Edena_of_Neith said:
Elves are not winners, not successful, not able to adjust or cope, not able to survive.
So how do you explain all the elves winning and surviving things all over the place in D&D settings and adventures?
In the real world, back in medieval Europe, life was - to use a clique - hard and short.
You mean cliche. And I would say that it was harder and shorter than it is in the industrialized world today. I'm not sure it was any harder or shorter than life in rural Ethiopia today.
More to the point, as is the case today, the difficulty and shortness of one's life varied widely based on various factors such as local ecology, social rank and privilege and a myriad of other things.
Still closer to the point, I am not sure whether D&D worlds are sufficiently similar to medieval Europe to make any useful analogies here. For instance, the DMG is quite clear that human life expectancy is much closer in D&D worlds to our own than it is to medieval Europe.
Their own needs meant 90% of the population had to engage in farming,
Depends where and when but I will agree that not only in medieval times but in most places and times outside of the contemporary industrialized world, this was the case.
The remaining 10% of the population could do something else. This assumed good weather, good crop yields, and peacetime.
Actually no. During periods of war, famine and poor weather, the proportion of the population engaged in farming declined; raiding, war and pastoralism tended to remove people from the land and place them in armies, bandit companies and migrant groups driving herds before them.
Bad weather ruined crops and brought famine. Plagues swept through cities, towns, and fiefdoms alike. A host of personal illnesses saw sky-high birth mortality for women, sky-high mortality among children under 5, and an unpleasant life for the survivors (if you count having all your teeth decay and fall out as unpleasant ... or convulsing in tetanus because you suffered a minor, dirty injury ... or repeatedly ravaged by influenza ... or working until you drop dead from it.)
Manmade troubles included wars (nothing like the Hundred Years War to engender merriment), taxes (medieval taxes ...), conscription, forced labor, and a social feudal system from deepest nightmare.
This is a sweeping generalization that just does not hold up. Why don't you read the accounts of medieval people when they write about the times in which they lived?
What you have done is throw together everything bad that ever happened in a 1000 year period and describe it as the normal situation. People wrote about wars because they were exceptional. People wrote about plagues because they were exceptional. Most people who worked on the land were not slaves. Most people led lives where they had a chance to make a home for themselves, fall in love and have kids. Most people had time to dance and sing and drink.
But I'm not sure where this reasoning can take us productively because I see no evidence that mortality and subsistence patterns in D&D worlds are like this. Indeed, the disease and aging mechanics, most thoroughly spelled out in the AD&D PHB, seem to indicate that human beings in D&D live in far greater material abundance than your average farmer in Tigray province in Ethiopia today.
Whereas the 3.5 DMG does indeed predict that commoners make up the lion's share of the population, it does seem that they are a healthier lot than medieval European peasants (or Roman rural folk, Egyptian fellahin, etc.). And the amount of war and plague in a kingdom is largely contingent on GM-controlled matters of world design not on some resemblance to our world's past.
Let's take this reality, and assume for a moment that the Fantasy World reflects it.
Why would I want to do that? If I did that, there would be no elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, goblins, dragons or any of the other stuff I play D&D to see. And given that this is a discussion of elves, this seems especially pointless.
This is a reasonable assumption to make.
No. It's not. For one thing, look at how different reality is for D&D women than real women; they have equal physical strength and size to men and are more socially mobile and free than even the most emancipated women in contemporary culture. And that's just one example.
The Greyhawk Wars exemplify the suffering of the human race in the Flanaess. The War of the Lance, Test of the Twins, Rise of the Knights of Takhisis, and War of Souls exemplify the suffering of mankind on Krynn.
One cannot reasonably contend that because wars happen in fantasy worlds, they happen the same way as they did in our world. Of course, if they did, that would be good news to your average peasant because it would mean he would be very unlikely to have to fight and would have a good chance of surviving if he kept his head down, a marked contrast from the mortality of a modern war like WWI.
Furthermore, it is also pretty clear from the coverage of these wars that disease vectors work differently in D&D worlds. The armies don't seem to be giant migrating contagions the way they were in the late medieval period.
Elves have all the problems of humans.
No. They don't. For one thing, it appears that elves are not agrarian societies; they appear to be societies closer to high-density hunter-gatherer societies like the Indians of pre-16th century California -- they live in highly bountiful wild environments that permit them to live at high densities without modifying the environment significantly.
Furthermore, elvish cultures, in almost all campaign settings, are almost always described as more internally peaceful than human societies. In addition, elves are more productive per capita in that (a) they live longer (b) they have more productive hours in their days (c) they are reproductively fertile for much longer than humans.
They have all the problems of humans because they 1: have no special immunities to the horrors of nature,
Special immunities are not the main thing that protects you from natural threats; knowledge of the natural world is your best protection. And it is clear that elves are more knowledgeable about the natural world than human beings are.
2: have no special immunities to manmade (and other races and monster) horrors,
But human beings today are no different physically than we were in the Middle Ages. What makes us less subject to natural and human threats is contingent on our technology, knowledge and forms of social organization. It is clear that D&D elves are, just as we are, technologically, educationally, socially and politically different both than D&D humans and medieval European peasants.
and 3: have to eat like anyone else.
But this is true of nearly all D&D creatures.
Humans in the medieval world had eight children.
Nope. The average number of kids people had in the Middle Ages varied dramatically from place to place and time to time. Generally, people tended to limit their family sizes in periods of extreme scarcity and increase family sizes in good times.
In good times, they could expect four to survive to adulthood. This occurred over a thirty year period. Thus, in a thousand year period, assuming good times (but if it is bad times, remember the bad times affect the elves also) you have around 8,589,934,592 descendants (2 x 2 for every 30 years.)
But this isn't the case; there was not a continuous massive exponential increase in Europe's population between 500 and 1500.
In that same time, a typical elven couple will have had 2 children,
Says who? Where do the RAW suggest this?
and their 2 children may or may not have had their first children yet. Total cumulatve elven population? 5. Two older adults, two younger adults, and one child.
How does the fact that elvish reproductive lives are typically 20x longer than the average human's affect things? How could this not matter? While female humans can make babies between 15 and 45, elvish women can make babies between 100 and 700.
And again, remember that if bad times stop those two humans from producing eight billion descendants in a thousand years, bad times affect elves too!
But the population of Europe did not increase from 10 million to 40 quadrillion between 500 and 1500 so perhaps your math may be off.
And the humans will gladly accept resurrection. Elves never do. Or so I've been told.
Do you see anything about that in the RAW? I'm not aware of this.
Furthermore, humans have this bad tendency to find longevity magic (you know exactly what I'm talking about ...) And in some settings, longevity is easy to obtain, or perhaps even semi-immortality as well.
If extreme longevity, verging on immortality is a factor in your model, then surely the elves would have the demographic edge because while less than 1% of humans might be able to achieve this magically, every single elf is born with this.
Elves, for some reason, like forests. They do not clear these forests. Witness Qualinesti and Silvanesti Forest, or the elves skulking around in assorted Flannae forests, or the great Forest Nations of the elves of Toril (such as Cormanthor.)
That is all fine and well. But you cannot grow crops in forests.
Indeed. But there are other models of living at very high population densities in forests without any clearing at all. I have already mentioned pre-Columbian California. But let be throw in the slash and burn agriculture of the Mayans while I'm at it.
Wheat, corn, barley, oats, rye, will not grow under the trees. Grass for grazing, will not grow under a canopy of branches.
Indeed. But this assumes that mixed agro-pastoralism is the only way to sustain high populations. Fortunately, the historical record shows that this is not the case.
Even medieval Europeans raised their pigs almost exclusively in forests until the 12th century. In fact, forest area was often measured based on how many pigs it could sustain.
You cannot build houses in forests, unless of course you clear away the trees necessary to make room for a house.
Or you build your house differently than we do. Check out the Lothlorien scenes in LOTR.
If there are thousands of elves wanting thousands of houses, this would require considerable clearing.
I don't buy this at all.
You *cannot* set up forges in a forest, unless you use wood (a great deal of wood) to fire them.
Huh? The forges of the medieval world were fired by charcoal made in forests and then transported some distance to the forge. How do you think forges were fueled?
Forests are not exactly comfortable places even in real life. Poison ivy and oak proliferate.
There are plenty of kinds of forests. I don't see why a game world's forests would be superabundant in these two particular species.
Brambles trail away from thickets of thorns. Branches slap at the face and body. Footing is difficult, and falls and injuries easily obtained.
The movement and natural hazard rules in the RAW seem to disagree with you here. As does my experience when I go hiking.
Stagnant water is undrinkable,
When I go hiking I come across all kinds of water.
and what little food there is comes only in Season (witness Mirkwood, from The Hobbit, in which Thorin and Company almost met their demise.)
But not all forests in LOTR are like Southern Mirkwood. Indeed, this is an exceptionally inhospitable forest because of Sauron's presence. What is true about Mirkwood is no more universal than what is true about Fangorn, the Old Forest or Lothlorien.
However, we do know that the elves of Northern Mirkwood and Lothlorien live comfortable, abundant lives sharply at variance with how you describe forest life.
Of course every form of disease imaginable occurs in forest settings,
Then how do you explain forest- and jungle-dwelling peoples having such poor immunity to colonizers' diseases in the past 500 years? It is cities that have traditionally been the places where disease is most common. The idea that your average medieval city was less disease-ridden than your average medieval forest is nothing short of preposterous.
and critters make things worse (that's right, there is no anti-venin for that rattlesnake bite, and yes there *are* black widows living in that tree and countless others, and yes the ticks, fleas, mosquitoes, and others bite, annoy, and carry horrible ailments for the victim's pleasure.)
Right.... ticks, fleas, mosquitos, spiders, rats, vermin... they never show up in cities.
In short, you can't build a civilization - even a civilization in the medieval sense of the word - in a forest.
Right... the Iroquois, Haida, Mayans... they clearly aren`t civilizations
Yet for some reason, elves insist on living in forests. Which means that, realistically, they never progress past the Stone Age (and the famous Elfquest strips and novels bear that out.)
But elves do work with metal everywhere except Elfquest strips. Now this might be because they make use of the abundant charcoal materials that surround them and fire forges on a large scale. Or it might be because they trade with metal-producing societies. This is how many societies get their metal stuff. Even today, most metal goods are obtained through trade not local production. Just look at how few countries make aluminum!
For some reason, elves like to dance and sing, frolic and be merry. They apparently like to waste their time (purportedly because they have so much time to waste.)
Well, this is the first time you have really made a strong case that elves are like medieval peasants. Fortunately the elves have an extra 6 waking hours every day in which to do this, and an extra 900 years of life, for good measure.
But frolicking does not put supper on the table.
But gathering wild mushrooms and acorns for a couple of hours does.
It does not purify polluted water.
Well, not unless it is the somatic component of the cleric or druid spell.
It does not create weapons or armor. It does not cure illnesses or wounds. It does not even protect from the occasional rainstorm and the pneumonia that can cause
The fact that elves like to frolic does
not mean that they compulsive frolic under all circumstances, even when doing so threatens their very existence; otherwise there would be a mechanic requiring elves to make a DC15 will save every round to avoid frolicking that round instead of defending himself.
Now, the OTHER races do *not* waste time.
Compare the elves` alignment descriptor with that of orcs and get back to me on that one.
But elves waste their time. It says so in the book.
I think you need to be a little more specific here. I see nothing in the books indicating that elves are compelled to neglect their basic survival and routinely starve because they are unable to stop frolicking. If the rules make it hard for any societies to do okay, it is Chaotic Evil societies. These societies are far more internally unstable, unproductive and lethal than elvish societies.
Nothing like playing a game of RISK, and the Elven Player decides to take Australia and sit there. He does not take his 3 Armies per turn, he does not pick up cards, and he does not make attacks
So, in the gaming materials you have read, have you ever heard about elves forgoing their attacks in a combat because they do not feel like it.
But that is how elves supposedly work. Or, in this case, *not* work, but dance, sing, frolick, and make merry. *Humans* must slave away from sunrise to sundown just to survive, but elves need not do so. Or so it says.
No. So YOU say; IT says nothing of the kind.
So elves:
1: Do not procreate.
Where in the RAW does it say that?
2: Live in forests under conditions that make any civilization beyond the Stone Age impossible.
Wrong again.
3: Waste time in singing, dancing, and making merry.
So does everybody else.
4: Humans and other races are on the aggressive against elves
Doesn't that depend on the world in question? In most settings I read, humans are more likely to be the allies of elves than their enemies.
5: Monsters infest the lands and forests, making survival even more difficult
These monsters also threaten humans and every other race.
6: Many of the other races are supercompetitive, superpowerful, and hate the elves like bad spinnach
Many other races are highly competitive, highly powerful and hate humans with a passion. And yet humans seem to do fine.
The upshot of the above is that players invariably play elves as humans.
All players of demihuman characters use humans as their baseline. But I see no evidence that players of elves do so less authentically than players of dwarves.
And elven civilization is depicted as being humanlike
Well, if the books depict elvish civilization as quite similar to human, on what basis are you asserting that it is not? If your ideas about elvish society don't come from these depictions, why should we view them as more reliable and rational than the depictions of elvish society in the published materials we read?
But what if some of us don't like elves as humans? What if we don't want that?
Then you can design homebrews and characters that emphasize the otherness of elves if that's what licks your stamps. Nobody is stopping you.
What if we want elves as ELVES? As a people who actually *do* procreate slowly, *do* live in forests, and *do* spend a lot of time in merriment?
Most settings deliver just those sorts of elves. I don't see you as needing to go out and reinvent the wheel if that's all you want out of your elves.
The question is, how to approach that - in D&D terms, and these terms and rules make it possible and even easily done - and make it work. How to have your elves as elves, in spite of all of the above, and still have them as winners.
"Elves as elves" doesn't really convey anything to me. You seem to have described a version of elves I'm not interested in: elves who live in crappy, hazardous forests they don't know very well, elves who have such a strong compulsion to frolic that they may starve to death as a result, elves who get their tubes tied at 90, etc.
If you want to play a crazy extreme version of elves who hate procreating, have poor impulse control to the point of severe mental illness, never trade and live in the most inhospitable forests they can find, that's your deal. But to dress this up as some kind of logical consequence of the RAW is just not on.
