Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9114038" data-attributes="member: 18">It's kind of a self-perpetuating thing.Half-Elves no doubt came in because of Elrond Half-Elven, Aragorn, and so on. Looking at their lifespan and capabilities in earlier editions, it's pretty clear they were more meant to be Aragorns than Elronds.But once they were in the game, people rapidly became extremely attached to them. In part because they are between two worlds - and so are a lot of people - not just ethnically mixed people, but people in general. Whether it's between two cultures of the same approximate ethnicity, between two (or most classes) in a classist society, between different groups of friends, even, this idea of being sort of bridge between two groups or stuck between two identities, depending on how you played it, had a huge amount of traction.They also have appeal on other levels - you're not immortal or nigh-immortal like an elf, but you don't have to be bound by the same rules as a human, for example.Game mechanics-wise, they didn't give you an "edge" in earlier editions - they're basically just a worse elf - except for one thing - they have higher level limits, in general. Few people enforced those (not none, but not many, in many cases characters simply never got that far), but some players definitely liked the fact that they couldn't easily be enforced on them (to be fair though, Elves also had pretty high limits, and humans had none - but couldn't multi-class).I think, at least in my experience though people who play Half-Elves usually keep playing them over and over - because it's just a theme they like, a style they like. It doesn't even really matter what abilities they have. I've seen people play them through 2/3/4/5E.I will say Tieflings have pulled some people away to that, because it has some of the same stuff going on, but in a way that can be played as either edgier, or more bizarre, or both. Plus some people just really like having horns and/or a tail.</blockquote>

Verification