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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rejuvenator" data-source="post: 6527220" data-attributes="member: 6781913">Maybe the term "races" is a misnomer that throws me off. The word "race" (by a modern definition) leads me to believe there should be clear biological and cultural divisions. That should be true for dragons and beholders, but demi-humans and humans share more kinship than not.Perhaps dwarves are an ethnic group highly adapted to life deep underground. Elves are essentially forest-centric humans transformed by fey energies. Halflings and gnomes have short statures as a parallel creationist strategy. And humans are pretty much the same now as the original versatile proto-human.In the same way that they are superficially drawn from the same human form, they all share the same human essence. For it is the gods that created humanity in their image and the gods themselves seem to belong to the same ancestral (?) origin. And there seems to be no evidence of evolution going on in D&D settings, so humanity remains essentially the same over the centuries, perfect unchanging products of intelligent design. (Later, the "corrupted" "races" like tieflings at least retain that core humanity.)By that paradigm, I can feel fairly comfortable roleplaying an elf as basically a human with pointy ears and a niche cultural outlook.That leaves me with only one thing left bothering me: that elves are the biggest time wasters I could possibly imagine. It is purely gamist that a 500 yr old elf isn't more knowledgeable than his 30 yr old companion. By all plausible accounts, a wizard elf has a bounty of years to memorize numerous more spells (common and rare) than his human counterpart, and a fighter elf had centuries of practice to learn a hundred combat maneuvers. There really is no excuse for this glaring "plot hole" in the game setting... unless elves grieviously waste the grand majority of their time on a fantasy equivalent of Minecraft BUT I see zero evidence in-play of elf PCs idling and daydreaming the hours away. Edit: And dragons are the laziest of them all, uselessly hibernating for years instead of being productive.</blockquote>

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