Do we treat Elves too well?

[Libertad]

Elves have always been something of the "pet favorite" in D&D.  There seems to be more game mechanics and fluff text in favor of elves in many D&D settings.

Elves more variant sub-races and class versatility: it's plausible to many gamers for elves to be fighters, wizards, druids, etc.  Since when's the last time you've seen wizardry encouraged among dwarves in a setting?  In 4th Edition, we have three "Elf" races: Elves, Half-elves, and Eladrin (who are now celestial elves).  Also, elves in some sourcebooks are considered kin to the Fey and have a bond with these powerful creatures.  Can the same be just as readily said of Halflings, Dwarves, or Humans with some other powerful species?

In many settings, elves had the mightiest empires, the greatest magic, and the most beautiful people.  In Forgotten Realms, the Races of Faerun entry on Sun Elves reads like some kind of nationalist propaganda.  Sun Elves pursue perfection in all its forms no matter the vocation; all sun elf communities live in harmony with nature and can get wild animals to help them (despite having no racial stats to accomplish this); sun elves have the last secrets of Mythal creation and Elven High Magic (only the humans had racial-specific epic magic prestige class, but they learned their magic from the elves).  Most Sun Elves are Chaotic Good, but a significant portion of their population hates humans and views them as vermin, with some fringe factions (supported by some elven nobles) advocating genocide.  Due to poor relations with humans, many sun elves will refuse to save the life of a human even if said elf faced minimum personal risk.

In Dragonlance, the Silvanesti Elves are xenophobic, reactionary racists who view even other elves as uneducated savages at worst and impoverished elvish equivalents to hillbillies at best.  The 3rd Edition Dragonlance setting went so far as to describe this view as "Good alignment taken to extremes."

These two examples are cultural sub-races representing the "haughty elf perfectionist xenophobe," yet it seems to be a double-standard because any other sentient creature would probably be branded "non-good" alignment-wise due to their persistent intolerance towards everyone else.

Why the special treatment?  Why the exaltation in flavor text and character options?  Is it due to the perceived omnipotence of Tolkien's elves, of which D&D elves were partly based off of?  Or do we just like pointy-eared magical people?

[KellKheraptis]

Don't forget the Valenar...aka the Eberron Huns

[Libertad]

Don't forget the Valenar...aka the Eberron Huns

I think that Eberron does a better job in regards to Elf bias.  The Valenar are warlike and arrogant, but they don't get alignment exceptions in their hostile attitudes.  They are also very hard to get along with if you're not a Valenar Elf.  They tend towards Chaotic Neutral instead of Chaotic Good.

The Elves still have an isolated nation: Aerenal.  But from what I've read they're not treated as some uber-powerful civilization that reached higher than all the others, unlike Evermeet in the Forgotten Realms.

[DonQuixote]

It's worth noting that, in my most recent campaign setting, I burned down all of the elven lands, killed approximately three-quarters of their people, and left the rest with crippling depression.

In my next campaign setting, all of the elves in existence are going to have been killed by an incursion of dread blossom swarms that they themselves caused.

Screw elves.

[StreamOfTheSky]

WTF is the OP talking about?  In 3E elves suck major fucking ass (mechanically), half elves even more so.  And dwarves have more subraces, iirc.  I suppose they get a lot of fluff...I'd rather have a race that's useful to play the game with.  a 700 year lifespan isn't too handy when you're at lower hp than most other characters in a game that runs for a year in-game, tops.

I never played 2E, apparently people are still upset from back then?

[veekie]

Mostly its inheritance, Elves were special snowflakes in the earliest editions because of borrowing from Tolkien, and later editions took the awesome elf and added more and more 'awesome'(in quotes because they don't know real awesome if you hit them on the head with a Polymorph).

Now the oddities, if you source from mythology as well as Tolkien you'd wind up with:
Elves - Still magical, but in the faerie sense. They'd still have the same basic imagery(pointy ears, skinny), but its a type descriptor rather than a race. They mostly have innate trickery and transformative magics(and in modern times an association with nature, in the original myths theres no differentiation between 'nature' and the world) but little in the way of permanent works. Good at hiding, in existing mechanics its more like a cross between a halfling, gnome and sorceror.

Dwarves - Arguable as magical as elves. Dwarves made most of the notable gear for the Norse pantheon. They can make stuff using improbable materials, and craft artifacts as a routine. Theres not a lot of quick flashy magic, but they are fairly adept at long lasting and care-requiring stuff. They're also immensely strong for their size. Add to that, in Tolkien basically the only dwarf we ever saw was those adventurers, which is hardly going to be representative of their race. Mythical dwarves are probably artificers and wizards.

Gnomes - Mythologically they're supposed to be spirits of stone. Elementals of sort. I'm not sure where the heck the D&D gnome came from.

Kobolds - Funny enough the original description basically has them being dwarves.

Goblins - Like kobolds, the original description seem more like....nasty elves than the tribesmen we see today.

[SneeR]

I'll say what I said in a different htread:
Really, elves make better rogues, gaining a proficiency they can actually use and those sensory bonuses, but elves are never painted as a roguish race in most fluff I've ever read. What kind of sense does that make?

In fact, elves are painted as pretty much everything but roguish. Warriors, wizards, archers, scouts, etc. What elves don't backtab people?

veekie pretty much hit the nail on the head there.

I am actually trying to determine what the races should and should not be able to do based on racial expectations. Please check it out and contribute!

[Mnemnosyne]

I think this is because of elven origins primarily stemming from Tolkien.  In his books, Elves are pure awesome.  There is not a single thing the Noldor are not awesome at, being bigger, smarter, stronger, faster, and just plain better than everyone, at everything, always.  The greatest of them were basically quasi-deities, able to have scuffles with Morgoth and his most powerful minions.

In D&D, their mechanical stats got toned down so that elves wouldn't be automatically superior to everyone at everything, but the concept stuck, so we get tons and tons of mechanically unsupported fluff explaining how they're better at everything than everyone else, and how they built great empires which have since fallen into ruin.  Here, we're mirroring the glory of the First Age of Middle-Earth where they built places like Gondolin.  Places like Evermeet are a parallel to Valinor, so they must be even more awesome.  Also eternal and unassailable.

[Unbeliever]

Mechanically, elves have been terrible since AD&D.  And even then, any advantage was mostly due to their ability to use Haste without the silly repercussions. 

I have been of the opinion for years and years that alignments are stupid, so I'm not going to touch whatever weird alignment exceptions the OP is talking about.

Finally, the idea that the elves were once a great or mighty X but now are not is a common trope:  they are supposed to be a failing and fading people, a source of melancholia.  So, that's fair, but it's also part of the idea of elves. 

Personally, the only setting I've found that has given undue love to elves was Tolkien, and that just kind of goes with the territory.  Though I haven't looked in detail at any of the published settings besides Planescape in a while.

[Kajhera]

Dwarves have pretty powerful fluff, and even mechanics when it comes to enduring creation magical and nonmagical.

Halflings get to ride dinosaurs (and other things, outside Eberron) and be the best at riding dinosaurs (and other things, outside Eberron), and that's better than any tie to mysterious fey things I can think of. Halflings are actually the people who work best with animals. Elves are pansies at it by comparison...

Humans get to be anything, and often get a bunch of the good empires, but also - look at their subraces. Illumian, Elan, Vashar. What humans are, is transcedental. Become the very language ordering the universe, transcend the limitations and vulnerabilities of mortal flesh through perfection of the mind. When humanity was first created, the basic principle of humanity, the first thing we tried to do was kill the gods. Humans are incredibly ambitious.

Elves... they strive to perfect something that exists. They take a human's lifespan to consider themselves competent enough to go apply the first level of a class. They try and keep the natural order. They are impressively conservative, likely owing to their long lifespans. I hardly ever read them as usually CG - adventuring elves, maybe, but not as a civilization.

[X-Codes]

If I could, I would completely re-write elves in D&D, and put them in the same sort of rank as the elves of 4e are.

Elves are just elves.  They're mostly human-like with scant bits of divinity.

Eladrin are the awesome-at-everything elves, literally with divine power in them.  They wouldn't even be Humanoids, but rather Extraplanar Fey with racial HD and SLAs.

Dark Elves would be something inbetween, with a little magic and adapting to darkness.

Dark Elves would not have pitch-black skin, would not have pure white hair, and would be forbidden by divine mandate to ever wield a scimitar (nevermind two).

[Shadowhunter]

Elves in my setting is a seafaring folk primarily concerned with trading and acquiring prestige through cunning deals. They're a dualistic people with great pride in their own personal freedom but they also abide by the deals they make and the hierarchy aboard the ship.
If you value being able to decide yourself but also will follow agreements (usually), you better be good at making an agreement that gives you as much power as possible. Hence why shrewd deals carry prestige in their society.
They're rarely seen further inland than port cities in the lands of other races, but in which they're a very common sight.
Many a human family have bound themselves to a deal that will last for a generation or two, often with the elf as the overall more successful partner in the end.

The minority of elves that take up a land-living life to provide for the community (farmers, smiths etc.) are both revered for their sacrifice and ridiculed for their choice.
As I said, they have this whole "Dual Nature" thing going on.
Alignment-wise they're Neutral-Neutral Good as a society.


The "connected to the ancient forest" archetype is covered by the Drow, which I think looks better. They're True Neutral. They're also on the whole basically unknown to the rest of the world.

[shriekingdrake]

Nah--except elves don't have to wear underwear.  Seriously, the question might better be "Do we treat kobolds too well?".  I think elves are not overpowered in 3.X, even if they are better looking, smarter, and longer-lived than the rest of us.

[ImperatorK]

Snip

Mind if I steal this for my own, nefarious purposes?

[Shadowhunter]

Snip

Mind if I steal this for my own, nefarious purposes?

Not at all, steal away.

[midnight_v]

Somewhat obligatory Elf fix:

(click to show/hide)

Elves: Servants of the High Wizards
The individual elf is a fine adventurer, blessed with many attributes that make them well suited to a life of killing monsters for their hard-earned possessions. They are extremely long-lived, quick of eye and reflexes, and blessed with the kind of training that comes from a childhood that spans decades. With all of these benefits, one wonders why they don’t rule the world.

The answer is simple: they have a secret. That secret is that elves, as a race, are the pawns of powerful wizards. Just as powerful wizards have taken the heads of giant owls and put them on the bodies of bears, some wizards in the far past decided "hey, lets make a race that’s hot, skinny, and long-lived enough to learn to really please me." The end result is a race whose favored class is Wizard, a class requiring study and materials. As engineered servants of powerful wizards, they mystically have the ability to learn their master’s arts. The influence of the overlord wizards is the explanation for the variation in the subraces of elves: height, skin coloration, racial abilities, and physical and mental attributes are shaped by the overlords to suit their favored environment and tastes in beauty. Wild elves are physically powerful but dim, while snow elves are hardy but racially arrogant and haughty, and this all stems from the tastes of their wizard overlords in the past. Art and music is encouraged among the young because it makes them more attractive to their overlords.

This doesn’t mean that your average elf is directly under the thumb of anyone; elves, like any race, have the ability to grow in power by testing themselves against dangers that can kill them. This means that the wizard overlords of the elven race are in fact elves now; like the githyanki, they threw off the shackles of their overlords eons ago...only to wear shackles designed by members of their own race. This is why in places like Faerun, any individual elf can’t even go to the elven homeland without doing something drastic (like promise to never leave). Powerful magic protects these places because the elven high wizards that rule the race live in these locations, and they receive only benefit from letting individual members wander the world collecting new experiences and magic to hopefully bring back to them.

As a race, elves of all professions tend to think like long-lived wizards. They know that they can potentially live hundreds of years, so they tend to be very risk adverse. In a word, like any wizard who survives very long in the DnD universe, they are cowards. They don’t allow ideas like "permanent homes" or "pride" to get in the way of survival. Your average elf lives in the woods because the woods have a lot of hiding places and a native of any particular woods can outrun any non-native trying to catch them, and if your home in a tree burns down you can easily build another home in another tree. Archery is encouraged among elves because it keeps your enemies at a distance, and it grants elves the ability to attack from hiding. Stealth and a distributed cell structure to their society keep them alive long enough for their wizards to prepare a strategy to beat their enemies. They harass and use hit and run tactics to wear down enemies to buy time for their wizards to draw upon their hundreds of years of experience in order to deal with the enemy.
   

... and really races of war hits it on the head as far as plausible explanation.

The pro-prettiness of D&D as far a fluff goes is generally overlooked and accepted, but it is glaring.

and seriously This is really worth reading on that note:
http://www.goblindefensefund.org/history4.html

I know he's being funny but the descriptions of thing in the fluff are just insane.
For those who won't click for fear of rick rolling :

The slurs continue, of course:

Goblin: “The concept of a fair fight is meaningless in their society. They favor ambushes, overwhelming odds, dirty tricks, and any other edge they can devise . . . goblins have a poor grasp of strategy and are cowardly by nature, tending to flee the field if a battle turns against them.”

Indeed. Cowardly swine, attacking from the bushes, fleeing when the battle turns against them. For shame. Clearly, a “poor grasp of strategy.” Nothing like elves . . .


From the 3E Monster Manual:
Elves: “Elves are cautious warriors . . . maximizing their advantage by using ambushes, snipers, and camouflage. They prefer to fire from cover and retreat before they are found, repeating this maneuver until all of their enemies are dead.”

It’s good to know that “firing from cover and retreating . . . until all of their enemies are dead” does not count as a dirty trick. Clearly, there’s just something about an elven ambush that makes them classier than a goblin ambush – probably the fact that while in melee, “elves are graceful and deadly, using complex maneuvers that are beautiful to observe.” Again, it does not require an overactive imagination to envision the writers of this trash sitting at their computers in their underwear, staring dreamily at their full-sized Legolas posters while typing this tripe.


But perhaps we are being unfair to elves. The tactics of other “good-aligned” character races are not dissimilar:

Gnomes:
“Gnomes prefer misdirection and deception over direct confrontation. They would rather befuddle or embarrass foes (other than goblinoids or kobolds) than kill them. Gnomes make heavy use of illusion magic and carefully prepared ambushes and traps whenever they can.”

Halflings:
“Halflings are cunning, resourceful survivors and opportunists . . . [they] prefer to fight defensively, usually hiding and launching ranged attacks . . . their tactics are very much like those of elves.” 

Perhaps some of these character races could hold some instructional classes on how to make one’s ambushes, misdirections, and deceptions respectable. 


There are a few other gems, such as “Goblins survive by raiding and stealing (preferably from those who cannot defend themselves easily)” – I think we can all agree this sounds more like typical adventurer behavior than anything. There are also the usual slurs about slave labor, and the repeated references to goblins being smelly and filthy but nothing we haven’t heard before

[Libertad]

That Goblin Defense Fund site has some good points.  I particularly like the description of the Sunless Citadel adventure the next page over regarding the goblin merchants.  A pie which can cure any disease for 50 gp is a bargain, not a ransom.

[shriekingdrake]

Thanks for sharing that Goblin Defense Fund site.  That was great.