Nutrition

[Korwin]

If a Wizard did it, can another one dispel the race?

[Username17]

-Username17

[Ravyn Dawnbringer]

So, as the article puts forward (and I believe Frank made a nod at this with his portals to other places clause of the dnd universe), what constitutes a magical food source? I understand energy that can be broken down and ridden with the entropy train is needed, but what would that entail? Magical bacteria such as the extremophilic varieties? Or would it simply require a bacteria that is eaten by bugs then so on? My biology is weak (I'm studying to be a psych major), but this topic is too interesting to me

[A Man In Black]

As for biology vrs. "A wizard did it"...
Which provides the more interesting and satisfying story? I personally think "AWDI" is cliche and actually explaining creature biology, especially how it's affected by the existence of ambient magic, is much more interesting.

The wizard doesn't need to be literal, and there isn't any reason that the wizard needs to be a bearded dude in an tower casting spells. As long as you have an agent using plot device abilities to make something work such-and-such way instead of making a holistic, functional system that makes sense from a scientific perspective, a wizard did it.

This gives you lots of plots. [Fantasy Israel] can really be the chosen land for the chosen people. Undermining a religion can directly undermine a nation's ability to continue to exist. Sacrificing people to the sun god can actually be necessary for a nation's health. It lets you have disinterested, passive deities who still require appeasement, because the deities' passive favor is necessary for continued life. It gives you a reason to have a race who is warlike and belligerent all the time (like 40K orks) because they're powered by it.

It's still a black box, but it's a black box that gives you interesting stories.

[Dominicius]

I always wanted to know one thing about D&D eating habits...

Would a carnivore species drink coffee? Or is their digestive system not suited for it?

[Itay K]

Would a carnivore species drink coffee? Or is their digestive system not suited for it?

Probably not. Caffeine is an alkaloid neurotoxin produced by plants as a pesticide; It has similar effect on humans, we just don't consume much and have much larger bodymass than insects. A purely carnivorous species would probably have less developed metabolic pathways dealing with breaking down plant toxins. It would still affect the carnivore as a stimulant, but even small doses would be toxic as they would be broken down very slowly (if at all).

As a corollary, If the carnivorous species consumes venomous or toxic animals (or used to recently on an evolutionary scale), it would probably develop defenses against those, so you would expect a mongoose-furry to start their morning with a small hit of scorpion venom, and maybe go to a fancy bistro to take small sips of expensive milked cobra.

"Licking toads, son? If you're such a big gnoll, I bet you can lick this entire GIANT FROG in one sitting. Go on then."

[Lokathor]

Twelve generations is indeed more than enough time to see selection in action. If you can make non-sterile offspring, you are fit. If you can't, you're out of the gene pool. You won't necessarily see competitive advantages with a small cycle of generations, but you will see the harsh binary finality of Darwinian allowances. Whether capabilities are granted by DNA or sorcery, it is still the same reality of selection that will determine if the species is fit or not.

Well there's obviously no knocking Evolution, but as far as I have ever understood it only plays out when you have continuity, selection, and random mutation. "Sorcery" as an explanation for life or as an explanation to replace various otherwise expected biological processes allows a species to breed without necessarily invoking any of those required elements.

• A creature's gene formation process could just be "pick 500 traits from a list of 2,000 traits", and if you get trait #2 by accident then you're probably doomed to a horrible death for some reason or another but that won't affect the odds of trait #2 showing up in any future members of your species regardless of if you breed before you die or not. Either way the list of dwarf traits won't change based on what you do.
• Moradin could craft the genes for each Dwarf by randomly picking two dwarves to combine from his list of all dwarves to have ever lived. It doesn't matter if they're dead because you could still get the "freakishly strong" genes that they once had. The odds of each gene showing up would become weighted over time (genes that show up more often would become more likely to be repeated), but in an entirely random and non-directed way. It's a selection of sorts, but it doesn't actually make the species any more likely to be able to survive its environment.
• And the most easiest thing to suppose is that perhaps Dwarves just don't mutate at all. It's a lot like the first case, but allows for bad genes to be eliminated from a bloodline. It also has every problem that inbreeding has and worse, but when you've got a god backing you up and a new generation only every hundred years or so, it can be fixed before it becomes a huge problem.

While I never actually took a Biology class in highschool because I just took Physics and Computer Science to get my science credits, so my understanding of the process is based on computerized setups of genetic algorithms (not actual examples of biological evolution), it seems like any of those would totally fuck up the evolutionary process.

And the article is quite nice. I'd probably throw "shadowgrass" into a setting myself. A plant that lives in soil or mud and feeds on darkness. It grows wherever people leave it alone for long enough, and so herds of small underground creatures would travel about in gigantic feeding loops like miniature terrier sized buffalo. That's funny to me, because I like the idea of tribal pigmy drow that feed on guinea pigs and live in a strange underground jungle. That's probably just me though.

[Username17]

Would a carnivore species drink coffee? Or is their digestive system not suited for it?

Maybe? It depends upon how different their metabolism is from ours. The really short hand of how caffeine works is that you have temporary signal molecules that trigger your body to begin liberating stored sugars to power your cells. Caffeine inhibits the breakdown of those temporary signal molecules, which means that when your body asks to use stored energy it gets more energy over a longer period. You get a pretty similar effect in most other vertebrates, since their energy metabolism is pretty similar.

Other creatures use those same signalling molecules for other things. If you were a slime mold, for example, you could use pulses of cAMP to organize the periodic contractions of your body in order to move. Caffeine would put you into tetanic paralysis.

So, as the article puts forward (and I believe Frank made a nod at this with his portals to other places clause of the dnd universe), what constitutes a magical food source? I understand energy that can be broken down and ridden with the entropy train is needed, but what would that entail? Magical bacteria such as the extremophilic varieties? Or would it simply require a bacteria that is eaten by bugs then so on?

Fundamentally, reactions only go one direction: towards entropy. The universe has a beginning and it marches steadily towards heat death. It may have just a hundred billion years before that happens. But that really only applies to over all reactions. That means that you can have a plant grow big and tall (an apparently counter entropic event) so long as it is tied to the giant ball of fire in the sky that is burning in nuclear hellfire in a screaming one-way trip to burning out.

So if you had a magical effect that was itself rumbling its way towards dissipation, you could tie a counter-entropic effect like growing a bacterial mat or a seed to it. You'd just need a cell with an appropriate catcher's mitt to grab ahold of whatever kind of power that was.

Well there's obviously no knocking Evolution, but as far as I have ever understood it only plays out when you have continuity, selection, and random mutation.

I point out again that Darwin did not even know about DNA. All that it requires is for:

• The next generation to be based on the previous generation in some way.
• The environment to exist.

Seriously, that's it. So long as there is an environment, there will be selective pressure of some kind. Since we live in our environment, it can be kind of hard to tell. But for example: if you are born without being to sustain 9.m/s^2 of constant gravitational acceleration without being crushed or without being able to handle 20% oxygen in the atmosphere without corroding, you simply don't live. From an outside observer's standpoint, every environment is both extreme and destructive.

Now, a lot of creatures can live if half or more of their babies don't make it for one reason or another. But if they can't make babies that will grow up to have babies of their own, that's the end of the species. That is the stark reality faced by every generation of every species that has ever or will ever exist. It doesn't matter if they have a bunch of weird recessive traits or were manufactured by a blind watchmaker, the inescapable reality is that if they don't survive they won't have survived.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

Yes, but knowing about DNA or not doesn't change that it exists in our world and it doesn't have to exist in other worlds. A species doesn't have to be based on the previous generation in any way approaching what we'd call normal, or even at all, and it can still get along just fine.

Further, if a species is allowed to pick "dead" members as a basis for future offspring regardless of the biological parents, then there is effectively no environment at all, because the number of living members only affects how fast you can make new members, not what the new members will be based upon.

[Username17]

Further, if a species is allowed to pick "dead" members as a basis for future offspring regardless of the biological parents, then there is effectively no environment at all, because the number of living members only affects how fast you can make new members, not what the new members will be based upon.

No. There are totally bacteria that scavenge DNA from dead bacteria and add it to their own. They still evolve. The environment is still important. There are even multicelled organisms that carry around DNA from several generations back. They still evolve. The environment is still important.

The only way things evolve away from some trait is for every holder of that trait to die, which is a property of the environment. If your magically created dwarves cannot survive in their tunnel homes, then the number of dwarves in the next generation will be zero, and that is the end of that.

---

Now one thing that we haven't really talked about here is the idea that the Underdark may not be self sufficient at all. It is entirely reasonable to presume that those who live in tunnels are like the tunnel dwelling people of Earth who have to get food shipped in from top side. In this case, one would assume that the deepest digs are essentially economic in nature - that there is stuff down there that is worth enough to get the people of the surface to send plenty of food down to get just a piece of it. Super metals like Adamantium and magic gems that could raise the dead (both of which the worlds of D&D tend to have) could certainly qualify.

In this model, the creatures of the underdark probably lived historically like bats - chilling during the days in caves and then coming out at night to do stuff. With a literal or figurative gold rush in the deeper caverns, these cave dwelling nocturnal races were the natural victors in the race to claim the deepest treasures.

-Username17

[Korwin]

Further, if a species is allowed to pick "dead" members as a basis for future offspring regardless of the biological parents, then there is effectively no environment at all, because the number of living members only affects how fast you can make new members, not what the new members will be based upon.

If the parents live long enough to give birth to a new generation...
its totally egal how the children will look.

But if some of those parents live long enough, but the children gets the quasi-gen-information from dead ones, the children wont have the quasi-gen-information to live long enough to have children themselves...


...

[Prak]

• Moradin could craft the genes for each Dwarf by randomly picking two dwarves to combine from his list of all dwarves to have ever lived. It doesn't matter if they're dead because you could still get the "freakishly strong" genes that they once had. The odds of each gene showing up would become weighted over time (genes that show up more often would become more likely to be repeated), but in an entirely random and non-directed way. It's a selection of sorts, but it doesn't actually make the species any more likely to be able to survive its environment.

This just puts an image into my mind of Moradin literally forging dna, like on an anvil, with a hammer and forge and all that, and that is fucking awesome.

[Roy]

• Moradin could craft the genes for each Dwarf by randomly picking two dwarves to combine from his list of all dwarves to have ever lived. It doesn't matter if they're dead because you could still get the "freakishly strong" genes that they once had. The odds of each gene showing up would become weighted over time (genes that show up more often would become more likely to be repeated), but in an entirely random and non-directed way. It's a selection of sorts, but it doesn't actually make the species any more likely to be able to survive its environment.

This just puts an image into my mind of Moradin literally forging dna, like on an anvil, with a hammer and forge and all that, and that is fucking awesome.

Plus Fucking One.

[Guyr Adamantine]

• Moradin could craft the genes for each Dwarf by randomly picking two dwarves to combine from his list of all dwarves to have ever lived. It doesn't matter if they're dead because you could still get the "freakishly strong" genes that they once had. The odds of each gene showing up would become weighted over time (genes that show up more often would become more likely to be repeated), but in an entirely random and non-directed way. It's a selection of sorts, but it doesn't actually make the species any more likely to be able to survive its environment.

This just puts an image into my mind of Moradin literally forging dna, like on an anvil, with a hammer and forge and all that, and that is fucking awesome.

One day, Moradin contemplated the world, and wanted to create his own people to live in it.

So, he studied genetics.

''Pah! You tell me its made of Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen and Phosphorus? What a crappy alloy! Mine is gonna be Mithral, Granite, Gold, Adamantine and Dragonforce!
Seriously, who puts friggin gases in blood? No wonder human smells so bad!''

As these words of wisdom were uttered, mighty Moradin crafted with a really really tiny hammer the code the code for the perfect being.
The foolishness of the human gods once again shows why so much more awesome dorfs are than humans. Elves too. Friggin trees-humpers.

[Lokathor]

No. There are totally bacteria that scavenge DNA from dead bacteria and add it to their own. They still evolve. The environment is still important. There are even multicelled organisms that carry around DNA from several generations back. They still evolve. The environment is still important.

The only way things evolve away from some trait is for every holder of that trait to die, which is a property of the environment. If your magically created dwarves cannot survive in their tunnel homes, then the number of dwarves in the next generation will be zero, and that is the end of that.

Gene scavenging isn't what I'm talking about though. Now yes, if the environment can reduce the dwarf population to less than 1 male and 1 female then they're dead because you can't make more dwarves (though since they were made by a god in the first place it seems reasonable he can just magic up some more dwarves if he really needs to). It's not that the dead members are being scavenged in a physical way that still allows for things like the passage of time and "he was incinerated by lava" to play a factor on the gene pool (though it's cool the bacteria can do that), it's that the odds of you getting your genes from one of the first dwarves ever and the odds of you getting them from your own older brother are equal and not determined by your parents.

**Two Dwarves fuck (or maybe they lay eggs) and now a new dwarf will need a gene set.
**The genes are not based upon the physical parents
**Instead, Moradin selects two dwarves at random from his list of "all dwarves ever", and then crosses their genes to generate the new dwarf's genes. It doesn't matter if the source dwarves are currently alive, or recently dead, or long dead, or not even a part of your bloodline, or anything like that.
**The two selected dwarves have their genes crossed to create a new dwarf, and that is how the new dwarf's genes are determined.

I'm not trying to be difficult, but I really do want to know how the environment could possibly continue to play a role in the shifting of the gene pool if you've got something like that going on.

[CatharzGodfoot]

**Two Dwarves fuck (or maybe they lay eggs) and now a new dwarf will need a gene set.
**The genes are not based upon the physical parents
**Instead, Moradin selects two dwarves at random from his list of "all dwarves ever", and then crosses their genes to generate the new dwarf's genes. It doesn't matter if the source dwarves are currently alive, or recently dead, or long dead, or not even a part of your bloodline, or anything like that.
**The two selected dwarves have their genes crossed to create a new dwarf, and that is how the new dwarf's genes are determined.

This makes me wonder: how many dwarves did Moradin make in the first place, and how genetically different were they? If we have an Adam and Eve scenario, then every dorf is genetically a sibling of every other dorf.

[angelfromanotherpin]

That dwarf scenario is not particularly different from how the extremely heterozygotic apple tree functions. And yet, still, those which are suited to their environments survive, and those which aren't don't. Just like everything else.

[Quantumboost]

I'm not trying to be difficult, but I really do want to know how the environment could possibly continue to play a role in the shifting of the gene pool if you've got something like that going on.

Those dwarves which are hilariously maladapted to their environment (like, "need to breathe sulfurous gas or die" in nonvolcanic areas) die and are dead, and the ones which don't are alive. If you strictly want to define the "gene pool" as "all dwarves ever", then it can't limit the gene pool - but the environment does affect which genes are actually in use at any given time.

But that's pretty much an extreme contrived edge case. Since clearly in that case Moradin doesn't *care* if like 99% of dwarves die at birth or before due to "not being able to survive in their home environment", or that the dwarven people can't do a damn thing about it.

[Kaelik]

1) Yes, if you create some bullshit like children that aren't in any way related to their parents, at all, even a little bit, you can come up with a situation in which evolution does not apply.

But you know what, fuck you that's retarded, and gods can't even do that on the Prime.

2) That race would actually be dead, all the time. If you assume that new dorfs only come into existance when two dorfs have sex, the fact remains that dorfs take like 100 years to mature and have more dorfs, and given the wide scope of "random genes" and the enviroments of D&D, that means that 70+% of all dorfs die at conception/birth, and the others have to actually survive 100 years and then have crazy dwarf sex to have eight more kids in order to get to population neutral. Throw in a single war and the entire race dies off.

[Manxome]

I'm not trying to be difficult, but I really do want to know how the environment could possibly continue to play a role in the shifting of the gene pool if you've got something like that going on.

It wouldn't. You broke Frank's first condition, "the next generation to be based on the previous generation in some way." Therefore, you are in agreement that the environment would not change the gene pool.

As Quantumboost pointed out, different gene combinations may lead to different expected lifetimes, which means that the environment will still influence the average genetic makeup of a living dwarf. But if you use phlebotinum to specifically define the gene pool as a constant, then the gene pool is a constant and it doesn't change for anything.

In a very general sense, though, we're basically defining the environment to be "whatever fucks with the gene pool," which makes it pretty clear what conclusion we're going to reach. If the genetic makeup of species is determined by the trading cards currently in possession of their patron diety, then for genetic purposes the "environment" is going to be whatever causes the deities to trade cards with each other, not the area where the species actually lives.

[Lokathor]

Well alright, then I've mostly got one more question for Frank (or any other Biologist), and this time it's entirely non-confrontational.

How is it that goats can seemingly eat just about anything at all, and what kinds of special powers would Orcs need to do the same thing? I want orcs that are resistant to hot and cold weather so they can live in the extreme climates and send raids to attack people who live elsewhere and then run home and get away with it because no one wants to bother trying to invade russia and/or morocco. As part of it, I want orcs to be able to eat raw meats, bones, small branches and pine needles, nuts, roots, and so on. Things that other creatures normally can't eat which is why no one lives there. Is there anything biologically special that would result from this kind of thing? Orcs already have tusks and strong teeth, so it seems like they'd already be fine crunching up medium sized bones into edible sections.

[Archmage]

Goats eat lots of things that they can't necessarily digest, I assume.

[Prak]

Goats eat lots of things that they can't necessarily digest, I assume.

lots of animals do. You should see the contents of shark and sea gull stomachs sometime...

[CatharzGodfoot]

The goat is a member of a class of animals called ruminants. These animals ruminate (chew their cud). Unlike us, they have special four-compartment stomachs especially designed to digest roughage (food high in fiber) such as grass, hay and silage.

The goat’s stomach has four chambers: 1) the rumen, 2) the honey-combed reticulum, 3) the omasum, and 4) the abomasum or true stomach. The size relationship of the four chambers changes as the animal grows up. The abomasum gets proportionally smaller. To understand why this happens, let’s consider the function of each compartment and then review the goat’s diet.

1) The rumen acts as a big fermentation vat. Bacteria and protozoa in the rumen supply enzymes to break down the fiber in the goat’s feed. This is similar to how bacteria can ferment the sugars in grape juice to make wine in big wine barrels. The tiny organisms in the rumen also help to build proteins from the feed and manufacture all of the B vitamins needed by the goat. Many nutrients that help provide the goat with energy are also absorbed here. The fermentation process produces heat that helps to keep the goat warm.

When roughage is eaten by the adult goat, it is chewed on, soaked with saliva, and then swallowed. This bolus of food is called “the cud”. It goes down into the rumen to be attacked and broken down or digested by the micro-organisms. At regular intervals the cud is brought back up to the goat’s mouth to be chewed on some more and then swallowed again. This entire process is called rumination. If you watch the goat’s neck carefully, you can see him swallow and later regurgitate his cud. The goat will often burp to get rid of the gas produced by all the fermentation going on in his rumen. You can really smell the fermentation process on his breath. If something causes the goat to stop being able to burp up the gases, the gas will build up and bloat or swell up his rumen and he may become very sick with “bloat”.

2) Once the food particles of cud become small enough, they pass to the second compartment or reticulum. Here any foreign objects that may have been accidentally swallowed with the feed settle out in the honeycomb structure of the reticulum’s walls. Another name for the reticulum is the “hardware stomach”.

3) The fermenting particles then pass on to the omasum. The omasum removes the water from them and also absorbs more nutrients called volatile fatty acids that help supply the goat with energy.

4) The particles are then forced into the abomasum or true stomach. Here, the particles are digested by the stomach acid, hydrochloric acid (HCl). This form of digestion is the same as what occurs in our stomachs.

The remaining particles are then passed on to the small intestine where most of the nutrients are absorbed by the body and made available to the goat.

Goats also have very thick skin in their mouths.

As far as I know, the decomposition of roughage is significantly different enough from other foods (say, fruits and meats) that a goat would get sick and die eating a diet that humans would be fine on. Bloating from fermentation gases and growth of harmful bacteria would be a big problem.

However, if the orc's digestion were set up differently they might actually be able to eat more omnivorously than a goat. They'd have to be able to digest meats and fruits quickly, before significant bacterial decomposition set in. This would put their 'true' stomach first. If you want to go totally crazy (and you don't like the idea of orcs chewing their cud), you might imagine some strange combination of fermentation chamber and gizzard (something like a snail's stomach, perhaps). This means that orcs would eat rocks.

Alternatively, maybe everything does rot in an orc's digestion, and they chew their cud. This would make an orc smell absolutely rank (basically like rotting meat mixed with fresh bread), and would be a good enough reason for why they're generally excluded from polite society.

Half orcs would probably suffer from fairly serious indigestion, as Gruumsh only knows what their composite plumbing would look like.

[Ganbare Gincun]

I seem to recall Frank doing a write-up of Orcs as strict carnivores a while back. And some humanoid insects in the TNE. Were those omnivorous, or herbivorous?