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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6856659" data-attributes="member: 4937">They farm, but most of it doesn't look like what we think of as farming.  I should back up.  In my game there are two basic races of (free) elves: high elves and all the rest.  All the other elves, snow elves, desert elves, wood elves, ect. belong to the 'wild elf' racial group, and they are basically elven barbarians.  Unlike some campaign worlds, I don't have like 20 different elven racial subtypes.  The wild elf culture is still basically hunter gatherer, and if you are hunter-gather and basically humanoid you society has to be mobile.  Without intensive agriculture, megafauna like humans with relatively poor digestive efficiency (but with ability to digest a lot of different things), has to be mobile in some fashion.  You can't just stay in one place.  So the wild elves live a lot like you'd expect hunter gather bands to live like.  In fact, they are good bit more common in my world than human hunter gatherer bands.   They hunt (offending their high elf kindred with their primitive savage ways) and go from place to place, largely independently of any larger economy.   The High Elves on the other hand look more like a society that has become what's known as "complex hunter gatherers".  No, this may or may not be obvious, but the big problem with intensive agriculture is not figuring how to stick seeds in the ground and get plants to come up.  Humans in the real world probably figured out that pretty much as soon as they became recognizable modern humans (or sooner).  They were just as smart as you and I, and it wouldn't have been hard to figure out that plants are where seeds come from and that the seeds of one plant produce more plants like it.  The big problem with agriculture is storing the food.  The problem is after you harvest all this stuff, mostly it would get eaten by something else before you were done with it.  And it would be big, heavy, and bulky, you couldn't really carry it with out.   The problem with agriculture is figuring out what to do with the harvest - all this excess.  And you had to do it in such a way that you didn't starve while transitioning to this new system.  So the real problem was finding foods that could preserved, and figuring out how to keep say the rats from eating it all.   That required technology.  It required mastery of fire.  It required pottery making.  It required well all sorts of stuff.  The way hunter-gather's initially deal with this is that the plant something the year before that is naturally hardy and grows well, then move around between different climate zones, and when they come back next year they hopefully find a bumber crop of what they planted.  It's not true intensive agriculture.  It's more of a bonus.  If it failed, that's a bit bad, but you can always go back to hunter and gathering wild food.  I said the High Elf society initially looks like complex hunter-gathers.  But it's not, because they don't have to move around.  It's simply been around so long, and understood the ecosystem so well, that it's tailored the whole natural environment to suit it.  So the blackberry patch might meander around over the centuries, but its meandering in such away and with the appropriate nudges, that it never actually transitions fully from meadow to scrub forest and you always have as much blackberries as you need.  All those oaks are infested with truffles, because why not.  Morrels come up in their season.  The hives are always overflowing from the seasonal flowers that come up practically the year round.  The pecans and walnuts have been selectively bred to produce bumper crops of nuts, because well, if you are around for centuries you can actually selectively breed things that are around a long time.  And as for pests, well, you can just _tell them_ that this is yours and you need your share, but that you'd be happy to let them have your left overs.  Bits like St. Patrick and the snakes are doable (if you have the need), and you can treat that trick as part of your technology.  So, too much rats, invite the snakes over for a temporary feast, for example.The elves are manipulating the land just as much as the humans.  But from the Elf perspective, they are preserving and healing it, and the humans are just mostly tearing it up and plowing it over with these primitive (but admittedly effective) mono-cultures that lose all the vast diversity that the environment is supposed to have.Nobody coordinates this.  They just do it.  Incidentally, if you were walking through an elf forest, and you were familiar with forests, you'd almost certainly get this weird vibe like something was not quite right.  You might hit on the word 'uncanny' even, though you might not be able to put into words what was wrong.  That vibe you'd be picking up is the subtle manner in which the forest was not truly natural.   And if you weren't truly stupid, you'd get the heck out right then and there before someone put an arrow through your eye from 120 yards away (truestrike; wizard is an elf's favored class).That's possible, but its equally possible that with such a long lived race, most elves are just 6th to 12th level commoners.  By the time your are 8th to 10th level, even if you are commoner, you've still had the opportunity to pick up a tremendous breadth and depth of skill.  And in a lot of ways, a 6th level commoner is going to seem a lot like a 3rd level fighter or warrior, if push comes to shove - especially since elves are just naturally skilled with swords and bows.  The elf didn't live a fierce adventurers life; he's just been slowly over the centuries accumulating knowledge and experience.  Sure, elven leaders are probably not commoners, and probably also - if they've been around a while - higher level than their shorter lived counterparts.  But in D&D terms, it doesn't require a fancy class to have extraordinary skill.Living like an elf would require extraordinary discipline for a human because its unnatural.  For an elf, living like a human would require extraordinary discipline.</blockquote>

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