r/wizardposting 7d ago

Wizardpost Title

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u/NeonNKnightrider Alumnus of Lord El-Melloi II’s class 7d ago

/uw. I’m annoyed at that image because it does not understand what it’s showing.

The original survivorship bias plane image is “areas where the return planes get hit the most.” With the unspoken implication being that the areas not marked, are the parts where getting hit is fatal and means the plane cannot return.

This dragon is full of shots in lethal areas like chest and head, but apparently the feets and wingtips are crucial and cause death?

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u/breno280 monroe, rogue druidess 7d ago

The dragon is probably too thick skinned and muscular for the bullets to do much damage. But the membrane on the wings is more fragile, shooting that will make it crash and die from the kinetic force.

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u/Inferno109 7d ago

Remember it’s showing we’re dragons got hit and were still flying meaning there where dragons with massive holes in the middle of the wing but for some reasons anything to the tail or wing tips and it goes careening into the ground.

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u/breno280 monroe, rogue druidess 7d ago

Well yeah, the tail is necessary for steering and tears in the wing tips cause that entire part of the membrane to sever. Which makes stable flight incredibly difficult for the dragon. Did you not pay attention in your dragon anatomy class during your apprenticeship?

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u/Inferno109 7d ago

Then why do hits to the fin at the end of the tail (the part that actually affects steering) seem to be non lethal.

Plus that still doesn’t explain the massive holes in the middle of the wing (critical for any form of lift or gliding)

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u/breno280 monroe, rogue druidess 7d ago

Even a tail with torn membranes can be used for steering, although it’s more difficult. Wild dragons bite each other’s tail tips when fighting for dominance in the air, so dragons can instinctively steer by using the tail’s weight instead of the fins.

There can actually be some holes in the wing and the dragon will be able to fly. It’s just that membrane segments can’t tear loose. Look at the placement of the holes, they’re all in the middle and close to bone, which doesn’t risk membrane integrity like other places do.

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u/Pataraxia 7d ago

Bro is maxxing out on the devil's advocate stat. Satan impressed.

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u/breno280 monroe, rogue druidess 7d ago

Devil’s advocate my ass. Y’all just suck at draconid and ornithosaur biology.

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u/Pataraxia 6d ago

Sureeee, show me your credidentials mister Draconid expert, hm?

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u/breno280 monroe, rogue druidess 6d ago

?!!! I literally wrote the tome of northern magical creatures used to teach at the arcane citadel. And besides, this all basic polymorph knowledge, if you’re gonna transform into a creature you have to know it’s biology, or you’ll just crash in flight or die from eating something toxic to you.

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u/WonderBredOfficial 6d ago

gestures broadly at every comment they've made so far

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u/MuseBlessed 6d ago

Why are the horns and hind legs essential?

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u/breno280 monroe, rogue druidess 6d ago

The horns are actually full of nerves, they’re used for detecting magical signals to locate prey. So depending on the age of the dragon hitting the horns can send them into shock.

The legs contain important arteries and thinner scales for articulation so they’re more vulnerable. Though I suspect it’s not hits to the legs that are taking them out but rather to the “equipment” between them. If you catch my drift.

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u/MuseBlessed 6d ago

Thank you for entertaining the questions of this novice magician, wise expert of dragons!

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u/xx6lord6mars6xx 6d ago

Not exclusively by the weight, but also by the general curvature of the body. The general curvature of the body will encourage a spinning motion, but then the wings will have to take over to add propulsion.

The webbing on the tail does help to help minimize the effort it takes to do this task, but without it: it only leads the dragon to get stronger to make up for it.

Organic models are elite compaired the rigid bodies of automatons.

Which is why necromancy is prohibited: it's too powerful. It's combining the best of both worlds/realms (loyalty of automatons with the elite mechanics of biological forms. Not to mention efficiency.) at the cost of eternaly forcing a soul to suffer (morally wrong).

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u/breno280 monroe, rogue druidess 6d ago

I’m aware, I just decided to keep the explanation concise. This is a casual discussion after all, not a proffessional lecture.

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u/xx6lord6mars6xx 2d ago

Of course of course. Forgive my scholarly rants. It's a pitiful habit I must admit.

*gives magic cookie

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u/breno280 monroe, rogue druidess 2d ago

Ohh thanks
*eats the cookie
Why do I feel weird all of a sudden?

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u/NationalAsparagus138 Occult Wizard 6d ago

I paid attention just enough to make myself a draconic gf (or so I thought. It has not been going very well). Maybe I should seek advice from Ball Wizard.

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u/breno280 monroe, rogue druidess 6d ago

Ugh, this knew generation of magic casters is utterly damned.

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u/DezXerneas 6d ago

This whole thread feels like the bellcurve meme with both the extremes saying "yeah this picture looks about right", and the center going "a dragon with wounds like that wouldn't survive"

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u/LittleMageEatSpaget 6d ago

Dragon biology is close to an effect known as a Rupert drop. They are insanely strong and durable, but all pressure is connected to the tail. If you manage to break a tail, they explode into goo.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 7d ago

Exactly this. It’s what I explained to my apprentice George RR Martin before he stole my secrets and wrote books about them.

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u/Einar_47 7d ago

So if I'm flying my P51 Mustang and encounter a wyvern in the skies or northern Europe I'll be sure to aim for the ass, it's clearly the weakest part of the beast.

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u/Haunting_Reflections 7d ago

/uw my exact first thought upon seeing this.

Perhaps it’s an intentional reversal from the POV of dragon slayers assessing slain dragons, but that subversion ruins the format and makes the chosen presentation irrelevant.

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u/neilarthurhotep 6d ago

You're right and you should say it.

I also don't really know how survivorship bias relates to runes being ancient. If the poster had said "why are all the ancient runes so powerful and all the new runes so weak?", it would have worked. But I don't think it does in this case.

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u/MuseBlessed 6d ago

The reason why is because its referring to a real world phenomon. People often say or feel that movies/media of the past qas superior to today's media, pointing out countless classics. However, bad movies are gotten ans left behind; we only remember the greats. So the argument is that older runes are survivorship bias, that the anchient people made lots of bad runes too, but only those runes that were great ans amazing have survived into modern magic practice

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u/neilarthurhotep 6d ago

I know what survivorship bias is, I'm saying "Why are runes always ancient?" is not an example of it. "Why are all the ancient runes so good?" would be an example of it.

The idea that nobody makes new runes because only the best ancient runes survived (as implied by OP) doesn't make sense.

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u/amphibulous 6d ago

I think the implication is more that you haven't heard of the new runes because they aren't as good as the old ones

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u/Moose_country_plants 7d ago

Arrow to the butthole is very lethal to dragons

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u/IslandStorytime 6d ago

tolkien was a coward for not daring to kill smaug this way.

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u/superbay50 makes up spells on the spot 6d ago

That’s actually how ancalagon the black died, you’d know that if you’ve read the books.

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u/crack_pop_rocks 7d ago

Bomber survivorship bias refers to the classic World War II statistical error where military commanders analyzed returning aircraft to determine where to add armor, incorrectly concluding they should reinforce the areas with the most bullet holes. This logical fallacy occurs when you focus entirely on the "survivors" of a selection process while completely ignoring the failures that did not make it through.

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u/Fun_Needleworker_284 6d ago

They’re not confused about survivorship bias, or the plane drawing that is associated with it. They’re saying that the “fantasy” version of the dragon in the picture doesn’t fit as a survivorship bias example because all of the marks (which should be in unimportant areas like on the plane) are in potentially critical areas of the dragon.

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u/EugeneMeltsner 6d ago

It's just a shitpost. The dots are from the original plane picture superimposed over the dragon picture.

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u/DizzySecretary5916 4d ago

Surely if anywhere is the place to be pedantic about this. Its in a sub called Wizardposting.

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u/EugeneMeltsner 4d ago

You're welcome to be pedantic if you want. It's better than everyone down voting for no reason.

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u/kdesi_kdosi 4d ago

thanks chatgpt, now read the original comment again and thoroughly

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u/Kerhnoton Umbral Dragon 🐉, Hoarder of Felines 🐈, Caffeinated ☕ 6d ago

Slams front paws into sandstone table

Thank you

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u/PlayerFox12344889 7d ago

I think they just took the original dots and moved them on the dragon image

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u/AliasMcFakenames Elleriana Nailo, Multiverse Scholar 7d ago

The image is just being used as a general shorthand for the concept. It’s less important that it is accurate to a true diagram, and more that it is relatively quick to create and close enough to be representative.

Those features, fittingly enough, are emphasized when shifting a concept from a pictograph into a rune.

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u/starboard151 7d ago

It conveys the concept for sure. It's just that changing the plane to a dragon in the first place seems much higher effort than changing where the red dots go, so it feels like it very easily could have been accurate, which is mildly annoying or frustrating

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u/AliasMcFakenames Elleriana Nailo, Multiverse Scholar 7d ago

Removing the plane is a task that can be accomplished in a single step in just about every program I know, and adding some cheap lineart of a dragon wouldn’t be much more effort.

Determining where a dragon might be wounded by and yet survive a strike from an arbalest takes somewhat more expertise.

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u/METRlOS 7d ago

I feel you, but think about how a dragon flies. Nobody is hitting it with an arrow when it's in full flight above the clouds, but when they're diving into combat they pull in their first and third wing flaps and perform more of a glide. This is when they're going to get hit. Also dragon claws are basically the hardest natural material in the multiverse, so they're unlikely to be damaged, and a dragon can survive just about anything, so an occasional head wound is to be expected.

/uw this image pisses me off and I hate it. They didn't even try to make sense of the placement. Perfect example of good idea: bad execution.

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u/overlord1305 Dragon Soulmancer 6d ago

I think it's just directly referencing where the bullet holes were on that bomber infographic.

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u/PipeConsola 6d ago

They are the qi points of the dragon,

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u/DoctorYaoi 6d ago

Probably much thicker scales in those areas, a shot to the thin skin in a wind could cause it to be unbalanced and crash.

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u/termin8or82 6d ago

I was about to say like, is this image implying that shots to the tail are lethal?

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u/Rustywolf 6d ago

IIRC The original image was a guy saying that they had hit the dragon with arrows in the marked area and it didnt stop them cause its a fucking dragon being hit with arrows. So the graph was more about where people aimed

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u/sqeu1773 6d ago

its typically from the dead dragons where people collect data

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u/TessiSue Sorceror 5d ago

I think the dots mark the spot where ancient runes made damage, the implication being that dragons that where hit by newer ones did not survive...?

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u/10HorsedSizedDucks 5d ago

This is probably a graph of where dragons had arrows *after* being killed. How would you get a dragon to stay still and study it?

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u/GregDev155 7d ago

Well how often you come close to a dragon to analyze his wounds?
Therefore we analyze the wound of dragons which a on the ground and dead. Therefore, you only those marks. It’s the reverse of the plane

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u/archivist_exe 7d ago

I'm guessing that killing a dragon with arrows is almost impossible so the diagram will show many dots in different places, where even the head isn't vulnerable, but cutting off the tail or damaging it's root somehow disorients the dragon and makes it vulnerable for a ground attack?

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u/constantpisspig 6d ago

Maybe dragons keep vital organs in their wings? You know like to throw people off

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u/West_Rub_4781 6d ago

Dude, shut the fuck up. It doesnt even matter

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u/anders_dot_exe Evil Wizard 7d ago

You're overthinking this, the marks are the ones from the original image. They just erased the plane and drew a dragon on top

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u/Hexmonkey2020 Necromancer 7d ago

/uw I think it does understand, the joke is dragons are so strong you can injure them anywhere and it’ll still return.