D&D cultures make no sense

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 1:39 am

D&D Cultures Make No Sense
Most of the cultural baggage in D&D as far as the core races are concerned comes from Tolkien's adaptations of the Norse mythology. We have assigned a monoculture and weapon stereotype based on a series of books about one particular adventure in the first world to use the standard races of modern fantasy. So, namehere and I have been working out a fresh start from physical stats to cultural weapons and armor and creating a mostly fresh culture for each race.

The big issue with this is the preassigned weapons, which are largely stupid, but there are some secondary things, like friendly elven forests of light, Scottish dwarves, and gnomes.

Good and Evil in Tolkien
Everybody loves Tolkien, right? And everybody bases their setting off The Lord of the Rings, which has a completely different view of the world from preceding legends and even the Hobbit. What everyone misses is Tolkien's agenda: Good is natural and peaceful, while evil is technology and violence. Half of this definition makes sense, while the other says that true Good is running around in loincloths hugging trees and true Evil is advancing technology. Because of this, Elves, the ideal good guys, are treehuggers, and orcs are the ones creating real progress. Throughout history, however, these have not been the views of most of humanity as they huddle within their tiny walls and fight against all the forces of nature that want to kill and/or eat them. I think we should scrap this; peaceful nature may exist, but the loving elven forest full of cute furry animals is the exception to the general rule of wolves, vicious boars, werewolves, and bugbears living like werewolves. The rest of this document proceeds from this assumption that most of what lives in the forest is out to get you.

Not your daddy's iron age
Frank and K correctly point out that the culture of D&D more closely resembles the iron age than the middle ages, but there are some problems with this from a societal and storytelling standpoint. The first is that peaceful little towns don't exist in the Tome series. The fact is that the hobbits really don't, or at least shouldn't, have anything that the bad guys are interested in but their land, and some do-gooder will show up to save them in the event that anyone bothers. The second is that everywhere is either hero-controlled or monster-ridden or both. This leads to a world where the farmboy hero can't arise from some tiny out of the way farm, because those all get eaten by monsters. This also prevents an Athens situation or an oligarchy.

The solution is that most places aren't really run by powerful forces, but do have enough allies to be protected from invasions or takeovers. Heroes tend to be concentrated in large cities or as masters of fairly large areas that can really get along without them. The Achaeans were drawn from a large number of island lords, like Odysseus, who had loose control over a large area and lived like the common man, and from the power centers of ancient Greece, like Athens, Mycenae, and Sparta. The vast majority of the world should not have a lord who lives in a castle and taxes the common man, but should instead have a war leader who lives in a fortress and has the best weapons and armor, but is really closer to a first among equals in peacetime. Overall, the world is largely empty of high-level heroes, but instead has a few level 4-6 guys who fight off local monsters and bandits and own ships and command warparties and crews in times of war in each civilization. Villains who get to the wish economy tend to ignore them, and high-level heroes show up when they don’t, because heroing involves being nice like that. On the other hand, when anybody gets into the wish economy, the setting breaks if it is anything like traditional fantasy or legends.

There are four levels of civilization. dwarves, goblins, halflings, hobgoblins, humans and orcs all set up in one of the three civilized levels, while elves simply don't have the population of peasants to set up any sort main line civilization.

0) Wilderness: their is no organized society of sentient beings in this region. There may be werewolves, dragons, and bugbears living like werewolves, but they have no long-term stability or defined leadership.

1) Meaningless peaceful areas: These regions have little of value and tend not to produce many heroes. They are still likely to be protected, whether for sentimental, moral, or potential economic reasons, by either expatriates, generically heroic dudes, or loot-hungry hobos. ex. The Shire, anywhere Link comes from.

2) Tribal/chieftain based societies: These regions have enough to feed themselves and some sort of military power, but they tend to attack others and generally fit the socialonomicon fairly closely. ex. Odysseus's Ithaka, Rohan outside Edoras

3) Power Centers: These are the big movers and shakers of the world. These city-states/nations have a large number of heroes and have authority over or ties to a large number of level 2 societies. ex. Troy, Mycenae, Minas Tirith, Edoras

High-level Heroes Break Your Setting
If you are looking for standard fantasy gaming, high level heroes break everything. The Wish economy breaks LotR, it breaks Wheel of Endlessness, it shreds Conan, King Arthur and Beowulf. The higher-order results of it actually do work in Greek and Roman epics, but the infinite lower-level items don’t fit the setting. The rest of this document assumes that most of the time, heroes don’t get above eighth level, and when they do, they are world shaking and go into legends for millennia. The fact is that going beyond the general limits of a “mortal man” and getting into legendary/action movie territory only needs characters somewhere between levels 5 and 8. Characters at level 4 and above can be considered named characters, and are therefore worthy of leading warbands and being named in the list of people Achilles, Hector, or some other high-level hero flips out and kills. Anybody who reaches level ten is a king, planar adventurer, or potential demigod. At this point, they really don’t care about most of the world, the wish economy gives them and their troops all the money they need, and they can acquire anything mundane for free.

Things high-level characters can and should do in a fairly standard setting:
1. Found cities. Theseus, Aeneas, Romulus and Remus.
2. Fight The Great War. The Trojan War, LotR, WoT,
3. Destroy cities. The Trojan War
4. Forge an Empire. The Gallic Wars, Alexander the Great, Muad’dib
5. The Legendary Quest. LotR, the Odyssey, the Labors of Hercules, slay any unique monster
6. Become a God. Hercules, Raistlin, Leto II
7. Return from the Land of the Dead. Hercules, Orpheus, Odysseus
8. Slay a god. Raistlin,
Things that really permanently ruin the setting:
1. Distribute the Wish economy beyond their own group of followers
2. Distributing infinite material or wealth loops.
3. Blow up the world (hard to do)
4. Destroy a species.

Two Cave Networks: The Underdim and the Undergrim
In most settings, there is one giant cave network throughout the entire world, called the Underdark. There is also a network of dwarven cave cities. These are often linked, even though the dwarves need secure tunnels and probably have the manpower to secure them. In light of this, it is necessary to have some terms to describe the separation of the dwarf-held areas and the drow, illithid, duergar, and other nasties’ regions. The underdim will refer to the dwarf cave networks, which are higher and connect to the dwarven cities, Halfling hill-fortresses, and possibly into surface-dwellers’ towns. Much like the interstates, the Autobahn, and the Roman road network, these tunnels allow swift transportation of both military and civilian traffic within the dwarves’ underground empire. The undergrim, however, is the part of the Underdark that you adventure in. Any civilized areas are controlled by insane slavers, brain-eating monstrosities, or demonic cults, while the wild parts are loaded with things that want to eat you.

The Axes Spears of the Dwarves
Dwarves are shorter than their enemies and live in caves. This does not make them Scottish. In fact, they are derived mainly from Norse mythology, so they should have a Scandinavian accent and say ya-e betcha alot. The axes do fit that stereotype, but they really suck for short people living in caves. Axes are used primarily in a downward swing or a large sweep. Dwarves have nothing to swing down at, since their enemies tower over them, and they don't really have room in caves to really swing their axes. The proper Dwarven fighting style is probably using a huge shield and some sort of thrusting weapon so they can get attacks in on their enemies. The one thing generic fantasy really gets right is the heavy armor. Dwarves can take the weight, and unless they are arcane spellcasters, they really should.

The thing that everyone gets right about the dwarves is that they live underground. Their bodies are the right shape, and living underground gives them defensive advantages and lets them constrict the movements of enemy soldiers. The only other place dwarves really get an advantage is the Arctic, mountaintops, and other cold regions, since they conserve body heat more efficiently.

Dwarves don’t tend to do surface wars of conquest, since there is little of value to them there. After all, they have access to all the metal and stone they want simply digging in inhospitable locations, and the thermodynaminomicon points out a number of ways for them to get food. It is, however, bad for storytelling for them to be able to build portals, otherwise they’d build a bunch and seal themselves off from the surface with immense walls of metal and stone. Without the ability to make them at will, they need allies or above ground regions to obtain cloth and wood, plus maybe food if building in a place with a magic source of food is not an option they like for some reason (like a mithiril vein).

That means, for one thing, that the dwarves can lock down their towns by sealing themselves off from the surface and import their food through underground connections to the other dwarves while being mildly inconvenienced by sieges from the surface. If mild inconvenience is all a siege can accomplish, it has failed utterly and no one will speak to the perpetrators at parties ever again.

Elves: the few and the awesome
Tolkien decided to make elves hardcore. In the Frank and K Tome series, being hardcore is represented with levels, and all levels are meant to be equal. This means that elves are higher level than mere men, which leads to the problem of why elves don't rule the world. The answer is that there are just a lot fewer elves, with a much higher hero rate. Every elf is a fairly hardcore something by age one hundred, and they can keep at it for six hundred years, so every single elf in the world should be an expert, aristocrat, or level one PC class.

Elves are saddled with some cultural baggage about longswords, rapier, longbows, and love of the forest. The longbows are fine; being seven feet tall does wonders for bow firepower, and elves have strength equal to the average man. Rapiers, on the other hand, are completely stupid. No self-respecting soldier is going to run around with a skinny little sword on a battlefield full of mega-armored dwarves and human knights-the only weapons worth using are big swords, axes, maces and polearms. Rapiers don't really belong in a pre-gunpowder setting, and dwarves break everything anybody ever knew about how armor goes out of fashion. The love of the forest works, but it's a cultural thing that has really been carried way too far. Tolkien did it because of the influence of the two World Wars on his worldview, and it has been kept because writers haven't been creative enough.

Elves should really live in the desert and the plains. They have a good surface-area to volume ratio for hot climates. Some elves do live in forests, because the average elf has some real levels, and their racial abilities help them deal with living in an environment full of man-eating beasts.

31 Flavors of Gnomes
The problem with gnomes was that no one ever really sat down and defined their flavor, except for when they were a joke race. This has since been corrected by Dragonlance, which tells us that gnomes are mad scientists who can't make anything work; Eberron, which tells us they are a bunch of mafia information dealers; and 3.5 which tells us that their entire racial schtick is being bards and talking to badgers. In fact, the best set of gnome flavor I have seen is Warcraft, where they are a bunch of light steampunk guys in a world of luddite humans and elves. The best thing we can do for gnomes in D&D is to burn all the books and start from scratch, including stats.

There are seven ways gnomes have been approached or very deliberately not approached.

Steampunk/mad scientist.
This is the Dragonlance gnome, only not crappy. We'd have to start over from scratch on their stats, but we could make a reasonable character. My approach to this is that they are essentially modified halflings who have taken over due to the fact that every single one of them is running around with some sort of crazy steampunk walker or airship.

Mafia
This is Eberron's approach, and would also need a rewrite of the gnomes' stats to really work. It can be cool, but there is the question of why not just use halflings?

Halflings
Just man up and admit that we really only have room for two races of short people: dwarves and short people, and halflings have the second slot.

Bards
No. We are not going this route.

Illusionists
The problem, which WotC noted and tried to correct, is that being illusionists and talking to badgers is really not enough to be a races entire schtick. Gnomes need something else to make them interesting as an entire species in your fantasy world.

Short Dwarves
Accept that gnomes are just short dwarves. This leads to the same solution as the halflings avenue, only we only have room for one race of dwarves.

Fairies
Take the illusionist and bard aspects and run with them. We might actually get somewhere by giving them a real magical race slot and taking it from the elves. On the other hand, this requires a huge rework of the entire race.

Halflings, peasants to the world
Halflings are the ideal of the English countryside, or those parts that are not full of dark woods and things that waylay you. This means that they are a bunch of peasants and country gentlemen, and none of them are any good in combat. Add to this the fact that halflings are shorter than everybody and don't have the combat-effective build of the dwarves, and you quickly realize that halflings are simply doomed. Halflings simply can't line up and kill people as well as everyone else, and the overall hero count of the world is concentrated in cities, not little farming towns. Noone really cares that much about halflings, except a few level seven wizards and some dwarves. The fact is that halflings are really only kept safe from more fierce creatures by the efforts of some crazy elves who live in the forest and survive on bear meat or the dwarves who are willing to protect them in exchange for food and pipeweed.
The fighting style of the halflings is centered around an underground fort in a hill, lots of traps, dwarf-made crossbows, and a tunnel down to the Underdim. When halflings enter the big city, they survive by stealing, since they're good at it. When their homes get invaded, they run away and get somebody big and chain-smoking to save them.

Hobgoblins are better than you
Hobgoblins are, as a whole, better than most other races. They can use whatever fighting style they want, have no height disadvantage, and are tougher and/or more agile than you. On the other hand, for any role, there is some race that is better at it than a hobgoblin is. Overall, they are quite capable of developing any sort of fighting style and culture. Hobgoblins are the least likely to be ruled by a mix of races, since they don't need to look for a dwarf to hold the line, a halfling to sneak, or an elf for archery. This means that a group of hobgoblins is stronger than a group of pure dwarves, halflings, or elves, so hobgoblins are about even with humans in potential world domination.

Hobgoblins live wherever they want, and we really just have to deal with that. They tend not to go in for the dwarves’ caves because of height or for forests because life is easier when mad boars don’t rampage through the peasants fields.

Crazy Human Weapons
Humans are fairly middle of the road, but they get a bonus feat. This is a really big deal in the Tome world, especially for generic humanoids. The big advantage that the armies of humanity have is that they can use crazy polearms much more effectively than anybody else. The human armies tend to have a bunch of specialized troops, but beyond that, it's all up to culture and tech level. The spiked chain is a uniquely human invention, since many more humans can use a spiked chain with full effectiveness than can dwarves, halflings, or hobgoblins.

Humans are suited to living more or less anywhere, but they get outperformed in certain environments by dwarves or elves, and tend to manage to get out of the orcish badlands.

Noone Loves Orcs
Frank and K covered this pretty thoroughly in Races of War, but some of what they said bears repeating. Orcs are basically stronger, dumber, uglier and less aware than everybody else. This means that any other species will win wars against the orcs, and don't really want any hanging around. The orcs get forced out into the badlands or used as shocktroops by more powerful and intelligent creatures. In general, orc civilizations either lose the war, collapse into tribal bickering in the badlands, or are assimilated into their enemies cultures.

The typical orc fights with some huge weapon, power attack, and the best armor he can scavenge. Orcs attack in massive melee waves and exploit any breakthrough they can achieve.

Note
These do not dictate that individual members of races cannot be high level whatevers, simply what the majority of the members of these races are and do.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 2:02 am

Overall, its fairly interesting. However, this...

The solution is that most places aren't really run by powerful forces, but do have enough allies to be protected from raids.

is just wrong. It just doesn't work. You need a fairly extensive government involved to actually protect people from raids, with a local presence of armed men. Having allies doesn't do jack for protecting against raids. What you *can* do with allies is get your own raid together, and go try to raid the people who just took off with half your crop, some of your cattle and probably one or two of your cousins. (And at this stage you're at Iron Age Ireland, and frankly your cows are used to monthly treks back and forth across territorial boundaries, depending on who's turn it is).

Now, if you and your allies can build a good reputation centering around retaliation, people will probably stop messing with you. But at that point you're pretty much half-way to a * government, and you might as well ring up Alfred the Great and offer him a crown.

*oops. not national government.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 2:11 am

Voss wrote:Overall, its fairly interesting. However, this...

The solution is that most places aren't really run by powerful forces, but do have enough allies to be protected from raids.
is just wrong. It just doesn't work. You need a fairly extensive government involved to actually protect people from raids, with a local presence of armed men. Having allies doesn't do jack for protecting against raids. What you *can* do with allies is get your own raid together, and go try to raid the people who just took off with half your crop, some of your cattle and probably one or two of your cousins. (And at this stage you're at Iron Age Ireland, and frankly your cows are used to monthly treks back and forth across territorial boundaries, depending on who's turn it is).

Now, if you and your allies can build a good reputation centering around retaliation, people will probably stop messing with you. But at that point you're pretty much half-way to a national government, and you might as well ring up Alfred the Great and offer him a crown.

Raids was probably a poor choice of words. Zeruslord will be editing that part somewhat.

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 2:24 am

zeruslord wrote:Fairies

Take the illusionist and bard aspects and run with them. We might actually get somewhere by giving them a real magical race slot and taking it from the elves. On the other hand, this requires a huge rework of the entire race.

Damn straight.
I still don't know quite how the "Wee Folk" concept will work for a fey setting, and the WOTC solutions always seem to disappoint.
Breeding hand-sized humanoids with anything else other than sprites is damned difficult. I can't figure out how they'll be related to hobbits/halflings/kithkin at all.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 2:26 am

I always thought of Orcs like Vikings or Mongols. Left alone, they eventually become successful enough to steamroll someone for awhile, but then break up and bicker inside. I'd even treat centaurs similarly.

Most of the successful endeavors of these guys have been lost to history because they weren't big on respecting dead people or writing, and who wants to write about the guys who beat you up for a few years and then you beat back? I'd list the Khans as one, but the hordes picked up by Rome as another, and even the technologically advanced Carthage. They ha great boats, lots of them - but lost not from numbers but from technology.

If we believe in half-whatever, there's no reason not to make some simple rules about how that works. Maybe the outward appearance of a race is based upon something as simple as the change between blue eyes and brown - nary the twain shall meet, but they show up mostly randomly.

---

Also, just because you have raiding doesn't mean you have armed men sitting around. Potentially every person in a community is a combatant, as the Greeks and Native Americans did. Only those bearing children at the moment or of great age wouldn't participate.

Even during the raiding era of Vikings, the odds that your village would be hit is a bit like a tornado: It might happen, it'll happen eventually, but doing much more than putting your valuables in the storm cellar once in awhile is probably more than enough. It's not like floods in Venice.

-Crissa

duo31 · Post by **duo31** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 5:42 pm

If elves are 7ft tall and live in the desert (I'm guessing darksun on this), why bows? Where are they getting the wood in the desert? I think that elves = jungle makes more sense than desert. Hot environment, lots of wood, jungle discourages heavy armor, etc.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 5:54 pm

duo31 wrote:If elves are 7ft tall and live in the desert (I'm guessing darksun on this), why bows? Where are they getting the wood in the desert? I think that elves = jungle makes more sense than desert. Hot environment, lots of wood, jungle discourages heavy armor, etc.

Actually, I've always considered a desert in a magical environment to an interesting place to gather wood.

As it was put in The Last Continent, "You could laugh at the idea of wooden weapons, until you saw the kind of wood that grew here."

If they're in a desert, they're probably nomadic, and not populous. Given how long-lived elves are, it's not unreasonable to suggest that most of them eventually acquire bows, through a respectful ceremony involved in taking a branch off a special kind of desert tree or whatever.

Edit: But I'm ambivalent on elves, so I don't actually care about where they end up.

traverse · Post by **traverse** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 6:51 pm

You could draw a similarity between Elves and the Egyptians, who also used bows, and were very naturalistic. They even had a couple of gods connected to archery.

EDIT: However, given zeruslord's reference to the deserts AND the plains, he's probably thinking more about native americans. Also used bows, also very naturalistic.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 7:56 pm

Judging__Eagle wrote:
duo31 wrote:If elves are 7ft tall and live in the desert (I'm guessing darksun on this), why bows? Where are they getting the wood in the desert? I think that elves = jungle makes more sense than desert. Hot environment, lots of wood, jungle discourages heavy armor, etc.
Not necessarily Dune Desert. Even the Sahara has oases, and people do raise animals that have bones or horns that can be used to make bows.

Many Native Americans that lived on the midwestern plains used bows until the introduction of fire arms.

On a side note:
Adventurers and Independents get better weapons than Armies.

It should also be noted that the average Native American soldier had a better fire arm than the average American soldier. Case in point, Custer's last stand. The Americans had single load breech-loading rifles; while their attackers had multiple round magazine loaded rifles. They lost the war due to numbers and lack of infrastructure, not b/c of lack of inherent awesomeness.

If you're in the army you get mass-produced weapons, simple weapons or the cheapest thing that can be given to you. If your from a culture that fights but doesn't have created armies, your own weapon can be something good.

The upshoot is that people in regular armies sometimes get the cheapest weapons so light crossbows, and their independent enemies can have awesome weapons like composite longbows tailored to the user in order to do the most damage. Regular armies are probably more organized though and have a chain of command.

Nihlin · Post by **Nihlin** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 9:22 pm

Judging__Eagle wrote:Case in point, Custer's last stand. The Americans had single load breech-loading rifles; while their attackers had multiple round magazine loaded rifles.

Quibble: either both sides were Americans, or the Americans were the red people and very definitely not the white people. I think you mean "The United States forces had single load..."

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 9:25 pm

Double post

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 9:27 pm

Also, for a society with relatively few members, they can obtain bows for all of them by trading things. And remember, nothing says the elves don't have heavy armor, and the only reasons not to are enviromental conditions and dex limits. an elf can seriously wear plate mail if they so choose.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 9:47 pm

zeruslord wrote: High-level Heroes Break Your Setting
If you are looking for standard fantasy gaming, high level heroes break everything. The Wish economy breaks LotR, it breaks Wheel of Endlessness, it shreds Conan, King Arthur and Beowulf. The higher-order results of it actually do work in Greek and Roman epics, but the infinite lower-level items don’t fit the setting. The rest of this document assumes that most of the time, heroes don’t get above eighth level, and when they do, they are world shaking and go into legends for millennia. The fact is that going beyond the general limits of a “mortal man” and getting into legendary/action movie territory only needs characters somewhere between levels 5 and 8. Characters at level 4 and above can be considered named characters, and are therefore worthy of leading warbands and being named in the list of people Achilles, Hector, or some other high-level hero flips out and kills. Anybody who reaches level ten is a king, planar adventurer, or potential demigod. At this point, they really don’t care about most of the world, the wish economy gives them and their troops all the money they need, and they can acquire anything mundane for free.

Things high-level characters can and should do in a fairly standard setting:
1. Found cities. Theseus, Aeneas, Romulus and Remus.
2. Fight The Great War. The Trojan War, LotR, WoT,
3. Destroy cities. The Trojan War

One thing with high level heroes is that once you've got them, the world ins't about armies anymore and you move more towards the Marvel Universe where you shouldn't even bother having an army at all, and should instead just worry about getting superheroes. You may have some preliminary police force to worry about petty crime, but for the most part, the moment a few guys hit about level 10, wars as we know them don't even exist.

The great orc hordes of Mordor become slow, unwieldly and ineffective and nobody cares about them anymore. You never call in the army, when trouble brews, you throw up the bat signal.

In fact, there's like little to no point to having an army at all and great wars and cities are a thing of the past. You only have those things when you're on a mundane and not a superhero system. Once indestructible superheroes and villains enter the fray, civilization as we know it pretty much stops.

Talisman · Post by **Talisman** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 11:21 pm

zeruslord wrote:Rapiers, on the other hand, are completely stupid. No self-respecting soldier is going to run around with a skinny little sword on a battlefield full of mega-armored dwarves and human knights-the only weapons worth using are big swords, axes, maces and polearms.

My take on this is that elves learn to use the rapier to fight each other. Bows are crappy to duel with, and elves typically eschew heavy armor. Rapiers are dueling weapons that elven nobles poke at each other with; when they have to fight dwarves, humans or monsters, they use longswords (their other racial proficiency).

I know rapiers "really" appeared later, but it's fantasy, and they are an elf-flavored weapon.

Elves should really live in the desert and the plains. They have a good surface-area to volume ratio for hot climates. Some elves do live in forests, because the average elf has some real levels, and their racial abilities help them deal with living in an environment full of man-eating beasts.

Or they could still live in the forest. Elves, being awesome, would be able to keep the small area they need clear of monsters. Unlike humans they're not expansionist; they can claim a valley, drive out or kill the nasties, and live their for several centuries before they need to expand. And not every forest is jam-packed with man-eating monsters...just a lot of them.

My two cents.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 12:37 am

Why is everyone stuck on elves being awesome?

The 13 Wise Buttlords · Thu Aug 07, 2008 12:45 am

Why is everyone stuck on elves being awesome?

Because we haven't made enough fun of the fanboys lately so people just roll on in here thinking it's okay to felch the second-biggest Mary Sue race while jerking off to a picture of Drizz't and having reactionary fantasies about treehouses and setting fire to science to a soundtrack by KORN, PAPA ROACH, AND LINCOLN PARK.

We need to reverse that shit. Elves should be the redneck swamp survivalists you see in Deliverance if you ask me; they're only threatening because you're in their environment, you're playing by their rules, and they see you as an intruder. Fortunately, the flavor text supports that interpretation, let's see if we can get them in some shit-stained overalls and pass out the banjos.

Dragons, kobolds, your time is coming too.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 12:58 am

Some elves do live in forests, because the average elf has some real levels, and their racial abilities help them deal with living in an environment full of man-eating beasts.

people should read entire things before commenting on them

We need to reverse that shit. Elves should be the redneck swamp survivalists you see in Deliverance if you ask me; they're only threatening because you're in their environment, you're playing by their rules, and they see you as an intruder.

That is actually sort of like dragonlance. they hide in the forest, which animates to attack invaders, but get totally owned outside except by people who lost their entire army to assassin vines beforehand, and one of the ultra dragons invaded by use of fire. basically, her army marched in behind a curtain of flame while she went ahead to gas the city to death. it worked, except she unintentionally Kamakazied the city due to siege machines, magic items, and divine intervention.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 1:06 am

Not to mention that just like the stereotypical real-life redneck, all the Dragonlance elves are useless racist pricks.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 1:09 am

Surgo wrote:Why is everyone stuck on elves being awesome?

Well because they live so long. Meaning that they're most likely to have the highest level characters due to their increased experience.

Talisman · Post by **Talisman** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 1:22 am

name_here wrote:
Some elves do live in forests, because the average elf has some real levels, and their racial abilities help them deal with living in an environment full of man-eating beasts.
people should read entire things before commenting on them

I assume this is aimed at me...

I did read the entire thing. I was merely pointing out that "forest elf" works just as well as "plains elf." "Some elves do live in forests" and "Elves should really live in the desert and the plains" is considerably different from "Elves can live in the forest just fine."

Surgo wrote:Why is everyone stuck on elves being awesome?

Because Tolkien's elves were awesome, and for very good reasons. They're the archetypal Heroic Fantasy Elves.

I actually like Terry Brooks's elves in the Shannara books. They're...people. They have an incredible history and some secrets and racial stuff, but individually they're no more made of awesome than humans or dwarves.

Deliverance elves...no, I don't think so. American Indian elves: yes. Woodland survivalist elves: yes. Inbred hillbilly elves?

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 1:38 am

actually, thanks to surface to volume ratios and such, the forests are a bit chilly for elves. also, forests are poor places to live, and inhabited parts of forests have usually been turned into places which are no longer forests, and more resemble plains. yes, even the american indians did that, because parts of forests with a village in them became woods with a large clearing holding a village. that is also why Europe is no longer nearly all forests. same with the east coast on the united states. You know how fangorn and the old forest in tolkien used to be part of the same forest? so did about every existing forest in england.

EDIT: This apparantly did not get across in the first post, but the point is that the existing cultures don't actually have a basis in logic, but rather tolkien and various other things getting combined with tolkien, and these are the cultures that would probably form from the stats, but they don't all need to fit these cultures, and if you want dwarves who live in the desert, other than heat issues we'd be fine with that, so long as they had no stupid cultural baggage involving weapons they can't really use right and took advantage of their ability to carry absurd amounts of weight without slowing down

Talisman · Post by **Talisman** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 2:11 am

Ah; I understand your point now.

Given that it's a fantasy world with flying, fire-breathing lizards in the first place, I'm not too worried about whether forest elves are logical or not. Forest-dwelling elves and axe-wielding dwarves may not have ever actually worked in the Real World, but they're fantasy archetypes and they're kinda cool.

That being said, I do appreciate this take on the races and I'm not trying to be argumentative.

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 2:20 am

duo31 wrote:If elves are 7ft tall and live in the desert (I'm guessing darksun on this), why bows? Where are they getting the wood in the desert? I think that elves = jungle makes more sense than desert. Hot environment, lots of wood, jungle discourages heavy armor, etc.

While Dark Sun is awesome, if I was basing everything on it, dwarves, orcs, hobgoblins, and humans would all live in the desert too. Elves have a survival advantage in any sort of semi-livable desert, because their body type is better adapted for it. The amount of energy a longbow can store is based on both length of the bow and the draw and the amount of force needed to use it. Therefore, elves, even with equal strength, are able to use a more powerful bow.

talisman wrote:I did read the entire thing. I was merely pointing out that "forest elf" works just as well as "plains elf." "Some elves do live in forests" and "Elves should really live in the desert and the plains" is considerably different from "Elves can live in the forest just fine."

Forest anything as a universal trait is really dumb, because forests try to kill you.

RC wrote:One thing with high level heroes is that once you've got them, the world ins't about armies anymore and you move more towards the Marvel Universe where you shouldn't even bother having an army at all, and should instead just worry about getting superheroes. You may have some preliminary police force to worry about petty crime, but for the most part, the moment a few guys hit about level 10, wars as we know them don't even exist.

This is really a problem with the assumptions we make and the underlying setting. If people are in the double digits and still involved in fighting on the Prime, they alter everything. At this point, I would assume that they end whatever the current wars are and either head home or move off of the world stage, by becoming gods, moving to the Outer Planes, slaying monsters in the distant wilderness, heading off into the West or something.

Talisman wrote: My take on this is that elves learn to use the rapier to fight each other. Bows are crappy to duel with, and elves typically eschew heavy armor. Rapiers are dueling weapons that elven nobles poke at each other with; when they have to fight dwarves, humans or monsters, they use longswords (their other racial proficiency).

This is a decent rationalization for it, but it still doesn't explain how the tradition got started. The idea here was that we backed out of the D&D/Tolkien cultures and tried to figure out what they would definitely arrive at. Their arbitrary dueling weapon could just as easily be bare fists, knives, or greataxes.

Buttlords wrote:We need to reverse that shit. Elves should be the redneck swamp survivalists you see in Deliverance if you ask me; they're only threatening because you're in their environment, you're playing by their rules, and they see you as an intruder. Fortunately, the flavor text supports that interpretation, let's see if we can get them in some shit-stained overalls and pass out the banjos.

You seem really bitter about elves being considered cool, and if you don;t shoot all the way for gnome-like levels of misdesign, your idea can actually be pretty cool. On the other hand, designing banjos into your setting is a recipe for total disaster.

talisman wrote:Given that it's a fantasy world with flying, fire-breathing lizards in the first place, I'm not too worried about whether forest elves are logical or not. Forest-dwelling elves and axe-wielding dwarves may not have ever actually worked in the Real World, but they're fantasy archetypes and they're kinda cool.

Using flying, fire-breathing lizards as an excuse for nonsensical humanoid cultures is for sissies!

K · Post by K » Thu Aug 07, 2008 2:25 am

RandomCasualty2 wrote:
Surgo wrote:Why is everyone stuck on elves being awesome?
Well because they live so long. Meaning that they're most likely to have the highest level characters due to their increased experience.

That doesn't quite work for two reasons:

1. Adventuring is dangerous even in a world or raise dead. You seriously can be turned into stone or eaten by a barghest and resurrection magic won't help you. The only way to live a long time as an active adventurer is to either stop adventuring or be very lucky. At best, it means that the elves have a lot of retired adventurers.

2. Long life is easy to get if you have access to magic (yours or someone elses). That means that the number of adventurers should be constant over all races unless some particular race has a problem with living a long life.

The 13 Wise Buttlords · Thu Aug 07, 2008 2:29 am

You seem really bitter about elves being considered cool, and if you don;t shoot all the way for gnome-like levels of misdesign, your idea can actually be pretty cool. On the other hand, designing banjos into your setting is a recipe for total disaster.

I hate any sort of cool that revolves around elitism and the 'we're better than you than the rest of your lives no matter what you do' mentality that permeates any kind of supernatural speculative fiction.

This is why I hate elves so very much along with dragons. Hobgoblins could one day reach this level of hatred, but since they're not sexually fetishized as much as elves and dragons I can deal.

Anyway, it's why One Piece kicks ass and Naruto is a Mary Sue wankfest. Elves telekinetically digest the shit straight out of an elephant's intestines and I want a fucking makeover.

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