Bay 12 Games Forum

So, is Joe a girl and/or horned?

"Hello there..." ((Does Sasha/Joe look like that picture you linked in the OOC thread?)

"So. About the new treasure, I'll volunteer to test the helmet for curses."

Scold the wisp. With steel if needed.

((What steel?))
[/quote]
The figurative steel. Ie, weapons.

Dogs are not wolves,

My original point. They are descended from wolves, however.

and dog taming took hundreds of years.

And how is this different than any other animal?

Essentially, the prescence of humans giving the animals food worked to make fear of humans undesirable, and thus the creatures slowly evolved into dogs, which became tame.

The way I've heard it, wolves were attracted to scavenging food from human villages, which selected for a shorter "flight distance" when a human was seen, which lead to half-domesticated scavenging wolves, which were domesticated.

But this all depends on how hard browts are to tame, since the fact that one is being used as a pack animal suggests they are natually suitable for domestication, having been domesticated already. Thus, it will take much less genetic shifting to domesticate them.

You'd say that about horses, pigs, and certainly dogs if all you knew of them was that they were docile and whatnot when domesticated--and you'd have pretty good evidence in the behavior of feral dogs. However, you'd be wrong.

You are mistaking taming and domestication.
Taming is the process of making an INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL not dangerous to humans, and not fearing humans.
Domestication is the long, grueling, multigenerational work of completely transforming a species into something more suited to human needs, like wolves to dogs.
We obviously can't domesticate anything at all in this particular game, because of time scale. We can, though, tame pretty much anything (I guess. Humans tamed almost everything he tried to IRL. With various degrees of success I'll admit). We already tamed a hat.

I actually brought this up.

But you're all missing my point. If many domestic animals have different names from their wild ancestors, so can browts/packbacks.

But that's no fun...wait, was Remuthra's character always a horned girl? (Note, I said horned, so no jokes.)

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on March 09, 2013, 02:21:46 pm

Quote from: IamanElfCollaborator on March 09, 2013, 10:31:44 am

Since I might as well, what would any of you say to me incorporating Az-Sho, Neyravah and Vanida? I'm looking to turn my mod into a fantasy kitchen sink.

Lore files to flesh out backstory and I'm considering adding their likenesses in as megabeasts. I've got some intriguing ideas since Neyravah wouldn't have been killed by Udil in the universe of the mod.....neither would have Az-Sho, as Udil, Thaneos and Aodun don't exist in the mod's universe.
It's essentially 1/4th Pantheon (Flameborn, Drakes, avatars, etc) and 3/4ths my own material.

Neat.

As long as the planet isn't covered in complete and utter darkness(which would kill of most intelligent species pretty fast) there's still incoming energy.

Well, most intelligent species still alive have died out...and the ash is still in the air...and pretty much all plants not sustained by magic have died...

If wolves are untameable, explain dogs.

Anyways, I could have chosen any domestic animal, it's just that the wild ancestors of dogs are better-known. Cattle are genetically different from aurochs, pigs are different from, um, wild pigs, chickens from Asian jungle fowl, sheep from whatever they're descended from, and yet each was tamed. Moreover, taming is different from domestication; for instance, while the Asian elephant has never been domesticated, it has been tamed. Obviously enough (since domestication starts with taming, and some people keep tame animals of species which are undomesticable as pets), taming lacks the rigorous requirements of domestication.

(And yes, it took many generations to turn dogs to wolves. Guess what? It'll take that no matter what we choose to tame or domesticate.)

-----

My point was, if genetic difference is enough to justify a different name, and domesticated animals show genetic differences from wild ones (both of which, I should add, have been mentioned by those who aren't me), then there is justification to give tamed browts a different name.