Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1123838How are you defining it, then? Why is the basilisk unnatural and what does being "unnatural" mean in this context? Is it a meaningful distinction to make in the first place? Why?

I don't personally think it's a meaningful distinction, no. In D&D, I suppose it's meaningful so long as there is a character class (Druids, or something like them) that can polymorph into only "natural" creatures. To that extent, the context of what's natural and what's unnatural would be based on the intent of that character class -- which as far as I can tell is to limit the transformation to real world animals.

Quote from: Shasarak;1123891Mainly because of the amount of people that dont use it properly.

For example a Giant in DnD is not a Human that has been increased to giant size.

OK. Not sure why that matters. Sure a D&D Giant is not the protagonist from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, but depending on the edition, a D&D Giant looks a lot like a humanoid increased to giant size.

Quote from: Bren;1123910OK. Not sure why that matters. Sure a D&D Giant is not the protagonist from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, but depending on the edition, a D&D Giant looks a lot like a humanoid increased to giant size.

Yes, a Giant looks like a human increased to Giant size.

Quote from: Shasarak;1123891For example a Giant in DnD is not a Human that has been increased to giant size.

Quote from: Shasarak;1123916Yes, a Giant looks like a human increased to Giant size.

I'm just not following you. You said that a D&D Giant is not a giant sized human, but it looks like it is a giant sized human. And that distinction matters, why? And it relates to (or does not relate to) the so-called cube-square law, how?

Quote from: Bren;1123922I'm just not following you. You said that a D&D Giant is not a giant sized human, but it looks like it is a giant sized human. And that distinction matters, why? And it relates to (or does not relate to) the so-called cube-square law, how?

The saying that I really dislike is that a Giant can not stand up because its weight would be so much that its legs would not be strong enough to support it.

This is taken from the fact that as you increase the size of an object the height (or surface area) increases by a squared rate while the volume (or mass) increases by a cubic rate.  So for example if you had a 2 meter cube that weighed 8 kg and wanted to double its size to a 4 meter cube then the weight would increase to 64 kg.

However this can not be applied to a Giant because even though a Giant "looks" like a human increased to giant size, it is actually a Giant.  Or to phrase it the way another poster already did: Ogres are Natural and Giants are Primal.

Thanks for the clarification. I use a simpler rationale. Giants look like they do because - myth.

Quote from: Chris24601;1123850But this also highlights the problem with your position; you say "basilisks should just be beasts, not monstrosities" but haven't bothered to actually read the 5e definition of a monstrosity; a beast with notable supernatural abilities that don't fit cleanly into other categories. It's not a beast because normal beast can't kill/petrify people with their gaze.

The beast type includes flying snakes, tressym, and cranium rats. They are all fictional and the latter two have magic powers.

The monstrosity type includes centaurs and griffons, which don't seem clearly unnatural or abominable. Not sufficiently for them to be enemies of druids or whatever the logic is.

Giant eagles have intelligence within the normal human range: slowly lower than average (INT . They have their own language, and they can understand (but not speak) others.

I don't see any consistent criteria for what distinguishes beasts and monstrosities.

Quote from: Chris24601;1123850Dragons aren't monstrosities because D&D has always ascribed a special nature to dragons (it fits cleanly into its own category); they aren't just big lizards that breathe fire, they're almost the embodiment of supernatural power second only to the gods complete with nigh immortal lifespans and colossal intellects.

Which is contradicted by drakes, wyverns, dragonets, etc being placed under the dragon type.

Why are dragons their own type, but not sphinxes? Or deities? Or spirits? Or imaginary friends? Or H.R. Giger biomechanoids?

My point, as always, is that the D&D taxonomy is arbitrary, vague, and inconsistent.

Quote from: Chris24601;1123850But that's irrelevant to your complaint, which can be fundamentally boiled down to "they aren't doing it the way I want them to."

It's just a rehash of your "I think D&D shouldn't have so many unique monsters because ogres and trolls and giants are basically different names for the same folklore creature" pitch with a fresh coat of paint.

Just because it isn't what you want it to be doesn't mean the system used doesn't make sense. My purely mechanical "taxonomy" works perfectly in my game.

I don't know what I want. I'm still trying to work out a functional taxonomy that doesn't come across as arbitrary and idiosyncratic like D&D's.

However, regardless of my personal WIP taxonomy, my complaint has always been that D&D's taxonomy is vague and inconsistent. Plenty of others in this agreed had agreed with that.

Quote from: Chris24601;1123850I'm getting off topic, but my point is; I have an entirely consistent taxonomy system in my setting that fits with its lore, but you've complained about it not meeting your standards and that standard seems to literally be just "how I personally want it done."

I don't remember complaining about your personal taxonomy. I may not agree with you choice of terminology (e.g. I use the dictionary definition of "ogres" as man-eating giants rather than a specific race), but I acknowledge you at least use consistent criteria. D&D does not.

Quote from: Bren;1123863OK. Let me try to explain this again. The creatures in AtLAB are not hybrids since they are not, so far as we see in the show itself, the result of hybridization.

As for what hybrids are, the definition of hybrid works fine so long as we specify that the reproduction is something that happens in game rather than as just some sort of short hand to describe what the creature looks like.

Spoiler

A hybrid is the offspring resulting from combining the qualities of two organisms of different breeds, varieties, species or genera through sexual reproduction.

So, hybrids are a combination by two organisms of different breeds, varieties, species, or genera through sexual reproduction in setting. While what we see on shows like AtLAB are described in shorthand as a combination of two or more creatures, creatures that may also include additional legs, arms, or wings, something like a six-legged turtlehopper (a made up exemplar) are not described as the result of sexual reproduction between a turtle and a rabbit.

Uh huh. That's not the logic D&D uses. If a creature is a combination of any two or more real world animals, then it's a monstrosity regardless of other factors. Unless it's a snake with wings, or a cat with wings and spell turning, or a rat with an exposed brain and psychic powers.

Quote from: Bren;1123863Personally, I see little need to include many hybrid creatures in game settings. Where I have, they come from one of two sources.

(1) Chaotic features or manifestations of being touched or tainted by Chaos and genesis or hybridization by certain Chaos creatures, e.g. the reproduction by Broos in Glorantha.

(2) Humanoid inter-species births, e.g. half-elves in Tolkienesque fantasy or human-Vulcan and other hybrids in Star Trek. I'm not enamored of this trope, but when I include it, I do so either because the canonical source material already has included it or accommodate a player who really wants to a PC who is a hybrid. In campaigns I've run, I've had more cultural hybrids (the classical 'raised by wolves' of Romulus, Remus, Mowgli, or Tarzan) than genetic hybrids,

Fair enough. I quite like the chaos mutation explanation for everything.

In any case, why would hybrids be classified by the in-game law of physics as [monstrosities] or whatever rather than the type of their parents? Why is a griffon or centaur a monstrosity, but a half-elf, half-orc, tressym, cranium rat, etc isn't?

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1123872I've got 30 years of software development experience, most of it object-oriented.  You only think you've seen taxonomy problems.

You can't fairly ding a thing for taxonomy problems if the problems you are dinging it for are completely outside of what it is designed to do.  Biology is kind of an odd appeal to experience from my perspective, since biology has all kinds of edge cases where its own taxonomy starts to blur.  But it isn't intended to be perfectly logical.  It's jut meant to get a handle on things as a starting point.  D&D is the same way, except that it deals with a much wider range of possibilities than biology does purely in the natural world.

Don't even get me started on real world stuff. The difference here is that real world taxonomy is an imperfect social construct intended to understand how objective living things are related to one another. Reality is unimaginably complicated.

Programming has a practical purpose. It may be revised and iterated upon. It is subject to endless amounts of testing.

D&D taxonomy, being pure fiction wholly subject to the arbitrary whims of writers, isn't comparable to either.

Quote from: Zalman;1123893I don't personally think it's a meaningful distinction, no. In D&D, I suppose it's meaningful so long as there is a character class (Druids, or something like them) that can polymorph into only "natural" creatures. To that extent, the context of what's natural and what's unnatural would be based on the intent of that character class -- which as far as I can tell is to limit the transformation to real world animals.

That's really the only answer for this. However, using the druid as a yardstick for what is and isn't natural has massive ramifications for world building that doesn't fit with established D&D rules. For example, you'd think the druid would be an enemy of everything unnatural but we don't see them trying to exterminate all owlbears, centaurs, griffons, pegasus, sphinxes, etc.

For example, in Mazes & Minotaurs the monster type has a purpose in the setting. Monsters are more difficult for beastmasters to tame, give more XP and honor when you kill them, and are generally implied to be more than simply regular animals with some fantastical abilities. (To my frustration, I can't find anywhere in the book where it defines what a "monster" actually is.)

Quote from: Bren;1123931Thanks for the clarification. I use a simpler rationale. Giants look like they do because - myth.

That's an interesting criterion. Myth and fairytale has some very interesting depictions of giants that you might not think are giants.

In Greek myth, Typhon is a giant with snakes for fingers and other fantastical features.

In Norse myth, several jotun appear in the forms of giant or otherwise fantastical animals: a giant eagle, a giant wolf, a giant snake, and a horse with eight legs. In fact, the word "jotun" may not necessarily translate to giant as several jotun weren't any bigger than the aesir or vanir.

For that matter, giants in myth and fairytale aren't inconvenienced by their apparent size when it comes to interacting with things smaller than them. Like standing in a hall that is sized for humans, or having sex with smaller people, or holding cities in their teeth.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1123932Uh huh. That's not the logic D&D uses.

I didn't even imply, much less say, that it was.

QuoteIn any case, why would hybrids be classified by the in-game law of physics as [monstrosities] or whatever rather than the type of their parents? Why is a griffon or centaur a monstrosity, but a half-elf, half-orc, tressym, cranium rat, etc isn't?

I said nothing about monstrosities. And hybrid is not a class, order, family, genus, or species. I don't consider griffons and centaurs hybrids since they don't follow the definition I gave for hybridization.

Last time I GMed a setting with griffons and centaurs in it, griffons were their own species and centaurs (like minotaurs and a few others) were loosely grouped as beastmen due (I think) to having both the beast rune and the man rune.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1123935That's an interesting criterion.

It works for me as an explanation for why giants' legs don't break and collapse under their own weight and has the virtue of being uncluttered with unessential verbiage.

Quote from: Bren;1123958I didn't even imply, much less say, that it was.

I said nothing about monstrosities. And hybrid is not a class, order, family, genus, or species. I don't consider griffons and centaurs hybrids since they don't follow the definition I gave for hybridization.

I thought we were discussing this with regard to D&D's taxonomy mechanic? Did I get confused somewhere?

Quote from: Bren;1123958Last time I GMed a setting with griffons and centaurs in it, griffons were their own species and centaurs (like minotaurs and a few others) were loosely grouped as beastmen due (I think) to having both the beast rune and the man rune.

That's a way clearer definition than D&D. You're talking about Glorantha, right? I have no familiarity with that setting.

Quote from: Bren;1123958It works for me as an explanation for why giants' legs don't break and collapse under their own weight and has the virtue of being uncluttered with unessential verbiage.

I didn't think the square-cube law applied to fantasyland anyway, since it runs on magic and the anthropic principle rather than real world physics. Glorantha is a good example, no?

Anyway, I expanded [giant] to include non-humanoid giants and giant animals too. The logic here is than giants (or titans, vanir, jotun, asura, wechuge, whatever you want to call them, etc) are the primordial precursors to and exemplars of men and animals. The first children of the primordial deities, somewhere between mortal and divine. Most of them were banished, imprisoned, or otherwise lost their dominion over the world in ancient times. Some of them still live on Earth, and are responsible for natural disasters.

Those who live in the Underworld (named orcneas, oni, wechuge, preta, etc) may be able to possess the bodies of mortals, especially those who break taboos against cannibalism. Hence why they are also called ogres, after the chthonic god/demon Orcus ("oath").

It's still a work in progress, but the idea is to loosely encompass the archetypes spread across world mythology so that it's all immediately recognizable. You'd be surprised by how many archetypes are shared between vastly separated cultures.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1123959I thought we were discussing this with regard to D&D's taxonomy mechanic? Did I get confused somewhere?

A number of settings have been discussed in this thread, not just D&D. For example you brought up, "settings like Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Dragon Prince" which you placed in contrast to D&D.

QuoteThat's a way clearer definition than D&D. You're talking about Glorantha, right? I have no familiarity with that setting.

Yes. It's the first example (so far as I know) of a published setting that uses mythological logic in defining the setting. For example, the world is not a sphere but a lozenge floating on a sea.

QuoteI didn't think the square-cube law applied to fantasyland anyway, since it runs on magic and the anthropic principle rather than real world physics. Glorantha is a good example, no?

Sometimes and in part depending on the system. The Runequest system is pretty simulationist. For example, unlike D&D damage bonus is based on Strength+Size not Strength alone and hit points are based on Constitution+Size so larger characters do more damage and can absorb more damage than smaller creatures. And giants really are gigantic. A small giant might be 10 meters tall. A large one the size of a mountain.