>Originally, there were level caps based on race for each class, so elves couldn’t get above level 10 in most classes, and the advantage of humans was that they could. This was done to explain why long-lived elves don’t rule the world, but when later editions removed this element, it became unclear why elves aren’t the dominant race
because 1,000,000 humans > 1,000 elves
>>93196479PC classes aren't representative of the general population, so it's completely immaterial what restrictions are placed on them.>because 1,000,000 humans > 1,000 elvesAlso this.
>>93196479Elf classes: WayfarerTreesingerGlade PriestDwarf classes:ProspectorSapperArtizanHuman classes:RogueWarriorMagi
>>93196499So why aren't humans being usurped by the clearly numerically superior ants?
>>93196715Because, unlike ants, they have a sense of individual preservation and don't want to die? Also, there's a possible point of balance between more numerous but weaker people and less numerous but stronger people.
>>93196715>>93196768Elves probably do measure humans in swarms.
maybe because i suck elves' cocks.
>>93196479Humans dont have all the time in the world so they need to get shit done NOW.Elves can always put off the annoying work 'til tomorrow.Overlord was right in identifying sloth as the sin of the elves.Dwarves had greed, halflings gluttony and humans had lust, wrath and envy I think? guess humans are the most sinful. Or the game makers didnt want to use non-iconic fantasy races
>>93197348Ok, I just read up on it and the sins were more about being distributed among the heroes-turned-villains than to each race.I think it could be a useful exercise however to think of what vice and virtue you would apply to each fantasy race, or something like that.What races would you put on the vice-virtue chart?
>>93196479I always thought thats Paris Hilton. Now i see thats not her.
>>93197054*gocksTolkienz intended elves to be femmeboy coded
>>93196479The implication that every single elf would have a spellbook is weirder to me. They couldn't cast spells naturally like sorcerers in later editions for balance reasons but it brings some not that great weirdness to them as a species. Other races simply being fighting men with an assortment of special abilities makes more sense because it's the bare minimum class to be an adventurer. But every elf that gets a class level suddenly becomes a fighter-wizard even if they're wood elves that probably don't have access to paper mills.
>>93197702>>93197711Just sad that I, Chudlor the Paladim will never plunge mine longsword into tnat fecund blossom, sneeding it and feeding it in a frosted glade, cheeks aflame
>>93196479Because they don't want to. They'd much rather stay in the comfort of their woods than give themselves migraines trying to micromanage a bunch of aggressive, competitive apes. Only the lessers are obsessed with dominating their betters because of their ressentiment and insecurity. The betters see rulership over their lessers for the pointless chore that it really is. Why should the elves help humans et al. unfuck their societies when they can suck on elf girl toes instead?
>>93197699People had been writing on animal skins for centuries just fine.
>>93197832A first level spell takes up three pages. Are you saying elves should be sitting around in yurts with miles of yakskin tapestry?
>>93197902No, they're sitting around forest lakes with freshwater dugongs. Also holy shit, what the fuck is that spell. A wizard would be killed three times over by the time he's finished reading it out loud.
>>93197918In old editions when a magic user is prepping a spell from their book the idea is that they are basically casting it 99% of the way. The last bit in combat is the final step of the ritual that activates the magic energy causing the spell to go off and the caster to "forget" it until they prepare it again.
>>93197943So it's essentially the same as in the Amber books, except you don't write the spells down there, you "weave" them in magical hyperspace. Which, by the way, removes the problem of books and pages entirely.
>>93197699elves have 'elven magic' a.k.a. cantrips; they can cast those at will, they don't need a wizard book for that, they're just born with itconsidering how dangerous some of those cantrips are (like shocking grasp, firebolt or acid splash) it makes me wonder how destructive elven kids can potentially be
>>93198013Elven lolis need all the firebolts they can get to defend against human nonces.
>>93196715Ants are too busy slaughtering each other to take over the world, once a single colony takes over the world is doomed
>>93196715Ants already rule the world. They keep humans around because we produce so much food they can trivially harvest from us
>>93196479How does an arbitrary lower cap for elves explain anything? What's the reasoning behind a longer-lived race being not only slower to advance at the same rate of others, but also being unable to reach the same heights?
>>93198857Low neuroplasticity
>>93196479The real reason is racism.
>>93196479>Also, different classes required different amounts of experience to gain levels back then. The resulting effect was that spellcasters were still more powerful, but took much longer to level up and were more fragile meaning that they could really only be played by more experienced players.
>>93196715Because 1,000,000 human > 2,000,000,000,000 ants
>>93199320The gap was never bigger than 1 level at any point of progression, and wasn't even that much most of the time.
Honestly I think that the more powerful your class, the longer it should take to level up to a notable extent. The inverse should also be true, if you're a martialfag you should level up super quickly because you're just a guy swinging a sword around.
Every time someone gets confused why elves don't just conquer the world, it basically reveals them to be an evil prick.>If *I* were immortal and perfect, I'd use my powers to subjugate everyone else!The elves don't conquer and destroy everyone else because they don't want to, because they're wise. It's that easy. They aren't power-tripping, selfish menaces like humans would be if they gained elven attributes.
>>93199519This is why everyone hates your species, Legolas
>>93199519you don't understand, you'd have to be working REALLY hard to not conquer the world if you lived that long and could have babies.Just by existing and making babies you'd beat everyone else at everyone and exist everywhere before them, better than them.
>>93199393Go back and do your math again.
>>93199549>Just by existing and making babies you'd beat everyone else>beat everyone elseAgain, what the fuck do you even mean by "beat everyone else"? Why?If you're immortal and have a purer sense of mind, there's no reason to fuck with anyone else. You can just chill in your forest where you have everything you need and just mind your business for hundreds of years. There's no reason to wander around flexing on other people. You also aren't going to go around having tons of kids because you're not a raging bag of hormones and lust.The issue is that you're just taking for granted that elves are full of the same evil desires you are, which isn't necessarily true. The point of confusion here is that you're just so cynical you actually can't even FATHOM what it would be like to not be motivated by base impulses.
>>93199549No, it might actually be the other way around. If your birth rates aren't through the roof, you'd be burdened with worthless old farts who don't work, own everything and hate progress. Basically the Japan situation.
>>93196715because ants don't have nearly identical bodies and needs as humans
>>93199608Anon, its one of two things, they either like to have sex, in which case they will outnumber everyone else and become so powerful, that opposing them becomes impossible (other races arent a threat).ORThey dont like sex, and there are barely 5 of them.It doesnt matter how nice and smart they are. This isnt about greed and power, its about normal population dynamics
>>93199612elves don't get old like that, they can just keep working.And pumping out kids.
>>93199644It's simple. They have sex for the purpose of procreation every couple hundred years or so because that's roughly about the time they'd like to introduce new life to the world.Of course, the idea of having children once in a blue moon purely because you want a child and for no other reason is also a concept that's why outside your realm of understanding.
>>93199758That's why so many animals have the estrous cycle. The humans don't, and it's a huge evolutionary mistake that's fucking us in the ass as a species.
>>93199791>he fell for overpopulation propaganda
>>93199758>>93199644I can only speak for Faerun and Paizo/Pathfinder, but I can tell you elves have just as much sex as everyone else>in the case of drow and Wood elves (who are canonically polygamous), actually more, I guess there's not much to do in the woods/underdarkthey're just smarter when it comes to contraceptionalso when you look at Skyrim there's like the implication that an elven woman can only have like two kids max
>>93199758Anon, if there werr two elves, they fucked to get more elves, did they suddenly decide "fuck me thats a lot of elves" and suddenly stop?If your elves procreate at a level that increases their number, they will dominate.If your elves procreate at any lower number they will not increase and as such cant form a factionThis has nothing to do with desires or wants or my realm of understanding, simple fucking population dynamics
>>93199972Elves learned of anal sex long ago so they can easily control their population.
>>93200082Why? Why are they controlling their population? There is no need to.
>>93200270Nobody wants to waste their lives looking after little shitheads if they have a choice.
>>93200313Again you dum dum, they were doing just that as they were increasing their number, why did they suddenly decide to stop
>>93200329You're the last person who should be calling anyone dumb, buddy. Their longevity says absolutely nothing about the growth rate of their population. It can be higher than humans. It can be be lower than humans. It all depends on whether or not they have children more or less frequently relative to their lifespans.
asking a thread full of incels to share their weird and fucked up opinions on how they think sex works
>reeee elves would out breed everyone due to their long lives!!!!!!Most settings usually make it so elves have low fertility or a really low desire to have kids or that they can only have kids during certain times.
>>93196715They are though. That's a pretty significant housing and agricultural problem in the real world. We genuinely, unironically, without sarcasm cannot compete with ants.
>>93196479It wasn't done to explain that. It was done because elves are OP so they have to be limited in terms of long term play. Didn't work but that was the idea.
>>93196479ACTUALLYelves could get to higher level by using a wish spell to increase their level capthey could also gain extra levels to their level cap by having exceptionally high primary statsfurthermore, it was specifically stated that some elves wish to become human to break their level cap
>>93200457ACTUALLYelves have no issues with fertility or libidotheir problem is that there are finite number of elven souls in circulation so the elves will never exceed a set population
>>93196479>it became unclear why elves aren’t the dominant racelol no, they aren't the dominant race for the same reason dragons or demons or other races aren't. Because people just don't want that in their fantasy.
>>93200429Exactly. As long as the average elven female each generation has 2 children plus a number of children based on the total population that die before being able to reproduce during their lifespan the elven population would stay stable. It is only when this number is exceeded that populations grow and only when this number is not met that populations decline.
>>93201904don't forget that Corellon is a little bitch and refuses to make more elven souls also, while it isn't confirmed it might be possible half-elves are the end of an elven soul getting reincarnatedand if I recall correctly, not all elven souls go back to Corellon to be reincarnated, like for example, those sacrificed to Lolth, or if you happen to devote yourself to another god, or if you like to sell your soul to a devil>which I mean, technically elves shouldn't be able to sell their soul because it technically isn't 'their' soul
>>93202231Half-Elves basically get to pick whether they want to have an elf soul or human soul when they die, which is an idea cribbed from Tolkien. There's no such thing as a half-elf soul, it's either one or the other and is apparently extremely obvious. Also non-elves who worship the Seldarine can become basically spiritually elven when they die and still go to the elf afterlife, but because they didn't commit the Original Sin other elves are guilty of they're not forced to reincarnate and just hang out in Arborea as an elfaboo. I imagine there's a lot of humans who heard there was a religion where you could hand around hot naked dancing drow women and the only tenet you needed to follow was about "I DENOUNCE THE UNDERDARK AND LOLTH, FUCK SPIDERS, FUCK AUSTRALIA, I LOVE DANCING NAKED IN THE MOONLIGHT AND NOT BEING EATEN BY ARACHNIDS!" which might be a big deal for the average Drow to embrace but is pretty easy to embrace as a human
>>93202061>people just don't want that in their fantasy.There are more elf/half-elf PCs made for D&D then there are human ones. People want elves but they want to be the exotic ubermensch.
>>93196715There is a serious case to be made that ants are the dominant form of life and we only exist as they have no interest in us
>>93196715If ants were Medium size, they would be.
>>93202231wait what? since when is this cannon? elves don't go to the outer plane oriented with their alignment? Since when do elves get reincarnated and not go to the Happy Hunting Grounds?
>>93197696He literally got so mad at people making Legolas out to be feminine that he went out of his way to write descriptions of how hardy and vigorous Elven men were, anon.
>>93205840he was also a hardcore catholic, and it showed in his work, especially when it came to elves, who were so perfect they>marry for love typically early in life and stay monogamous and never cheat>they are "seldom swayed by the desires of the body" or influenced by lust
humans should be raped and enslaved
>>93205821giga boomer gygax era lore he seems to be referencing, from when elves couldn't have raise dead cast on them. elves only spend a brief time with correlon when they die before being reincarnated, so its not that elves breed badly or dont have sex often, elves live a long time and are usually peaceful so they rarely die and hence there is rarely an elven soul "available" to be reincarnated to create a babygenerally considered obsolete, however they seem to have brought this lore partially back with 5e's Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes but with a different justification (it wasnt originally correlon being a cunt about it, he just always made them from the start as reincarnaters who lived forever)see the 5e description of the banshee>The woeful banshee is a spiteful creature formed from the spirit of a female elf. and compare to the 1e descriptor>The groaning spirit, or banshee, is the spirit of an evil female elf - a very rare thing indeed. the original lore being that reincarnation depends on alignment, ie that all normal elves are chaotic good, because if they werent previously they wouldnt have reincarnated that way in the first place, a good drow would be redeemed in death etc, so it is somewhat vestigial lore as you can see because other things have changed that would mess it up
>>93196479why shouldn't elves rule the world?
>>93196499In a pre-modern society there is basically no reason why humans would significantly outnumber elves.
>>93212329This is a thing a lot of fiction just glosses over. Humans are always the young up and comer race, yet somehow were conveniently allowed to exist and develop into a threat without anybody just stomping all over them while they were weak and few in number.
>>93212606Because dark elves are actually incapable of giving birth. They're forced to either buy or kidnap humans to turn them into more dark elves using demonic alchemy.
>>93198021That truly is a damning indictment of all mankind that you are most probably right. Orcs rape other races so as to breed more orcs for old one eyes never ending war on the other gods. So they have to wait for other races to reach maturity before they can rape them for more orcs. Humans rape others because we are sick fucks who love the feel and sounds our victims make when we harm them. The younger the better there screams are to our ears. In D&D the god that made humanity is ether so ashamed of us and our evil deeds they erased there own name from history and forsook us long ago. Or he is the first human and the inverter of fascism. And he became a god by thinking he is better than everyone else.
>>93212606Human lovers would suck for elves. Humans are smaller in stature, smaller dick, less stamina. It would probably be nice for human women to have sex with elf men I guess.
>>93197348For classic races wrath is obviously orcs, envy and pride are abit harder but I reckon a toss up with your preferred flavour of draconoid and fae respectively.
