Why do people hate Elfkind?

[ProfessorCirno]

The problem with the "good drow goddess" as opposed to not having an "evil elf deity" was that elves weren't "ALWAYS EVIL, ALL THE TIME" like Drow originally were. If an elf turned evil, they'd just shrug and find some other evil god to worship.

Drow on the other hand had to go out of their way not to be ALWAYS EVIL, ALL THE TIME, so they almost needed their own deity.


I'm not counting Drizzt into this because, quite frankly, screw that half-ass, poorly written, angsterbanging speshul snowflake.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It is all Tolkien's fault, really, because as others in this thread have mentioned, he effectively made elves more "god-like" than humans, and thus better at pretty much everything on a micro scale (i.e. maybe their civilization is failing and their birth-rate is near zero, but they're smarter than you, better looking, quicker, longer-lived, etc.).

Then of course Gary has to give in to demands that people be allowed to play elves in D&D, and it's all downhill from there, because elves retain their key trait:

They're better than humans, in pretty much every way that counts in a game, and they're generally portrayed as both smug and serious.

This problem is self-compounding, in that the sort of people who constantly play elves and think about them a lot also tend, strongly, to be smug, humourless and self-regarding types who think they're better than everyone else, especially if we're talking teenage players. Either that or they're just helpless elf-worshipper, who totally buy into the "better than humans" deal and are keen to go on about it.

Then this whole "they're better than humans" angle often expands into a kind of sub-nazi racial supremacist deal (to the point where "elf nazis" is a not uncommon trope, I'd suggest), which just adds fuel to the fire, because I think to the modern mind, a race which is inherently superior to others in all ways, is somewhat offensive.

Recently, trends have been away from this, I note. 4E's Elves are no longer clearly "better" than humans, indeed they're kind of arsebastards, which is nice, and back to the Hobbit in a lot of ways (as opposed to LotR), and we've seen enough "Creepy bad fae" portrayals to last a lifetime. If only Drow could somehow be made interesting. Perhaps by de-evil-ing them, heresy though that might be (and "up-evil-ing" the other Elf-types).

Oh well. I'm probably baised. Every time someone says "Eladrin" in my group someone sings "Dance the magic dance!" or the like, and I think they're the new focus for annoyance. Not many people really hated Wood Elves that much, it was the bloody smug High Elves they despised.

As for Dwarves, they're typically less annoying because they're never portrayed as clearly "better than humans" and rarely have the same psycho fans. However, the dangerously high leves of cliche than are increasingly associated with Dwarves and the fact that we've not seen an interesting or different mainstream RPG portrayal of them since, like, the early '90s worries me. I think if I see one more dwarven smith or dwarf who loves ale I may throw something. Even bloody elves aren't so consistently written and/or roleplayed so purely in terms of cliches.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Yeah, the problem was 1e. Gary stuck too closely to his source material. Unlike Tolkien's elves, Gary's are playable but they are still head and shoulders above the other races.

 

[Set]

Then of course Gary has to give in to demands that people be allowed to play elves in D&D, and it's all downhill from there, because elves retain their key trait:

They're better than humans, in pretty much every way that counts in a game, and they're generally portrayed as both smug and serious.

And yet, Gary's elves *were not* Tolkeins elves. They were shorter, and had some lower stat maximums. Humans were better at certain things, and many class options (and the whole Dual Classing thing) were not available to elves, *and* Elves couldn't be as good as a human at any specific class. Even the stuff that elves were associated with, like the magic-user class, they could never be as good as a Human magic-user.

Tolkein's elves were quasi-divine beings. Give an Elf a variation on the Half-Celestial template, and that would be more like it. AD&D Elves have always been in some ways inferior to Humans, in other ways more versatile (able to have multiple classes, but that was hardly unique, as every other non-Human race could have multiple classes, even the silly Halflings). I think the problem is that people read Tolkein, saw the word 'elf' and thought that AD&D elves should be like Tolkeins divinely-empowered creatures who were stronger, tougher, more beautiful, more graceful, innately magical, wiser, etc. than humans.

It would be like having a bunch of Anne Rice fans over to play a game of Vampire based on the movie Near Dark or 30 Days of Night. They would have a *completely* innappropriate idea what kind of vampires they would be playing, just as people weaned on Tolkein have a completely different concept of what an 'elf' should be. If they came to AD&D from Elfquest, they'd be equally off-base as to what the word 'elf' means *in this game.*

A fan of Norse myth would look at the Dwarves of 1st and 2nd edition and wonder what the heck was up, since Dwarves were the most magical race of all, in Norse myth, known for their shapeshifting, illusion-casting and, especially, their creation of magical artifacts worthy of the gods.

That's the only 'problem' with elves, IMO, is people bringing baggage in from other sources and trying to kludge the AD&D elf into the role they learned somewhere else.

 

[Klaus]

Yeah, the problem was 1e. Gary stuck too closely to his source material. Unlike Tolkien's elves, Gary's are playable but they are still head and shoulders above the other races.

Gary's elves were playable and fallible, not unlike the Tolkien elves circa "The Hobbit". But players insited on playing them (and DMs on DMing them) like they were the godlike, unfallible ubermenschen of LotR and Silmarillion.

 

[Lurks-no-More]

Gary's elves were playable and fallible, not unlike the Tolkien elves circa "The Hobbit". But players insited on playing them (and DMs on DMing them) like they were the godlike, unfallible ubermenschen of LotR and Silmarillion.

Godlike but very, very fallible, really.

That's what saved Tolkien's elves from the twinkery: in the First Age and before, they made a ton of really bad and stupid decisions because of pride, greed, stubbornness and whatnot; repeated it in the Second Age with the Rings of Power; and had generally faded out in the Third Age (plus Galadriel had finally wised up).

 

[Barastrondo]

There's also the fact that the first thing discarded from an in-game portrayal of a Tolkienesque elf is the idea that they're all in decline. They're leaving the world, surrendering it to men, and someday they'll all be gone. This was touched on in some settings (and directly ripped off in others), but nobody really wanted to play beautiful immortals with the understanding that in a hundred years, they'd be fading memories in the minds of the now-dominant humans and other races.

To be fair, there's not much of a way to represent that decline in such a way that it's mechanically balanced with the advantages you get from being a Tolkien elf. Plus, hanging around and having a legacy is eminently gameable, and something that suits the way D&D characters move into high levels. So eliminating the idea of the decline makes sense — you just have to remove the implied superiority along with it. That's a bit harder, though, because really, players do want to be special.

So, design theory time: One of the reasons I think dwarves are so popular is that they seem innately balanced. "Play a dwarf if you want to be good at being tough and crafty and enduring; don't play a dwarf if you want to be a romantic figure or an elegant gymnast." "Play a halfling if you want to be good at stealth, cleverness and agility; don't play a halfling if you want to be big and strong." These are pretty clear, and the races seem right at a glance. Elves have "Play an elf if you want to be good at magic or woodcraft or agility or good-looking or sophisticated or in tune with nature*", but they don't really have a "don't play an elf" weakness that pops out at you. Any class you can think of, elves can do just fine. So even when they're mechanically balanced, they seem to be imbalanced as archetypes. They're just not clearly below-average at anything, yet they are clearly above-average at some things.

That perception can probably do a lot for making the people who like elves like them even more and the people who don't like elves like them even less.


*4e addresses this a bit by splitting out the "if you want to be good at" into two races. However, I'm not sure that either elves or eladrin have a "don't play one" weakness as clear as that of a dwarf or halfling or even tiefling.

 

[ejja_1]

I love elves, they stay crunchy in milk.
Dwarves are however dirty hairy little buggers that get stuck in my teeth!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It would be like having a bunch of Anne Rice fans over to play a game of Vampire based on the movie Near Dark or 30 Days of Night. They would have a *completely* innappropriate idea what kind of vampires they would be playing, just as people weaned on Tolkein have a completely different concept of what an 'elf' should be. If they came to AD&D from Elfquest, they'd be equally off-base as to what the word 'elf' means *in this game.*

Er, in the 1980s, virtually every D&D fan was a greater or lesser Tolkien fan, particularly of LotR, and this didn't change that much in the 1990s, so essentially this is precisely what was happening, and what continues to happen. As D&D's elves were different but not clearly separated by utterly different traits (merely small physical differences, which I suspect stemmed from misunderstanding of Tolkien, not an intentional attempt to separate them), and indeed resembled the particulars of Tolkien's elves in many ways (FR's Elves having the whole "Journey to the West" bs for example and being "in decline"), then I think it would be illogical to assume people would see them any other way, unless D&D was their first real exposure to elves (as it was mine).

 

[AllisterH]

I see we all recognize the "fun" that was Complete Book of Elves.

Query: How many "bladesingers" did your group seem to have after that book was released?