RandomCasualty2 wrote:Really the big question here isn't about crop yields and that crap. That's just a bunch of bullshit you honestly shouldn't be caring about unless you want to totally go all Tolkien on the setting. Hell, I don't even think Tolkien did that.
As far as your PCs are concerned, your farmers fields are arbitrarily large and they do produce a totally arbitrary amount. There's plenty of crap that can affect crop yields, droughts, bad soil, animals eating crops, insects... seriously. You don't want to get into that shit.
The main thing you want to get into is to not have your world not make sense with the spells you have available and your given rules set. That is, if you've got crap like wish or fabricate, you do have to explain why it hasn't conquered the world.
I agree with your last point wholeheartedly. However, even though it appears that a little bit of research is anathema to the industry, I don't see what the harm is in locating
tidbits of information (or even just making them up in the case of wholly fantastic things, like underground giant mushroom farms) and using those as a basis for writing up your campaign world. Include information like the number of
acres in a square mile (640), or what 1000
calories might look like (a loaf of french bread, 2 ounces of cheese, and a medium apple) and then, right or wrong, you at least have some basis for
how big towns and villages should be, how many people are growing food for everyone, and so on.
Anyway, that sort of information is something that (IMHO) would be better served done on the front end, integrated with the monsters and magic of the setting, and distributed in a sourcebook, rather than having everyone individually look things like that up. Hell, even putting something like that together here would be useful.