ANyone else have "just a quick question" and then end up going down a rabbit hole that makes your "real fast thing" turn into a whole "now I have to learn a whole thing" deal just to make a dungeon?
No?
Just me?
No, it’s not just you.
Sposta’s right, it’s just you. Sorry
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"Come with me, and you'll be. in a world of pure imagination. Take a look, and you'll see, into your imagination. we'll begin, with a spin. traveling in a world of my creation. what we'll see will defy explanation!" ~Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
their is no light without dark. no calm without storm. no heroes without villains. I, unfortunately am the dark. I am the storm. I. Am. The. Villain (not really considering I'm a forever player and never get the chance to DM)
ANyone else have "just a quick question" and then end up going down a rabbit hole that makes your "real fast thing" turn into a whole "now I have to learn a whole thing" deal just to make a dungeon?
No?
Just me?
It's just you...
and a lot of other folks.
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"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
So, as follow up to the above, I just determined that a game standard red dragon would need a territory large enough to provide roughly 5.2 million pounds of biomass a year for it to eat, assuming it only eats about 20k pounds of biomass a week.
A Game standard red dragon is roughly the equivalent of two elephants, which following the cube law would be needing to about a fifth its body weight a day in biomass.
Biomass is the total of nutritious food it needs to consume.
That's basically a decent sized Bull a day. Call it a half dozen barbarians a day.
Now, the worst part is that I figured this out not as part of my prior question, but I could figure it out because of my prior question, which was all about coming up with a decent set of random encounter tables for each biome, so I could start making determinations of what the stats for certain critters would be (based on the biome's general occupancy) and what they would be in the anticipated simplified ecology of the game that is messed with by the presence of monsters.
No, the dragon question was a reddit thing.
Now, note that I am the gal who is always saying that "reality doesn't count"...
... but I do like to have a good understanding of things so they feel 'right". Kinda strange to encounter a bear in the swamp or an alligator in an alpine forest.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
ANyone else have "just a quick question" and then end up going down a rabbit hole that makes your "real fast thing" turn into a whole "now I have to learn a whole thing" deal just to make a dungeon?
No?
Just me?
That happened to me once.
i believe it was about the accurate wingspan and weight of a dragon twice as tall as Smaug.
ANyone else have "just a quick question" and then end up going down a rabbit hole that makes your "real fast thing" turn into a whole "now I have to learn a whole thing" deal just to make a dungeon?
No?
Just me?
That's the most AEDorsay thing I've ever heard. ;)
It doesn't happen to me for D&D adventures but does for history projects and stuff, so I definitely see how it could occur while building an adventure.
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He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
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Now, do your calculations include the possiof a dungeon’s occupants eating each other and reproducing to maintain a sort of homeostasis?
`So, yes...
They presume that the Dragon is not the only top chain predator -- merely that it is the largest in its territory. Hence why I figured out that there needed to be 5.2 million pounds of biomass available in its territory -- that enables the structure of the web to support the amount of food required by such a being.
Now, the real question is what does a dragon eat. If dragons are carnivorous, the math gets a little rough -- but it always functions from the position of the dragon being the highest position in the food chain within its territory. If dragons are herbivorous, things shift a great deal, as the Dragon is then shifted to a different location and position -- and suddenly we need to start looking at what does dragon poop do in a soil system!
I presumed that they are omnivorous - they eat a LOT of food, compared to other beings, and while omnivores generally only make up less than 5% of a biome's species, they also are able to compete more efficiently and reduce the impact on the consumer side of the ecological system by combining both consumers and producers.
Take the largest living land animal -- African Bull Elephant. Big suckers eat 375 pounds a day. Cross referencing that with the food of other herbivorous creatures and then a selection of carnivores (all large size), I came up with a gamified figure of a being needs to eat ten times its weight in a year in biomass (for omnivores -- it is 12% for herbivores, and 7% for carnivores).
Dragons, per the MM, are about twice the size of an African Bull Elephant, and the cube square rule for mass/size would apply when determining the rough weight, so i just used the basic calc there. So, around 36 to 40k pounds for a Red Dragon. Cut out a fifth for bone, and that's a LOT of biomass to deal with. But 360,000 pounds of biomass is only about a thousand pounds a week, and dragon's are active predators, who fly, hence the massive jump given the size and kcal needed to move such a thing through the air.
Something this big would impact at about 20% of the total biomass (33% if carnivorous, 12.5% if herbivorous), based on overall existing systems, so that's where you get the yearly point of 5.1 million. That also tells me that a Dragon entering that territory would be an immense burden -- but the next question is how much area is needed to support that amount of biomass?
It is shockingly small. A temperate forest generates 256,000 pounds of biomass (including insects and plants) per square foot, or 713,687,000,000,000,000 pounds per square mile. For an Apex A-O predator, only about 10% of that is needed at most, so the territory of a dragon can be as small as a square mile without any issues. If they are Omnivorous. Carnivorous changes things dramatically, as we then have to factor in size, and that means that something this size, focused mostly on temperate grasslands and forests for a hunting space (because of the need for ungulates and related groups), we get about 10 to 20 square miles per beasty, and that's when we run i to issues of chain breakdown should an outside force alter the ecological balance.
Edit: The reason it becomes so shocking is that without the 80% of biomass from plants, you only have about 4.25% of biomass from cattle and wild animals, as a total, so you need a much larger chunk of space that such prey can survive on. Hence why I shifted Dragon to an omnivorous position -- from an evolutionary standpoint, for an animal that active with that much mass, it would make sense that they would be shifting to survive on more than a portion of 4.5% of biomass, they would need a larger capacity -- and that's before we get to brain size and intelligence as additional factors, which burn through protein and fats (two things hard to obtain in quantity from herbaceous material).
Then I had to determine what can support that kind of massive consumption, while also supporting a broader ecosystem around it (since if you don't, everything dies) and that's how I got the figure of 5.2 million pounds of biomass -- to support a broad ranging ecosystem beneath an A-O predator, you still have to have the appropriate steps down.
Now, the reason it sucked me into a maelstrom of learning is that my models in my head were still sorta stuck in some older format stuff -- the pyramid basis, essentially, which doesn't always accurately reflect actual world systems and makes computer modeling get pissy. So, I learned a whole new layer to add to my collection of knowledge about biological systems on a large scale (regional, continental, planetary) just so I could make better encounter tables.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
And all of that led to me creating a list of general biomass structures by category of thing, which, in turn, gives me a rough idea of the overall population in comparison, lol.
I started with Earth, then adjusted it slightly for the changes around Wyrlde in relation to having to include things like dragons and slimes and mimics and the assorted other whatnots and wherefores.
Was a surprise to realize there were so many of my Trolls out there, and how few of the native beings (dragons and related creatures) there are. May flip that about down the road.
As a note, this is very close to Earth in terms of overall breakdown. Changes were made strictly to account for the addition of entire new critter groups. More plants, added in an entire chain based off of plankton types. Faunalia and Floralia are terms I use for "monster" animals and plants of a more "regular kind" -- jackalopes and almiraz, awakened shrubs and the like. Monster is a the term for all the stuff that eats but really is pure ick -- Beholders, etc. I did not include planar beings, though.
Surprisingly, part of the goal here is to simplify an ecological system structure so that it can be gamified more easily. Life-webs for each of several biomes are an extremely effective way to determine what all is encountered and what may be attracted, distracted, or detracted from any violent encounter. Since one can encounter animals that are considered North American in the same places one encounters animals that are considered Asian or African, if the biome is the same, it becomes a kind of key thing to be sure that such is able to be workable when doing a world that can change as a result of player actions.
And now you have an idea of how serious I take worldbuilding (excessively, without limitation, fanatically) despite building my worlds off stuff like a throwaway line in a movie, lol.
I do draw the line at astrophysics, though. I am not that gifted mathematically.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Now, do your calculations include the possiof a dungeon’s occupants eating each other and reproducing to maintain a sort of homeostasis?
`So, yes...
They presume that the Dragon is not the only top chain predator -- merely that it is the largest in its territory. Hence why I figured out that there needed to be 5.2 million pounds of biomass available in its territory -- that enables the structure of the web to support the amount of food required by such a being.
Now, the real question is what does a dragon eat. If dragons are carnivorous, the math gets a little rough -- but it always functions from the position of the dragon being the highest position in the food chain within its territory. If dragons are herbivorous, things shift a great deal, as the Dragon is then shifted to a different location and position -- and suddenly we need to start looking at what does dragon poop do in a soil system!
I presumed that they are omnivorous - they eat a LOT of food, compared to other beings, and while omnivores generally only make up less than 5% of a biome's species, they also are able to compete more efficiently and reduce the impact on the consumer side of the ecological system by combining both consumers and producers.
Take the largest living land animal -- African Bull Elephant. Big suckers eat 375 pounds a day. Cross referencing that with the food of other herbivorous creatures and then a selection of carnivores (all large size), I came up with a gamified figure of a being needs to eat ten times its weight in a year in biomass (for omnivores -- it is 12% for herbivores, and 7% for carnivores).
Dragons, per the MM, are about twice the size of an African Bull Elephant, and the cube square rule for mass/size would apply when determining the rough weight, so i just used the basic calc there. So, around 36 to 40k pounds for a Red Dragon. Cut out a fifth for bone, and that's a LOT of biomass to deal with. But 360,000 pounds of biomass is only about a thousand pounds a week, and dragon's are active predators, who fly, hence the massive jump given the size and kcal needed to move such a thing through the air.
Something this big would impact at about 20% of the total biomass (33% if carnivorous, 12.5% if herbivorous), based on overall existing systems, so that's where you get the yearly point of 5.1 million. That also tells me that a Dragon entering that territory would be an immense burden -- but the next question is how much area is needed to support that amount of biomass?
It is shockingly small. A temperate forest generates 256,000 pounds of biomass (including insects and plants) per square foot, or 713,687,000,000,000,000 pounds per square mile. For an Apex A-O predator, only about 10% of that is needed at most, so the territory of a dragon can be as small as a square mile without any issues. If they are Omnivorous. Carnivorous changes things dramatically, as we then have to factor in size, and that means that something this size, focused mostly on temperate grasslands and forests for a hunting space (because of the need for ungulates and related groups), we get about 10 to 20 square miles per beasty, and that's when we run i to issues of chain breakdown should an outside force alter the ecological balance.
Edit: The reason it becomes so shocking is that without the 80% of biomass from plants, you only have about 4.25% of biomass from cattle and wild animals, as a total, so you need a much larger chunk of space that such prey can survive on. Hence why I shifted Dragon to an omnivorous position -- from an evolutionary standpoint, for an animal that active with that much mass, it would make sense that they would be shifting to survive on more than a portion of 4.5% of biomass, they would need a larger capacity -- and that's before we get to brain size and intelligence as additional factors, which burn through protein and fats (two things hard to obtain in quantity from herbaceous material).
Then I had to determine what can support that kind of massive consumption, while also supporting a broader ecosystem around it (since if you don't, everything dies) and that's how I got the figure of 5.2 million pounds of biomass -- to support a broad ranging ecosystem beneath an A-O predator, you still have to have the appropriate steps down.
Now, the reason it sucked me into a maelstrom of learning is that my models in my head were still sorta stuck in some older format stuff -- the pyramid basis, essentially, which doesn't always accurately reflect actual world systems and makes computer modeling get pissy. So, I learned a whole new layer to add to my collection of knowledge about biological systems on a large scale (regional, continental, planetary) just so I could make better encounter tables.
Ya shouldn't have asked, huh?
Fascinating. Did you also look into the possibility that they might have much slower metabolic rates? That would reduce their necessary daily caloric intake. Like, for example, crocks, ‘gators, pythons, etc. only need to eat periodically, and bears can go months without food while hibernating, which dragons are known to do.
Also, I was always kinda enamored of the idea that dragons hoard because their diets, at least in part, consist of precious metals. Dragons hoard gold as a food source, like a pantry. They literally eat wealth. Had you considered that theory as well?
Now, do your calculations include the possiof a dungeon’s occupants eating each other and reproducing to maintain a sort of homeostasis?
`So, yes...
They presume that the Dragon is not the only top chain predator -- merely that it is the largest in its territory. Hence why I figured out that there needed to be 5.2 million pounds of biomass available in its territory -- that enables the structure of the web to support the amount of food required by such a being.
Now, the real question is what does a dragon eat. If dragons are carnivorous, the math gets a little rough -- but it always functions from the position of the dragon being the highest position in the food chain within its territory. If dragons are herbivorous, things shift a great deal, as the Dragon is then shifted to a different location and position -- and suddenly we need to start looking at what does dragon poop do in a soil system!
I presumed that they are omnivorous - they eat a LOT of food, compared to other beings, and while omnivores generally only make up less than 5% of a biome's species, they also are able to compete more efficiently and reduce the impact on the consumer side of the ecological system by combining both consumers and producers.
Take the largest living land animal -- African Bull Elephant. Big suckers eat 375 pounds a day. Cross referencing that with the food of other herbivorous creatures and then a selection of carnivores (all large size), I came up with a gamified figure of a being needs to eat ten times its weight in a year in biomass (for omnivores -- it is 12% for herbivores, and 7% for carnivores).
Dragons, per the MM, are about twice the size of an African Bull Elephant, and the cube square rule for mass/size would apply when determining the rough weight, so i just used the basic calc there. So, around 36 to 40k pounds for a Red Dragon. Cut out a fifth for bone, and that's a LOT of biomass to deal with. But 360,000 pounds of biomass is only about a thousand pounds a week, and dragon's are active predators, who fly, hence the massive jump given the size and kcal needed to move such a thing through the air.
Something this big would impact at about 20% of the total biomass (33% if carnivorous, 12.5% if herbivorous), based on overall existing systems, so that's where you get the yearly point of 5.1 million. That also tells me that a Dragon entering that territory would be an immense burden -- but the next question is how much area is needed to support that amount of biomass?
It is shockingly small. A temperate forest generates 256,000 pounds of biomass (including insects and plants) per square foot, or 713,687,000,000,000,000 pounds per square mile. For an Apex A-O predator, only about 10% of that is needed at most, so the territory of a dragon can be as small as a square mile without any issues. If they are Omnivorous. Carnivorous changes things dramatically, as we then have to factor in size, and that means that something this size, focused mostly on temperate grasslands and forests for a hunting space (because of the need for ungulates and related groups), we get about 10 to 20 square miles per beasty, and that's when we run i to issues of chain breakdown should an outside force alter the ecological balance.
Edit: The reason it becomes so shocking is that without the 80% of biomass from plants, you only have about 4.25% of biomass from cattle and wild animals, as a total, so you need a much larger chunk of space that such prey can survive on. Hence why I shifted Dragon to an omnivorous position -- from an evolutionary standpoint, for an animal that active with that much mass, it would make sense that they would be shifting to survive on more than a portion of 4.5% of biomass, they would need a larger capacity -- and that's before we get to brain size and intelligence as additional factors, which burn through protein and fats (two things hard to obtain in quantity from herbaceous material).
Then I had to determine what can support that kind of massive consumption, while also supporting a broader ecosystem around it (since if you don't, everything dies) and that's how I got the figure of 5.2 million pounds of biomass -- to support a broad ranging ecosystem beneath an A-O predator, you still have to have the appropriate steps down.
Now, the reason it sucked me into a maelstrom of learning is that my models in my head were still sorta stuck in some older format stuff -- the pyramid basis, essentially, which doesn't always accurately reflect actual world systems and makes computer modeling get pissy. So, I learned a whole new layer to add to my collection of knowledge about biological systems on a large scale (regional, continental, planetary) just so I could make better encounter tables.
Ya shouldn't have asked, huh?
Fascinating. Did you also look into the possibility that they might have much slower metabolic rates? That would reduce their necessary daily caloric intake. Like, for example, crocks, ‘gators, pythons, etc. only need to eat periodically, and bears can go months without food while hibernating, which dragons are known to do.
Also, I was always kinda enamored of the idea that dragons hoard because their diets, at least in part, consist of precious metals. Dragons hoard gold as a food source, like a pantry. They literally eat wealth. Had you considered that theory as well?
Well, for the most part I was trying to stick to the MM and MotM basis (don't have fizban), so for the general calculation I have to say no.
For my own dragons, though...
Yes. While my dragons are not quite as long lived, they have racial memory and are longer lived than any of the people, have slow metabolisms (with an "afterburner effect" I blatantly stole directly out of the Heorot series that means they also like it cold), and they require minerals such as copper, gold, platinum, titanium, iron, and other such things in order to maintain peak form.
Oddly enough, though, that isn't how their hoards work, though. That's more like a pantry or larder, lol. It actually feeds into their breath weapons, in part, though that may change since I am still restructuring them along the weird lines I have decided on (the eastern cycle approach). I know, for example, that Dragons go through stages of life, and that all dragons are female, male, and neither at one point -- and I also discovered, rather accidentally, that they are matriarchal. Tiamaris was one of the first two to witness the coming of people, and she was very hostile to them. Her partner, Bahal, took the opposite tack. So within the racial memory there exists both points of view.
Hoards I borrowed from Sagara's concept for her "human" dragons. More a conceptual thing, abstract, instead of a concrete, physical collection.
There is a secret thing I did on the website, lol, since the final 20th level adventure in the campaign is about dragons -- I told the story of the dragons very briefly, in small snippets -- and set them up as one for each year of the site's current incarnation (so 2018 to now), with one post on the first of january each year (backdating is awesome). That's how I learned about the dragons, lol -- by just writing it out and letting it come.
All told, they aren't even a full page, but there is a lot of information in there.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Omnivorous dragons means you can have them eating trees like celery. Which is fun.
It also means multiple stomachs, lol, so Mercer and CR would not approve.
I am totally broken up about it, as you can tell.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Omnivorous dragons means you can have them eating trees like celery. Which is fun.
It also means multiple stomachs, lol, so Mercer and CR would not approve.
I am totally broken up about it, as you can tell.
Why would it necessitate multiple stomachs? I eat celery, and I only got 1 stomach. At least, that is, I only got 1 stomach I know of.
Ah, but you do not eat trees, which ou systems cannot handle, and so yes, there would be an additional stomach (ruminants can have as many as five!) -- and if one is digesting metals and stones and such, that's an additional one as well (Dragon Gizzards!)
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
I'm fry, and I make doodles. That's why they call me FRY DOODLES. Also no pressure but check out my YouTube channel (Fry Doodles) Soli Deo Gloria(Sed servus eius crustulum vult) I'm a disabled, neurodivergent, artsy dumpster fire, and somewhat of a clown. But, I'm also god's favorite princess and the most interesting girl in the world. Crafter of Constellations, vocaloid enjoyer, waluigi’s #1 fan, space alien, your favorite pretty boy, and certified silly goose
Ah, but you do not eat trees, which ou systems cannot handle, and so yes, there would be an additional stomach (ruminants can have as many as five!) -- and if one is digesting metals and stones and such, that's an additional one as well (Dragon Gizzards!)
Huh.
What if a large portion of a dragon's hoard is just refined processed poop?
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"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
Ah, but you do not eat trees, which ou systems cannot handle, and so yes, there would be an additional stomach (ruminants can have as many as five!) -- and if one is digesting metals and stones and such, that's an additional one as well (Dragon Gizzards!)
Huh.
What if a large portion of a dragon's hoard is just refined processed poop?
Ah, but you do not eat trees, which ou systems cannot handle, and so yes, there would be an additional stomach (ruminants can have as many as five!) -- and if one is digesting metals and stones and such, that's an additional one as well (Dragon Gizzards!)
Huh.
What if a large portion of a dragon's hoard is just refined processed poop?
Where do you think the loose gemstones come from?
I wonder where the dragon hides the toilet, or if they just do it naturally.
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I'm fry, and I make doodles. That's why they call me FRY DOODLES. Also no pressure but check out my YouTube channel (Fry Doodles) Soli Deo Gloria(Sed servus eius crustulum vult) I'm a disabled, neurodivergent, artsy dumpster fire, and somewhat of a clown. But, I'm also god's favorite princess and the most interesting girl in the world. Crafter of Constellations, vocaloid enjoyer, waluigi’s #1 fan, space alien, your favorite pretty boy, and certified silly goose
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Sposta’s right, it’s just you. Sorry
"Come with me, and you'll be. in a world of pure imagination. Take a look, and you'll see, into your imagination. we'll begin, with a spin. traveling in a world of my creation. what we'll see will defy explanation!" ~Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
their is no light without dark. no calm without storm. no heroes without villains. I, unfortunately am the dark. I am the storm. I. Am. The. Villain (not really considering I'm a forever player and never get the chance to DM)
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It's just you...
and a lot of other folks.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
So, as follow up to the above, I just determined that a game standard red dragon would need a territory large enough to provide roughly 5.2 million pounds of biomass a year for it to eat, assuming it only eats about 20k pounds of biomass a week.
A Game standard red dragon is roughly the equivalent of two elephants, which following the cube law would be needing to about a fifth its body weight a day in biomass.
Biomass is the total of nutritious food it needs to consume.
That's basically a decent sized Bull a day. Call it a half dozen barbarians a day.
Now, the worst part is that I figured this out not as part of my prior question, but I could figure it out because of my prior question, which was all about coming up with a decent set of random encounter tables for each biome, so I could start making determinations of what the stats for certain critters would be (based on the biome's general occupancy) and what they would be in the anticipated simplified ecology of the game that is messed with by the presence of monsters.
No, the dragon question was a reddit thing.
Now, note that I am the gal who is always saying that "reality doesn't count"...
... but I do like to have a good understanding of things so they feel 'right". Kinda strange to encounter a bear in the swamp or an alligator in an alpine forest.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Now, do your calculations include the possiof a dungeon’s occupants eating each other and reproducing to maintain a sort of homeostasis?
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That happened to me once.
i believe it was about the accurate wingspan and weight of a dragon twice as tall as Smaug.
That's the most AEDorsay thing I've ever heard. ;)
It doesn't happen to me for D&D adventures but does for history projects and stuff, so I definitely see how it could occur while building an adventure.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.`So, yes...
They presume that the Dragon is not the only top chain predator -- merely that it is the largest in its territory. Hence why I figured out that there needed to be 5.2 million pounds of biomass available in its territory -- that enables the structure of the web to support the amount of food required by such a being.
Now, the real question is what does a dragon eat. If dragons are carnivorous, the math gets a little rough -- but it always functions from the position of the dragon being the highest position in the food chain within its territory. If dragons are herbivorous, things shift a great deal, as the Dragon is then shifted to a different location and position -- and suddenly we need to start looking at what does dragon poop do in a soil system!
I presumed that they are omnivorous - they eat a LOT of food, compared to other beings, and while omnivores generally only make up less than 5% of a biome's species, they also are able to compete more efficiently and reduce the impact on the consumer side of the ecological system by combining both consumers and producers.
Take the largest living land animal -- African Bull Elephant. Big suckers eat 375 pounds a day. Cross referencing that with the food of other herbivorous creatures and then a selection of carnivores (all large size), I came up with a gamified figure of a being needs to eat ten times its weight in a year in biomass (for omnivores -- it is 12% for herbivores, and 7% for carnivores).
Dragons, per the MM, are about twice the size of an African Bull Elephant, and the cube square rule for mass/size would apply when determining the rough weight, so i just used the basic calc there. So, around 36 to 40k pounds for a Red Dragon. Cut out a fifth for bone, and that's a LOT of biomass to deal with. But 360,000 pounds of biomass is only about a thousand pounds a week, and dragon's are active predators, who fly, hence the massive jump given the size and kcal needed to move such a thing through the air.
Something this big would impact at about 20% of the total biomass (33% if carnivorous, 12.5% if herbivorous), based on overall existing systems, so that's where you get the yearly point of 5.1 million. That also tells me that a Dragon entering that territory would be an immense burden -- but the next question is how much area is needed to support that amount of biomass?
It is shockingly small. A temperate forest generates 256,000 pounds of biomass (including insects and plants) per square foot, or 713,687,000,000,000,000 pounds per square mile. For an Apex A-O predator, only about 10% of that is needed at most, so the territory of a dragon can be as small as a square mile without any issues. If they are Omnivorous. Carnivorous changes things dramatically, as we then have to factor in size, and that means that something this size, focused mostly on temperate grasslands and forests for a hunting space (because of the need for ungulates and related groups), we get about 10 to 20 square miles per beasty, and that's when we run i to issues of chain breakdown should an outside force alter the ecological balance.
Edit: The reason it becomes so shocking is that without the 80% of biomass from plants, you only have about 4.25% of biomass from cattle and wild animals, as a total, so you need a much larger chunk of space that such prey can survive on. Hence why I shifted Dragon to an omnivorous position -- from an evolutionary standpoint, for an animal that active with that much mass, it would make sense that they would be shifting to survive on more than a portion of 4.5% of biomass, they would need a larger capacity -- and that's before we get to brain size and intelligence as additional factors, which burn through protein and fats (two things hard to obtain in quantity from herbaceous material).
Then I had to determine what can support that kind of massive consumption, while also supporting a broader ecosystem around it (since if you don't, everything dies) and that's how I got the figure of 5.2 million pounds of biomass -- to support a broad ranging ecosystem beneath an A-O predator, you still have to have the appropriate steps down.
Now, the reason it sucked me into a maelstrom of learning is that my models in my head were still sorta stuck in some older format stuff -- the pyramid basis, essentially, which doesn't always accurately reflect actual world systems and makes computer modeling get pissy. So, I learned a whole new layer to add to my collection of knowledge about biological systems on a large scale (regional, continental, planetary) just so I could make better encounter tables.
Ya shouldn't have asked, huh?
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And all of that led to me creating a list of general biomass structures by category of thing, which, in turn, gives me a rough idea of the overall population in comparison, lol.
Was a surprise to realize there were so many of my Trolls out there, and how few of the native beings (dragons and related creatures) there are. May flip that about down the road.
As a note, this is very close to Earth in terms of overall breakdown. Changes were made strictly to account for the addition of entire new critter groups. More plants, added in an entire chain based off of plankton types. Faunalia and Floralia are terms I use for "monster" animals and plants of a more "regular kind" -- jackalopes and almiraz, awakened shrubs and the like. Monster is a the term for all the stuff that eats but really is pure ick -- Beholders, etc. I did not include planar beings, though.
Surprisingly, part of the goal here is to simplify an ecological system structure so that it can be gamified more easily. Life-webs for each of several biomes are an extremely effective way to determine what all is encountered and what may be attracted, distracted, or detracted from any violent encounter. Since one can encounter animals that are considered North American in the same places one encounters animals that are considered Asian or African, if the biome is the same, it becomes a kind of key thing to be sure that such is able to be workable when doing a world that can change as a result of player actions.
And now you have an idea of how serious I take worldbuilding (excessively, without limitation, fanatically) despite building my worlds off stuff like a throwaway line in a movie, lol.
I do draw the line at astrophysics, though. I am not that gifted mathematically.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
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Fascinating. Did you also look into the possibility that they might have much slower metabolic rates? That would reduce their necessary daily caloric intake. Like, for example, crocks, ‘gators, pythons, etc. only need to eat periodically, and bears can go months without food while hibernating, which dragons are known to do.
Also, I was always kinda enamored of the idea that dragons hoard because their diets, at least in part, consist of precious metals. Dragons hoard gold as a food source, like a pantry. They literally eat wealth. Had you considered that theory as well?
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Well, for the most part I was trying to stick to the MM and MotM basis (don't have fizban), so for the general calculation I have to say no.
For my own dragons, though...
Yes. While my dragons are not quite as long lived, they have racial memory and are longer lived than any of the people, have slow metabolisms (with an "afterburner effect" I blatantly stole directly out of the Heorot series that means they also like it cold), and they require minerals such as copper, gold, platinum, titanium, iron, and other such things in order to maintain peak form.
Oddly enough, though, that isn't how their hoards work, though. That's more like a pantry or larder, lol. It actually feeds into their breath weapons, in part, though that may change since I am still restructuring them along the weird lines I have decided on (the eastern cycle approach). I know, for example, that Dragons go through stages of life, and that all dragons are female, male, and neither at one point -- and I also discovered, rather accidentally, that they are matriarchal. Tiamaris was one of the first two to witness the coming of people, and she was very hostile to them. Her partner, Bahal, took the opposite tack. So within the racial memory there exists both points of view.
Hoards I borrowed from Sagara's concept for her "human" dragons. More a conceptual thing, abstract, instead of a concrete, physical collection.
There is a secret thing I did on the website, lol, since the final 20th level adventure in the campaign is about dragons -- I told the story of the dragons very briefly, in small snippets -- and set them up as one for each year of the site's current incarnation (so 2018 to now), with one post on the first of january each year (backdating is awesome). That's how I learned about the dragons, lol -- by just writing it out and letting it come.
All told, they aren't even a full page, but there is a lot of information in there.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
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Omnivorous dragons means you can have them eating trees like celery. Which is fun.
It also means multiple stomachs, lol, so Mercer and CR would not approve.
I am totally broken up about it, as you can tell.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
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Y’mean with cream cheese spread all up and down em? 😋
Why would it necessitate multiple stomachs? I eat celery, and I only got 1 stomach. At least, that is, I only got 1 stomach I know of.
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Ah, but you do not eat trees, which ou systems cannot handle, and so yes, there would be an additional stomach (ruminants can have as many as five!) -- and if one is digesting metals and stones and such, that's an additional one as well (Dragon Gizzards!)
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
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Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
I'm fry, and I make doodles. That's why they call me FRY DOODLES. Also no pressure but check out my YouTube channel (Fry Doodles)
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Huh.
What if a large portion of a dragon's hoard is just refined processed poop?
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I wonder where the dragon hides the toilet, or if they just do it naturally.
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I'm fry, and I make doodles. That's why they call me FRY DOODLES. Also no pressure but check out my YouTube channel (Fry Doodles)
Soli Deo Gloria(Sed servus eius crustulum vult)
I'm a disabled, neurodivergent, artsy dumpster fire, and somewhat of a clown. But, I'm also god's favorite princess and the most interesting girl in the world.
Crafter of Constellations, vocaloid enjoyer, waluigi’s #1 fan, space alien, your favorite pretty boy, and certified silly goose