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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3579459" data-attributes="member: 30001">In the first place I think the race is created from the perspective of "this is an adventure game".  I don't think many people have the kind of technical knowledge necessary to conclusively establish that elves would have language, metallurgy, agriculture, and other society/technology factors that would allow them to be successful.  In areas where you are an expert (like Tolkien was with linguistics), then I suppose it's an interesting excercise to create something for elves, but I would hardly think that it would be worth it in every single field that humanity is creative in. The way I see it is that you can either become a genius-expert in every aspect of human society and survival, or you can just handwave the issues and accept that elves have corrected for whatever disadvantages you think they have.  Because any one of the following is possible in areas where you are not a genius-expert:a.  you're wrong about the disadvantageb.  the disadvantage is pretty easily overcome by technology consistent with the elf personac.  the disadvantage is pretty easily overcome with a trivial tweaking of elf biologyd.  the disadvantage is easily offset by one or more advantages arising from a-c above.I also strongly disagree that the SRD has anything to say about issues that would be pertinent to the survival of a race.  The core rules (or indeed, probably any game rules) are incomplete from a simulationist perspective.Another problem is that a lot of your analysis relied on making comparisons between elves and other races.  It wasn't that elves were doomed on their own, your statement AFAICT was that they were just less advantaged than other races.  This implicitly puts you in a situation of having to do an a-d analysis of every other race as well.  For example - the advantages that you claim for orcs - as far as being violent and fertile, may very well be disadvantages in the light of other factors.  Again, unless you're a PhD sociologist with a concentration in fantasy-races-that-never-were, I'm not sure how you conclusively prove anything in a single lifetime.So IMO it's better just to get down to playing the game, and gloss-over any aspect of the world that's not fully formed (which is probably most, if not all).  If you want to make up some fantasy forest-crops so that your elves have something to eat, why not?  That's my philosophical approach to creation.</blockquote>

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