With all the comments I've made thus far, I feel like I should clarify something that I hadn't bothered to bring up since the discussion was purely about half-elves and elves. My distaste for the half-elf and the half-orc as fully written-up PHB species are two-fold... first of course is the...
Oh, of course. I personally couldn't care less what tag got put on them (or any monster for that matter). I was coming at my comments from others perspective who got so bent out of shape about it. :)
They aren't of the 'elemental' type because the printed books do not have that printed in their stats. And that appears to be the most important thing to most players-- what is printed in black and white in the books. Even if they could change it to something else they'd prefer or add a new...
Very good point. Which is really part of the problem when it comes to trying to make all these other non-human species make sense. We have had elves in D&D games for decades, with almost everyone playing these creatures exactly the same as we play humans, which is almost entirely incorrect...
And there's 48 years of paper spent on half-elves. So you are not hurting for information about them even though they don't get a statblock in the 5E24 Player's Handbook.
If it's just a mix of the two, then why does WotC need to bother printing it in a book? Why can't the DM just give two human traits and two elf traits to the player to make their "half-elf" and call it a day?
Resourceful
Skillful
Fey Ancestry
Trance
Boom. Done. There's your "half-elf". And...
And I personally would say not enough to warrant making a special species write-up for them in the Species chapter of the PHB, when any individual player could just roleplay those aspects of their "mixed species" character if they wanted to. Getting three or four rather bland species features...
ANY person of any species that goes into a world of which they are not the dominant species gets the same exact "fish out of water" experience. A Human who leaves their community of humans and goes to the land of the elves is just as out of place and an outsider as a Half-Elf that leaves their...
But then if they become a self-sustaining population... they no longer are the "isolated from both worlds" species that people keep saying is the reason why we need them and why their premise is popular. Thus rendering the need to have them as a selectable mechanical option in the PHB...
But we humans do not fall in love with our pets, form "lifetime bonds of marriage" with them, nor procreate with them to product children that we know are also going to die 50 years before we do. I mean if a person knew that every single child they were going to produce in a very specific...
I find the premise of half-elves (and the relationship between an elf and a human) to be ridiculous on its face. I don't remember who talked about it somewhere that I read... but basically the Human lifespan to an Elf is like a Human's lifespan to their pet dog or cat. You go into this...
Sigil-style pizza is round but has a hole in the middle of it. Radiant Citadel-style pizza just has an entire pepperoni stabbed through the center of it, perpendicular to the pie. :D
Hmm... hadn't heard about Rising Phoenix in Marlborough. Know of TotalCon that goes up in February and am hoping to get over there finally. But I will need to look at Rising now too! Thank you! (Have gone to PAX East so many times now, I'd like to try some things different).
(To answer your...