D&D General Alien Character Mindsets: Elves should be pretty conservative about almost everything.

[Mind of tempest]

One thought though is just how influential elves would be when living among other races. Imagine the unbelievable power a virtually immortal courier could amass. Someone who works quietly, behind the scenes. Would be able to have an enormous impact if they chose to.

okay so elf legally not joseph stalin as a champaign villain or the evil elf Jafar?

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I don't count as ultra long-lived, but I have a great memory. One thing I find fascinating is that I have a twin, and sometimes when I talk about things that I vividly remember, he has no recollection of them. Time and memory are strange, fluid things. I would think that that sheer volume of memory would appear differently for different elves. One elf might care more about the memories visited in trance than anything in the here and now. Another might have forgotten that they ever slew that dragon that's come back as a dracolich and is causing trouble again.

I just wonder how good an ultra long-lived creature's memory is.

Do they get rose-tinted glasses like us, or do they remember 'wow, it actually was way worse before we invented science and empathy' and knowing they're going to still be around a century from now, would actually be MORE interested in progress.

One salient point about elves from Tolkien is that Galadriel's ring of power, Nenya, primarily empowered her to keep things as they were in Lothlorien, to protect the way of life they had lived for so long from both the forces of Sauron and change. When change finally does come, it is in the form of the end, of the elves going to their afterlife.

 

[tkstargazer]

I just wonder how good an ultra long-lived creature's memory is.

Do they get rose-tinted glasses like us, or do they remember 'wow, it actually was way worse before we invented science and empathy' and knowing they're going to still be around a century from now, would actually be MORE interested in progress.

Since they invented writing ten thousand years ago, I fully expect that most elves would, at the very least, have a journal with a paragraph on something major that had happened in the last month (maybe year?) to remind themselves in 300 years of why they insist on shooting down every flying visible that comes across the hills near their homes.

 

[Steampunkette]

I probably should've titled the thread "Out of Touch" instead of "Conservative" and gone from there.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I probably should've titled the thread "Out of Touch" instead of "Conservative" and gone from there.

People would have gotten Real Mad if you had.

 

[Steampunkette]

People would have gotten Real Mad if you had.

Oh, I don't mean that conservative = out of touch. Only that old elves should probably be out of touch with the youth. With the faster paced aspects of society and fads and the like. The "Grandpa asking about the Youtubes" angle, specifically.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Oh, I don't mean that conservative = out of touch. Only that old elves should probably be out of touch with the youth. With the faster paced aspects of society and fads and the like. The "Grandpa asking about the Youtubes" angle, specifically.

I get what you meant, but I think we both know that would have gotten a lot of 'I'm old and I'm not out of touch! I dab and twerk and Harlem shake with the best of 'em diggety, dog! Fortnite."

 

[Mind of tempest]

I get what you meant, but I think we both know that would have gotten a lot of 'I'm old and I'm not out of touch! I dab and twerk and Harlem shake with the best of 'em diggety, dog! Fortnite."

look I am gen z and even I do not know what we are all about dance wise we are utterly atomised.

 

[Vaalingrade]

look I am gen z and even I do not know what we are all about dance wise we are utterly atomised.

Gonna be real here : I think naming dances is probably 'cringe' now. Like breathing or not ruining children's movies for said children.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Gonna be real here : I think naming dances is probably 'cringe' now. Like breathing or not ruining children's movies for said children.

that is reasonably likely but watch being super cring-inducing becomes the new fad.