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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Anthtriel" data-source="post: 3869171" data-attributes="member: 13764">Which matters quite a lot. Especially, as I pointed out, for professions more dependant on experience. A 50 year old master craftsman/wizard/pretty_much_anything is considered very much superior to his 20 year old neophyte colleague. But compared to his 500 year old colleague, who, contrary to the human, doesn't suffer from age deterioration, that master must look like an absolute beginner. Living hundreds of years is crazy. Usually, humans do something and get better and better until they start getting worse, due to age. As knowledge expands and humanity advances, there is less and less time for an individual to have a decent grasp of a discipline and still advance it. Eliminate the age problem, and slap hundreds of years on top of that, and who knows where we would be?If Newton, Da Vinci or Descartes were elves, they would still live, and god knows where science would be. I appreciate the whole "elves are completely different", "elves don't singlemindedly set themselves to a goal" argument. That works, but it makes elven society entirely alien to humans. You cannot have elves living in the same towns, they need to be much more than humans with pointy ears, very hard to portray correctly. This is an assumption that is just not there in modern fantasy.And I would argue that Tolkien already does this to some extent. And the elves are still superhumans who do everything better than humans. The only humans in LotR who can hold a candle to elves are themselves of elven descent and have abnormal life spans. Sure, they are pushed to the side by the sheer mass of humans to some extent, yes, but even then, they are a notable power, and would be much more if they would actually care and not just set sail.Eberron never made assumptions like that, and FR in 3E actually made a point to make elves interested in the world around them, and to integrate themselves into human cities. Modern fantasy elves are not the Tolkien elves, they are human with pointy ears who live hundreds of years and still don't accomplish much, because they are somehow ridiculosly incompetent.Adding to that, I stopped seeing any reason why you would need to have elves that live that long anyway, just because Tolkien did it that way back then. The benefits (completely different, alien society) are not really employed anymore, because people have grown sick of the reclusive elves slowly sailing away we had for 30 years.</blockquote>

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