Talk:Dragon turtle

Creature vs. Inhabitant
Okay, Lhyn has given me an opportunity to discuss the question on whether creatures are inhabitants... a long time ago, High admin FW stated only specific persons, such as Drizzt Do'Urden go into Category:Inhabitants of Toril and drow do not... so I would like to have another vote on what other editors think :) - Darkwynters (talk) 16:53, November 30, 2014 (UTC)


 * I just noticed a minute ago that you were making that distinction. It was not clear to me until you made a correction for Aldani.


 * To me, an inhabitant is broader than just persons. If it were me, I'd have a category family for "Characters in..." which would be a subcategory of "Inhabitants".


 * In any case, I'll stop tagging such cases unless we decide otherwise. ~ Lhynard (talk) 16:57, November 30, 2014 (UTC)

Read: Help:Writing an article about a person... now we might change this, but let's wait to see what others think. - Darkwynters (talk) 17:01, November 30, 2014 (UTC)


 * I suppose technically, the only things that shouldn't be 'Inhabitants of Toril' are those creatures that come from other worlds or planes of existence and there's no argument I can think of that can't be refuted in this regard. For simplicity's sake however, I'd say only named creatures and unique individuals should get an inhabitants cat. I am however all for a 'Creature native to...' category, or something similar, as that kind of thing should help DMs. It's all about indexing for our readers - when people are searching for an NPC, they want to find precisely where that NPC calls home. When they're looking for monsters, they want to find the general area where those monsters roam, hoping it's near where their game is set or using that area to narrow down where they want to place their game. -hashtalk 17:39, November 30, 2014 (UTC)


 * I like the "Creature native to..." idea. ~ Lhynard (talk) 17:46, November 30, 2014 (UTC)


 * /agree with "Creature native to"! That seams to be allot better! Edit: So considering stuff like Kenku there would probebly be a "Creature native to Urbanisations/Cityscapes"? Terrorblades 's Far Realm logs dated  17:52, November 30, 2014 (UTC)


 * I don't like the word "Characters" because it doesn't have an in-universe flavor. I think "Inhabitants" should be used for NPCs and named creatures. If we start using "native to", we should keep it as general as possible or else some creatures like orcs will have dozens of categories. So "Creatures native to Toril" is probably all you need for orcs.


 * But what about creatures that are not partitioned by Faerûnian geography? Something like the remorhaz? "Creatures native to cold regions"? Do we want to categorize all creatures this way? The Monster Manual II 1st edition has 16 pages of tables listing monsters by terrain type. There are 34 tables ranging from "Cold, Civilized Mountains" to "Tropical, Wilderness Desert" and there are 12 more tables for aquatic encounters. And THEN there are the (depending on your cosmology) anywhere from 17 to 26 Outer planes and 6 Elemental Planes and a dozen Elemental realms plus a few stray planes (the Ethereal Plane, the Astral Plane/Sea, the Feywild, the Shadowfell) that creatures can call home. Adding up the numbers in bold, we approach 100 different ways to categorize creatures in addition to Faerûnian geography. And the crowning caveat is that different editions might contradict, and we can't tabbify categories, so we get the (2e), (3e), etc. suffixes like we have for classes and spells. The "Creatures native to..." categories would be nice to have, but IMO you are opening a huge can of larva if you go there. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 02:18, December 2, 2014 (UTC)


 * I think this raises the issue about the purpose of categories. One could just list links of all the known characters/inhabitants of a given location in that entry. But the entry for Faerûn would have hundreds of links in a seemingly endless list, so we use categories instead so we don't have to do that, and we don't have to have a link for Artemis Entreri in a list in Calimshan, Lands of Intrigue, West Faerûn, Faerûn, and Toril. It helps automate things also.


 * As a DM, one thing I very often want to know is what sort of monsters my group should expect to meet in the Forest of Mir or the Marching Mountains. It would be super helpful to have a list somewhere that provides that information. Categories would do this. However, asking, "What sort of monsters are in Calimshan?" is generally too broad a question. It is more likely that I am going to ask, "What sort of monsters are in the Teshyllal Wastes?" Maybe it makes sense to include a list of monsters in the articles for any "smaller" locale but not for large and broad regions? So maybe Moviesign is correct.


 * On the other hand, I am not sure we would need to worry about conflicting editions. If 2e says wyverns are in Chult and 3e does not, I don't think that logically implies a retcon to remove wyverns from Chult. It just probably means that they aren't as populous as a monster mentioned in both editions. I don't really see how this is a bigger can of worms than other cases. A Wiki always runs into crazy explosions of data like this; but that's the sort of "monster" we have with all the source books and novels out there. I don't think that kind of mess can be avoided&mdash;especially with the abysmal job of keeping everything consistent among the additions that occurred when they switched from 3e to 4e.


 * (That makes sense about not liking the word "Character"; perhaps there's some other word that isn't "Inhabitant"? "Personages"? "Individuals"? I think I like "Individuals" best. In any case, it's a minor thing; now that I know the distinction, I am fine with limiting "Inhabitants" to named individuals. I just didn't know before because that's not what "inhabitant" means to me at first hearing.)


 * I'm not really providing a suggestion here or even a defense of a view; this is mostly just things to think about. However, I do think that something should be done to help DMs find out what monsters they should plan for their adventures in locale X. ~ Lhynard (talk) 03:42, December 2, 2014 (UTC)


 * Hmmm... I have created a few environment categories, such as Category:Creatures by environment - Darkwynters (talk) 04:45, December 2, 2014 (UTC)


 * So DW, do you want to use the 34 terrain types? We could categorize each location, like "Cold, Civilized Mountains", and creatures could be put in something like "Found in Cold", "Found in Civilized", and/or "Found in Mountains", etc. This would be a perfect utilization of the Template:Category intersection functionality (it can do AND and OR operations), if only it was working correctly :( (I have yet to hear back about my bug report). &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 01:03, December 3, 2014 (UTC)


 * I think I found a workaround to fix the Category intersection!!1! &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 02:03, December 3, 2014 (UTC)


 * So you want to use the 1st edition terrains over the 2nd or 3rd edition terrains? - Darkwynters (talk) 03:14, December 3, 2014 (UTC)


 * Oh, I don't really care. That's the system I am most familiar with, and it is probably the most detailed, but it may not be the best for the wiki. Should we start a Forum thread about it? &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 03:48, December 3, 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, so other editors can put in there feedback :) - Darkwynters (talk) 03:55, December 3, 2014 (UTC)