The Gaming Den

The assumptions about large-sized crops/bigger fields is kinda... foundationless. Let's ignore that.

That said, you can always take cross-class skills. If that means the humanoid hitdie is better than a commoner level, well, yeah. Probably. It's commoner, an NPC class designed to flat out suck, and model the average person who is incredibly suckage. And that's fine - it's for people who suck so bad they don't get to have humanoid hitdice.

Ogre farmers produce 6.5 gp to 9 gp by farming a week. (Take 10, 3 cross-class ranks, possibly a +3 skill focus, possibly an ogre-child in training providing a +2 assist.) We will assume this is just all food of equivalent value. It's also perfectly reasonable to assume ogres need 2x the food, and I believe it's explicitly stated though I wouldn't know where to find it. So eating poor meals, each one needs 2 silver worth of food a day.

So that's between 65 silver and 90 silver a week, and each ogre eats 2*7 = 14 silver a week. So a crappy ogre farmer can feed himself and 3.5 others. A good ogre with his little ogre boy helping him out can feed himself, that ogre boy, and 4.5 others.

But, as we all know, the profession rules suck, and the fact that we're making points from them makes me cry. Ogres don't farm because they have no one to teach them profession farming, they live in rocky terrain where the soil is useless, and any attempt to move into more... fertile land is met by being driven out by the humans already using it. Or other more organized, numerous races. Who, of course, see ogres as nothing but man-eating beasts, and can't possibly understand them as neighbors who could live peacefully nearby. It probably doesn't help that ogres have disproportionately large amounts of testosterone and aggression. They might just be more violent than the other races, and therefore bad neighbors.

The gods in a fantasy world would have to almost certainly be detached dicks in order for society to work. As in, if you upend the order too strongly then you'll be punished severely in the next world. So if you lead a slave rebellion? You get sent to hell for the crime of making people lose faith in society. You let things degenerate into a slave rebellion? You also get sent to hell for making people lose faith in society. You genocided a bunch of uppity slaves behind peoples' backs and calmed the masses by lying about them being infected with a zombie disease? As long as people still had faith in society, you get a seat in heaven.

In other words, it's like the worst parts of the 'know your place in the order, even if you're a crap-covered peasant' morals of Jade Empire, only much worse because the Jade Empire is fairly stable.


That said, there just HAS to be some kind of moral philosophy out there that compels not only the heroes but also the underlings to have faith in society and their brothers. That doesn't require them to be incredible dicks. Damned if I know what it is, though.

Holy thread necro, Batman!


But yeah, I don't think the kind of philosophy you're looking for actually exists, because in the real world we haven't actually had a need for philosophers to speculate all that much as to the moral duties appropriate to a situation wherein some individuals can wield as much power as the whole rest of society, but most cannot. It's simply a situation that is not actually reflected in the real world.

Honestly, your best bet would be trying to cobble together some kind of moral philosophy from comic books; the moral situation facing superheroes isn't much different from that facing powerful adventurers.

Endovior wrote:Holy thread necro, Batman!


But yeah, I don't think the kind of philosophy you're looking for actually exists, because in the real world we haven't actually had a need for philosophers to speculate all that much as to the moral duties appropriate to a situation wherein some individuals can wield as much power as the whole rest of society, but most cannot. It's simply a situation that is not actually reflected in the real world.

Lolwut? This situation is called "feudalism". Sure, in fantasy the circle of people who wield disproportional amounts of combat power might well be far narrower than it was IRL, differences between them and unwashed masses greater, but the basic concept of well-armed elite holding most of power and influence was reality throughout large swathes of the world's history. In fact, it is basically the default form of human organization once society gets stable enough that an average Joe The Household Owner no longer perceives being stabbed in the face by his neighbor as an everyday possibility and therefore starts paying more attention to his fields, and less to matters of self-defense.

Anyway, the whole thread is fucking pointless. There can be no broad generalizations about fantasy societies, because basic rules of the world can be completely different, even within bounds of DnD. You have to establish them first, explicitly, before you can start talking about the impact on society.

I'm not sure, but I think Kant provides a pretty good guide there.