Holiday Present - The Elf PHB entry

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Decent. Other than monkeying with the gods for fluff, this seems like a fair racial writeup.

There are some unusual decisions (35' move?) but I expect they will make more sense in context. The "group perception" thing seems particularly hard to adjudicate in practice, unless for simplicity you just ignore the range thing and simply give a +1 to everyone in the party with an elf (which doesn't explain why the elf's ability applies to everyone, of course). "Group perception" looks like it could turn into the Dodge of 4E.

 

[Green Knight]

Didn't see how it's supposed to gain "racial levels" though, and thats all I'm realy interested in seeing when it comes to races.

Reread that article. In the very same article where they bring up the idea of racial levels, they say that they discarded that idea. There are no racial levels, but instead Racial Feats which one can take as they level.

 

[Scholar & Brutalman]

One thing I just noticed about the Elven Accuracy power: it would appear to be most helpful for strikers, who spend time trying to set up devastating attacks that they really want to succeed. Of course, elves are recommended as a good race for rogues and rangers. I don't think that this is an accident.

I wonder if you have the option to buy more uses of a racial power? If an elf could buy 3 or 4 uses of Elven Accuracy, the feat becomes more useful.

 

[vagabundo]

I think you could get enough wood from deadfalls and old dead trees to make bows and arrows. They are probably very conservative with them.

Although they dont use much magic I'd guess that there would be a number of utility Arcane/divine spells that could mend broken arrows/bows, help to use wood that is unsuitable, possibly "ask" the tree to shed some branches and so on.

 

[Bagpuss]

Arrows perhaps, but bows generally require long straight pieces of wood that come from the trunk. It also needs to dry correctly which isn't going to occur with deadfall.

 

[delericho]

Reread that article. In the very same article where they bring up the idea of racial levels, they say that they discarded that idea. There are no racial levels, but instead Racial Feats which one can take as they level.

Probably the right decision, I think. However, a couple of racial talent trees for each race (similar to the same for classes) might also be a good thing to have. Maybe.

 

[Green Knight]

They're going with Racial Feats, rather then Talent Trees. The idea being that they don't want players to lose out on their class abilities.

 

[Wulfram]

Fluff is fairly meh. I'm glad they're getting rid of the long childhood, but they're too shortlived for my taste - I like my elves immortal, it's their most interesting aspect. Otherwise it's fairly standard wood elf fluff, but then innovation is not what I want from the core fluff, particularly in so established and well explored a race as elves.

Also concerned that it appears there won't be any urban elves - if the Eladrin are defined by a tie to the feywild, then they would seem even less likely to appreciate city life.

The stats seem a clear improvement on the 3e ones, though I share some scepticism about the perception aura.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

Also concerned that it appears there won't be any urban elves - if the Eladrin are defined by a tie to the feywild, then they would seem even less likely to appreciate city life.

It has been said that they have cities there, and that some of them can shift in and out. Yay to stealing from Elfquest.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

That and you now need to know where everyone is standing to even make an Perception check are they within 5 squares of the elf or not? So you need to have a map out even if folks are just overhearing a conversation in the street. I can imagine a lot of the time players will forget this bonus as it isn't recorded on their character sheet, but somebody elses.

Or you can do it the easy way...

"You're all hanging out close enough to the elf." or "You're all not hanging out close enough to the elf."