How Did Familicide Stop?

[David Argall]

Only in our world, where common ancestry is guaranteed. In particular, we aren't randomly introducing lines from completely separate genetic pools.

Ah, definitionally, we can't introduce lines from completely separate pools because they are no longer separate. And once we do mix them, we again eventually end up with the two groups. Either all members of a group are now descendants of everybody in either group who has descendants, or no members are.

So, the argument strategy is:
Step 1. Posit a world in which your argument is true.
Step 2. Assert without evidence that your hypothetical is reality.
Step 3. Claim the truth of your argument on that basis.

"I know you are, but what am I?"
Your own arguments are at least as subject to your charges as mine. So the argument has to be rejected.

Sorry, I'm not buying it.

As noted before, your judgement is not evidence.

No, there is zero reason why a created world would have common ancestry.

And again as noted, there are a host of reasons why they should be considered to share ancestry even if no such ancestors ever existed. We have already noted that the world would be created as a going concern. We have looked at the case of babies, which we adopt the going concern concept by saying some adults are created at the same time. But we need lactating mothers, which means no births for 9 months, or some women were created pregnant. And while most of us don't go around killing children, we don't often go to the extreme trouble of raising a rugrat unless it is ours. We expect buildings that were never built. And political states that were in place from the start, with political divisions based on events that never happened....

All of this boils down to "In the absence of evidence, assume I'm right." Which, when you're the one making the claim, is not the correct assumption.

But evidence of various sorts has been presented. You just keep rejecting it.

There is zero, zip, nada evidence that every human in OotSworld has dragon ancestry.

Since we know that some humans have dragon ancestry [and really do have no evidence that others don't], we obviously do have some evidence. Inadequate maybe, but definite evidence.

There is zero, zip, nada evidence that every human in OotSworld is related to someone with dragon ancestry (to a close enough extent that Familicide applies).

But our basic math and simple fact that there have been some with mixed ancestry, means we do have evidence.

In fact, there is evidence AGAINST this claim, namely, that Familicide's effect was limited. You attempt to dodge this by claiming that Familicide wasn't executed logically, even though the author went so far as to lay out the exact logic of the spell for us. What can I say to such denial?

That it must be judged by the facts.
Claiming the author didn't know what he was saying is a bold claim, but has been shown to be true many times, at least once in the case of our author [He protested that he have never shown V to be good. Several of us pointed out he had done exactly that with Unholy Word, and he admitted his error.] So saying the author made an error in this, or any other, point is on the table even when we have a presumption of innocence.

There was a lot of posting on the point before the author laid down the exact logic of the spell. That does not make it reasonable to call it illogical AFTER the logic has been laid down.

It is in fact easier to call it illogical after the logic has been laid down than before. That is when the logic can be studied and judged, and possibly found wanting. Prior, the point must be found illogical under all possible justifications, not just the one used. [Joe shoots John. We can not call it illogical without knowing more since we know people get shot. But when the author says that was because John was stepping out with Mary, we can object that Joe didn't know this, and would not have objected, and/or,,,]

Evidence like, say, the description of the spell as laid out in exact terms...

Go look at any law book and you will see that the short amount the writer wrote on the spell simply can't be exact. All words, being mortal, are inexact, and routinely very much just approximations. We can also look at the time spent on the comic, and deduct that only a few minutes could have been devoted to the wordage of the spell. We can agree that the writer does a very good job in general, but he remains mortal and subject to error.

[Aldrakan]

Argall, if we have "presumption of innocence" for the author it is blindingly obvious that Familicide would not wipe out human life because everyone isn't dead, and a situation in which it wouldn't have killed everyone has been clearly presented to you. What you appear to be doing is assuming that he got it wrong, creating a hypothetical situation in which he would have been wrong, and then claiming that's the most likely scenario based on evidence that you yourself just admitted is inadequate.

[137beth]

But our basic math and simple fact that there have been some with mixed ancestry, means we do have evidence.

No, we have evidence that some humans in OOTS have dragon ancestry. We have none whatsoever that they all should.

[ChristianSt]

I don't have exact parameters on the OotS-world (and I think even the Giant has hard enough numbers made up to really discuss this), but for me Familicide is perfectly plausible.

First of all: even with dragon/human-breeding being "common" it doesn't really matter. We know that 1/4 of all black dragons died to Familicide. Even if 1/2 of all black dragons breeded with humans, it could be that no human related dragon was killed by Familicide (but we know that isn't true, since Girards bloodline was effected by it - but it could certainly the only one).

But we don't know how many different bloodlines existed at the start of the OotS-world (it could that there would be thousands or even much more), and how slowly/fast they mix (depending on many factors, like how far humans travel, how fast they start getting children, or how long a typical marriage holds). It could certainly be possible that Girards bloodline was relatively local and didn't mixed with many other before it got mixed with the dragons. So it is certainly plausible that Familicide could have operated how it did.

If there would be a comic stating that in OotS there is an Adam & Eve, then you could say Familice is illogical. But with the information we have it could certainly be possible.

For the problems with the world-creation: We have gods that created it. I think it wouldn't be hard for them to make it and simple start it (sure there would related persons, because there are families, but there is simply no need to relate all of them (or maybe there weren't families and they organized much faster to settlements and cities than real world humans. We haven't any clue about how the OotS-world started)). Applying real-world science to a (D&D-)fantasy world often doesn't make that much sense.

[B. Dandelion]

There calender is only a little more than a thousand years old. We don't know how old the OOTS world is.

Seems to be the implication. "A thousand years and more have passed in the world of mortals," the last event referred to being the creation of the planet. So "a thousand years and more since the creation of the planet" had passed when Soon's wife died.

I mean I guess you could argue "and more" means any number of centuries or millenia but "a thousand years and some change" seems the more likely reading to me which lines up with the established calendar (1184 in #489).

[David Argall]

No, we have evidence that some humans in OOTS have dragon ancestry. We have none whatsoever that they all should.

There are 10 X. If we posit that all X are Y and we test one and find that to be true, do we have evidence?
If we test two and find both are true, do we have evidence?
If we test three and find all are true, do we have evidence?
4? 5? 6? 7? 8? 9?
Evidence does not mean absolute proof. It often does not even mean proof. It means we have some indication of what the situation is, and enough evidence will be proof.
So if we find that some humans have dragon ancestry, we have evidence that all do. It may or may not be convincing evidence, but it is evidence.
Now in many cases like this we have the rule that 1 white buffalo beats 1000 non-white. That is the proposition that there are no white buffalo is provent false by 1 white buffalo no matter how many non-white are considered. And finding 1 human with no dragon ancestry would disprove the proposition that all humans have dragon ancestry. But we don't know the ancestry of any humans enough to say they have no dragon ancestry.
We merely know some do [or rather, did] have dragon ancestry. We can not reject the proposition that all do.

[Aldrakan]

Evidence does not mean absolute proof. It often does not even mean proof. It means we have some indication of what the situation is, and enough evidence will be proof.

We merely know some do [or rather, did] have dragon ancestry. We can not reject the proposition that all do.

Actually we can, because as people have told you many times, there is obvious evidence that not everyone has the ancestry you claim: they are alive.
You have concocted out of nothing the idea that Familicide wasn't enacted properly, and then based on this nothing argued that all humans should be dead because they must have dragon ancestry. You have no actual evidence that everyone has dragon ancestry, you just say that because it can't be proven that they don't, they must have, and therefore they should be dead, and therefore Familicide wasn't enacted properly. Do you really not see how ludicrous this is?

[jere7my]

There are 10 X. If we posit that all X are Y and we test one and find that to be true, do we have evidence?
If we test two and find both are true, do we have evidence?
If we test three and find all are true, do we have evidence?
4? 5? 6? 7? 8? 9?
Evidence does not mean absolute proof. It often does not even mean proof. It means we have some indication of what the situation is, and enough evidence will be proof.
So if we find that some humans have dragon ancestry, we have evidence that all do. It may or may not be convincing evidence, but it is evidence.

You're talking about inductive generalization. If you sample a population and find that x% of your sample has a certain attribute, can you extrapolate that x% of the population probably has that attribute? Answer: maybe. It depends, in a complicated statistical way, on the size of the population and the size of the sample. If the population is large enough and the sample is small enough, then you can't draw any conclusions at all—you're falling for the hasty generalization fallacy. Trying to use that "evidence" to support any conclusion is statistically indistinguishable from random guessing.

In this case, the sample size is one (because the Draketeeth are not independent from one another), and the population size is probably some millions. Two people could use the same methodology to simultaneously find "evidence" that all sentient beings in the OotS world are elves and that they're all goblins. That weakens the word "evidence" to meaninglessness.

[Nilehus]

One family out of thousands of families does not make for good statistical evidence.

The Draketooth clan is the only family line we've seen that we know has dragon ancestry. The Greenhilt family? No evidence. Elan's family? No evidence. Haley's? No evidence. V's? No evidence. Belkar's? No evidence. Durkon's? No evidence. And that's just the main cast. Of all the humanoids, the only proven dragon bloodline is the Draketooth clan.

Extrapolating that all humans have dragon ancestry from that is the equivalent of saying that all humans are Lawful Good, since the entirety of Roy's family is Lawful Good.

[Porthos]

I might remind people of this bit of posting from The Giant:

But if it worked like that, it would have [insert obscure effect proven with math]!
Yeah, well, it didn't. Why? I don't know. But it didn't. I guess that makes me a crappy writer because I didn't think of whatever implication you just thought of, but there it is. I'm not a biologist or a mathematician. If it makes you feel better, just assume that all the laws of heredity and genetics work differently because It's Magic™.

I hope this will end the endless debates. It's really quite simple, and if you're getting to a point where it seems utterly complicated or recursive or whatever, you're probably thinking about it more than I did.

I think the comment about 'laws of heredity and genetics work(ing) differently' is a sage one. After all, who the hell is to say that the people in OotSWorld even have genetic DNA/RNA? Yeah, that's how it works in Real Life. But nothing says it has to work that way in OotSWorld.

Maybe The Essence that binds families together (which Familicide attacked) is passed down from generation to generation. But The Essence becomes weaker and corrupted and changed after several generations. So much so that after what we would consider 6 generations a person is literally no longer related to their great great great great great uncle three times removed. Because the Essence that ties to two people together is gone.

Or maybe in some families The Essence is stronger (this, not coincidentally, is shown in families that take great pride to list all of their ancestors from the last 500 years).

"Genetics and Heredity don't work that way, Porthos", I hear you say? In RL, yes. In a world of D&D where the Germ Theory of Disease might very well be a bunch of hokum*? Who can say?

* It is clearly caused by ill-humors that take precise magical incantations or imbibements to get rid of.

Besides, I tend to think in world where you have naturally occurring Half Elf/Half Dragons, things like DNA and the like left town in disgust a long time ago. And if that is the case, then it isn't that big of a leap to suggest that, after a while, people aren't related anymore when enough time (and magic) passes.

Can it be a cop out to say A Wizard Did It? Sure. But sometimes it is just pointing out that, yes, a person might just be over thinking this a bit.

[Math_Mage]

Ah, definitionally, we can't introduce lines from completely separate pools because they are no longer separate. And once we do mix them, we again eventually end up with the two groups. Either all members of a group are now descendants of everybody in either group who has descendants, or no members are.

We surely can introduce lines from separate pools. The pool of dragons was completely separate from the pool of humans prior to the first interbreeding. From that point onward there is no equal ancestors point among humans until either all humans have dragon ancestry or none do--and if another interbreeding happens with a different line of black dragons, all bets are off again. Indeed, the very existence of the Draketooth clan suggests there was no equal ancestors point among humans until they were wiped out.

"I know you are, but what am I?"
Your own arguments are at least as subject to your charges as mine. So the argument has to be rejected.

Not at all. See, step 2 of my argument is to point out that the consequences of my hypothetical are exactly what we see in the comic. Step 2 of your argument is to assert that your hypothetical is correct despite that the consequences would be markedly different from what we see in the comic. The only thing I have to reject is your absurd false equivalence of these two lines of argument

And again as noted, there are a host of reasons why they should be considered to share ancestry even if no such ancestors ever existed. We have already noted that the world would be created as a going concern. We have looked at the case of babies, which we adopt the going concern concept by saying some adults are created at the same time. But we need lactating mothers, which means no births for 9 months, or some women were created pregnant. And while most of us don't go around killing children, we don't often go to the extreme trouble of raising a rugrat unless it is ours. We expect buildings that were never built. And political states that were in place from the start, with political divisions based on events that never happened....

Thus proving once again that you need to go read what the Giant wrote about Familicide:

Wouldn't that spell kill everyone of the original target's species?
In our world? Maybe. The OOTS world is not ours, though. It was created fully populated, even with black dragons. So there could be 100 original black dragons who (as V noted) breed slowly over the relatively-short span of time the current world has been in existence, leading to one-quarter of them being wiped out. If it had been cast on a human first, it may well have taken half or more of the population with it, depending on how many Original Humans there had been and how much interbreeding had occurred. Good thing that's not what happened, right?

Good thing black dragons don't have hypothetical shared ancestry, right? Otherwise they'd all be wiped out. So much for the world being created as an ongoing concern.

But evidence of various sorts has been presented. You just keep rejecting it.

Ah, and here you mistake *any old fact* for *evidence*. Facts only constitute evidence if they go some way towards proving your point.

For example:

Since we know that some humans have dragon ancestry [and really do have no evidence that others don't], we obviously do have some evidence. Inadequate maybe, but definite evidence.

This is utterly wrong. We know that some humans are descended from one specific dragon-human pairing. We also know that most humans are not descended from that pairing. The existence of that one pairing is therefore not evidence of dragon ancestry, inadequate or otherwise, for anyone outside the Draketooth clan.

That it must be judged by the facts.

Oh, that's rich, coming from the person whose first reaction to finding that his interpretation doesn't fit what happened in the comic is to dismiss the events of the comic, rather than to reconsider his interpretation. Please, tell me more about how you impartially weigh competing claims about the comic according to the facts.

Claiming the author didn't know what he was saying is a bold claim, but has been shown to be true many times, at least once in the case of our author [He protested that he have never shown V to be good. Several of us pointed out he had done exactly that with Unholy Word, and he admitted his error.] So saying the author made an error in this, or any other, point is on the table even when we have a presumption of innocence.

Time for some Bayesian analysis.
Rich has been correct about 99.9% of what happens in his comic. So let's generously assume your arguments for your position have been as strong as mine have been for mine. This is ignoring your wanton abuse of the word 'evidence', your demonstrated ignorance of what the Giant has actually written, your naive understanding of biology, etc. I'm still 99.9% likely to be correct.

Don't like that analysis? Then don't premise your arguments on the assumption that Rich got it wrong.

(Btw, Unholy Blight affects both Good and Neutral targets. Granted, it doesn't sicken Neutral targets, but it doesn't prevent Good characters from moving, either, and we see it doing that to the Order, so we already know it's not strictly RAW. How, exactly, is this evidence that V is Good?)

Go look at any law book and you will see that the short amount the writer wrote on the spell simply can't be exact.

Nah, f*** that. Rich isn't writing a law, he's writing pseudocode for the execution of an algorithm (the spell). Go look at any program and you will see that it is perfectly possible to write an exact statement with few words.

[ChristianSt]

There are 10 X. If we posit that all X are Y and we test one and find that to be true, do we have evidence?
If we test two and find both are true, do we have evidence?
If we test three and find all are true, do we have evidence?
4? 5? 6? 7? 8? 9?
Evidence does not mean absolute proof. It often does not even mean proof. It means we have some indication of what the situation is, and enough evidence will be proof.
So if we find that some humans have dragon ancestry, we have evidence that all do. It may or may not be convincing evidence, but it is evidence.
Now in many cases like this we have the rule that 1 white buffalo beats 1000 non-white. That is the proposition that there are no white buffalo is provent false by 1 white buffalo no matter how many non-white are considered. And finding 1 human with no dragon ancestry would disprove the proposition that all humans have dragon ancestry. But we don't know the ancestry of any humans enough to say they have no dragon ancestry.
We merely know some do [or rather, did] have dragon ancestry. We can not reject the proposition that all do.

But we have proof in form of the comic, that not all humans have dragon ancestry (with dragon ancestry being to to black dragons relevant to Familicide. It could be possible that all humans have dragon ancestry to other (even black) dragons), simple because there are still living humans (unless you say that all strips after 639 are an illusion/afterlife/whatever). So you can gather all evidence you like, it doesn't make that proof wrong (until you find something that contradicts that proof).

So why does the fact that there is one (or more) human bloodline that haves dragon ancestry (again of the Familicide black dragon type) change anything about that proof? (Unless you say that the Familicide description is wrong, but I would find it much more likelier that Familicde is correct and your assumptions about the OotS-world are wrong. So if there is a possible scenario that is consistent with the facts provided by the author, I think you can't say: "But that doesn't work, because If I assume x,y,z (which by the way you didn't say anything about whether they are correct or not), then clearly the events shown cannot be happened that way!", If I assume that magic doesn't work than I can clearly say that nearly the complete comic doesn't make any sense, but the comic doesn't operates under that assumption.) And even with the assumption that the Familicide description is wrong there is not a single piece of evidence that states that all humans have dragon ancestry, since we can't really apply real world genetics/science to the OotS-world.

Familicide is plausible with the given explanations from Rich, so I can't understand why anything about Familicide needs to be illogical.

If you have a problem with a world crated with multiple different bloodlines (because the gods liked it that way), then I'm really surprised that you have no problems with magic of all kinds.

[David Argall]

You're talking about inductive generalization. If you sample a population and find that x% of your sample has a certain attribute, can you extrapolate that x% of the population probably has that attribute? Answer: maybe. It depends, in a complicated statistical way, on the size of the population and the size of the sample. If the population is large enough and the sample is small enough, then you can't draw any conclusions at all—you're falling for the hasty generalization fallacy. Trying to use that "evidence" to support any conclusion is statistically indistinguishable from random guessing.
In this case, the sample size is one (because the Draketeeth are not independent from one another), and the population size is probably some millions. Two people could use the same methodology to simultaneously find "evidence" that all sentient beings in the OotS world are elves and that they're all goblins. That weakens the word "evidence" to meaninglessness.

You are still confusing evidence and proof. Any one fact, no matter how insufficient to prove a case is still evidence. In our given example, fact #1 is insufficient, but so are facts 2-9 individually insufficient. If we say 1 fact is no evidence, then 9 facts are no evidence. 9x0=0. But in our case, 9 facts are highly convincing. In many cases we would have stopped well short of 9 and made our conclusion. So each fact is evidence. Insufficient in many cases, possibly all, but insufficient is not "none whatsoever".

[Math_Mage]

You are still confusing evidence and proof. Any one fact, no matter how insufficient to prove a case is still evidence. In our given example, fact #1 is insufficient, but so are facts 2-9 individually insufficient. If we say 1 fact is no evidence, then 9 facts are no evidence. 9x0=0. But in our case, 9 facts are highly convincing. In many cases we would have stopped well short of 9 and made our conclusion. So each fact is evidence. Insufficient in many cases, possibly all, but insufficient is not "none whatsoever".

How very lawyerly of you.

Have your Fact 1 for the Draketooths if you wish. Where are Facts 2-1,000,000? Nowhere, right.

But if you feel arguing over whether your fact is 'no evidence' or merely 'drastically insufficient evidence to the degree of being negligible' will help you make your case, I won't stop you.

[jere7my]

You are still confusing evidence and proof. Any one fact, no matter how insufficient to prove a case is still evidence. In our given example, fact #1 is insufficient, but so are facts 2-9 individually insufficient. If we say 1 fact is no evidence, then 9 facts are no evidence. 9x0=0. But in our case, 9 facts are highly convincing. In many cases we would have stopped well short of 9 and made our conclusion. So each fact is evidence. Insufficient in many cases, possibly all, but insufficient is not "none whatsoever".

No, you're confusing evidence and data. Evidence has to support a conclusion. [Edit: it might be more precise to say evidence must incline toward a conclusion.] Evidence of everything is evidence of nothing.

If I wake up and see my cat, I do not have evidence that every being in the world has been turned into cats.

[ChristianSt]

You are still confusing evidence and proof. Any one fact, no matter how insufficient to prove a case is still evidence. In our given example, fact #1 is insufficient, but so are facts 2-9 individually insufficient. If we say 1 fact is no evidence, then 9 facts are no evidence. 9x0=0. But in our case, 9 facts are highly convincing. In many cases we would have stopped well short of 9 and made our conclusion. So each fact is evidence. Insufficient in many cases, possibly all, but insufficient is not "none whatsoever".

So we have enough evidence for to proof that all humans have dragon ancestry and we have at the same time proof that not all humans have dragon ancestry? (And even if we didn't have that proof, we would have equally enough evidence to claim a proof).

So only way to resolve this problem of Schrödinger's ancestry is to just measure the ancestry to get the result ... oh wait, we had such a measurement (the whole comic after 639).

Applying that logic you could nearly "proof" anything you wanted: Here, I have proof that all humans can survive a 10km free fall, because there is at least one human who did survive it. (Disclaimer: please don't try this at home)

[F.Harr]

There calender is only a little more than a thousand years old. We don't know how old the OOTS world is.

O.K., let me take this seriously. OotS is not Arda from Tolkien's work. Mr. Berlew did not spend decades fiddling with a fully-developed and indepent world for his own enjoyment. This is a parody so we've got no reason to assume that things are other than what they seem to be. If the date is 1189 we can reasonably assume that it's "anno mundi", as it were. This is because one of the things being parodied is roll-playing games and roll-playing games come with worlds that intended to be fully-functioning and as full of as many characters as the imagination of campaign designers, D.M.'s and players can come up with. There's no Earthly reason why it HAS to to be an older world becasue it doesn't take place on a world like Earth. It takes place in a world like Dungeons and Dragons including a slew of creater-gods.

Also, as has been noted, the Giant (in his booming, inhuman--'cause he's a giant, see--and occationally irritated voice) has stated that the world the OotS'ers inhabit was created "fully populated". That sounds to me like "in the beginning" there wasn't a thousand or two mew critters of each species, but hundreds of millions. Undoubtedly, some bloodline have run out. Others expanded. Still others stagnated. But unless they intermaried, they are seperate. What V did was extinguish all bloodlines related to one dragon. Assuming that there are millions of sapient bloodlines out there, as horrendous a thing as V did, it's still a vast minority of all that exist.

"There is no recursiveness or whatever. Penelope's actual child was targeted in Step 1, Penelope was targeted in Step 2. Penelope's theoretical child with Tarquin is also targeted, because that child and Penelope's actual child have shared ancestors. Tarquin, however, has no shared ancestors with the actual child, so he's safe. The spell does not check for people with shared ancestors for people killed only by Step 2."

O.K. That makes logical sense.

"Suddenly, Mitochondrial Eve is a lot more terrifying as a concept."

Thank god, spells like that don't really work, huh?

"I guess I just prefer using terms like 'ancestor' and 'descendant' over 'bloodline' or 'sharing the blood' because the former are more specific and therefore, to my mind, clearer."

I can see that.

"2) More importantly, while yes, the number of ancestors increases exponentially the further back in time you go, due to inbreeding there is going to be a lot of overlap in your ancestry. It is hard to calculate mathematically how much of an effect this has, but I would doubt that even on our world, where long distance travel has been widespread for a number of generations now, everyone can trace their ancestry back to say, Julius Caesar."

That's a fair point and one that's easy to forget. There's actually a Straight Dope collumn touching on that.

"I am the descendent (in that sense) of some fraction of the humans that were alive 1000 years ago, but to many of them I am unrelated unless you go farther back than that. 30,000 or so years ago the human population bottleneck was so small and localized that we may be related to most of them, but how many evolutionary dead ends from there? It's not just individuals who didn't have children that you're not related to, what if none of their children reproduce, or none of their grandchildren?"

That's much in the same vein. Cool.

[137beth]

O.K., let me take this seriously. OotS is not Arda from Tolkien's work. Mr. Berlew did not spend decades fiddling with a fully-developed and indepent world for his own enjoyment. This is a parody so we've got no reason to assume that things are other than what they seem to be. If the date is 1189 we can reasonably assume that it's "anno mundi", as it were. This is because one of the things being parodied is roll-playing games and roll-playing games come with worlds that intended to be fully-functioning and as full of as many characters as the imagination of campaign designers, D.M.'s and players can come up with. There's no Earthly reason why it HAS to to be an older world becasue it doesn't take place on a world like Earth. It takes place in a world like Dungeons and Dragons including a slew of creater-gods.

Also, as has been noted, the Giant (in his booming, inhuman--'cause he's a giant, see--and occationally irritated voice) has stated that the world the OotS'ers inhabit was created "fully populated". That sounds to me like "in the beginning" there wasn't a thousand or two mew critters of each species, but hundreds of millions. Undoubtedly, some bloodline have run out. Others expanded. Still others stagnated. But unless they intermaried, they are seperate. What V did was extinguish all bloodlines related to one dragon. Assuming that there are millions of sapient bloodlines out there, as horrendous a thing as V did, it's still a vast minority of all that exist.

*sigh*
Sabine purports to be more than 2000 years old. There's no reason to expect that she is lying, any more than we should jump to the conclusion that the world is less than 2000 years old. We don't really know how old the OOTS world is.

[NCoffin]

Wasn't the age of the world discussed at some length in another thread? I seem to recall this conversation happening nearly verbatim already.

[hamishspence]

*sigh*
Sabine purports to be more than 2000 years old. There's no reason to expect that she is lying, any more than we should jump to the conclusion that the world is less than 2000 years old. We don't really know how old the OOTS world is.

The gods are much older than the world. They hid after the Snarl wreaked havoc (destroying a previous world), before creating the new one. No reason why other outsiders could not have done the same.

[Rogar Demonblud]

One family out of thousands of families does not make for good statistical evidence.

The Draketooth clan is the only family line we've seen that we know has dragon ancestry. The Greenhilt family? No evidence. Elan's family? No evidence. Haley's? No evidence. V's? No evidence. Belkar's? No evidence. Durkon's? No evidence. And that's just the main cast. Of all the humanoids, the only proven dragon bloodline is the Draketooth clan.

Extrapolating that all humans have dragon ancestry from that is the equivalent of saying that all humans are Lawful Good, since the entirety of Roy's family is Lawful Good.

Incorrect on two points. Enor is half blue dragon, half ogre. And Julia Greenhilt is True Neutral (or at least was at the time of the Cliffport arc).

[137beth]

The gods are much older than the world. They hid after the Snarl wreaked havoc (destroying a previous world), before creating the new one. No reason why other outsiders could not have done the same.

Yes, it is entirely possible. But we don't have any proof of such--it is quite possible that the OOTS world is substantially older than Sabine, and it is quite possible that it is not. We don't have proof of either claim.

F.Harr seems convinced that we are definitively certain of the age of the OOTS world. This is false.

[Math_Mage]

Yes, it is entirely possible. But we don't have any proof of such--it is quite possible that the OOTS world is substantially older than Sabine, and it is quite possible that it is not. We don't have proof of either claim.

F.Harr seems convinced that we are definitively certain of the age of the OOTS world. This is false.

On the other hand, we are definitively certain that the author has made the world young enough that the black dragons aren't all related yet. Thankfully, this is enough, and we don't need F.Harr's stronger conjecture.

If I had Races of the Dragon handy or knew anything about dragon life cycles off the top of my head (other than that they reach Young Adult at 50yo and Adult at 100yo), we could use the Giant's hypothetical of 100 initial black dragons to guess at how old the world might be now. Of course, it'd be completely pointless since it's just a hypothetical...but hey, it's an excuse to do math.

[137beth]

On the other hand, we are definitively certain that the author has made the world young enough that the black dragons aren't all related yet. Thankfully, this is enough, and we don't need F.Harr's stronger conjecture.

If I had Races of the Dragon handy or knew anything about dragon life cycles off the top of my head (other than that they reach Young Adult at 50yo and Adult at 100yo), we could use the Giant's hypothetical of 100 initial black dragons to guess at how old the world might be now. Of course, it'd be completely pointless since it's just a hypothetical...but hey, it's an excuse to do math.

We don't need an excuse to do math, it is its own excuse

[Porthos]

We know that other worlds exist. No reason we can't presume that Sabine kicked around on some of them.

[David Argall]

Actually we can, because as people have told you many times, there is obvious evidence that not everyone has the ancestry you claim: they are alive.

But that is the proof that the spell is being used illogically. The spell should kill a great many people, possibly all. Having nearly all survive produces a contradiction.

You have concocted out of nothing the idea that Familicide wasn't enacted properly, and then based on this nothing argued that all humans should be dead because they must have dragon ancestry. You have no actual evidence that everyone has dragon ancestry, you just say that because it can't be proven that they don't, they must have, and therefore they should be dead, and therefore Familicide wasn't enacted properly. Do you really not see how ludicrous this is?

Here again we have that tendency to deny evidence by claiming none exists. It can be an effective rhetorical device, but it is almost without exception wrong. The evidence is often weak, but it is rarely completely absent.
Here we have a claim the spell kills all descendants, with no limit on generations. That makes math evidence. Each generation the number of descendants about doubles, until we start duplicating ancestor, and eventually all members of the group are descendants of all ancients who have any descendants. So the math is evidence that this is the case.
Now we can expand on that. 639 tells us that at least 60 breedable dragons were killed. That is clearly a minimul figure. Now we can note that 3 of these dragons were half dragons. 842 gives us 3 more half-dragons, who are not in 639. So inter species sex is not rare among black dragons.
Adding to that figure is that these half-dragons will be living shorter lives than the full dragons. So our 6 half-dragons are all born in the last century or so, and each previous century would have their own half-dragons who are now deceased [but left descendants in many cases]. Not nearly as large a percentage of the dragons would die before the spell could get them. So half-dragons will appear in good numbers.
And the half-dragons breed into the general population even more so. We note in our case that the unions only happened a century or so ago and the descendants numbered in the dozens. We start considering half-dragon born several centuries ago, and our descendants reach the millions each.
Note too, that the spell hit world-wide. Unlike a pure human case, where all of population A would have dragon blood, while population B, on the far side of a mountain range, might have none for a substantial period, here we would have dragon flying over the mountains, and infecting both populations. So we would have a case much closer to the pure mathematical doubling each generation. Among the short lived humans a very large percentage would be vulnerable to the spell, and any shorter lives species would be wiped out. So the sight of creatures not dying is proof of a logical flaw.
Now for most purposes, this is not too serious. Our writer wanted a dramatic effect, which he got, and and a reason why the party has to be more than mere messengers. indeed need to do just about all the heroics, which he also got. [He may have some other reason as well of course, but these are enough.] All he needed of the logic is that it sounded plausible. Mere logic error were not worth bothering about, particularly when you need a stripe out tomorrow.
However, for us that means that deep logic chains are routinely faulty. We are not able to prove that NPC 2349 had 17 grandkids instead of 16.

[hamishspence]

The spell should kill a great many people, possibly all. Having nearly all survive produces a contradiction.

Or- your assumptions are in error.

Not to mention that step 2:


Step 2: Kill everyone who shares blood with any of the people killed in Step 1. Think of it as killing everyone descended from (or siblings to) any and all still-living ancestors of each secondary target. So if Penelope had a grandfather on one side and a great-grandmother on the other side who were still alive, every person who could trace their blood back to either of those people would be [/B]dead, because Penelope's daughter carries both of their bloods. If a person can only trace their blood through (say) Penelope's already-dead great-great-great-grandfather, then they're safe. Thus cousins and second-cousins and the like are all dead, but more distant genetic relations are not. It is possible for some cousins to survive if all older generations were already dead, yes, but Vaarsuvius wasn't really likely to take the time to make that distinction while sobbing on a dungeon hallway floor.

allows the chain to break, if an ancestor is already dead at the time of Familicide.

[Math_Mage]

But that is the proof that the spell is being used illogically. The spell should kill a great many people, possibly all. Having nearly all survive produces a contradiction.

And we're back to the 'postulate a world where my claim is true, assert that we're using that world in contradiction of the author's description of his own world, and claim victory' line of argument.

You keep asserting that the author is deliberately ignoring logic for dramatic effect, despite that the author has explicitly laid out his logic. Isn't that, y'know, completely ignorant? And insulting to his effort at explanation? If he was ignoring logic for dramatic effect, why the hell would he bother explaining his spell's logic? Your disconnect from reality is simply jarring.

Or- your assumptions are in error.

Not to mention that step 2:


Step 2: Kill everyone who shares blood with any of the people killed in Step 1. Think of it as killing everyone descended from (or siblings to) any and all still-living ancestors of each secondary target. So if Penelope had a grandfather on one side and a great-grandmother on the other side who were still alive, every person who could trace their blood back to either of those people would be [/B]dead, because Penelope's daughter carries both of their bloods. If a person can only trace their blood through (say) Penelope's already-dead great-great-great-grandfather, then they're safe. Thus cousins and second-cousins and the like are all dead, but more distant genetic relations are not. It is possible for some cousins to survive if all older generations were already dead, yes, but Vaarsuvius wasn't really likely to take the time to make that distinction while sobbing on a dungeon hallway floor.

allows the chain to break, if an ancestor is already dead at the time of Familicide.

No, hamishspence, you haven't grasped the mind-boggling delusion at work here. The argument is that every human MUST have black dragon ancestry tracing back to ABD, and would therefore be wiped out in Step 1 of the spell. This is the level of ignorance you are dealing with.

[jere7my]

Here we have a claim the spell kills all descendants, with no limit on generations. That makes math evidence. Each generation the number of descendants about doubles, until we start duplicating ancestor, and eventually all members of the group are descendants of all ancients who have any descendants. So the math is evidence that this is the case.

It's really not. Populations are not homogenous. We don't know how much contact the various groups of humans have had. If the world began 1100 years ago with a thousand geographically isolated and spontaneously created villages, and they only started coming into contact and intermarrying a hundred years ago, the bloodlines will still be largely distinct.

If, on earth, the gods had created year-one populations in South Africa and Australia and Poland and Siberia and Thailand and Chad and Mexico and Chile and Canada, then sat back and watched until the middle ages began, how many people in Chad would share a common ancestor at that point with someone in Canada?

What if the first dragon-human crossbreed happened about a century ago? What if it was culturally taboo for black dragons to mate with humans until then, and then suddenly it became trendy? Would that affect the "math evidence"?

The math evidence is insufficient. We need to know the details of the history, and we don't.

Mere logic error were not worth bothering about, particularly when you need a stripe out tomorrow.

Mere grammar and spelling error were not worth bothering about neither, apparently.

[The Giant]

Oh, guys, you should know by now that David Argall has a long history of deciding I'm wrong and than badgering everyone about it with passive sentence construction until they give up arguing with him.

So, just to be clear:

1.) The people created at the moment of the planet's creation were all unrelated to each other, or perhaps only related in small groups—a family of 5 or 10 might have been created, but with no relation to all the other families being simultaneously created. Why? Because.

2.) There is no reason to think that just because the comic shows something that it is statistically likely, or that the number of panels I draw of something is intended to be a statement about the frequency of such a thing. I do not draw the comic based on statistics or demographics, I draw it based on what looks good.

3.) Yes, the proof that not all humans have the blood of that specific black dragon is the fact that they didn't all die. Things aren't errors just because they don't support your preferred assumptions. It just means your assumptions are wrong.

4.) Explicitly, I am going to say that no black dragon, ever, in the history of the world, ever mated with any human being until Girard's grandparents. Some black dragons mated with other species, and some other colors of dragon mated with humans. But black dragons and humans? One time only in the history of OOTS-world. That's canon now. Done.

It's now impossible for any humans to have died other than the Draketooths and the families they intermingled with in the last 5 generations. And since Step 2 of the spell requires a LIVING link to keep the chain going, humans that have no living ancestors with those people are safe.

So, yeah. The spell works exactly as I explained, it's just the world that works differently than assumed. Which is exactly what I said the first time I explained how it worked.