Why do elves suck?

[Sejs]

Everyone who likes dwarves is a raving dwarf fanboy.

!!!


I can't believe you said that, Kae'Yoss!

 

[babomb]

because they aren't dwarves.

Quoted for truth.

 

[Set]

I like Sejs comment above about making them more chaotic and fey.

The elves of Evermeet and Spelljammer and Eberron and even Menzoberranzan are described as almost uber-lawful. They're either tightly organized, or completely bound into a caste system, or fanatical followers of 'the Way of Lolth' or something. It's completely counter to what I think of as 'chaotic.'

From the old stories, elves were described as fickle. They followed rules, but they weren't rules that men could understand, and one minute they'd seem friendly and whimsical, and the next they'd be killing your cattle and kidnapping your children.

The most interesting role-playing of elves I've seen was a time they were portrayed as fickle fey, almost as much like sharks as people. An elven warrior would wander the world, matching his blade against any threat, just to prove his own skill. He would drink and laugh and party, but he was a complete hair-trigger. His emotions, wild and fey, were vastly stronger than those of humans. He would laugh himself sick, sometimes at a joke that didn't seem that funny (but, to his century old perspective, was hilarious). He would fall madly passionately in love with someone he saw at a distance, and be obsessed with her, only to lose interest and wander away. He would grow violent in a second, having taken offense so quickly that he'd go from laughing to drawing his blade and attacking so quickly that his drinking companion would have a sword lodged in his throat before he even realized that he'd said something to set the elf off.

And, just as quickly, he'd be overcome with wrenching sadness and regrets, and have to be all-but carried away. The elf lived life entirely in the moment. No past. No future. He had been living that way for centuries, and unless he got himself killed, he'd likely continue to do so for centuries more. The idea of trying to remember the past, or plan for the future, was an alien concept for him. He'd been around longer than many human *nations,* and, particularly in a setting like the Realms, he'd live to piss on the graves of many of the gods. Why plan for the future? You can't control it. Save all your money, see it become worthless with the collapse of the monarchy. Invest in wheat, and a crop blight destroys it. Build a city, only to see it burn.

The great elven secret was that life was there to be experienced, not studied.

 

[Infernal Teddy]

Set, that was a great mine of ideas, mind if I borrow?

 

[Set]

Set, that was a great mine of ideas, mind if I borrow?

Always. If I posted it, it's free to use.

 

[Infernal Teddy]

Domo!

 

[Desdichado]

Second, everything you mention after that ignores the fact that Gary Freaking Gygax didn't take his inspirations from Tolkien - he took them from Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, all of whom were writing sword-and-sorcery tales before Tolkien started up the high fantasy genre - and I personally think D&D is better with more Weird Tales and less The Lord of the Rings.

I think Gary Freaking Gygax can be full of crap too I imagine--but it's not necessary here since you're misquoting him and misrepresenting him in this case. It's true that he said that he greatly preferred the pulp style sword & sorcery tales of folks like Howard or Leiber. It's also true that much of the tone and feel of D&D is more like that than Lord of the Rings, especially in many of its early publications. However, much of the flavor and superficial detail is exactly like Tolkien's work, and Gary Freaking Gygax himself said that he did that on purpose.

 

[Baby Samurai]

I went for Favoured Class: Wizard

I mean, if elves are so inherently magical and charismatic, I’m thinking sorcerer…

 

[Gez]

One of the only things that annoyed me about the extended edition of The Return of the King was the scene where Legolas out-drinks Gimli. Elves should not be out-drinking dwarves. It's like an unwritten law or something.

Peter Jackson is such an elf fanboy. He even let himself get killed by Legolas in his cameo appearance.

And apparently, he never read The Hobbit, where a bunch of elves (of the exact same ethnie as Legolas, they're his kins) get completely drunk on HUMAN wine (no silliness about "feywine" or whatever that's more potent than what mere mortals can stand), so drunk that Bilbo manages to free the dwarves from their prison cells.

In another version of this same conversation, the question came up: how do you fix elves?

You can't. It's a problem of how they're perceived. Only thing you can use is succeed at making an influential portrayal of them that's different from the cliché.

Take a look at D&D elves. Alright, they're chaotic good, they're rather short, and they're not immortal. They aren't any smarter or wiser than humans or dwarves or gnomes. A bit more graceful, true, but they're also more frail. Those points are practically constant (yeah, only exception is that they're lawful when there's only the law-chaos axis and chaos is used to mean evil).

Now that the rules are covered, look at what the writers made about them, in the settings. Rigid caste society here. Uber ancient and powerful kingdom with unchanging traditions there. The best wizards here and there. Even though in AD&D they were limited to something like level 15 max. Tall. Well built. Resist poisons, diseases, and strong alcohol better than humans and even dwarves. Have basic telepathy. Learn how to speak in the womb. Never really die, instead planeshifting directly to Arvandor or whatever when they're too bored of hte world to stay any longer. And all that crap.

You can't fix them if you don't work directly on the setting.

They are portrayed as perfect because Tolkien wanted them to be that way

They weren't perfect in Tolkien's portrayal. They're pretty, yeah. But they're selfish, terribly selfish. And ultimately, they're not loved by Eru as much as humans are, because humans get to go beyond the Tir-na-nog clone when they die, while elves don't.

More wild and chaotic. Fickle, passionate, and perpetually living in the now. The old school kind of elves that would try to chase down a deer unarmed, get drunk off their ass under the stars and screw on a whim. Ones that don't care if Everything Was Better Before, because frankly, they can hardly remember it anyway.

Exactly. At the very least, the wood/wild elves should be like that.

 

[Dragonbait]

They weren't perfect in Tolkien's portrayal. They're pretty, yeah. But they're selfish, terribly selfish. And ultimately, they're not loved by Eru as much as humans are, because humans get to go beyond the Tir-na-nog clone when they die, while elves don't.

Meh. What's one more innacurate and negative generalization amongst so many on these kind of threads?