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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 4377580" data-attributes="member: 3820">There's also the fact that the first thing discarded from an in-game portrayal of a Tolkienesque elf is the idea that they're all in decline. They're leaving the world, surrendering it to men, and someday they'll all be gone. This was touched on in some settings (and directly ripped off in others), but nobody really wanted to play beautiful immortals with the understanding that in a hundred years, they'd be fading memories in the minds of the now-dominant humans and other races.To be fair, there's not much of a way to represent that decline in such a way that it's mechanically balanced with the advantages you get from being a Tolkien elf. Plus, hanging around and having a legacy is eminently gameable, and something that suits the way D&D characters move into high levels. So eliminating the idea of the decline makes sense — you just have to remove the implied superiority along with it. That's a bit harder, though, because really, players do want to be special. So, design theory time: One of the reasons I think dwarves are so popular is that they seem innately balanced. "Play a dwarf if you want to be good at being tough and crafty and enduring; don't play a dwarf if you want to be a romantic figure or an elegant gymnast." "Play a halfling if you want to be good at stealth, cleverness and agility; don't play a halfling if you want to be big and strong." These are pretty clear, and the races seem right at a glance. Elves have "Play an elf if you want to be good at magic or woodcraft or agility or good-looking or sophisticated or in tune with nature*", but they don't really have a "don't play an elf" weakness that pops out at you. Any class you can think of, elves can do just fine. So even when they're mechanically balanced, they seem to be imbalanced as archetypes. They're just not clearly below-average at anything, yet they are clearly above-average at some things.  That perception can probably do a lot for making the people who like elves like them even more and the people who don't like elves like them even less.  *4e addresses this a bit by splitting out the "if you want to be good at" into two races. However, I'm not sure that either elves or eladrin have a "don't play one" weakness as clear as that of a dwarf or halfling or even tiefling.</blockquote>

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