It seems somewhat common for D&D and D&D-derived settings to have three main elven branches: wood, high, and elf. 4e has "elves" (wood), eladrin (high), and drow (dark). 5e has wood, high, and dark. 13th Age has wood, high, and silver/dark. Draw Steel has wode, high, and shadow. Sometimes, the divisions are a little different, like in Eberron, and sometimes, they are downplayed, as in Golarion.A good deal of these settings have these super-cool, super-mystical, super-mysterious (and often, to some degree, closed-off, stagnant, or both) elven polities. Examples include the Forgotten Realms' Evereska and Evermeet; Birthright's elven forests; 4e's Feywild cities; Eberron's Aereni, Tairnadal, and feyspires; Pathfinder's Kyonin and Sovyrian; ENWorld's War of the Burning Sky's Shahalesti; ENWorld's Zeitgeist's Elfaivar; 13th Age's Court of Stars; and Draw Steel's wode elf wodes and high elf cities.Sometimes, the writers play up how longevity, magic, discipline, ancestral guidance, etc. make the people of these elven polities super-strong and super-competent. Eberron's Keith Baker mentions that "There’s a reason we present the Tairnadal as the being pound-for-pound the most dangerous people on the planet": https://keith-baker.com/eberron-flashback-aereni-and-tairnadal/Then there are "casual elves." Often, in setting writeups and adventures, one or more NPCs in a mostly human place will coincidentally be elves, without it being a major part of the character. They are not super-competent or super-noteworthy just for being elves. Sometimes, demographics back this up; the spotlight nation of Eberron, Breland, is canonically 8% elves (or 7% in Sharn, the big megacity), and they are surely not Tairnadal-tier.I get why it is this way. Writers want to have both super-lofty elven ethnostates, and the freedom to have "just so happens to be an elf" NPCs and PCs.(Continued in the next post.)
In Eberron alone, I have played a "regular" everyday elf, a House Phiarlan elf, an Aereni elf, and a Tairnadal elf all as separate PCs. In Eberron and in a variety of other settings, I have depicted a large assortment of elves as NPCs.There is a bit of cognitive dissonance. Players are expected to meet some "casual elves" in a small town or a big city in an "Oh, those are Bobeth and Maryel. They just so happen to be elves. Normal people, if a little quirky" manner. Those same players are also expected to encounter "hardcore elves" in a "You stand before Borithanaeth and Maralaruelle of the super-cool, super-mystical, super-mysterious elven ethnostate of High Pothelshapareia. Fear them. Their longevity, magic, discipline, and ancestral guidance make them super-strong and super-competent. They are beings far above you" context. It can be hard to reconcile both in the same setting, you know?It also creates this odd sense that if everyday Bobeth and Maryel were instead born and raised in that hypothetical elven ethnostate, then they would have been lofty superhumans instead.Eberron was close to solving this by playing up half-elves as a people of their own (the "Khoravar"), but Eberron ultimately did not commit to this. In the megacity of Sharn, for example, elves are more common (7% of population) than half-elves (5%).The "hardcore elf" vs. "casual elf" divide, I think, is a far more significant distinction than anything about "wood elves" and "high elves" and whatnot.What do you think on the subject?
One blogger (Goblin Punch guy) had a similar observation and made his version of "high elves" not playable, basically all player elves or casual elves are the (sterile) wood elf variant. I think most can suspend their disbelief on this matter, as most people can assume an Elf PC is "just starting out" in the same way a human PC doesn't preclude there being powerful and significant human NPCs in the world, so in the same way, powerful elf NPCs can exist while level one elves can exist.
KILL THE ELVESThey only fit in one setting LOTR because the setting is purposely build to make sense of their presence. They were intimately webbed into the setting. It makes sense why they no longer dominate the world and act the way that they do. In LOTR you have the elves, different kinds of elves. They are are what they are and have the abilities that they have because they were firstborn, were bathed in the light before the sun, the year of the trees, and some made journey across the sea and they dwelt there for a while. Then you have the whole thing with the jewels the Silmarils. The civil war that followed, Melkor introducing evil to the world, and then Sauron of course. All that elves are tied up in that setting so much and so intimately that if you just pluck them as a concept out of Middle-Earth and drop them into Greyhawk, drop them into Forgotten Realms, drop them over here. Even if it's really blowing dust a mom put another jacket on they are still Tolkien elves. When you take them out of the context of Middle-Earth they lose something. In Middle. Earth, elves are tragic- they have a kind of sadness to them and grief and the sense that your kind's time is almost over is big part of being an elf. They live forever, but age in a different way. They are forever attached to the world, even in afterlife. They have to deal with living in a world that Melkor and Sauron and every all the other forces of darkness have have polluted forever. That weighs heavily on them that's why Tolkiens elves work and it's difficult to replicate that.It's difficult for just DM who are just trying to come up with a with a thing and they're just trying to do a campaign. They're not linguistic scholars with decades of dedication and work, nor with a huge background in history and mythology and the time and ability to write and craft worlds. They turn to these tropes, themes, and characters and turns out they don't work as well and clash with the tone of the game.
>>97911594That is definitely one way to do it. Another method would be to use half-elves for such a role.As mentioned, I think Eberron came close to settling on this idea, with its concept of the half-elven "Khoravar" as a people of their own, but ultimately did not commit to it.
>>97911579Imagine you go to GB and find a posh polo player and a hooligan. I don't see the disonance here. There's also> was Reborn and Became a High Elf, but I Got Tired of My Slow Life after 120 YearsMC reincarnates as an elf and after a century of living in the idilic wood city he hates life, so he goes out to spend his next 800+ years actually doing stuff. He meets a low elf, and she's scared shitless of him because any insult to their obscure millenial traditions could result in getting every spirit to nuke the city. Which seems reassonable to the high elves just like we kill ants. Most of the story centers about time scale tho. He feels he still needs to get better at blacksmithing by the time other disciples married and set up their own places, he has to deal with elf issues and comes back to find the woman he was courting an old lady in death's door, everything moves way too fast around him. It's a bit like Frieren, a melancholic story about time passing too fast but from the perspective of someone who already lived a life as a human and with more of a cultural aspect.
I have no idea what point you're trying to make or why you think anyone would give a fuck.>elfgames have elves in themNo shit.
I think a good way to marry the concepts and smooth over any weirdness would be to have elves focus on things outside of regular human scope. To us someone becoming a godly expert on, for example, gemcutting is the kind of thing that would make sense if we lived for 500+ years. If an elf is effectively a human in the terms of what they want to do and the societies they create that would be what they would do. The solution then, if you want elves to be playable or appear at a lower level, is to have them instead spend all of that time on doing things like learning to talk to squirrels or how to naturally grow a tree into the shape of a two-story bungalow with indoor plumbing. We might think that's silly, but for whatever reasons (cultural, biological, divinely mandated squirrel-therapist role, etc) that is how they mostly spend the vast time they are given. They're still then super-competent, but at really hard to master things not always valued by mortal men.But>>97911594is right in the sense that it's not too much of a problem unless you make it one.
>>97911630I can dumb it down for you, retard-kun>Some elves big and strong because live long, but player and NPC elves not big and strong! This weird!>Why anyone would give a fuckOP put effort into their post and even though I think elves are lamer than grimlocks I'd at least like to reward threads that aren't one sentence nothings.
>>97911576>>97911579Oddly enough, I think the time that D&D did this distinction most cleanly was in 4e.Instead of having all the different types, they just had Elves as a race that lived for about 200 years at the upper end, and were largely similar to Wood Elves.But they also had the Eladrin, which were explicitly from a different Fey realm and were even more magical than High Elves are usually depicted as.To a certain extent I think the former are a lot easier for people to grasp, where Elves might be long-lived, but not to an extreme degree, and are far closer to Humans in that they still have plenty of wordly concerns. The society of 1000 year old or extreme immortal elves is something I find a lot of players having a trickier time grasping unless elves are explicitly set up as something alien and inhuman in their thinking.And obviously trying to have both works better when you divide them more cleanly by calling one of them something other than elves.
Tolkien’s Elves aren't a "race" in the modern RPG sense; they are a theological category. When you strip away the Two Trees, the Doom of Mandos, and the literal fading of the world, you’re often left with nothing but "haughty humans with pointy ears who are good at bows."In Middle-earth, immortality is not cool a burden. In a standard D&D setting like the Forgotten Realms, immortality is often treated as a "cool stat" rather than a crushing weight. You get Elven adventurers who act like 20-year-old humans despite being 400 years old. If they truly felt the weight of centuries, they wouldn’t be tavern-crawling; they’d be staring at a river for three decades mourning a flower.Tolkien’s Elves work because they are leaving. Their presence is a beautiful, tragic sunset. Most DMs want Elves to be a vibrant, political power in their world. You can't have "Tragic, Fading Remnants of a Golden Age" and "Active Political Superpower with a Standing Army" in the same breath without it feeling like a cheap costume. If they are powerful and thriving, their "sadness" feels like unearned brooding.Most settings grab the aesthetic (archery, forests, grace) but ignore the foundation. Without the mythic "why," Elves often feel like a "Mary Sue" race: better at magic, better at fighting, more beautiful, and longer-lived, with no actual trade-off.
>>97911579>It can be hard to reconcile both in the same setting, you know?most published settings, especially for D&D, are kitchen sink messes that try to do everything and have something for everyone and thus end up being nonsensical sludge. Of course it's going to be contradictory.That said as a generic approach to feature both you can say that just being an elf in and of itself won't result in them being haughty superhumans and instead that's a result of culture, norms, institutions, policy, access of education and knowledge etc. that exists in the advanced elven cultures and amplified by inherent physical and mental traits.Elven diaspora and ethnic enclaves won't have access to that and thus adopt different lifestyles more similar to their surroundings. These will also be amplified by their inherent physical and mental traits mind you.
>>97911663According to the 4e Player's Handbook 1, eladrin still live for:>over 300 years, and even at the end they suffer few of the infirmities of old age.You can definitely see how, near the start of the edition, the writers were willing to commit to eladrin being super-cool, super-mystical, super-mysterious, super-strong, super-competent, and so on and so forth by dint of their otherworldly nature and longevity. A generic eladrin fey knight in the Monster Manual 1 is a level 7 standard; the weakest eladrin noble in the Monster Manual 1, the bralani of autumn winds, is a level 19 standard.Did 4e commit to this? No. You had "casual eladrin" in the city of Overlook in Dungeon #157's installation of Scales of War, and in the city of Nefelus in Dungeon #165's own chapter of Scales of War. This is to say nothing of the 4e version of Forgotten Realms declaring that moon elves and sun elves are actually eladrin, thereby filling the natural world with large quantities of "casual eladrin" everywhere.Writers seemingly cannot resist the temptation to nonchalantly include elves, eladrin, etc. in the populace of towns and cities.
>>97911728>That said as a generic approach to feature both you can say that just being an elf in and of itself won't result in them being haughty superhumans and instead that's a result of culture, norms, institutions, policy, access of education and knowledge etc. that exists in the advanced elven cultures and amplified by inherent physical and mental traits.>Elven diaspora and ethnic enclaves won't have access to that and thus adopt different lifestyles more similar to their surroundings. These will also be amplified by their inherent physical and mental traits mind you.Yes, this is a fair way of rationalizing the idea. Thank you.
>>97911733Looking to Eberron as an example, according to Keith Baker:https://keith-baker.com/eberron-flashback-aereni-and-tairnadal/>Looking to what that means: There’s a reason we present the Tairnadal as the being pound-for-pound the most dangerous people on the planet. It’s because their lives are intensely structured and devoted to emulating their greatest champions. Tairnadal children undego decades of intense training in the path of their ancestor. If the typical human soldier is a first level warrior and the typical Tairnadal soldier is a fourth level ranger, it’s because that Tairnadal has spent a decades mastering those skills… and, as noted above, because they are further being guided and inspired by their patron ancestor.Given Keith's background in D&D 3.5, he is probably referring to warrior, the NPC class versus ranger, the PC class.So in this example, being an everyday soldier in an everyday nation results in being a 1st-level warrior with an NPC class, whereas being an everyday soldier born and raised among the Tairnadal elves results in being a 4th-level ranger with a PC class due to overwhelmingly superior discipline and training (and ancestral guidance).
>>97911729I said they it was the most cleanly D&D managed it. I didn't say they pulled it off perfectly.Ultimately, I still find it's the best approach. Have the casual elves that have been watered down, but then the only way you'd see commonplace Eladrin is if you actually went to the feywild, and they'd otherwise all be fairly notable knights and mages rather than some random barkeeper.But I suppose I've also never cleaved to closely to published settings as a whole. I've never had much problem in picking and choosing information when it comes to running a game. And it certainly feels like a better use of time to spend time thinking about how to implement these concepts for my own ends, rather than worrying about how some guy wrote an adventure path put Eladrin everywhere because he thought they were cool.
>>97911829Yes, I can see that.Ideally, there should have been some sort of setting bible detailing a strict guideline of "Eladrin, the high elves, are mystical beings from another plane of existence. Outside of the Feywild, they should be extremely rare. PCs in 4e are special, so an eladrin PC gets a pass, but any eladrin NPCs in the natural world should be highlighted as exceptional specimens in unusual circumstances."
>>97911576I have actually complained to friends (who didnt really care but simply let me rant because they are my friends) about this exact topic.Elves in todays fantasy games (and anime, but thats a whole other can of worms) are not thought out at all. They are just thrown in there for no reason, with no nuance. An immortal magically superior species cannot look at humans as equals, it would be a farce on a rediculous level. Its like a human deciding a chimpanzee is equal to humans and marrying it and then giving birth to a half chimp abomination.You cant have immortals be considered "everyday people". Hell, any species that lives 200 years will view humans like we view goblins, maybe more pleasant but thats it.Btw any feudal system would prefer an elven monarch, as it instantly makes the succession issues not your problem
>>97911628It's a fun story. He is basically a teenager and leaves home at like 15 in human years. (Basically for every 10 years is a "year" to him where half elves and dwarves it's every 4. Which is important after he adopts an half-elf and raises him. Also helps end the Elf/Dwarf feud by wanting to learn under a Dwarf Blacksmith, and helps him become king of his people in a Forge in Fire like contest at one point.)
>>97911579Casual elves are just humans with pointy ears, same way casual dwarves are just short humans. 99 percent of a city should be humans with MAYBE a halfling enclave. A noble human has maybe seen an elf and a royal human may even have met one>Player: I would like to play an elf>DM (me): No
>>97911579>>97911624Well, authors seem to tend to make worlds that have decent internal coherency so they get a good framework for the narratives they want to spin (even Howard had a full world history for the Hyperborean age, with the rise and fall of nations, migrations of peoples, etc, despite the stories then just following a single man during a few decades at most.). Whereas the narratives DnD aim at and produce seems to be mostly something more akin to that one time Timmy rolled a nat 20, killed the really big monster, and got some magical item that made his character totally OP for the two-three sessions remaining before that campaign fell apart. That's not a story that really needs much world building behind it, and so DnD's world building aims at other things. Often mostly just to cram in as much Cool Shit™ as possible so Timmy will buy the new splatbook. People want casual elves? Put them in! People want super elves? Put them in! Won't this break the world's internal consistency? Nope, it never really had any to begin with!Then MMORPGS showed up, and the similarities to what some of those do in order to sell expansions are liekly quite obvious.In short, they aim to include everything but the kitchen sink, not to make a really coherent world.
>>97911576Interesting read. I had, in Muh Setting, put two tiers of elves because I had a particular, peculiar idea of them that I wanted to play around with, that rather resembles the dichotomy written about here. Common elves don't live too much longer than humans, and aren't too different from them. High Elves are more the hardcore variety, but are made by the elven gods picking and choosing elves to heap blessings on, elevating them a fair bit above most others in many respects. There's a few other species that are technically immortal as well, but they usually shirk the casual/hardcore division due to how the ways they choose to live keeping their lifespans short enough that one of them has never had a recorded example of dying of old age even before they became immortal.
>>97911935Part of the problem is that a lot of settings just don't seem to care that half their mortal races live for maybe a century at most, and the other half (traditionally dwarves and elves, with other things added in seemingly at random) are 'mortal' seemingly just because the author says so because they live for functionally ever. Lifespan doesn't matter in worldbuilding, for no apparent reason.
I am glad someone finally offered not omly a detailed and specific explanation of their thoughts on a topic directly relating to games, but cited direct examples from games to support his points.Unfortunately, because I don't like my elves to be "like perfect human but pointed ear and long life", I don't actually have anything to offer this topic, beyond the bump my post will give the thread.But I do want to express my appreciation, so thank you.
>>97911576Most settings do not do Elves properly, they're usually elves in name only, which most versions of elves in forgotten realms as an example, the only truly alien creatures are the fey/feywild critters or the drow. The other elves are basically just shitty tolkien elves. If you want a different take on them, Peter F Hamilton's civilization series has a race of space elves that are alien enough to constitute an elf.
>>97911624>>97911665I don't think it's hard to replicate a good amount of what a Tolkien elf feels like in a totally different setting. Even D&D's settings try at this, having like "elf god made elves; some bad guys didn't like this". But basically if you give ANY thought to why elves sholud turn out kinda like Tolkien elves, your'e going to do just fine by your players who want to play elves. Generally, I don't think you need to have "casual elves" at all- OP mentions them because they definitely show up, like someone wants to describe a bustling city so there's some elves that are on this or that council, like some kind of ethnic representative. You don't need these elves in your world if you don't want them though. I don't have any casual elves in my game world. You find a brothel? There's no elves there. Best you can do is a human chick with costume ears. By contrast, if you get rid of the hardcore elfy-elves, you basically just have elf as a human ethnicity or something, no self-identity. That can be fine too- I think some players just like having the body of an elf and the mechanics- but it's not how I build a world.Anyway, to elf or not to elf your world up really depends on what you are going for and also whether you have players that like elves. I've always had at least one elf or half-elf player character in every game I've ever run- I'll port them *anywhere* as a result. I'd need a solid decade of gaming with no elfplayers to consider running without them.
>>97915754>I've always had at least one elf or half-elf player character in every game I've ever run- I'll port them *anywhere* as a result.How do you port them though?
>>97916183You make sure that they have some in-game reason to think of themselves as elves, and for elves to be pretty sure they have some kind of reason to exist that helps the world somehow. The place they are from is theirs, and anyone who tries to take it from them is obviously evil. An evil elf has either sworn loyalt to some evil principle or is otherwise the result of some tragedy. You can have an evil elven empire and its members can all be exoticaly cruel but they won't be mundane. Elven bandits? No. Fallen elven dark knights? Sure. But most elves are good, and they work towards being good in ways that are obvious but also in ways that are subtle.I've had elves be an elder race that is in some stasis for a future event they believe is coming, and I've had them be a young race created by a goddess who is vain and obsessed with perfection and wanted to make something like a human but better. Obviously a race nobly striving against an inevitable curtain call works, but you don't need to copy Tolkien to get what amounts to his elves in your world- or at least, close enough for your players.
>>97920545Why do you want most elves to be good?
>>97911576You have made a couple of observations that are completely false and from there the premise of your post falls apart.First false observation>Sometimes, the writers play up how longevity, magic, discipline, ancestral guidance, etc. make the people of these elven polities super-strong and super-competent. This is incorrect, particularly the last part about competence. Most of the settings you mentioned like DnD had this tendency to do shitty base elves in most of their settings, and everything was about the super special humans snowflakes who can do anything. Quite literally, the class table from the original DnD proves this in which all races, not only elves, are restricted to a number of classes while humans can do anything they want. They're also the most populous race and are everywhere and are 99% of NPCs. More recent editions of DnD even removed most hard racial differences so may as well argue elves don't exist as separate entities.Second false observation>A good deal of these settings have these super-cool, super-mystical, super-mysterious (and often, to some degree, closed-off, stagnant, or both) elven polities.Elves are "cool and mysterious" as opposed to what? Humans that can do literally anything and are almost all important characters in these stories? Dwarves who also have their little corners? Tieflings from hell? Cool and mysterious means nothing in this context because 98% of cities and political entities are human, the rest are other cool and mysterious races. Elves being part of the latter have their little ghetto where they usually are not that relevant to the plotline.
>>97911576>>97920760Third false observation>Then there are "casual elves." Often, in setting writeups and adventures, one or more NPCs in a mostly human place will coincidentally be elves, without it being a major part of the character.If these characters just happen to be elves, then they're just humans with pointy ears. Same if a character just happens to be a dwarf, but has no dwarf traits. Or a halfling that happens to be a halfling. If you don't want an elf to have elf traits or you want to water them down to be irrelevant, then why are you even including elves in your setting in the first place? In your game?Forth false observation>I have depicted a large assortment of elves as NPCs.>They just so happen to be elves. Normal people, if a little quirky" manner. >Their longevity, magic, discipline, and ancestral guidance make them super-strong and super-competent. They are beings far above you" context. It can be hard to reconcile both in the same setting, you know?So these are not elves at all! There are already many people like you. People who are unable to get in the shoes of an otherworldly fantasy race or even able to integrate them to your stories. People who the only type of character they can conceive and play is always the oc donut steel superhuman who can do anything at any moment, and you admit it by saying you just want normal people. Blank slates. Instead of trying to keep pushing for blander, and blander fantasy races, why don't you go out of your comfort zone and do something different for once? That's the whole point of fantasy in the first place. And read some good stories with elves in it. Even DnD has some despite their main settings being focused on humans.
>>97920767>If these characters just happen to be elves, then they're just humans with pointy ears.No true Scotsman.
>>97920801
>>97920704Because that's what the players expect. Remember, this isn't a new race, or a custom race, this is getting the Tolkien elves, who are mostly good, into your world without having them have to have the exact stuff Tolkien gave us to get there.
For me, it’s pirate elves.The majority of elves outside of their island kingdom are the assholes that want to take your shit
