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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7175054" data-attributes="member: 4937">As a practical matter, elves have generally been a terrible PC race.   When first introduced their level caps were very strict.   As a practical matter, they'd cap out as 5th level fighters/9th level M-Us.  The XP required to hit that cap would put them well behind any single class human character, and if you single classed them in anything but thief, they'd become irrelevant quickly and they are pretty much always inferior to some other choice for single classed characters.   The have a penalty in the most important attribute in the game - Constitution.   As a practical matter, to play a multi-classed elf, you needed to roll a 16 or better Int, a 15 or better Dex, and a 17 or better Con (before racial adjustment) - good luck with that even with a 4d6 drop 1.  While they have a balanced array of bonuses applicable to different areas of the game, none of them are really nice except the high immunity to charm spells.   Any munchkin would be attracted to the idea of elves rather than the reality of them.  Yes, they did begin introducing munchkin elf subraces later as elf fans rebelled against having weak and unimpressive elves, and Drow are just a DM pet, but elves themselves in D&D are small, short, and really not that impressive.  3e elves are also rather weak, perhaps one of the least impressive PC races.   I beefed up the elf in my homebrew to make it slightly better than the 3e version, and it's still one of the least played races.Dwarves are typically much stronger choices for a character than elves.  They do better single classed, and fighter/thief is generally more practical than fighter/M-U or fighter/thief/M-U.  They have a constitution bonus, and their charisma penalty doesn't apply to other dwarves (so you can have dwarven henchmen for your dwarf, and you basically aren't losing a thing).   Also, 19 Dex is 'meh' and not really much better than 18 Dex.   But 19 Con is just godly, and if you can get 19 Con in 1e AD&D, your character is set (19 Con fighter averages ~11 hit points per level).  Plus, the saving throw bonuses in 1e for a dwarf character are just insanely good, potentially letting you start a first level character with saving throws as good or better than most 10th level characters.  But the uber best at everything race of D&D has always been humans.  Even in 3e, when there was a mechanically niche optimizable race for any build, humans were usually a valid second or third choice.  I think someone is basically ranting against a munchkin idea of elves that largely exists only in parody are satire, and has little bearing on elves as they appear at most people's tables.</blockquote>

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