Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="drothgery" data-source="post: 563020" data-attributes="member: 360">Fantasy doesn't have to conform with modern science, and serious sci-fi can make one or two exceptions (usually allowing faster-than-light travel, sometimes introducing psionics or something similar). It does have to avoid breaking the rules in big, obvious ways, unless the author wants to give the impression that they didn't really think about the choices made in world-building. In fantasy you can have a system for breaking the rules, and call it magic, psionics, the Force, or the One Power, but D&D doesn't posit that elves are inherently magical creatures, so they don't get to break the rules just because they're elves.If it were serious sci-fi (which Star Trek isn't -- and even there, some later Next Generation episodes established that most of the intelligent races in our part of the galaxy are the result of another long-gone species' genetic engineering, so the hordes of half-alien characters isn't quite as silly), standard D&D elves and humans would be considered the same species (it's only tradition that keeps us from calling dogs and wolves the same species); all D&D elves can produce fertile offspring with all humans.The no-sleep thing is silly, and hardly simple; it introduces tons of contrivances that really shouldn't be necessary. Elves don't sleep, okay, whatever. If you want to deal with a mixed-race party where some PCs never sleep, while others do, and all the logical consequences of that, fine. But the 3e authors didn't do that, recognizing that most PCs will be human unless there are significant mechanical advantages for being something else, and wanted the core races to be balanced, so they nuked most of the consequences of not sleeping with the meditation-trance thing, leaving just enough to annoy anyone who wants to ambush the PCs in their sleep, send a PC a message in a dream, or even say 'you all slept for the night'.</blockquote>

Verification