Elves - Love em or Hate em?

[Rika]

I don't care for the flighty, fay, "let's run around our treehouses and show everyone how magical and in touch with nature and magical and superior and magical we are" approach to elves. I very much prefer my elves in the vein of Tolkein's Noldor: passionate, vengeful, powerful and utterly self-righteous. My current homebrew doesn't have them, but in my previous one they were a pretty xenophobic lot, dabbling in forbidden mysteries and indulging in all manner of sinister conspiratorial goings-on intended to crush the lesser races beneath their pointy-toed boots. I'm also (surprise) a big fan of the Dark Sun elves - a really original take on the race, imho.

This is the only way I play them. Which can be a lot of fun when in a game with someone that things they should all be like you're first example. Fourtunately my GM agrees with me.

He had a campaign going for a while in which the elven nations had all come together to exterminate all the other races. It was really quite a good campaign. Which isn't to say they were evil, just fed up with the stupidity of humans mostly.

 

[Dryfus]

I am..

..indifferent to elves, and dwarves. When I play it's usually halfling or human. I just dont get the arguing that this race is more powerful than that race "mecanically". It's all hogwash if you ask me, after all a good GM will exploit the weaknesses in everyrace/class combo. In 3.5 if I'm gonna be something it's gonna be a human fighter, 3 feats at fist level, and only 5 levels with absolutly no feats, and two or three with two or more feats.

 

[Gez]

That's like saying "I also dislike water (when it's wet)

Nope. Dwarves, as a whole, are lawful -- they have a well-organized civilization and long traditions. They tend to live in cramped, cloistered places (underground), making hygiene a necessity. They have bonus to craftmanship (and to combat against certain foes), hinting at an efficient, thorough educational system.

My dwarves have a refined, complex (and even complicated) civilization, where social interactions are subtle (maybe exceedingly subtle, even, for it hamper the full development of their personality, hence the Cha penalty) and where skill and merit is the ultimate expression of one's value.


Elves, on the other hand, are wild and debauched eternal adolescents without much notion of the flow of time. Between a dwarf and an elf, it's the elf that's the most likely to charge you naked with a large weapon while shouting madly -- the dwarf would be too inhibited to even think of such a behaviour, while elves are notorious for lacking inhibition.

 

[Bront]

Personaly, I think the 2 half races got slighted a bit.

Half-elves are somewhat useless unless you're playing with the exp penalty for multi-classing, or Half-elves get something else special (Eberron's Dragonmarks). Get half the bonuses that elves do in most cases, add only a bonus to 2 skills, but they get any language as a bonus and have any favored class. Um, yeah, that sucks. Rather be either a Human or an Elf.

Half-Orcs have no racial distinctions beyond that they're strong, stupid, ugly, can see in the dark, and are considered orcs for all special effects (So Dwarves can beat them up easier). They should at least have the Orc Double Axe as a familiar weapon, and why not a few skill bonuses or some other flavor ability? If you want strength, they're the way to go, but a +2 isn't so big a bonus that they can't get anything else? I mean, come on. There's got to be more to a Half-Orc than being big, strong, dumb, and ugly.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

My dwarves have a refined, complex (and even complicated) civilization, where social interactions are subtle (maybe exceedingly subtle, even, for it hamper the full development of their personality, hence the Cha penalty) and where skill and merit is the ultimate expression of one's value.

Good for you, but that's not the norm.

And when we're talking about our dwarves: My dwarves are extinct, or learly so. They are/were outsiders from the Elemental Plane of Metal, and begrudged the Material Cosmos the precious metals it's got. So they tried to invade to take all the gold, silver, platinum, and so on, were repelled, persued into their home plane and nearly exterminated. The survivors know better (for now) than to try something like that again.

 

[BullMarkOne]

Both

Voted don't care, but its really both. I hate tolkienesque elves, I love faerie style elves. Tolkiens elves were really just humans+ as some other poster mentioned. I'll take carfree generally forest dwelling bardic types with difficult to pronounce gaelic names.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Half-elves are somewhat useless unless you're playing with the exp penalty for multi-classing, or Half-elves get something else special (Eberron's Dragonmarks).

3.5 helped a bit there, but there's still some way to go.

Half-Orcs

I think they're useless and unnecessary IMO:

If I'm not mistaken, they were put in to have an easy to play race, something that doesn't have many things to remember. Well, we had that: humans. It won't get easier than "any favoured class, one extra feat, and one extra skill point". Also, I don't think that a race that is mostly the result of crimes (or bad judgement calls while drunk) should be in as one of the most basic racial archetypes.


So I'd say get rid of the half-orc and touch up the half-elf

 

[Psion]

Not to hijack this thread, by why all the dwarf mechanical hate?

Because they are fairly strong mechanically. Con is the stat useful to about any class, and charisma is the first dump stat.

I still don't think they are as advantageous as a race as humans are, but I can see it.

I am a fan of stumpy dwarves meself: +2 con, -2 dex. That would about fix dwarves IMO.

I really am not on board with the elven subrace hate. They make elves playable.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

I still don't think they are as advantageous as a race as humans are, but I can see it.

For fighter builds, they are. Especially if you want to have the sword'n'board variant, and your "sword" is the waraxe. Chances are that the human would have used his extra feat for bastard sword, anyway.

I am a fan of stumpy dwarves meself: +2 con, -2 dex. That would about fix dwarves IMO.

I'm thinking of making them small, with all the advantages and disadvantages (except carrying capacity). They would still be nice, as the only small race without strength penalty, but they would have to use smaller weapons and armour, and have disadvantages in grapple.

I really am not on board with the elven subrace hate. They make elves playable.

I also don't understand why the elven subraces are bashed so much, while dwarves also have lots of subraces, and noone seems to care, because "the elves got more".

 

[MadMaxim]

I don't really hate them, but I don't really love them either. As other have stated, if they're played right (whatever that may be, depending on the setting) they can be great just like any other race. They're there and that's it. I agree with Joshua Dyal that Eberron has made a good effort at changing all the stereotypical core races in new and interesting ways.