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<blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7785166" data-attributes="member: 6873517">They weren't level limited as Thieves, hence the 1E joke:&nbsp;Q. &quot;Where are all the elven thieves?&quot; A. &quot;All around you.&quot; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> In my own campaign world, due to world events from a long time before the campaign timeline, the &quot;fae races&quot; fertility (this included dwarves, gnomes, elves, and some goblins) had been altered, by what turned out to be an open gate to the Far Realm. Humans were immigrants from elsewhere and not native to the world. Elves and dwarves had very few children because they literally couldn't and needed to use magic fertility treatments to do it. However, they were extremely potent in their own particular areas, especially due to the presence of some really badass high level leaders and heroes, but, slowly but surely, were fading out of existence simply due to population loss. Over the course of the campaign, the fertility-reducing effect was undone, but the consequences of that have not yet begun to manifest. Various other explanations were offered over the years for why elves don't level up so much, living the good life/laziness being a classic one. D&amp;D has really never had much of a mechanism for things like level loss due to aging or retirement (understandable because the game really wasn't set up that way), but if we look at nearly any real life person who's achieved a very high level of expertise or excellence in an area, a lot of effort goes into maintaining that level and it is, ultimately, a losing proposition over time. This is true for athletes, musicians, and many other folks trying to maintain elite level performance. If we wanted to make the game more like Pendragon, where adventures are rare and the lifetime of a PC is indeed quite finite, it would make sense to put in atrophy rules. But they're not there in D&amp;D, so if you take things literally there should be scads of medium to high level characters floating around. The designers really never cared about that level of simulation detail.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Jay Verkuilen, post: 7785166, member: 6873517"] They weren't level limited as Thieves, hence the 1E joke: Q. "Where are all the elven thieves?" A. "All around you." ;) In my own campaign world, due to world events from a long time before the campaign timeline, the "fae races" fertility (this included dwarves, gnomes, elves, and some goblins) had been altered, by what turned out to be an open gate to the Far Realm. Humans were immigrants from elsewhere and not native to the world. Elves and dwarves had very few children because they literally couldn't and needed to use magic fertility treatments to do it. However, they were extremely potent in their own particular areas, especially due to the presence of some really badass high level leaders and heroes, but, slowly but surely, were fading out of existence simply due to population loss. Over the course of the campaign, the fertility-reducing effect was undone, but the consequences of that have not yet begun to manifest. Various other explanations were offered over the years for why elves don't level up so much, living the good life/laziness being a classic one. D&D has really never had much of a mechanism for things like level loss due to aging or retirement (understandable because the game really wasn't set up that way), but if we look at nearly any real life person who's achieved a very high level of expertise or excellence in an area, a lot of effort goes into maintaining that level and it is, ultimately, a losing proposition over time. This is true for athletes, musicians, and many other folks trying to maintain elite level performance. If we wanted to make the game more like [I]Pendragon[/I], where adventures are rare and the lifetime of a PC is indeed quite finite, it would make sense to put in atrophy rules. But they're not there in D&D, so if you take things literally there should be scads of medium to high level characters floating around. The designers really never cared about that level of simulation detail. [/QUOTE]

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