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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Salthorae" data-source="post: 7839175" data-attributes="member: 1095">Ennui and differing focuses. Dwarves are the best smiths in world usually because they practice for decades and centuries more than human smiths. But they don’t usually make the craft of war their whole focus. Elves are flighty in focus and go from thing to thing. OR They have a long view, so for them to spend decades mastering a spell isn’t as big a deal. I also really like Eberron designer Keith Baker’s take on why it takes an elf a 100 years to do something humans do in ten. [spoiler] This ties to my idea that Aereni arcane magic presents very differently from Aundair’s path. At my table the idea is that the Aereni use a definitive lexicon of magical incantations, and that as an Aereni wizard you not only learn the 82 words for fire and the proper conjugation, you also learn to enunciate them with the exact pronunciation the elf who first scribed the spell… while Aundair’s Path is that each wizard works from a basic toolset but personalizes it. So four wizards from Arcanix are all using the same fundamental incantation for their fireball, but they are emphasizing different syllables, and they’ve added or dropped a few words to find out what works best for them. Their gestures are similarly unique. Think of it as the magical equivalent of music. The Aereni are a classical symphony orchestra, where each piece has to work just so; Arcanix teaches jazz, and every time you cast a spell the casting might be slightly different, as you adjust to the feelings of the moment. Which is why an Aereni spends a century learning the same foundation a human can master in a decade. It’s not that the elf is stupid; it’s that their wizardry is literally more ARCANE, and human wizardry is more “figure out what works and run with it.” I think the Aereni are appalled by human wizards and amazed that they somehow produce magic with their clumsy, kluge-y methods. Meanwhile, those same methods are why human wizards are coming up with things that the elves have never tried in twenty thousand years of working spells… because their approach to magic encourages creativity.[/spoiler]From this post on his blog <a href="http://keith-baker.com/sorcerers/" target="_blank">Dragonmarks: Magicians</a></blockquote>

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