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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 3573024" data-attributes="member: 7240">Edena,I feel that we are all beginning to repeat ourselves. And I think that's bad when it happens in a thread on EN World. I sometimes get into this situation, myself when I find myself making a point that nobody else seems to be understanding. At some point, I have to ask myself why it is that I am in such a tiny minority in holding the view that I do. When I get to that point, I don't always decide that I am wrong. But I do force myself to come up with an explanation for why I am so unpersuasive on a particular point because I am usually a pretty persuasive guy. Here are some of the reasons that I have arrive at on other threads where I have found myself the sole defender of a particular position:- a word that everybody is using means something different to me than it does to other people in the argument- I think a particular word is clearly referencing something that other people haven't heard of or don't think it is referencing- something that I consider to be hard-wired into the rules is considered "fluff" by the other people in the argument or vice versa- something that I think of as a hard and fast rule is something others perceive as a general guideline or vice versajust to name a few. Why do you think you are not getting through to us? What's your theory of what's going wrong in this debate?Okay. Here are my thoughts:Generally, when I create a campaign world, I have elves who are in the process of a long recovery from the Iron Wars, the name I usually give to the human invasion of their lands when many of their sacred groves were destroyed.I tend also to have the elves split in their reaction to the war, with a hawkish dark elf contingent plotting a long-term revenge or counter-attack while the light elves have decided to reach some kind of accommodation with the humans. My light elves tend to be concentrated in a small number of densely-packed forests that are tended on a model fairly similar to the modern <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture" target="_blank">permaculture</a> movement's. These forests tend to have been selected and well-tended over a period of centuries or millennia to be highly ecologically productive places. They also tend to be defended by hard-to-find paths, traps and well-camouflaged guardposts. My elves tend to have top-heavy hierarchical societies with a disproportionate number of nobles. They tend to trade seasonally in furs, woven silks, tortoise shells, precious stones, etc., usually visiting human markets or opening markets of their own in borderlands. But I'm not sure that you are going to be satisfied with my solutions because it seems, if I may speculate, that you want elves to be mechanically superior to other humanoids. The things I come up with to make elven societies successful are not mechanical fixes; they are cultural.Right. And that, I think, is the problem with this discussion. We disagree with you there because we believe that the strength of a human/humanoid society comes, in part, from the game mechanical characteristics of the creatures in question but mostly from the cultural characteristics. So, when we are asked what would help elf societies survive we come up with the wrong kinds of solutions.I think that the other part of this discussion is that you tend to fit species in D&D into one of two categories: dominant or doomed. The elves in my games do not fit into either of these two categories.I think that we all agree on this. Where the discussion seems to have hung up is in things that you believe the rules necessarily imply that the rest of us don't. Maybe you might want to ask yourself why you are so certain that the rules imply something that the rest of us just don't see.I have a theory on that front but I'd like some confirmation I'm on the right track before floating it.</blockquote>

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