Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
The problem with elves take 2: A severe condemnation [merged]
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 3569578" data-attributes="member: 7240"><p>So how do you explain all the elves winning and surviving things all over the place in D&D settings and adventures?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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.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.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.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?</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.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.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.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. </p><p></p><p>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.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. </p><p></p><p>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.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.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.But this is true of nearly all D&D creatures.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.But this isn't the case; there was not a continuous massive exponential increase in Europe's population between 500 and 1500.Says who? Where do the RAW suggest this?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.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.Do you see anything about that in the RAW? I'm not aware of this.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.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. 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. </p><p></p><p>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.Or you build your house differently than we do. Check out the Lothlorien scenes in LOTR.I don't buy this at all. 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?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.The movement and natural hazard rules in the RAW seem to disagree with you here. As does my experience when I go hiking.When I go hiking I come across all kinds of water.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.</p><p></p><p>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.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.Right.... ticks, fleas, mosquitos, spiders, rats, vermin... they never show up in cities.Right... the Iroquois, Haida, Mayans... they clearly aren`t civilizationsBut 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!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 gathering wild mushrooms and acorns for a couple of hours does.Well, not unless it is the somatic component of the cleric or druid spell.The fact that elves like to frolic does </p><p>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.Compare the elves` alignment descriptor with that of orcs and get back to me on that one.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.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.No. So YOU say; IT says nothing of the kind.Where in the RAW does it say that?Wrong again.So does everybody else.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.These monsters also threaten humans and every other race.Many other races are highly competitive, highly powerful and hate humans with a passion. And yet humans seem to do fine.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.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?Then you can design homebrews and characters that emphasize the otherness of elves if that's what licks your stamps. Nobody is stopping you.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."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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="fusangite, post: 3569578, member: 7240"] So how do you explain all the elves winning and surviving things all over the place in D&D settings and adventures?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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.But this is true of nearly all D&D creatures.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.But this isn't the case; there was not a continuous massive exponential increase in Europe's population between 500 and 1500.Says who? Where do the RAW suggest this?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.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.Do you see anything about that in the RAW? I'm not aware of this.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.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. 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.Or you build your house differently than we do. Check out the Lothlorien scenes in LOTR.I don't buy this at all. 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?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.The movement and natural hazard rules in the RAW seem to disagree with you here. As does my experience when I go hiking.When I go hiking I come across all kinds of water.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.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.Right.... ticks, fleas, mosquitos, spiders, rats, vermin... they never show up in cities.Right... the Iroquois, Haida, Mayans... they clearly aren`t civilizationsBut 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!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 gathering wild mushrooms and acorns for a couple of hours does.Well, not unless it is the somatic component of the cleric or druid spell.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.Compare the elves` alignment descriptor with that of orcs and get back to me on that one.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.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.No. So YOU say; IT says nothing of the kind.Where in the RAW does it say that?Wrong again.So does everybody else.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.These monsters also threaten humans and every other race.Many other races are highly competitive, highly powerful and hate humans with a passion. And yet humans seem to do fine.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.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?Then you can design homebrews and characters that emphasize the otherness of elves if that's what licks your stamps. Nobody is stopping you.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."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. [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
The problem with elves take 2: A severe condemnation [merged]
Top