The Gaming Den

The example of Farming as the example of what's wrong with the profession skill has always bothered me for one reason.

shouldn't farming be a craft skill? the divide the PHB puts between the two is that craft skills produce a physical product, which farming does.
also we have much more precedent for craft skills requiring tools and raw materials, which farming does. In fact the craft rules also provide at least some acknowledgment that farming benefits from things like fertilizer and better soil conditions/

norms29 wrote:The example of Farming as the example of what's wrong with the profession skill has always bothered me for one reason.

shouldn't farming be a craft skill? the divide the PHB puts between the two is that craft skills produce a physical product, which farming does.
also we have much more precedent for craft skills requiring tools and raw materials, which farming does. In fact the craft rules also provide at least some acknowledgment that farming benefits from things like fertilizer and better soil conditions/

The thing about farming is that it creates wealth every year in a completely renewable way. It short circuits people herp derping about supply and demand of labor or resource depletion because you're working for yourself and making something that will be desired a month or a year or a century from now.

So the example is always Profession (Farmer) because that cuts out the most stupid arguments about "realistic" profession limits.

-Username17

norm29 wrote: shouldn't farming be a craft skill? the divide the PHB puts between the two is that craft skills produce a physical product, which farming does.

I'm sure that most farmers in the pre-specialization ancient world also had to have some knowledge of animal husbandry, along with the less sexy aspects of farming like fertilizing, irrigation, crop management, and soforth.

Also, profession measures how much money you can get out of providing a service, not the quality of what you actually make. And considering that most agriculture creates homogenous products it's not a particularly interesting output (because if you were really interested you could just extrapolate production from how much money the farmer made) unless we made the Crafting minigame a lot more discrete and involved than it is.

Because the turnips make the craft checks.

Because farming's the iconic pre-industrial job. It's one of the most common professions that non-nomadic civilizations used at the time.

Libertad wrote:Because farming's the iconic pre-industrial job. It's one of the most common professions that non-nomadic civilizations used at the time.

After prostitution, presumably.

Please bear in mind that my intent is NOT to derail this thread but...


Prostitution my be an older profession than organized farming (at least of the type where you expect to trade/sell some of your surplus as opposed to subsistence farming)

however, I think that in terms of the number of people employed in the two professions farmers MUST outnumber "urbanite" professions in a per-industrial society by almost 3 to 1 in order to not have your cities collapse.

Depends on output. If we're talking bullshit medieval Europe rates it needs to be a lot higher than 3 to 1. More like 20 to 1. And this is if we're just including adult-age agricultural workers on the seed to plant and/or raising livestock end, not their children or people who directly support farmers like wainwrights, butchers, or brewers.

In a D&D-verse this number may be higher or lower. With the monster population implied by the books it'll have to be higher. If agricultural aids -- which don't necessarily have to be industrial age technology or magic but will help a lot -- are thrown into the mix it can be lower. If we're talking Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms the number of people employed in farming will have be be ridiculously high, like 50 to 1. If we're talking A:TLA it can be like 2:1 or even lower than that.

While we're on the subject of farmers prostitution and cities, it should be noted that the continuity of cities relies less on the number of farmers, and more upon some of them constantly migrating to cities.

Cities, you see, until very recently were death traps, more people died of disease, accidents, murder, ect than the population could replace, thus requiring a constant influx of immigrants just to keep a city populated.

Were lots of farmers required? sure, but generally you see cities grow not as the farming population increases, but rather as it decreases with the individual productivity of farmers going up.

darkmaster wrote: Cities, you see, until very recently were death traps, more people died of desires, accidents, murder, ect than the population could replace, thus requiring a constant influx of immigrants just to keep a city populated.

This is just true for ridiculous pre-Columbus European cities. If you told Akbar the Great or Montezuma or the Great Khan that their capital cities were death traps and were doomed to linger in the tens of thousands range for more than a millennium they would've laughed at you.

No, I'm sorry, but no. Until recently, with innovations in medicine and other modern inventions, more people died in cities, than were born in cities. And it really didn't matter where in the world you were. Hell, maybe cities in the Americas were different, but we don't know because we really don't have much in the way of records.

[citation needed]?

Well, if you want empirical evidence you best bet is China, they have the most comprehensive census data going the farthest back. If, however, you'd be willing to accept a purely logical argument.

First think, what is a city? A place where lots of people are packed together. Now think of the condition of those people in early and pre-modern cities. They would be dirty, if they weren't malnourished they would be close, they would have little to no understanding of diseases or how they spread. The sum total of this being one big old microorganism hoedown.

But that's not the end of it, oh no, think of all the things that can happen to a person in a city. There's a lot of shit, and remember, their medical knowledge wasn't a great as ours. There were no antibiotics, hell, there was no concept of germs, and coming back to that crowded and dirty thing from before infection wouldn't have been rare. So even the smallest wounds could very well be lethal.

All this adds up to a fairly high mortality rate, especially in children who couldn't resist diseases as well as adults could thus requiring more people to fill the gulf between the number of people dying and the number being born.

Now, the rulers of these cities might have laughed at the idea, but that would have probably been more because they didn't live there. And they probably didn't care so long as the city wasn't empty. I'm not saying rulers actively moved people to cities to keep them full, no people moved all by themselves, but if people wouldn't have done that the city would have dwindled, if not down to nothing, then close.

Archmage wrote:[citation needed]?

http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberhi/0134.html
[just the abstract]

www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=ADH_101_0033
This is full study that you can read.

Urban mortality is the typically the catch phrase for this kind of information. It's not just a US issue, it's a worldwide historical phenomena caused by the crowded, unsanitiary conditions that pervaded urban areas. These conditions lead to death rates in urban areas being much higher than in the countryside.

multiclass farmer/prostitutes

"I've got some extra plump crops off in me shack, if you'd like to purvey m'lord" *wink*

somebody make a Farmer chart, from brazen dirtscratchers to High Class Estate Owners with vast acres.

So the follow-up question now becomes: what would the mortality rate of the rural centers then become if people didn't migrate to the cities?

Or for a more D&D example: let's say that orcs live on shitty land and don't have much in the way of agricultural knowledge. Therefore the constant warfare with neighbors is a way to reduce demographic pressure either by killing off 'excess' orcs or getting new lands. The obvious conclusion is that the orc warbands are a meatgrinder and death trap, but then my follow-up question is, would orc mortality rate have been higher were it not for the warbands? If so, then, the characterization of orc warbands (or ancient cities) in this instance being a population drain is the wrong way to look at it.

I mean, sure, disease is one helluva killer. But so is starvation or poverty from economic depression.

While it's true that orcs would die quickly in a situation of squalor and poverty. However it is also generally assumed that they also have a much faster reproductive cycle than humans. And so long as more of them are born than die population density would go up. In such a situation orcs would also be likely to raid their neighbors more consistently than the they would go to open war.

Remember also, that a level 1 orc warrior has +3 Fort (given the numbers in the SRD) and that orcs, not having anything to do other than war, are going to be mostly warriors, meaning they're less likely to succumb to sickness and infection as the average human. Not to mention being more resistant to the aforementioned starvation.

So it's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to assume that the generally stronger, more resilient, orcs would be able to sustain their population well enough to call for war bands.

darkmaster wrote:No, I'm sorry, but no. Until recently, with innovations in medicine and other modern inventions, more people died in cities, than were born in cities. And it really didn't matter where in the world you were. Hell, maybe cities in the Americas were different, but we don't know because we really don't have much in the way of records.

That bolded part does not mean what you think it means.

Jingzhao Fu was nearly 2 million people in the 742 census. That means the population was going up. By a lot. So that means that people were born there and dided there, and also people were born elsewhere and died there. So more people died there than were born there, but that doesn't make Jingzhao Fu a "death trap".


Between the beginning of the Han dynasty and the end of the Song dynasty, the population of China was roughly flat. During that time, the cities got bigger and the rural population by definition became more sparse. That does mean that more people died in cities than were born there, but it does not mean that cities were a bad place to live.

-Username17

norms29 wrote:The example of Farming as the example of what's wrong with the profession skill has always bothered me for one reason.

shouldn't farming be a craft skill? the divide the PHB puts between the two is that craft skills produce a physical product, which farming does.

First of all I don't particularly like the skill system or the allocation of skills to categories (or even the definition of categories). But if I were to define borh "profession" and "craft" I would probably define farming as a profession.

The reason for this is that a "craft" is generally labor constrained. You take the inputs, you spend time crafting, and you get the output that you immediately sell for a profit. You work a night and you get a profit based on the work you did that night.

Farming isn't labor constrained (although it needs labor) as it is time constrained. You take the raw materials and you plant them. But then you have to wait an entire harvest season and then perform more labor and harvest them for a profit. Thus the reward is based on a time frame of months.

This long term commitment beteen inputs and outputs probably deserve to push this into a "profession" than a "craft." Farmers, wine makers, and anything that requires a long term time commitment as opposed to a pure labor commitment should probably be profession and not craft.

With craft you can say, "how much did I make over the weekend," where you can't do that with farming. You have to be committed to farming for long periods.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
In a D&D-verse this number may be higher or lower. With the monster population implied by the books it'll have to be higher. If agricultural aids -- which don't necessarily have to be industrial age technology or magic but will help a lot -- are thrown into the mix it can be lower. If we're talking Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms the number of people employed in farming will have be be ridiculously high, like 50 to 1.

For FR it is about 9 - 10 to 1. Just a fact.

FrankTrollman wrote: That bolded part does not mean what you think it means.

Jingzhao Fu was nearly 2 million people in the 742 census. That means the population was going up. By a lot. So that means that people were born there and dided there, and also people were born elsewhere and died there. So more people died there than were born there, but that doesn't make Jingzhao Fu a "death trap".


Between the beginning of the Han dynasty and the end of the Song dynasty, the population of China was roughly flat. During that time, the cities got bigger and the rural population by definition became more sparse. That does mean that more people died in cities than were born there, but it does not mean that cities were a bad place to live.

This also doesn't mean the opposite. People are demonstably willing to migrate into amazingly bad conditions when the alternative is starvation.

FatR wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote: That bolded part does not mean what you think it means.

Jingzhao Fu was nearly 2 million people in the 742 census. That means the population was going up. By a lot. So that means that people were born there and dided there, and also people were born elsewhere and died there. So more people died there than were born there, but that doesn't make Jingzhao Fu a "death trap".


Between the beginning of the Han dynasty and the end of the Song dynasty, the population of China was roughly flat. During that time, the cities got bigger and the rural population by definition became more sparse. That does mean that more people died in cities than were born there, but it does not mean that cities were a bad place to live.

This also doesn't mean the opposite. People are demonstably willing to migrate into amazingly bad conditions when the alternative is starvation.

But that's just it: the alternative was starving. People go on and on about how rural populations lived longer, healthier lives, but it's just not true. It's not true today, where people living in metropolises live longer than people living in rural areas, and it wasn't true in Ancient China either.

In the ancient past, people have been able to find shit like "If you made it to 60, your life expectancy was bigger in the rural areas", but even that is probably not really true because of selection bias. The fact is that rural living is shit now and it has always been shit and the carrying capacity of the land was lower in the past even than it is now.

-Username17

tzor wrote:

norms29 wrote:The example of Farming as the example of what's wrong with the profession skill has always bothered me for one reason.

shouldn't farming be a craft skill? the divide the PHB puts between the two is that craft skills produce a physical product, which farming does.

First of all I don't particularly like the skill system or the allocation of skills to categories (or even the definition of categories). But if I were to define borh "profession" and "craft" I would probably define farming as a profession.

The reason for this is that a "craft" is generally labor constrained. You take the inputs, you spend time crafting, and you get the output that you immediately sell for a profit. You work a night and you get a profit based on the work you did that night.

Farming isn't labor constrained (although it needs labor) as it is time constrained. You take the raw materials and you plant them. But then you have to wait an entire harvest season and then perform more labor and harvest them for a profit. Thus the reward is based on a time frame of months.

This long term commitment beteen inputs and outputs probably deserve to push this into a "profession" than a "craft." Farmers, wine makers, and anything that requires a long term time commitment as opposed to a pure labor commitment should probably be profession and not craft.

With craft you can say, "how much did I make over the weekend," where you can't do that with farming. You have to be committed to farming for long periods.

First I'd like the thank you for being the only one to address my actual question of why farming is classed as a profession instead of a craft.

but I can't help but notice that your reasoning runs almost exactly counter to definitions given to the two skills in the PHB. Profession is explicitly the skill used to say "How much did I make this week" The only thing seperating farming from the other craft skills is, as you point out, that the time input is fixed. but the craft rules allow for that, you can make multiple copies of the same item (multiple daggers, or vials of acid) with one check if your output is great enough.
so what reason do we have to make farming a special case of the craft rules, where fixed output over variable time is disallowed, leaving variable output over fixed time, which the craft rules already cover.

Because, to get stupidly technical with it, as said above: you're not making the craft checks to build the turnips, the turnips are making the craft checks to build themselves (using materials that you can't: sunlight, raw positive energy, and particles in the air). You're making a Profession(Turnip Guardian) check to let them get along safely long enough to grow themselves into proper turnips.

You're making Profession(Farmer) instead of Craft(Farm Food) for the same reason that you make Profession(Sheppard) instead of Craft(Sheep).

FrankTrollman wrote:
But that's just it: the alternative was starving. People go on and on about how rural populations lived longer, healthier lives, but it's just not true.

Maybe, or maybe not, but alternative to moving into city - for people who actually moved into city - being starvation does not prove it. Because these people certainly were younger sons and so on, the parts of the ever-expanding population, who simply had no place in a non-expanding rural community and had to find some way of earning bread. Or die trying. Accidentally, such nature of newcomers might well have contributed to cities being demographic black holes as much as any faults of that time's sanitary. This does not preclude good quality of life for those remaining, depending on the principles of inheritance (i.e., if there is one heir to a household and everyone else are asked to fuck off). You're free to disagree, of course, but if you want to convince me that you aren't just talking shit because you don't want to believe in the proven fact of urban mortality, please bring some links and references to actual reputable demographic research on Ancient China.