D&D General So how do Half-Elfs feel different to Elfs?

[kigmatzomat]

Regarding Rules-As-Written, the 5e 2024 Players Handbook says in the Elf species description: "They live for around 750 years."

On average.

The actual text is

An elf typically claims adulthood and an adult name around the age of 100 and can live to be 750 years old.
link

Not "on average" not "typically". "Can live to be 750." Not a lot of wiggle room there, even with the change from a stat block in 5e14 to narrative text. A change mainly so they could save page count in 5e24.

None of the races use the exact same language, being moved out of a stat block.

• Halfling "robust life spans (about 150 years)."
• gnome "who live around 425 years."
• dwarf "with a life span of about 350 years."[/i]

In a technical sense, the elven one is the only hard ceiling. The others have vaguer language. But I guess when you can live to 750 years old, the wiggle room would be much larger if it was "around 750yro". As it is you could see an exceptional gnome living to 500, which is around 425.

Maybe its a side effect of the curse that removed their shape-shifting abilities long, long before they arrived on the mortal planes. And now they are just mortals. Reduced to "fey ancestry", their connection so weak that defenses that stop actual Fey have no effect, just like tieflings and aasimar can walk through wards against Celetials and Fiends.

 

[AnotherGuy]

How long have ethnic groups like the Jews or Roma been "outsiders" while still having their own community?

I think that is not a logical comparison and ignores part of @MGibster's post.
Do you imagine half-elves are a people with their own communities in your fantasy world or are they uncommon/rare individuals that fit within the fabric of society they live in i.e. different but same.

They certainly DO NOT have their own history, customs, religion and language like the Jews and Roma you compared them to.

This was such a weird comparison to make.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

I think that is not a logical comparison and ignores part of @MGibster's post.
Do you imagine half-elves are a people with their own communities in your fantasy world or are they uncommon/rare individuals that fit within the fabric of society they live in i.e. different but same.

They certainly DO NOT have their own history, customs, religion and language like the Jews and Roma you compared them to.

This was such a weird comparison to make.

IRL, for example, you could be half black and half white of any kind- Barack Obama is half Kenyan and half white American, for instance. He's just a half black, half white guy; he was definitely raised in the racialized culture of America, but he doesn't belong to a "mixed race culture." In this example, he's your regular half-elf.

On the other hand, you have creole cultures that do result from two or more peoples (usually of different races) coming together in a geographically bound region and creating their own culture. There may be Louisiana Creoles who look very similar to Barack Obama and have almost exactly 50% black and 50% white ancestry, but they have a totally different culture that is based in part by most members of that community having black and white ancestry. In this example, the Louisiana Creole are akin to the Khoravar of Eberron.

I want to take a moment to point out that yes, Creole cultures do have their own history, customs, religion (ever heard of Louisiana Voodoo or Santeria?) and language (including "Pidgins") like the Jews and Roma do now. You just engaged in a flagrant and frankly disgusting example of cultural erasure and you should be ashamed.

EDIT: Also for my personal fantasy world; I have both. In mine the elves are immortal and their governments have strict population control and forced sterilization of the underclass, so half-elves are explicitly children born outside of the "system" and the reach of the elven governments, often kept stashed away in other countries. They are typically the children of male elf diplomats and traders, and there are cities close to the borders of elven nations where lots of elf high society go to naughty word and enjoy luxuries (if the elves are Chinese, think of places like Macau, or how Saudi Arabians drive over the border to Bahrain or Dubai to get plastered), so these cities have developed large high elf communities over the last few centuries that are starting to generate their own artistic and cultural identities.

 

[Maxperson]

Very good point. Which is really part of the problem when it comes to trying to make all these other non-human species make sense. We have had elves in D&D games for decades, with almost everyone playing these creatures exactly the same as we play humans, which is almost entirely incorrect.

Almost no elf that has a thousand year lifespan would follow the boom-boom-boom, quest-quest-quest, never stopping, never resting "adventuring path", 'get to Level 20 over the next five years'... that we play with all the time as humans. These alien creatures have lived through so much stuff over their millennia of life that whenever humans have this idea of "We have to solve this problem RIGHT NOW! LET'S GO!!!" and move from one thing directly into another... the elves should be looking at all these silly humans and just rolling their eyes and walking away. After all... humans have like what... at best 50(?) years of useful action (from when they reach adulthood to retirement-age) to get all their crap done... and that's merely a blink of the eye for an elf. And yet we all play elves with that same exact go-go-go mentality that we give to humans.

Yeah, but that's because it's humans playing these races. We cannot truly play them as the alien races that they are. I accept these anomalies, because it's a game. My view is that PC elves are just a bit insane from the viewpoint of elven culture.

 

[AnotherGuy]

EDIT: Also for my personal fantasy world; I have both. In mine the elves are immortal and their governments have strict population control and forced sterilization of the underclass, so half-elves are explicitly children born outside of the "system" and the reach of the elven governments, often kept stashed away in other countries. They are typically the children of male elf diplomats and traders, and there are cities close to the borders of elven nations where lots of elf high society go to naughty word and enjoy luxuries (if the elves are Chinese, think of places like Macau, or how Saudi Arabians drive over the border to Bahrain or Dubai to get plastered), so these cities have developed large high elf communities over the last few centuries that are starting to generate their own artistic and cultural identities.

If in ones own personal fantasy world, the half-elves reach population/community proportions then they are indeed their own people and not an exception like Tanis or Spock, then I agree one could compare them to a people of earth. Where though they are a rare breed, and have not reached community-forming levels then they are not a people like abc.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Yeah, but that's because it's humans playing these races. We cannot truly play them as the alien races that they are. I accept these anomalies, because it's a game. My view is that PC elves are just a bit insane from the viewpoint of elven culture.

It would be interesting to flip the script on my PCs and have the elves on the last minute quietly pull out from the Council of Waterdeep which was formed to deal with the Cult of the Dragon issue on the grounds that the elves would like to give the problem some time to resolve itself. Besides who could believe that mere mortals have the necessary capabilities to summon a being like Tiamat from the Nine Hells. Pure hopeful madness.
Perhaps give my elves the the attitude of Much Ado About Nothing.

 

[TwoSix]

If in ones own personal fantasy world, the half-elves reach population/community proportions then they are indeed their own people and not an exception like Tanis or Spock, then I agree one could compare them to a people of earth. Where though they are a rare breed, and have not reached community-forming levels then they are not a people like abc.

I think there's a question running through this thread as to whether the assumed baseline for half-elves should be relatively rare (like Tanis), prevalent enough to form communities (like the Eberron Khoravor), or some intermediary state (half-elves are relatively frequent, but not organized into distinct communities, instead being found in human and elven communities).

The removal of half-elf as a distinct race from core 2024 seems, to me, to point towards the third option; there's a tacit assumption that plenty of humans have some elven ancestry, and vice versa.

 

[Maxperson]

It would be interesting to flip the script on my PCs and have the elves on the last minute quietly pull out from the Council of Waterdeep which was formed to deal with the Cult of the Dragon issue on the grounds that the elves would like to give the problem some time to resolve itself. Besides who could believe that mere mortals have the necessary capabilities to summon a being like Tiamat from the Nine Hells. Pure hopeful madness.
Perhaps give my elves the the attitude of Much Ado About Nothing.

I think that would be very interesting and in line with how elves view things. Other than the last part. It wasn't too long ago as elves view things that a mere mortal tore the very Weave itself(as he briefly became a god) and caused the goddess Mystral to sacrifice herself in order to repair it. I think elves would have a bit more respect for what mere mortals can do, even if they'd want to take a few short decades or centuries to study the problem.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

If in ones own personal fantasy world, the half-elves reach population/community proportions then they are indeed their own people and not an exception like Tanis or Spock, then I agree one could compare them to a people of earth. Where though they are a rare breed, and have not reached community-forming levels then they are not a people like abc.

We don't need "a people" to have a playable race though. In almost all D&D settings tieflings, aasimar, genasi and other planetouched, which are also basically "mixed race people", are said to exist as minorities in most human(oid) societies and no one has an issue with that. Societies of Tieflings and Genasi are much rarer in D&D fiction and associated exclusively with 4e (I can think of only Bael Turath in Nentir Vale, the Venemous Demesne in Eberron and Calimshan and Akanul in FR, the latter two have been retconned away).

Why do you have a different set of standards for half-elves than tieflings?

 

[Maxperson]

I think there's a question running through this thread as to whether the assumed baseline for half-elves should be relatively rare (like Tanis), prevalent enough to form communities (like the Eberron Khoravor), or some intermediary state (half-elves are relatively frequent, but not organized into distinct communities, instead being found in human and elven communities).

The removal of half-elf as a distinct race from core 2024 seems, to me, to point towards the third option; there's a tacit assumption that plenty of humans have some elven ancestry, and vice versa.

This brings up something that I want to clarify. When I was talking about half-elven communities upthread, I was speaking more along the lines of a smaller community like a Koreatown in a city, rather than a full on half-elven town or city.