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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Captain Eru" data-source="post: 4053857" data-attributes="member: 60289">I have a feeling I’m going to get flamed for the following statement, but I’m going to say it anyway. I have already said that I agree with you that Gort’s statement had little to do with the game mechanics. I argued he was suggestion perception, or zeitgeist. So pouring over the game mechanics to disprove a zeitgeist simply won’t work. It’s a futile endeavour.Dungeons and Dragons began as a way to take the mythological, those creatures, concepts, and fantasy at large, and bring it to the tabletop environment. Over time the game takes on a history of its own, diverging from the source material. But at the core, elves are based on the stories of the Norse Álfar and English elves. And while accounts vary, they were diminutive. It’s one of the reasons that elves remain shorter than humans in the game. That’s how they exist in the zeitgeist. Tolkien, Rowling, and other authors have made their own elves. But they all derive from the same source material.Ask a random person on the street to tell you what they think an elf is, and I doubt you’ll find many that will describe a hulking creature that towers over humans. I’m guessing you’ll hear terms like slender, frail, petite, beautiful, skilled, or magical. But I doubt you’ll hear hulking, massive, tall, or the like as ways to describe them.There is nothing wrong with the elf archetype. Not all elves fit it. But the majority do. I just did a search on Wikipedia for average adult height around the world. I wasn’t surprised to find that countries such as Netherlands, Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden were among the highest, while China, India, Philippines, and Indonesia were amongst the shortest. I’m not suggesting there is anything wrong with it, or trying to be racist in any way, but the zeitgeist is that northern Europeans are tall, and Southeast Asians are short. At least from what I read <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_height" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_height</a>, it would seem to be more or less accurate. But there are short Dutch people, just like there are tall Chinese people. There are strong elves, there are weak dwarves, but that’s not the most likely scenario.</blockquote>

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