happen when I make a choice, it's probably going to leave me feeling very unsatisfied.

I agree. But thats not the case in my hypothetical "magic is mystical" setting. Beeing a game, magic is defined in some way. You can make choices using the rules in the D&D books set in the context of the setting (this is neccesary, otherwise thinhs drowing-healing would be a possible choice, but is ruled out in the context of most settings). Creating Chimeras (not the D&D monster) is not covered in those rules and thus under the purview of the DM.

Cerlis
2011-11-10, 07:06 AM
I need to come back to this topic but i think we really need to start ignoring actual in game rules. The rules are just a medium to prevent players from cheating and make things fair, as well as make things tangible so we can write them down.

So things like the fact that a cat can kill a commoner, or Punn pun (both rules exploitations if i'm correct) that defy common sense shouldnt even be mentioned in this topic.

We are discussing this as if the "real" magic of the realm was able to create the bridge that prevents other species from breeding (as well as taking the randomness out of it) and how that could be applied to other ideas and how that would affect the world.

also, like i said, i need to come back to the topic so forgive me if its been mentioned...

But Full Metal ALchemist pretty much has something simular in the form of Chimera and Homonculi. And one thing to note would be that the difficulty of creating a chimera would be almost gone since in FMA you need to understand the science of the makeup of the creatures and with magic you do not, but i think the series suggests that such creations are seen as scientific abominations or freaks. In an advanced society that had these things for centuries it would bleed into everyday life, but i think thats only after a long time of the people getting used to it, they dont outright rebel against the idea, forcing the government to seclude it to military and government related issues.

TooManySecrets
2011-11-10, 01:57 PM
Point is, you asked "Why isn't the D&D world filled with a bajillion specialised hybrids like owlbears?" And I gave you a logical answer that's supported by the game rules: in the long run, an adaptable generalist race is better.

Now you obviously don't like that answer, but it's a perfectly sensible one. :smalltongue:

Well, here's why I don't like the answer: it's applicable to one edition. Owlbears have been around since AD&D the 1st, and with the same explanation. Not to mention the fact that in all editions high-level characters have been outnumbered by high-level monsters. Look at it this way: what do high-level casters, in fluff, usually end up doing? Either they become a lich (i.e. high-level monster) or try to ascend to godhood (i.e. high-level monster).

Yes, from a 3.5 rules perspective, both of those are pretty bad choices. Lichs lose caster levels and if you really want undead traits you can just become a necropolitan (or take the Sand Lich PRCs if you want some phylactery action). Gods have no set rules for ascension which means it's all up to GM fiat and it's anybody's guess what the LA on a deity is.

And yet that seems to be the goal of most of the high-level casters. At least the ones that don't want to end up being wormfood (sorry if that was insensitive to Priests of Kyuss).

In short, I'm arguing this from a worldbuilding perspective in the general, beyond just one edition of D&D, and you gave me a rules-based answer that was founded in 3.5 rules. I would react the same way if I asked "What's the most powerful base class at level 4 using only the SRD?" and somebody answered "Definitely paladins. They're just so cool. The fluff of being a warrior of holiness versus the forces of darkness is just so compelling, you know?". The answer is useful in one context, but not another.


There are several interesting and quite consistent answers to that, actually. But it's off-topic.

Go right ahead and enumerate them. I don't care if it's off-topic. I'm the original poster - I can just edit the original post so that it becomes on-topic.

In fact, I just did.


You're over-analysing. In those days people just made up monsters for the fun of it. Take a look at the 1E FF sometime, most of the monsters in that book came from a magasine column where people would send in their ideas. The're almost all homebrew. OwlBear is 1E MM of course, but someone at TSR just had a zany idea one day and the OwlBear was born. Monsters in those days where an exercise in creativity upon which the rules were loosely draped.

Of course I'm over-analysing! That's why I brought up the distinction of soft vs. hard. Early D&D was very soft. I'm just trying to imagine what a hard version of D&D would be like in one very specific case i.e. magical animal hybrid magic.

Sidenote: The owlbear comes from Gygax himself. It was based on action figure that he had (at least if Wikiped can be trusted on this).

This isn't a question of which is better, soft or hard fiction. That's like asking "Which is better red or blue?" Likewise, this isn't a debate on whether the original D&D was soft or hard, either, since it is so obviously soft.

Merely consider the discussion to be a "what if" - "What if the creation of magical animal hybrids more closely followed what we see in real history and technology?"


Yeah, just one.


Zoofights.

Zoofights? (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zoofights)


Fist, sorry for cutting your posting into quote bits.

Don't worry about it.


1. Please watch your words. I havent used "random" in my posting, and for a reason. Saying that magic equals randomness is a positive definition, while used a negative one.

Okay, let me explain why I used "random" then.

If magic is not random, than that means it's effects can be predicted and it must obey a certain set of rules. Since it obeys a set of rules, than that means that one can use these rules to make predictions and test those predictions through a rigorous scientific method. If you can do that, than you can improve your casting methods and magical rituals. You know, use an ounce of water instead of trying to get a dozen newt eyes.

The only way that magic couldn't be improved in a similar method to technology is (a) it is random and you, therefore, can't use rational means to examine it or (b) every magical spell is already at optimal power, which is ... unlikely, to say the least.


2. Eberron is Eberron. One of the specific premises of the setting is that magic is technology. This doesnt hold true for other settings, ie. my homebrew one.

Yes, but it does hold true for my homebrew one.

Once again, I'm not arguing what I'm arguing so that players can run to their DM and demand that the DM let them overrun the world with mix-and-match critters. This is just a stepping stone to creating a campaign world, and if it came off like I was trying to undermine other people's campaign worlds, I apologize.


3. Yes, Wizards have a spell book, and they need it to prepare spells. So what? Anyone else other then the specific wizard also cant understand whats "writen" in this spell book. They need magic to comprehend it.
And in 3.5 at least there are LOTS of magic systems, "arcane preperation" beeing only one of them.
Form all this no conclusion if magic is technological or not can be made with certainty. And I think thats intentional.

Right now we're communicating through computers. Computers could not have been made without using technology, specifically electronics. There is about 2 billion transistors on each of our CPUs, each of which is about a 1 cm^2 area. The transistors are smaller than the eye can distinguish between. The fact that you need magic to use magic is irrelevant. Completely. After all, you need technology to use technology as well.

My point with the fact that wizards need to prepare spells, is that they can predict what can happen from preparing. Wizards aren't going around rolling dice to determine what they can cast that day. It's all planned beforehand. Planning implies that the forces involved can be understood. If it can be understood, we go back to what I was talking about above.

The main difference between magic and technology is that it can be understood and forced by force of will. Wizards use intellect to understand and manipulate the forces of magic, but sorcerers use the strength of personality and sense of self. As far as I know, calculators don't care how pretty you are.


Please note that I dont say that magic can't be seen as technology. I'm saying that this is neither a necessary, nor a automaticly desirable nor a strongly implied conclusion.

We're in agreement then.


Emphasis mine.

Now, see thats somehow the problem I have with the tone of your postings. While there is no gramatical conection, the way your response is structured strongly implies that the bolded parts are correlated.

This is A) wrong. Magic as something mystical and esoterical (I dare to say "magical") is a conscious desing choice, just like treating magic as technology or anything else.

And B) it is a form of passive-aggressive posting behaviour I would kindly ask you to stop.

This is reenforced by the picture of the DungeonMaster you keep posting. The caption says "Its magic. I dont need to explain." This is ignorant to the fact that saying something along the lines "its magic" CAN be an explanation. Its an explanation you obviously dont like, but thats just your personal preferences in setting premises.

Okay, you're reading far too much hostility into what I'm posting.

Let me be absolutely clear about my position:

It is the goal of the DM to ensure that the majority of players have fun playing the game and, in pursuit of this goal, the DM can do anything he or she wants in the context of the game.
The reason I posted two different DM explanations is because both are valid reasons to stop anything that I've proposed. One approaches it from a story perspective and one approaches it from a metagame standpoint, but both are valid because they're being used in defense of keeping a game that is fun for everybody involved. Another thing the DM could have said is "Sorry, but creating rules to cover that would be too complicated and liable to loophole abuse", which would be coming from a rules standpoint.

Now, about that picture:

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/5139/magiclp.jpg
I'm not using the picture to make the claim that any explanation that magic is unknowable is bunk or invalid in the context of preserving a game. My point is more that some people use magic as spackle for plot-holes, an all encompassing plot device that can be used to do anything and everything (and sometimes nothing) when the plot demands it. It is very similar to the way that technology is used in Star Trek. Today the transporters can be used to go back in time, but tomorrow they can't because of tachyon bursts and the next day they're extra powerful because of tachyon bursts.

In the context of writing, this is very bad practice. However, gaming is more than just writing, though it's part of it. The important thing is that the players get into the game knowing that magic is unknowable. It needs to be explicitly stated.

None of this, however, should be taken to imply that I am sort of Grand Arbiter of Gaming. If somebody wants to play a game with bad writing, poorly planned encounters, and inconsistent application of rules, I don't care as long as they're having fun doing it. We all know people who get completely incensed that there is somebody out there who has the gall of enjoying an edition of a game that they don't play (please don't name names)! I'm not like that. There is no "right type" of fun. Fun is fun, and my objections or notions of what makes a game fun should not in anyway impede yours or anybody else's enjoyment of it.

I hope that clarifies my position.


No. Fiction is a certain type of media.
Also I would advise to staying away from terms like "real" in definitions. If you define something using "real" you dive deep into Ontology. And believe me thats not pretty even if you know what your doing (= be a philosopher).

I was making a joke. But, if you want to take it seriously, I can oblige:

Well, what technically separates fiction from non-fiction is that fiction doesn't make any claims to be "real", in either the subjective or objective sense, not withstanding authors who are claiming that what they're writing is real in order to make a satirical or otherwise meta point vis a vis Swift's Modest Proposal, so perhaps a better way is of stating that is non-fiction is a written account of things-in-themselves where the author believes there is a corresponding object-in-themselves (whether or not it actually exists) while fiction is a written account of things-in-themselves where the author believes that it does not have a corresponding object-in-themselves. http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/4061/emotawesome.gif

... Wait, that didn't sound very serious. I'm bad at being serious. Oh well.


I agree. But thats not the case in my hypothetical "magic is mystical" setting. Beeing a game, magic is defined in some way. You can make choices using the rules in the D&D books set in the context of the setting (this is neccesary, otherwise thinhs drowing-healing would be a possible choice, but is ruled out in the context of most settings). Creating Chimeras (not the D&D monster) is not covered in those rules and thus under the purview of the DM.

Yep. Which is why I would be the one running such a game with magical animal hybrid creation.

Uh, just out of curiosity, how many people who have been part of this discussion have assumed that I was, like, trying to force this on a DM where I was a player in the game or something? If that's the impression that I gave, I apologize as that wasn't my intention.


I need to come back to this topic but i think we really need to start ignoring actual in game rules. The rules are just a medium to prevent players from cheating and make things fair, as well as make things tangible so we can write them down.

Agreed. I've mostly been trying to focus on the fluff surrounding the rules.


But Full Metal ALchemist pretty much has something simular in the form of Chimera and Homonculi. And one thing to note would be that the difficulty of creating a chimera would be almost gone since in FMA you need to understand the science of the makeup of the creatures and with magic you do not, but i think the series suggests that such creations are seen as scientific abominations or freaks. In an advanced society that had these things for centuries it would bleed into everyday life, but i think thats only after a long time of the people getting used to it, they dont outright rebel against the idea, forcing the government to seclude it to military and government related issues.

Well, part of the problem with homonculi was that you were creating creatures that (a) were really powerful and (b) completely inhuman in mentality. Only the insane would purposefully create super-powerful beings that are uncontrollable and have a history of hating humanity. (Which is probably why most homunculi aren't made purposefully in FMA)

The problem with chimeras, on the other hand, was just a question of social perception, though (actual spoiler)

given that Wrath was in charge of the military dictatorship, said social perception was probably exasperated by him on purpose. Keeping people fearful of chimeras makes it easier to keep it only done by an inner-circle of trusted alchemists.

Social perceptions change. During the showing of the first film, people freaked out. When there was the first on-screen kiss (http://www.futilitycloset.com/2010/03/14/big-love/), people freaked out again.

Sidenote: I don't know whether the chimeras in FMA were true breeding. I don't think it ever came up (though I'm sure there's a hentai out there that goes into excruciating details about it - that is not an invitation to post a link, please). Being able to breed them is really the main factor that I'm considering. If it takes special rituals and magic, than it's easier to contain to a few people. If they can breed, than it's a whole lot harder.




Anyways, I've been thinking about how the government would maintain control over such a situation. It was hard enough to put down peasant revolts even when they were poorly armed and the king had armies of well-trained soldiers and cavalry. Putting down a revolt of a tough servitor race would be even harder. Basically, I have it coming down to three things:


1. Don't allow it. The king prohibits the creation of hybrids. The problem with this is that this puts that kingdom at a huge disadvantage against any kingdom which does produce hybrids. The kingdom will lose money and probably end up being seen as a backwoods nation.

2. Increase control The king starts putting into place secret police, mind controls dissidents, restricts movement, and otherwise tries to make revolt as impossible as possible. This would allow the feudal system to continue and the nobles will probably love it. The peasants will hate it, but since they can't do anything about it, it doesn't matter.

3. Cede some authority The king gives authority to a number of different groups, essentially foisting the burden of responsibility to somebody else. The peasants and servitors might still revolt, but they're probably not going to go against the king. Instead, they'll revolt against the group that is in charge of them.

In the campaign world, probably all three will happen, but I'll go with most kingdoms taking Option 3. Basically, a group of kingdoms - modeled after the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Diet_%28Holy_Roman_Empire%29) - decide to collectively cede some authority to guilds, leagues, and other groups that would henceforth be called Factions. Factions ultimately derived their authority from the kingdoms, so they're beholden to them, but at the same time they have a measure of independence as well since they were not beholden to any single king. Factions rent land from the kingdoms and are able to make laws on their own areas.

I like the concept of Factions because (a) I like Planescape, (b) because it allows the players to get involved with politics without having to get noble titles (though that's still an option), and (c) it's a way of declaring one's philosophical standpoint without getting caught up in the alignment system.

TheCountAlucard
2011-11-10, 02:42 PM
Actually, you can totally understand another spellcaster's spellbook without magic - it just takes a Spellcraft check, and it's quite frankly a piss-easy one.

The Reverend
2011-11-10, 05:39 PM
I would say if we are discussing "magic" in some kind of greater philosophical discussion I make a motion we continue that portion of the discussion using Mage: The Ascension terminology.

I would say that magic predicated by the paradigm of the user. Wizardly magic works because they know that if they vocalize the seventh name of sharzile opener of divine light while breaking a ruby of no less than 12.23415 carats but no more than 22.345 carats, its facets not being of a prime number and its facet count not exceeding 54, and then inscribing a septagram with its broken form in the windershins manner described in the practicum trisarcus it will end in a teleportation portal opening.

Sorcerers know if the yell realllly loud while making the ok symbol behind their back and visualizing where they want to be a portal will also open, and not farting that is very important. But frankly charisma is a stupid stupid stat to begin with. Its a catchall because WoTC wouldn't break it down into the logical minimum of 8 different stats.:smallsmile:

If you haven't read it The Master of The Five Magics is an excellent read on this kind of topic.

buddy of mines homebrew kinda covers tech v magic. Magic warps reality, therefore the delicate and highly precision made technology gets literally broken by exposure to ambient magic. Even low level spells nit even cast at the object will quickly leave it useless. So they replaced it with crystaltech that replicates magic item use on the cheap, even had a base class built around it. One of tje problems you get is that the most advanced societies have gotten to a stage of high magick and a stable peaceful culture so they dont allow a whole lot of new anything in. Technology is a Lot cheaper for the most common chores but cannot be used anywhere near magic so its relegated to fringe worlds

jackattack
2011-11-10, 06:42 PM
A couple of random thoughts.

-----

Hybrid animals in nature are frequently sterile. The more "organic" you make your hybrids, the more likely that they can't breed on their own. If they still do, it's magic.

Furthermore, two creatures aren't enough to breed a species from, as the very first "natural" generation will all be siblings. The first generation would need to consist of about a hundred creatures, all of them created by magic, to keep the new species from inbreeding itself to extinction. Unless the only genetic variation between the first two creatures was an X vs a Y chromosome and every resulting member of the species is a perfect clone of every other member of the species.

-----

Piers Anthony populated Xanth with hybrid creatures created by "love springs". Any creature that drank from a naturally occurring love spring would mate with the next creature it saw, and their union would produce at least one viable hybrid creature. I'm not sure if those were supposed to breed true.

This gives the DM a source of hybrid creatures that isn't a spell that can be learned or researched. It is a kind of magic that might never be available to any spell caster. It does, however, allow for the discovery and use of these pools by any NPC or PC, and thus for interesting campaign hooks.

-----

I have a half-formed idea for a campaign in which the ubiquitous Ancient Ones did themselves and each other in using hybrids and monsters they created. Most/worst of the monsters in the world actually come from spawning vats that were "left on", and the characters would be trying to find them and destroy them to rid the world of various threats.

Cerlis
2011-11-10, 08:58 PM
In regards to the comment about chimera's I'd call into question the idea of "breeding" when first creating a creature. indeed Owlbears breed true, but i HIGHLY doupt that a wizard made the first few by using magic to stimulate the receptiveness of genes between owls and bears.

there may be more logical ways, but i think the most sensible way is to magically fuse two of the animals together (whether that is a transmutation spell on one, or actually fusing two different animals) and using magic to alter the genetics of each of them so that any "gaps" are filled (thus preventing sterility, or out right death from DNA confusion).

I see every reason to believe the first owlbears where created like chimera and where perfected so that they could breed,not that someone used a magic featus to obtain traits from both parent species (though a 3rd party blank fetus makes more sense than a owl boning a bear)

---------------------

Either way once you get it to breed true then you can start farming them.

However, i do think that if the government started using Beardogs in their policeforce i'd get freaked out (even in a world i with magic) and dont think the disdain for chimera was from the Homonculi meddling. People are afraid of the unkown and things that pervert what they know. A chimera is one of them.

Urpriest
2011-11-10, 10:07 PM
If we're looking for general logic applying to any edition:

Almost invariably (Eberron and Battletitans being tentative exceptions), crossbred beasties in D&D are unstable monsters. They almost invariably go around savaging commoners, devouring their creators, and generally being a nuisance. Even if it is possible to create useful hybrid creatures that don't inevitably kill everyone who tries to control them, the research program has rather steep costs. I could see it not having progressed very much by whatever time the setting is set.

If you really want real-life genetics as a model, look at large animal cloning, or cross-species breeding. The first tends to produce creatures which sicken and age rapidly, while the second almost always (with a few cool exceptions that were historically quite hard to find) result in sterile products. Now magic doesn't have to obey the same rules. In fact we know it doesn't: Owlbears are certainly not sterile, while Chuuls are immortal. But it does make it rather plausible to make the processes involved to have idiosyncratic drawbacks. Like bloodthirsty monster syndrome.

The Succubus
2011-11-11, 05:48 AM
Piers Anthony populated Xanth with hybrid creatures created by "love springs". Any creature that drank from a naturally occurring love spring would mate with the next creature it saw, and their union would produce at least one viable hybrid creature.

I really, *REALLY* wouldn't want to be the guy that discovered one of those springs. :smalleek:

hewhosaysfish
2011-11-11, 08:07 AM
Anyways, I've been thinking about how the government would maintain control over such a situation. It was hard enough to put down peasant revolts even when they were poorly armed and the king had armies of well-trained soldiers and cavalry. Putting down a revolt of a tough servitor race would be even harder. Basically, I have it coming down to three things:

Option 4: Designer Babies
The royalty/nobility of a particular kingdom could convince themselves that adding the features of certain "regal" creatures (lions, eagles, dragons, etc.) represents a improvement to human rather than a degradation. So they might modify their own children rather than tampering with the genetics of the peons. This would actually make rebellion less likely as no-one wants to try and overthrow a dragon-man aristocracy.
In theory the nobles might try to add traits of wisdom or intelligence to the next generation but I would personally bet on prejudice and vanity winning out and the modified individuals being given more traditional "noble virtues" such as strength, valor and looking fancy.
The peasantry could still be modified in this scenario: strong ox-men labourers, fierce dog-boy guards, fast-breeding rat-man farmers, etc but the nobles don't have to worry about creating servitors that are individually more powerful than themselves.

Amuse yourselves for a moment by imagining the diplomatic relationships between a country which chooses to create animal-man hybrids for labourers while keeping the noble bloodlines "pure" and the neighbouring country where expensive GT (genetic-transmutation) is reserved for the lion-man upper-class.

Option 5: Beastmasters
The kingdom decides to be boring and only create dumb animals. More productive livestock, faster mounts, more vicious hunting "dogs", cuddlier pets, etc but nothing with human (or human-like) intelligence.
Since the only GT-creatures under the control of the peasants would be photosynthetic cows, then this does nothing to threaten the balance of power.


Piers Anthony populated Xanth with hybrid creatures created by "love springs". Any creature that drank from a naturally occurring love spring would mate with the next creature it saw, and their union would produce at least one viable hybrid creature. I'm not sure if those were supposed to breed true.

IIRC the hybrids did breed true. This was the apparent origin of the centaur race. :smalleek:
Although that may not have been a property of the springs; it may have just been part of the natural background magic of Xanth that anything could breed with anything else and all the springs did was to... encourage creatures to do so.

The Reverend
2011-11-11, 12:01 PM
There is a steam punk style game that has this designer classes thing as part of its character creation and fluff. Rat workers that are toughened against toxins, dog based security class, etc. I can't remember the name of it though.


Another "Magical" aspect would be literally instilling properties into people magically. Literally fixing "Justice" or "Nobility" or "Wisdom", as literal substances or living concepts plucked from the astral sea, into a given population. Or outsiders, angels whose powers and qualities are incarnated into a person and blood but not their active mind or will. The same could be done with primordials, godlings, nature spirits, elemental beinga, etc.

TheCountAlucard
2011-11-11, 12:10 PM
Although that may not have been a property of the springs; it may have just been part of the natural background magic of Xanth that anything could breed with anything else and all the springs did was to... encourage creatures to do so.This is indeed the case. The series, as a whole, did contain quite a few hybrid offspring. :smalltongue:

Arminius
2011-11-11, 01:23 PM
The neogi actually do something like this already. They created the umber hulks to be a slave race, specifically bodyguards. While umber hulks do get free every so often, they're very weak against the form of mind control used by the neogi.

Part of the solution to preventing a slave uprising is making it part of the culture. The neogi, for instance, believe that everybody is owned by somebody else (except possibly for a single neogi). Neogi own other neogi who, in turn, own other slaves. Sometimes you even get circles of ownership where A owns B owns C owns A. None of the neogi want to rock the boat, even though each one is a slave, because they all own their own slaves.
This strikes me as making the creation of a specialized slave race unnecessary, since we would already have slaves. The idea is to make manual labour unnecessary for the original population. The Neogi seem to have just made specialized bodyguards, but haven't expanded on the idea.


Also, as a sidenote, I think you're missing a most-interesting issue with developing slave races - what happens when the group that created the slave race is conquered? Going back to the good kingdom annexing the evil kingdom with hybrid soldiers, the good kingdom is now faced with the issue of letting the hybrids work for them (thereby profiting from evil) or killing them off (which is obviously evil). The good group can't even just ask the former-slave race what it wants to do if it's been mind controlled to be subservient - they're obviously going to answer that they want to be ruled.
It would really depend on how the slave race was designed, and on the nature of the conquerors. Those used as soldiers will probably not surrender and just fight to the death unless ordered otherwise by their commander. The workers may become unruly or refuse orders from the new rulers, assuming they are mind controlled to obey certain individuals or classes of individuals only. If they do becme free, they may become listless, or feel they lack purpose.



Making them sterile ignores the whole point of making them organic, though. Perhaps such a group would try to hybridize in ant-style growth, with a few fertile males and females and a bunch of sterile workers.
Not necessarily. What we really want are machines with the intelligence of humans. Making machines intelligent is very difficult. Barring some drastic breakthrough, we probably won't see a trully intelligent machine in our lifetime. However, there are intelligent biological beings, so it might be easier to make biological machines. Letting them breed independantly undermines the level of control we will have over them, since they will evolve, possibly in undesired ways. The trick is just producing them in large enough quantities. But, as you yourself noted, it is likely that the techniques will be prefected.



Who, exactly, is going to get the specific chemical, though? You can't let the created slave race get it, so you have to use your own people to do it. Anybody who gets the chemical would have to be trusted completely because they effectively have control of your race of super-strong, resilient mutants.
Yes, we would still have to maintain direct control over the production. This would be necessary in any event. If the culture loses control of it, that negates the purpose of even putting it in. We want enough intelligence from the slaves for them to be useful, but not so much they begin to question why they serve.


That's a modern view of looking at it. In the real world, the aristocrats pretty much saw the serfs as sub-humans already. There were numerous peasants revolts throughout history, all of which were put down violently and with very little concessions being made. In areas where aristocrats had less power, the people who had power were the plutocrats - rich merchants, mostly. They're certainly not going to want to hob-nob with dirty peasants.
I don't think the traditional aristocracy will have all that much say in the matter. The aristocracy's traditionally purpose is to kill things. They are essentially the army. The slave race(properly controlled) makes them unnecesary. The real power in the long run will be the people making the slaves. For a generation or two, they might still obey the aristocracy, but they will reach a point where they can just kill the aristocracy outright if they want to. I am approaching this from a modern point of view, but then again I am not a peasant in a pseudo-medieval setting. it is entirely possible that this sort of technology or magic, call it what you will, would meet the same fate as the Ancient Greek steam engine. An interesting toy, but not taken to it's full potential because there was no apprant need for it to be.

TooManySecrets
2011-11-11, 02:10 PM
Hybrid animals in nature are frequently sterile. The more "organic" you make your hybrids, the more likely that they can't breed on their own. If they still do, it's magic.

The physical laws that govern D&D are different than the ones in our world. That's the reason you can have dragons that are three-stories tall and are still able to fly (or breathe, for that matter) without having the density of a cotton-ball.

The reason for the infertility in something like mules, for instance, is that a mule has 63 chromosomes, while horses have 64 and donkeys have 62. There's actually a rule, called Haldane's Rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldane%27s_rule), that explains when a hybrid can be sterile or fertile.

Now, all of this leaves us with a few options:

1. Sterility is essentially random We're mixing together things that could never naturally mate, so of course there's going to be a lot of variability. Sometimes a cow-dog hybrid is sterile, sometimes it's fertile, and there's no real way to tell. Pretty easy to implement in rules - just roll some dice.

2. Sterility is deterministic We're at maximum realism and we follow a set of specific rules, similar to Haldane's Rule. Female cow and male dog hybrids are sterile, but male cow and female dog hybrids are fertile. There might still be a bit of randomness (perhaps not all male cow-female dog hybrids are fertile), but it's still something that can be predicted with pretty good accuracy. This is the most realistic, but it's also the most difficult to implement in rules, since there's a lot of bookkeeping and it might be tough for the GM to apply the rule fairly.

3. All hybrids are fertile The most unrealistic. The process that creates hybrids somehow also insures that all the hybrids can mate with similar enough other hybrids. Maybe the world doesn't work on DNA and chromosomes. This is the absolute easiest to implement in rules.

Personally, I prefer the third one. I think that it would be the most fun for the players as it allows for maximum freedom. I might implement a variation where hybrids sometimes become sterile and this danger increases with complexity of mixes (as a way to prevent abuses by maintaining some measure of justified control), but the exact specifics can be left until later.


Furthermore, two creatures aren't enough to breed a species from, as the very first "natural" generation will all be siblings. The first generation would need to consist of about a hundred creatures, all of them created by magic, to keep the new species from inbreeding itself to extinction. Unless the only genetic variation between the first two creatures was an X vs a Y chromosome and every resulting member of the species is a perfect clone of every other member of the species.

It obviously depends on the species. Plants, for instance, can create clones without big problems (at least for several generations - at which point diseases that prey of specific clonal branches start to become a problem). If the world doesn't run on DNA and chromosomes, this also wouldn't be a problem.

Now, we can introduce variation by hybridizing an existing hybrid with one of the existing parts. For instance, we can add a bit more dog to a cow-dog. There might also be a ritual for introducing mutations into a species.

Anyways, it's a good point and something that would need to be dealt with.


Piers Anthony populated Xanth with hybrid creatures created by "love springs". Any creature that drank from a naturally occurring love spring would mate with the next creature it saw, and their union would produce at least one viable hybrid creature. I'm not sure if those were supposed to breed true.

This gives the DM a source of hybrid creatures that isn't a spell that can be learned or researched. It is a kind of magic that might never be available to any spell caster. It does, however, allow for the discovery and use of these pools by any NPC or PC, and thus for interesting campaign hooks.

In Eberron, the Daelkyr have created most of their servitors through something similar. A Husk of Infinite Worlds is (essentially) a minor artifact that adds a random mutation to a creature inside it. Though only 1% of the mutations are useful, that doesn't really matter to their Daelkyr (they're evil and pretty much immortal with a lot of time to kill). Given that the Daelkyr have pretty large populations of specific types of monsters, such creatures would probably breed true.

Anyways, I can still have natural hybrid creatures depending on the mechanism involved. If the ritual uses some sort of substance that occurs in nature, then - bam! - you have the ability for natural hybrid creatures. This can be used to explain some really weird and bad combinations, instead of using an all-purpose "Well, it was made by a mad wizard".


there may be more logical ways, but i think the most sensible way is to magically fuse two of the animals together (whether that is a transmutation spell on one, or actually fusing two different animals) and using magic to alter the genetics of each of them so that any "gaps" are filled (thus preventing sterility, or out right death from DNA confusion).

Speaking of owlbears, has anybody noticed how weird it is that owlbears are like in every campaign world but other hybrids aren't? I mean, even if we accept that you can only make hybrids as a mad wizard, does that mean that there's a mad wizard out there who is spending all his time making only owlbears? Not only making them, but creating a stable breeding population of them on innumerable worlds. Is he like the Johnny Appleseed of owlbears?

Anyways, I agree that it doesn't make much sense that you magically enable owls to woo-hoo with bears. I was thinking more like a The Fly-esque transformation chamber that you place the creatures in or you get samples of their blood and mix it together into an artificial fetus of some sort.


Either way once you get it to breed true then you can start farming them.

However, i do think that if the government started using Beardogs in their policeforce i'd get freaked out (even in a world i with magic) and dont think the disdain for chimera was from the Homonculi meddling. People are afraid of the unkown and things that pervert what they know. A chimera is one of them.

Ah, I didn't say that they created it, merely that it was exasperated by them. You know - made worse. Beardogs are going to be weird for the first generation of people who see them, and perfectly normal for the second generation. Nobody thinks twice of all the weird things we have today, since they're not weird to us. Once people get used to the initial hybrids, it will be easier to bring in more hybrids. Eventually, people will be scared when there isn't beardog law enforcement.


But it does make it rather plausible to make the processes involved to have idiosyncratic drawbacks. Like bloodthirsty monster syndrome.

Well, first, Peaceful-And-Useful-Animal-Hybrid-That-Doesn't-Hurt-No-One, doesn't really make itself an interesting pick for the various Monster Manuals. (Then again, fifteen varieties of slimes and elves don't either, but I digress)

Second, I wouldn't make Bloodthirsty Monster Syndrome the inevitable result, but I do like making it an occasional result. Hybrids can get some really weird traits - ligers, hybrids of a lion and tiger, are larger than either of it's parents, for instance. I think that the best parallel would be how 3rd edition Shadowrun had rules for cybernetic surgery. Basically, the threshold (equivalent to DC) increased the more complicated surgery you were trying to perform. Every surgery had a certain number of negative effects, but getting enough successes led you to either remove negative effects or add positive effects. So, for instance, bonuses or maluses to Handle Animal would be an easy way to simulate Bloodthirsty Monster Syndrome.

Sidenote: I was going to refer to Bloodthirsty Monster Snydrome by it's acronym, but that led to unfortunate (and potentially misogynistic) implications. Have to find a different name


I really, *REALLY* wouldn't want to be the guy that discovered one of those springs. :smalleek:

http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/6939/fountainofdoubt.jpg


Option 4: Designer Babies
The royalty/nobility of a particular kingdom could convince themselves that adding the features of certain "regal" creatures (lions, eagles, dragons, etc.) represents a improvement to human rather than a degradation. So they might modify their own children rather than tampering with the genetics of the peons. This would actually make rebellion less likely as no-one wants to try and overthrow a dragon-man aristocracy.
In theory the nobles might try to add traits of wisdom or intelligence to the next generation but I would personally bet on prejudice and vanity winning out and the modified individuals being given more traditional "noble virtues" such as strength, valor and looking fancy.
The peasantry could still be modified in this scenario: strong ox-men labourers, fierce dog-boy guards, fast-breeding rat-man farmers, etc but the nobles don't have to worry about creating servitors that are individually more powerful than themselves.

Amuse yourselves for a moment by imagining the diplomatic relationships between a country which chooses to create animal-man hybrids for labourers while keeping the noble bloodlines "pure" and the neighbouring country where expensive GT (genetic-transmutation) is reserved for the lion-man upper-class.

Option 5: Beastmasters
The kingdom decides to be boring and only create dumb animals. More productive livestock, faster mounts, more vicious hunting "dogs", cuddlier pets, etc but nothing with human (or human-like) intelligence.
Since the only GT-creatures under the control of the peasants would be photosynthetic cows, then this does nothing to threaten the balance of power.

The problem with Option 5 is that you can't unring a bell - which is to say, as soon as the magi-tech is available, somebody is going to to start trying to experiment with it outside of the king's control. In essence, Option 5 is just a slightly less hardline position of Option 1 (Don't Allow It).

Option 4 has some of the same problems of Option 1 and Option 5, as well as some of the problems of peasant revolt. See, the problem isn't of creating a super-strong servitor race, it's of giving power to the lower classes. Whether the lower classes are peasants or servitors, it really doesn't matter.

Now, the fact that both of these options have problems doesn't mean that I don't like them in terms of story potential. Besides, all the options have problems with them - that's life. If anybody else wants to suggest some, go right ahead. There's no reason that they can't be mixed and matched, as well. Perhaps one kingdom reluctantly allows factions, but it also limits the amount of hybridization in the kingdom, while also secretly enhancing the upper class with certain less-obvious traits.


IIRC the hybrids did breed true. This was the apparent origin of the centaur race. :smalleek:
Although that may not have been a property of the springs; it may have just been part of the natural background magic of Xanth that anything could breed with anything else and all the springs did was to... encourage creatures to do so.

PIERS ANTHONY! http://i.pbase.com/o6/25/257025/1/101739472.pUXogcJW.emotargh.gif

EDIT:

This strikes me as making the creation of a specialized slave race unnecessary, since we would already have slaves. The idea is to make manual labour unnecessary for the original population. The Neogi seem to have just made specialized bodyguards, but haven't expanded on the idea.

The thing is, the Neogi are culturally incapable of sharing power, while at the same time racially arrogant. A Neogi will be owned by another Neogi, because they're both the same race, i.e. the best race, at least from the Neogi's perspective. Neogi keep umber hulks as a servitor race because they know that they can be permanently mind controlled. Other races, however, they can't be assured of doing it permanently. If the Neogi were willing to form a coalition of sentients with similar philosophies, i.e. evil, they would probably be unstoppable.


Letting them breed independantly undermines the level of control we will have over them, since they will evolve, possibly in undesired ways. The trick is just producing them in large enough quantities. But, as you yourself noted, it is likely that the techniques will be prefected.

Good point about the independence. I think it depends on how much risk the controlling race is willing to give. If the controlling race trusts that the servitors will report new borns, than it should be fine. Perhaps the servitors are completely mind controlled and subservient, or maybe they're bred to enjoy the particular form of work (mole hybrid miners, for instance). The closer the groups come to symbiosis rather than parasitism, the more likely the controlling race allows the servitors independent breeding.

I do think independent breeding is better in terms of cost. Allowing the servitors to breed would always be less expensive then directly creating them. The Neogi, for instance, would never allow it because the lack of absolute control doesn't make up for the reduced cost.


Yes, we would still have to maintain direct control over the production. This would be necessary in any event. If the culture loses control of it, that negates the purpose of even putting it in. We want enough intelligence from the slaves for them to be useful, but not so much they begin to question why they serve.

Actually, it's not a question of intelligence (or, rather, not entirely). Creating a very intelligent race that also wants to be your slave is more effective in the long-run.


I don't think the traditional aristocracy will have all that much say in the matter. The aristocracy's traditionally purpose is to kill things. They are essentially the army.

Er, yes and no. Lower level aristocrats - mainly those without lands of their own - served in the army as officers and knights. Higher level nobility were more interested in keeping control of the serfs and the proper running of the kingdom, as well as serving as diplomats to neighboring kingdoms.


The slave race(properly controlled) makes them unnecesary. The real power in the long run will be the people making the slaves. For a generation or two, they might still obey the aristocracy, but they will reach a point where they can just kill the aristocracy outright if they want to.

See, the thing is, medieval aristocrats had done a pretty good job of instilling the concept of the divine right of kings (and similar concepts of sovereignty). Force of arms alone was not sufficient to create a legitimate government. If people in medieval times tried what some D&D characters do i.e. killing the king and his army and claiming the lands for themselves, they would face near continuous revolts, especially if any of the heirs still existed. Heck, even other kings would try to come in to restore "legitimate" authority.

The hybrid-makers would probably have positions of authority in the king's administration (and might even be the real power behind the throne), but it's sort of doubtful that they would be able to take overt control. Smart kings would probably try to make sure that the best hybrid-makers were either part of the family or properly compensated.

The concept of democracy and self-rule was, in part, founded due to the increasing importance of the middle-class and plutocrat upper-class. However, it took centuries and even with the long existence of republics - Venice, the Hansa, several Free Imperial Cities - monarchs were the order of the day and nobody was really talking about the rights of peasants.

Of course, in the long-run, the decision of the kings to cede authority to the Factions are going to bite them in the butt as that's going to lay the seeds for democracy and transfer who people perceive as the legitimate government, but that's pretty long-term.

hewhosaysfish
2011-11-11, 04:11 PM
Anyways, I agree that it doesn't make much sense that you magically enable owls to woo-hoo with bears. I was thinking more like a The Fly-esque transformation chamber that you place the creatures in or you get samples of their blood and mix it together into an artificial fetus of some sort.

God I hope so. Otherwise this talk of the aristocracy replacing the peasantry with animal-human hybrid servitors (and my own suggestions about the aristocracy altering their own next generation) takes on a really, really weird aspect.


Well, first, Peaceful-And-Useful-Animal-Hybrid-That-Doesn't-Hurt-No-One, doesn't really make itself an interesting pick for the various Monster Manuals. (Then again, fifteen varieties of slimes and elves don't either, but I digress)


What about Slime Elves? We have the technology to make it happen!


The problem with Option 5 is that you can't unring a bell - which is to say, as soon as the magi-tech is available, somebody is going to to start trying to experiment with it outside of the king's control. In essence, Option 5 is just a slightly less hardline position of Option 1 (Don't Allow It).

I felt it was suffiently different to deserve a separate listing: shark-elephant cavalry, desert-dwelling cactus-cows, flying horses, silk-producing spider-goats, these will all serve to change the military and economic status of a Type 5 setting compared to a Type 1.
Not to mention the fact that a Type 5 setting means that it is possible for people to openly and legitimately aquire the skills and materials neccessary to magically engineer new life forms... making it far easier for rogue transmuters to break the rules.

That being said, I still think that if you apply the different options to different nations then the rogue transmuters are more likely to emmigrate to somewhere with a more permissive attitude than they are to continue clandestinely in their homeland.


Option 4 has some of the same problems of Option 1 and Option 5, as well as some of the problems of peasant revolt. See, the problem isn't of creating a super-strong servitor race, it's of giving power to the lower classes. Whether the lower classes are peasants or servitors, it really doesn't matter.

Wait, how does option 4 give power to the lower classes? If the upper classes engineer themselves with dragon genes then they still have all the same advantages over the peasants as before (lese-majesty laws, "divine right of kings", plate armour and warhorses, etc) plus if it comes to open rebellion they now have claws and the ability to breathe fire.



The hybrid-makers would probably have positions of authority in the king's administration (and might even be the real power behind the throne), but it's sort of doubtful that they would be able to take overt control. Smart kings would probably try to make sure that the best hybrid-makers were either part of the family or properly compensated.

Absolutely.
No matter how quick, cheap and simple the hybridisation process may eventually become, in the beginning it's going to require lots of education and more money. Logically speaking, the hybrid-makers-to-be are going to be part of the ruling elite before they ever learn to make hybrids.

Of course, fantasy tropes aren't always on speaking terms with logic and there is a long-standing tradition of crazy hermit-wizards creating bizarre monsters in isolated towers in the woods; the point remains though that if he wants to realise his dream of putting cheetahorses in every stable in the land then he'll need to get the local government on board for their connections, their financial backing and their not-declaring-him-an-enemy-of-the-state-and-siccing-the-army/some-adventurers-on-him.

The question of how the secrets of fast, safe and reliable abomination making then spread to other nations could be the making of several campaigns in itself...

jseah
2011-11-11, 07:28 PM
The trick is just producing them in large enough quantities. But, as you yourself noted, it is likely that the techniques will be prefected.
Take the ideas I used in the psychological engineering thread.
The problem of controlling the bred intelligences is something I considered.

Let's call our final desired animal type B1. There are only ever B1s of one sex. (ie. B1s cannot reproduce)

Basically, what we do is breed an animal that gives birth to B1s by themselves. We'll call that B1F. Let's say it gives birth to a B1 every 1.5 years starting from 3 years old until 27. Which gives 16 B1s from every B1F.

Now, what you do is create a B1F2, which is exactly like the B1F, except that it gives birth to B1Fs instead of B1s.
Continue up the chain as desired.

At B1F4, a single one of them will eventually result in a whopping 65536 B1s. And every single one of those is only 4 generations away from the original, which is way too short for any evolution.
Futhermore, any undesirable traits that do appear can just be culled away and you'll be certain it won't affect the rest. The asexual "reproduction" that terminates in sterile B1s means that any mutation is purely chance. There is no gene pool, no recombination. Culling a mutant completely removes that mutation from the population.

Breeding new hybrids might be expensive, but 65 thousand times is alot of dilution. (its actually more than that, as you can already start using the B1F*s)
If you want, you can go to 5 generations (B1F5), which results in over 1 million B1s.

How many million gp does it take to make one thing again?

The Succubus
2011-11-11, 08:33 PM
What about Slime Elves? We have the technology to make it happen!

The ungodly amount of squick involved in this idea is too much, even for these forums.