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

[Chaltab]

The problem isn’t that any individual elf saw any particular historical event, it’s that for any given historical event, there are living elves who saw it.

EDIT: This also isn’t just an elf problem. Lots of species have long enough lifespans to make what should be ancient history into living memory. Elves are just the most egregious example.

Not as such, but magic like teleportation, scrying, sending, etc. enables almost as effective mass communication.

Yes, but what one thousand year old elf knows is irrelevant when there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of elves in the world. The long lives of these species means that an “ancient temple” isn’t really ancient, if it could easily have been built within the lifetimes of half the party. It doesn’t matter if none of them were directly present when it was built, what matters is that with so many peoples in the world who live so long, people’s relationship with time is different.

Again, the concern is less who knows what, it’s that constitutes being old.

Yeah... that's one of the reasons recorded history in most D&D worlds extends so much farther back than the 6000 or so it does in ours--you have an entire civilization that throws off the curve.

One solution I kind of like is the Witcher's solution: Elves aren't natives to the world, they came from somewhere else and in relatively recent memory.