This is partly me just being a pedant, but not without good reason ... one of the things I love about complex games is they get people to exercise their brains, and in which regard I think it's important they use language correctly.
Zoological taxonomy does not go: domain kingdom phylum class order family genus species race ... that last one is a human construct to differentiate between what is actually mostly cultural ( and neither consistently or reliably genetic ) differences within a single species.
So with that in mind, I think I'd like to see ( though this is less about the presentation via the website & tools, and more about the content itself ) a better D&D specific zoological taxonomy developed to cope with how biology works between realms, planes, dimensions etc. ... because I go to the "races" page, and what I see are arguably different species, with only a few different "breeds" that could be related species.
I'd love to see D&D help educate people that "race" is about cultural brainwashing NOT biology ( and certainly not science ), if anything it's a political distinction, not a biological one.
[ EDIT ] FROM MY REPLY TO MATEOINC BELOW:
The D&D world requires its own taxonomy, and it should begin from the one we know and be modified from there.
Domain in the real world refers to a foundational space of archaia vs. eukaryotes vs. prokaryotes ... but in D&D I think it worthy for us to consider the origins of protocellular life when taking into account magic, elemental planes, and other realms of existence ... having done this, the rest of the taxonomy could remain largely unchanged, but when you get to the species end, here's how I think it should go:
GENUS: things that can interbreed but may not necessarily have fertile offspring
SPECIES: things that can interbreed with likely fertile offspring
BREED: things that have distinctive and common characteristics within a species ( eg: skin tone, bone structure etc. )
RACE: political & cultural affiliations and membership
Biology undergrad here. Considering there is interbreeding with fertiles descendants, at least elves, humans and orcs are races or breeds (not sure about English, but in Spanish they are synonims), not species, just like dogs (And depending on authors I think there is interbreeding across a broader range of races). Also, using these concepts with real-world meaning assumes real world biology, which assumes real world chemistry, which assumes real world physics, but there is magic in DnD, so it's not a good idea to apply those terms with the same exact meaning.
I think they should start from the same root meaning, and the introduction of magic doesn't give cause to change the meaning of species.
The D&D world requires its own taxonomy, and it should begin from the one we know and be modified from there.
Domain in the real world refers to a foundational space of archaia vs. eukaryotes vs. prokaryotes ... but in D&D I think it worthy for us to consider the origins of protocellular life when taking into account magic, elemental planes, and other realms of existence ... having done this, the rest of the taxonomy could remain largely unchanged, but when you get to the species end, here's how I think it should go:
GENUS: things that can interbreed but may not necessarily have fertile offspring
SPECIES: things that can interbreed with likely fertile offspring
BREED: things that have distinctive and common characteristics within a species ( eg: skin tone, eye/hair colour, bone structure etc. )
RACE: political & cultural affiliations and membership
I don't see how your family (or nutrition, chemistry and anatomy) has anything to do with what you know regarding taxonomy, but anyways, my point was that a fantasy world might as well be made of solid non-atomic matter, and there could be no evolution (all races created in their current state) because it is fantasy, so there is no need for a setting to specify all this stuff (though it might benefit from it if done correctly). And there is no such thing as "the D&D world", there are settings, which can vary according to the DM, even popular ones vary from table to table, like the actual standard Forgotten Realms. Heck, in a fantasy world there could easily be no microorganisms, most diseases being akin to curses.
It's all down to around 50 years of the word "Race" being used by pretty much every fantasy and sci-fi role-play game, to define the different creatures that the player can choose their character to be.
On the most part, role-play game designers aren't experts in a variety of scientific fields and are more concerned with using words that they believe their audience will understand - in this respect, almost every time they're going to use the word "race" just because every other roleplay game has and everyone knows what the designer means.
Yes, this is what we need. A chapter all about taxonomy. Because that's what I play D&D for, a biology lesson. /s
The homebrew I'm running has Humans about able to mate and produce offspring with just about anything. Given that the ability to reproduce is a hall mark of speciation how then would you classify that? Why even bother? I mean unless you're grouped with a group of biology grad students or researchers, what's the point? How does that add to the system in a meaningful way?
I find it funny, I had the same thought when I first picked up the PHB, because I had zero exposure to tabletop RPG's before a few months ago, I was like. "hmm, what do they mean, race? aren't these all different species with races all their own?" I mean shouldn't all the variants be races of species instead of variants of a race? (marine biology major over here!)
However, I now think it is important to actually call them races for a few reasons. First, it isn't incorrect to call them races, rather than species. Not all A's are B's and all that logic. Secondly, the term race has implications with us, the players that I think need to be preserved in the game aside from it being the common terminology in RPG's. The implication for the word species does not offer a mindset of equality on the playing field, but instead i tend to think of an evolutionary chain, or better yet the food chain. Race is indeed a social construct that implies a cultural difference more so than biological. From my experience with this game, the species I'm playing has far less significance than the race I'm playing. Besides that, all the characters could very well be the same species with very different breeds or races, after all. However, the term race generally is able to take all of that into account as a single concept rather than having it broken down to the genus. For role-playing, this is much easier to handle and improvise, as much of the game-play requires.
If you were so inclined, you could write a fan-made taxonomy of the world. I would be very interested in that as a supplement to official materials, as I'm sure many lore-heavy GM's would be as well. But for official releases for general game players, let's let science be science and games be make-believe.
I'm 46 and I was around back when D&D started, ano it used to teach so much good stuff in the original books, where Gygax had drawn diagrams that showed how he thought about a lot of things, and had actually rationalised a science behind things.
But hey if the new breed of players want to keep devolving the game and losing some of the best aspects of what it once had, I guess that explains the direction it has taken.
I think I'd rather start my own game from scratch ... I have not liked the direction D&D has been headed for many years, because it's just catering to people's laziness and fragile egos that need propping up, much like the online games of the genre that went downhill for the same reasons.
I don't know what you mean about others egos being propped up, but I'm assuming that's from your longer experience with the game? I've only experienced 5th edition so I can't speak to other differences if that's what you're drawing on. I can say that I love the customization ability I have over the world and all inside it though. You could create an accurate Taxonomy if you wanted, and i'm sure others would appreciate it. But I don't think that added complexity would add enough interesting detail to be worth it for most players. But that would depend on what you want your game to be about. For realism, probably worth adding all that. For simple fun for busy adults with kids, families, jobs, school, or etc... depending on the group, the detail and time commitments to learn all the detail may detract from the fun so best to leave it out unless needed for some reason. On the other hand, for people familiar with the real information, that may be even more distracting to have it be wrong so maybe it is actually worth it to amend it in your games. It really seems to depend on your group gaming preference.
It's interesting getting another perspective on the current D&D development trends, since the majority of opinions I saw as I learned about the game were leaning very positively towards these new changes.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Experience: 5e Only - Playing, DM, world building.
DM for Home-brew campaign based on Forgotten Realms lore. 5 player. Also play in party of 8.
What I mean about the ego comment is that ( using WoW as an example, but I see the same pattern happening in D&D ) ... Blizzard missed their opportunity to evolve WoW in a far better direction, because they catered to this lowest common denominator of people's egos. The game has become about getting "gear sets", and levelling up as fast as you can.
i played wow in the early days, and I was desperately hoping to see certain things develop, and I suggested such ideas in the forums, but the only thing anyone was interested in was making the game easier, faster, and thus ( to me ) more boring ... I wanted the game to be harder, and I wanted it to force people to actually THINK, but instead you can just buy-in to a high level character with all the best gear, and the personality of the players is often annoying to say the least ... I mean, I understand that a lot of them are just kids, so I'm not expecting adult behaviour, but for f*cks sake these kids ( and many of the adults ) are utterly disgusting in their behaviour, and they remind me of a fantasy game version of that Wikileaks collateral damage video.
D&D is ( to some degree ) heading in the same direction with all this stuff about gear sets, making things easier, and catering to the lowest common denominator ... which in turn makes the game more boring. What happened to the role playing aspect? What happened to the philosophy maths and science on which the game was originally based? I can applaud SOME of the changes, but they're poorly implemented, they are from a systems perspective utterly unimaginative, and I just weep at the dumbing down of everything.
Gary Gygax had incorporated some amazing ( from the perspective of a kid to whom the information would be new ) graphs explaining probability curves, his diagrams of the various planes of existence, of the character alignment spectrum, etc. ... it was all great stuff ... but instead of expanding on it, instead of deepening it, it's been dumbed down or scrapped in many cases, and I wholly disagree with this move.
When I think of the direction I'd have taken D&D had I been amongst the owners of the rights, it looks like a very ( vastly ) different game, and itjust seems that many people in the D&D community are not interested in that direction, but unfortunately their reasoning is flawed, and I think they'd prefer the direction I propose if they actually saw it working, but they they won't support it to see it working ... hence the statement about starting from scratch with a new game.
I love D&D, I'm just not a fan of the way it's heading, because I think that's a lazy and unimaginative direction.
I loved all those charts and graphs in 1st edition AD&D because it was all new and amazing to me - they gave me a lot of understanding of how a game could work.
Here's the thing though - they don't add to the story-telling of the game and experience tells me that they actually prevented it at times, disrupting the flow of the game, while people checked through the books to work something out.
The simpler a tabletop roleplay game is, the more the DM & players must rely on roleplay, rather than rolling dice.
One of my favourite tabletop RPGs of all time is Amber, which is a diceless system, with characters having some very basic stats to serve as comparison between them. Massively complex gameworld.
D&D isn't World of Warcraft and they are very much different things.
I mean, I really don't "care" to a certain extent although I have used the argument before. Back in 3rd edition when Dwarf were naturally Fighters and Elves were naturally Wizards, I thought was incredibly stupid. And told my GM the rule is dumb, because you can't say ____ people are naturally good at _____ thing.
As for the point about Half-Elves and Half-Orcs, I've always assumed they are mules. Genetically infertile as a group.
A Donkey (Equus asinus) and a Horse (Equus caballus) can breed and it creates a creature that is neither Donkey nor Horse, but it's not a "species" because the ability to breed is a requirement of a "species". Keep in mind these terms are all diegetic in a certain way.
That said you can always make a Wizard that's trying to create a taxonomy of creatures, and figure out exactly what physiologically make a Goblin, Hobgoblin, and Orc different...
I mean, I really don't "care" to a certain extent although I have used the argument before. Back in 3rd edition when Dwarf were naturally Fighters and Elves were naturally Wizards, I thought was incredibly stupid. And told my GM the rule is dumb, because you can't say ____ people are naturally good at _____ thing.
As for the point about Half-Elves and Half-Orcs, I've always assumed they are mules. Genetically infertile as a group.
A Donkey (Equus asinus) and a Horse (Equus caballus) can breed and it creates a creature that is neither Donkey nor Horse, but it's not a "species" because the ability to breed is a requirement of a "species". Keep in mind these terms are all diegetic in a certain way.
That said you can always make a Wizard that's trying to create a taxonomy of creatures, and figure out exactly what physiologically make a Goblin, Hobgoblin, and Orc different...
You'd probably be a Necromancer.
I mean, if whether half-somethings can reproduce depends on the author/DM I don't think there's enough information to classify them universally. And I'm not against classifying them, just not as part of the base game/setting, since it's not made for that.
Speaking as a biologist. The big difference between race (or breed or anything like that) and species is weather they can reproduce with viable off-spring. Since there are Half-Elves & Half-Orcs which can have children they can't be seen as different species Tiefling are in a similar boat. Dwarves don't have any half-dwarves at this stage but in past editions there have been half-dwarves. So only Halfings & Gnomes can really be seen as a different species.
I agree with you that there were issues with the earlier editions of the game, but the solution was not to remove these things, the solution was to better help people use them OR ignore them by choice ... and I disagree they got in the way of story telling, because I used them, and I found them to be some of the most useful things.
The problems of complexity are not solved by dumbing down, they're solved by making a simple user interface to the complexity, but the complexity itself stays ... that's a foundational concept of design called "encapsulation" ( or abstraction, depending on your perspective ) ... and the problem with commercial projects is typically that management and accounting ( the purse string holders ) are typically not very bright, scientifically illiterate, greedy and lazy, so when they hear the complaints, they go for the easiest and dumbest solution, which is also the worst.
Agreed for the most part ... I guess there needs to be both core rules AND background information, as there was with one of the earlier DMG editions.
PERHAPS THE SOLUTION IS AS FOLLOWS:
There's core rules - as per my other post ( D&D tools-as-lore-books ) - and there's additional information that requires skills and location to find
A DM and players can create a campaign specific information set, which tracks the location of information and copies of information
Players can also add to this body of information via research, writing and other actions
Therefore such things as taxonomy of species could be something a DM has access to, and a player can get access to IF he/she has a character researching it ( or accidentally stumbles across it )
... thus the location of some information is no longer in the DMG but is cross campaign & campaign specific, depending on your role in the game ( DM vs. player ), and depending on the location and skills of your characters.
Mule giving birth. And fertile Hinny's have been documented. This is just inter-species hybridization and is fairly common. A completely fertile example would be Grey Wolf + Coyote = American Red Wolf.
This is partly me just being a pedant, but not without good reason ... one of the things I love about complex games is they get people to exercise their brains, and in which regard I think it's important they use language correctly.
Zoological taxonomy does not go: domain kingdom phylum class order family genus species race ... that last one is a human construct to differentiate between what is actually mostly cultural ( and neither consistently or reliably genetic ) differences within a single species.
So with that in mind, I think I'd like to see ( though this is less about the presentation via the website & tools, and more about the content itself ) a better D&D specific zoological taxonomy developed to cope with how biology works between realms, planes, dimensions etc. ... because I go to the "races" page, and what I see are arguably different species, with only a few different "breeds" that could be related species.
I'd love to see D&D help educate people that "race" is about cultural brainwashing NOT biology ( and certainly not science ), if anything it's a political distinction, not a biological one.
[ EDIT ] FROM MY REPLY TO MATEOINC BELOW:
The D&D world requires its own taxonomy, and it should begin from the one we know and be modified from there.
Domain in the real world refers to a foundational space of archaia vs. eukaryotes vs. prokaryotes ... but in D&D I think it worthy for us to consider the origins of protocellular life when taking into account magic, elemental planes, and other realms of existence ... having done this, the rest of the taxonomy could remain largely unchanged, but when you get to the species end, here's how I think it should go:
Biology undergrad here. Considering there is interbreeding with fertiles descendants, at least elves, humans and orcs are races or breeds (not sure about English, but in Spanish they are synonims), not species, just like dogs (And depending on authors I think there is interbreeding across a broader range of races). Also, using these concepts with real-world meaning assumes real world biology, which assumes real world chemistry, which assumes real world physics, but there is magic in DnD, so it's not a good idea to apply those terms with the same exact meaning.
I think they should start from the same root meaning, and the introduction of magic doesn't give cause to change the meaning of species.
The D&D world requires its own taxonomy, and it should begin from the one we know and be modified from there.
Domain in the real world refers to a foundational space of archaia vs. eukaryotes vs. prokaryotes ... but in D&D I think it worthy for us to consider the origins of protocellular life when taking into account magic, elemental planes, and other realms of existence ... having done this, the rest of the taxonomy could remain largely unchanged, but when you get to the species end, here's how I think it should go:
By the way:
So yeah, I'm not just making this up 😉
I don't see how your family (or nutrition, chemistry and anatomy) has anything to do with what you know regarding taxonomy, but anyways, my point was that a fantasy world might as well be made of solid non-atomic matter, and there could be no evolution (all races created in their current state) because it is fantasy, so there is no need for a setting to specify all this stuff (though it might benefit from it if done correctly). And there is no such thing as "the D&D world", there are settings, which can vary according to the DM, even popular ones vary from table to table, like the actual standard Forgotten Realms. Heck, in a fantasy world there could easily be no microorganisms, most diseases being akin to curses.
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D&D Beyond FoundersIt's all down to around 50 years of the word "Race" being used by pretty much every fantasy and sci-fi role-play game, to define the different creatures that the player can choose their character to be.
On the most part, role-play game designers aren't experts in a variety of scientific fields and are more concerned with using words that they believe their audience will understand - in this respect, almost every time they're going to use the word "race" just because every other roleplay game has and everyone knows what the designer means.
Pun-loving nerd | Faith Elisabeth Lilley | She/Her/Hers | Profile art by Becca Golins
If you need help with homebrew, please post on the homebrew forums, where multiple staff and moderators can read your post and help you!
"We got this, no problem! I'll take the twenty on the left - you guys handle the one on the right!"🔊
Yes, this is what we need. A chapter all about taxonomy. Because that's what I play D&D for, a biology lesson. /s
The homebrew I'm running has Humans about able to mate and produce offspring with just about anything. Given that the ability to reproduce is a hall mark of speciation how then would you classify that? Why even bother? I mean unless you're grouped with a group of biology grad students or researchers, what's the point? How does that add to the system in a meaningful way?
Also
So I'm not just making this up.
I find it funny, I had the same thought when I first picked up the PHB, because I had zero exposure to tabletop RPG's before a few months ago, I was like. "hmm, what do they mean, race? aren't these all different species with races all their own?" I mean shouldn't all the variants be races of species instead of variants of a race? (marine biology major over here!)
However, I now think it is important to actually call them races for a few reasons. First, it isn't incorrect to call them races, rather than species. Not all A's are B's and all that logic. Secondly, the term race has implications with us, the players that I think need to be preserved in the game aside from it being the common terminology in RPG's. The implication for the word species does not offer a mindset of equality on the playing field, but instead i tend to think of an evolutionary chain, or better yet the food chain. Race is indeed a social construct that implies a cultural difference more so than biological. From my experience with this game, the species I'm playing has far less significance than the race I'm playing. Besides that, all the characters could very well be the same species with very different breeds or races, after all. However, the term race generally is able to take all of that into account as a single concept rather than having it broken down to the genus. For role-playing, this is much easier to handle and improvise, as much of the game-play requires.
If you were so inclined, you could write a fan-made taxonomy of the world. I would be very interested in that as a supplement to official materials, as I'm sure many lore-heavy GM's would be as well. But for official releases for general game players, let's let science be science and games be make-believe.
Experience: 5e Only - Playing, DM, world building.DM for Home-brew campaign based on Forgotten Realms lore. 5 player. Also play in party of 8.I'm 46 and I was around back when D&D started, ano it used to teach so much good stuff in the original books, where Gygax had drawn diagrams that showed how he thought about a lot of things, and had actually rationalised a science behind things.
But hey if the new breed of players want to keep devolving the game and losing some of the best aspects of what it once had, I guess that explains the direction it has taken.
I think I'd rather start my own game from scratch ... I have not liked the direction D&D has been headed for many years, because it's just catering to people's laziness and fragile egos that need propping up, much like the online games of the genre that went downhill for the same reasons.
I don't know what you mean about others egos being propped up, but I'm assuming that's from your longer experience with the game? I've only experienced 5th edition so I can't speak to other differences if that's what you're drawing on. I can say that I love the customization ability I have over the world and all inside it though. You could create an accurate Taxonomy if you wanted, and i'm sure others would appreciate it. But I don't think that added complexity would add enough interesting detail to be worth it for most players. But that would depend on what you want your game to be about. For realism, probably worth adding all that. For simple fun for busy adults with kids, families, jobs, school, or etc... depending on the group, the detail and time commitments to learn all the detail may detract from the fun so best to leave it out unless needed for some reason. On the other hand, for people familiar with the real information, that may be even more distracting to have it be wrong so maybe it is actually worth it to amend it in your games. It really seems to depend on your group gaming preference.
It's interesting getting another perspective on the current D&D development trends, since the majority of opinions I saw as I learned about the game were leaning very positively towards these new changes.
Experience: 5e Only - Playing, DM, world building.DM for Home-brew campaign based on Forgotten Realms lore. 5 player. Also play in party of 8.What I mean about the ego comment is that ( using WoW as an example, but I see the same pattern happening in D&D ) ... Blizzard missed their opportunity to evolve WoW in a far better direction, because they catered to this lowest common denominator of people's egos. The game has become about getting "gear sets", and levelling up as fast as you can.
i played wow in the early days, and I was desperately hoping to see certain things develop, and I suggested such ideas in the forums, but the only thing anyone was interested in was making the game easier, faster, and thus ( to me ) more boring ... I wanted the game to be harder, and I wanted it to force people to actually THINK, but instead you can just buy-in to a high level character with all the best gear, and the personality of the players is often annoying to say the least ... I mean, I understand that a lot of them are just kids, so I'm not expecting adult behaviour, but for f*cks sake these kids ( and many of the adults ) are utterly disgusting in their behaviour, and they remind me of a fantasy game version of that Wikileaks collateral damage video.
D&D is ( to some degree ) heading in the same direction with all this stuff about gear sets, making things easier, and catering to the lowest common denominator ... which in turn makes the game more boring. What happened to the role playing aspect? What happened to the philosophy maths and science on which the game was originally based? I can applaud SOME of the changes, but they're poorly implemented, they are from a systems perspective utterly unimaginative, and I just weep at the dumbing down of everything.
Gary Gygax had incorporated some amazing ( from the perspective of a kid to whom the information would be new ) graphs explaining probability curves, his diagrams of the various planes of existence, of the character alignment spectrum, etc. ... it was all great stuff ... but instead of expanding on it, instead of deepening it, it's been dumbed down or scrapped in many cases, and I wholly disagree with this move.
When I think of the direction I'd have taken D&D had I been amongst the owners of the rights, it looks like a very ( vastly ) different game, and itjust seems that many people in the D&D community are not interested in that direction, but unfortunately their reasoning is flawed, and I think they'd prefer the direction I propose if they actually saw it working, but they they won't support it to see it working ... hence the statement about starting from scratch with a new game.
I love D&D, I'm just not a fan of the way it's heading, because I think that's a lazy and unimaginative direction.
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D&D Beyond FoundersI'm 45, so you have a year on me. ;)
I loved all those charts and graphs in 1st edition AD&D because it was all new and amazing to me - they gave me a lot of understanding of how a game could work.
Here's the thing though - they don't add to the story-telling of the game and experience tells me that they actually prevented it at times, disrupting the flow of the game, while people checked through the books to work something out.
The simpler a tabletop roleplay game is, the more the DM & players must rely on roleplay, rather than rolling dice.
One of my favourite tabletop RPGs of all time is Amber, which is a diceless system, with characters having some very basic stats to serve as comparison between them. Massively complex gameworld.
D&D isn't World of Warcraft and they are very much different things.
Pun-loving nerd | Faith Elisabeth Lilley | She/Her/Hers | Profile art by Becca Golins
If you need help with homebrew, please post on the homebrew forums, where multiple staff and moderators can read your post and help you!
"We got this, no problem! I'll take the twenty on the left - you guys handle the one on the right!"🔊
mateoinc, I have to say I'm with GalacticPresident.
I mean, I really don't "care" to a certain extent although I have used the argument before. Back in 3rd edition when Dwarf were naturally Fighters and Elves were naturally Wizards, I thought was incredibly stupid. And told my GM the rule is dumb, because you can't say ____ people are naturally good at _____ thing.
As for the point about Half-Elves and Half-Orcs, I've always assumed they are mules. Genetically infertile as a group.
A Donkey (Equus asinus) and a Horse (Equus caballus) can breed and it creates a creature that is neither Donkey nor Horse, but it's not a "species" because the ability to breed is a requirement of a "species". Keep in mind these terms are all diegetic in a certain way.
That said you can always make a Wizard that's trying to create a taxonomy of creatures, and figure out exactly what physiologically make a Goblin, Hobgoblin, and Orc different...
You'd probably be a Necromancer.
Speaking as a biologist. The big difference between race (or breed or anything like that) and species is weather they can reproduce with viable off-spring. Since there are Half-Elves & Half-Orcs which can have children they can't be seen as different species Tiefling are in a similar boat. Dwarves don't have any half-dwarves at this stage but in past editions there have been half-dwarves. So only Halfings & Gnomes can really be seen as a different species.
I agree with you that there were issues with the earlier editions of the game, but the solution was not to remove these things, the solution was to better help people use them OR ignore them by choice ... and I disagree they got in the way of story telling, because I used them, and I found them to be some of the most useful things.
The problems of complexity are not solved by dumbing down, they're solved by making a simple user interface to the complexity, but the complexity itself stays ... that's a foundational concept of design called "encapsulation" ( or abstraction, depending on your perspective ) ... and the problem with commercial projects is typically that management and accounting ( the purse string holders ) are typically not very bright, scientifically illiterate, greedy and lazy, so when they hear the complaints, they go for the easiest and dumbest solution, which is also the worst.
Agreed for the most part ... I guess there needs to be both core rules AND background information, as there was with one of the earlier DMG editions.
PERHAPS THE SOLUTION IS AS FOLLOWS:
... thus the location of some information is no longer in the DMG but is cross campaign & campaign specific, depending on your role in the game ( DM vs. player ), and depending on the location and skills of your characters.
Fair point, so therefore:
I like your criteria and definitions, but just pointing out that while rare, it does happen in the real world too.