To use another IRL example, humans did drive the wooly mammoth to complete extinction with little more than sharpened rocks attached to sticks.
Humanity's ability of cooperation is a massive force multiplier and let's us accomplish tasks that would kill and individual.
Because certain systems have different focuses.
The core game focus of DnD is pretty heavily directed toward combat. Most of the spells and skills your character has are for combat or for getting into combat or for between combat encounters. It's a combat centric game, with some RP rules added on top for in-between combat encounters.
Compare that to World of Darkness's Storyteller system, which is much more heavily focused on the social interactiom and narrative drama. Combat in that game is quick and usually quite lethal, and even in the 5th Edition games Paradox is releasing, calls for combat to be 3 turns before resolving the interaction.
It takes a lot of time and effort to add on your own rules to make these systems handle what they weren't really designed for.
I wouldn't really want to run a game of complex political intrigue in DnD just as I wouldn't want to run a monster slaying dungeon crawl in World of Darkness.
Certainly coffee houses do have historic basis in our own reality but the highly commercialized omnipresent franchises with extensive supply chains like IRL Starbucks would definitely be a bit more anachronistic, especially in an adveture friendly world where monsters and bandits are waiting outside the walls of the city waiting to ambush cargo shipments.
Something like that probably wouldn't have been even remotely possible until the age of Mercantilism well after the medieval period gave way to the Renaissance and eventually the age of exploration.
As a DM dice are there to make noise behind the screen and raise tension. They're a psychological tool as much as they are a randomizer.
Personally I play a lot of World of Darkness games, which runs on dice pools, so if I can just keep obviously adding more and more dice to a pool, recount once or twice and roll to really sell the illusion that they may be in for something a lot bigger and scarier than they are. Or just roll a handful of dice as moments are going on, give a facial reaction and let that simmer under the surface for a while.
Point taken, but they also still had the resources and people to make that many charts.
Well Rollmaster has multiple authors/designers and the benefit of 43 years of accumulated writing and knowledge.
He laughed when I said 5.
When the Order of Hermes takes design cues from the Society of Ether.
I think the writers of Mage the Ascension got it best when referring to DnD as a wargame with role-playing tacked on top.
So much of DnD the dnd rulebook and printed material is focused around combat and getting from one combat encounter to the next one.
Odd, everything I'm coming across is saying broths are made from meat where stocks are primarily made from bones. Both use vegetables as part of the aromatics.
Waterdeep Vampires, started out as a drinking club of the bards of various famous adventuring parties, like werewolf bard Keith Moon of The Whom, high Elf bard Jontiel Lennoniel and Aasimat bard Ringo Starrfall of The Beetles, and Shifter bard Mickey Dole Z of the Monkees.
Current members include merfolk bard Johnny Deepp, Human bard Koe Qerry, and former barrel maker turned bard Alice Cooper.
I really like WoD's Resources background, one thing I do tend to append to the rules is separate out recurring income from lump assets.
Basically Income Resources are used up and refresh each month worth of time provided players maintain their income or have retainers keep watch over the accounts. Lump Resources are like having a big pile of gold, or a big inheritance from an eccentric uncle or just a bunch of money in a savings account. Once they're used up, they're used up.