D&D General Effect of Druids on Scientific Knowledge in your Campaign?

[Seramus]

Druids can probably see the writing on the wall and logical conclusions of human scientific development: factory farms, animal testing, GMOs. The irony is that this puts them in a similar position as oil companies; they need to disrupt and confuse the findings of science to promote their (polar opposite) goals.

Some Druids want to wipe out all life, and return the world to a pristine blob of rock!

 

[Cadence]

If you're looking for real world equivalents to Druidic thought and practice, there are worse places to start than researching indigenous and other traditional knowledges. Dig into ethnobiological research (particularly ethnobotany and ethnozoology).

There's plenty of ways to relate to and "know" about nature that are outside of traditional "scientific consensus". More importantly, these knowledges are not pre-science; they're very much contemporary.

Druids seem pretty well suited to this construction of knowledge, personally

I hadn't thought of that. My brain (til your post) was more stuck on the idea of people who could actually talk to or become animals.

 

[TwoSix]

One of my favorite old threads (but not here), where someone takes an entire Monster Manual and attempts to classify it taxonomically.

💯 Staff Pick! - [Necro] [Where I Infer] The Phylogenetic Tree of the Monster Manual | Dungeons & Dragons / Fantasy D20 Spotlight

There's something wondrous and otherworldly about coming face-to-levitating-eyeball with something truly weird. The D&D rulebooks have given us a vast menagerie of peculiar, unlikely, and frequently just plain impossible creatures of myth and madness. These things could never exist in our world...

forum.rpg.net

 

[GMMichael]

Some Druids want to wipe out all life, and return the world to a pristine blob of rock!

You're on to something: magma druids. Life is a disease on the surface of an otherwise elementally beautiful blob.

But we digress...

 

[el-remmen]

I'm with whoever said that they just run with old theories and ideas about how the world works. So for example, there are no "germs" in my D&D world - but work with the miasma theory that holds "that disease originated from particles emanating from decomposing matter, such as that in sewage or cesspits," for example.

 

[niklinna]

whales were classified as fish because they lived in the sea, so were beavers, equally bats fly so they are birds. Having mammaries wasnt the determining factor of being a mammal or not.

Now I am wondering when the concept of "mammal" even came up. How did various people categorize flora & fauna before Linnaeus? Domestic/wild, walking/crawling/swimming/flying, maybe eats plants/eats your stored foods/eats your livestock/eats you too? Cloven hooves are in there somewhere to be sure, along with swims with fins vs. everything else underwater.

Also imagining a circle of germs druid, running around all the time with a runny nose and a slight cough....

 

[Cadence]

Now I am wondering when the concept of "mammal" even came up. How did various people categorize flora & fauna before Linnaeus? Domestic/wild, walking/crawling/swimming/flying, maybe eats plants/eats your stored foods/eats your livestock/eats you too? Cloven hooves are in there somewhere to be sure, along with swims with fins vs. everything else underwater.

Also imagining a circle of germs druid, running around all the time with a runny nose and a slight cough....

And now I'm off googling...

Aristotle's biology - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

This is a complicated question, and shows the difficulty of applying real world scientific terms and ideas to fantasy settings. Are Owlbears, Pegasi, Hippogriffs, and Griffons mammals or birds? Are Chimeras mammals or reptiles? Do Druids classify animals in different categories like this? Since Orcs/Elves and Humans can produce fertile offspring, are they all the same species? Or are they just different species that close enough to interbreed? Or are their genetics magical, allowing them to breed with a vast array of different species (like Dragons and Angels/Devils can)? Or are they just a very complicated ring species? Do species still mutate and evolve over time? Does DNA even exist? Like others said, diseases could be caused by something else in D&D (miasma, bad odors, curses). Germ Theory may not be applicable in D&D settings.

D&D doesn’t answer these questions. Magic makes things a lot more complicated. I’m not sure these questions can, or need to be answered. It’s fun to think about, though.

 

[MGibster]

I prefer D&D fantasy settings where science really isn't a thing. Or at the very least settings where the scientific method isn't a thing. So I don't really have druids, or anyone else, classify animals into kingdom, phylum, class, family, genus, and species. Did I miss one? I really feel like I missed one. I don't want them to know about germ theory.

That doesn't mean they migh not understand how to deal with situations where disease is rife. The British Royal Navy made a connection between hygiene and disease long before germ theory gained any acceptance. George Washington understood you had to take care where your soldiers dug their latrines lest they all get sick.

 

[Shardstone]

Everyone's bringing up a lot of ways to avoid this question, but what about embracing this question? Druids develop various theories that end up becoming the foundation to biology. Eventually, druids come to understand microscopic life exists due to their studies, and beyond that, they learn about cells and DNA and start testing naughty word out with plants like that one priest did IRL. Next thing you know, its 2077 and druids are running gene-altering companies to fund their preservation planets built throughout the cosmos via terraforming 9th level rituals.