WOW, I need to lay off the caffine and go to bed. MY brain hurts just reading what I wrote (ranted?).
Search Posts
I just recently started posting on this site and came across this thread and I find it interesting. There were some interesting points made but I think the problem is just that the PBH and other books don't have the space to make too much reality out of fantasy.
It says in the books that the elves are contemplative and take a long time to do anything. So for politics I would think that they spend a great deal of time and thought on what this decision will affect two centuries from now etc and then two centuries later the problem has changed around them making the decision moot. But in PC classes and such think of it like this: a human wizard learns his two spells he can cast at first level and then levels up to get more power as soon as possible, an elf however wants to learn every spell and more importantly why the magic works. "Why does a fireball use bat guano and sulfur instead of tar as components?" etc. Basically due to the human's short life span he is a meta gamer, he doesn't care why he can blow things up he just wants to know how. Inevitably the elf realizes how much his power affects the world (think Dark Sun setting) and doesn't throw around the big guns. Also the elves craft High Magic which generally has a very costly component (usually the lives of several powerful elves) and keeps their numbers down. Someone above mentioned money and the wealth that comes with time. My response to this is: a minimum wage job over 2000 years still lands me in a pathetic little apartment up to my eyeballs in debt. And even in long lived societies someone has to muck out the horses stalls. In all the books I have read with elves in them it states that they "grow" their homes out of the trees or out of crystal and stone. How much does it cost to grow a mansion? High level wizards charge a premium price just to cast detect magic what will they charge to grow a mansion out of trees? Their economy would take into account time. What are the taxes on a 10,000 year old estate? What's the interest on a 300 year mortgage? With so many years of economic decisions to make they are more likely to hit a disaster (natural or poor choice) that bankrupts them; wastrels in the family; war etc. You would see a tiered society just as we have. (rich elves still want to keep the status quo) Despite their long lives in general elves only have one or two children. And their biggest enemies, orcs, seem to sprout fully adult from the trees every season. The idea of 'culling' has not worked with orcs so why would it work with any other race. And all of the great epics show that enough throw away orcs can over come any fortification or master swordsman etc. Last the elves are for the most part a race that leans towards good so they don't tend to enslave and conquer. This also makes them great heroic martyrs. They tend to throw themselves on the blades of their foes just to save the girl. Or they die to the last trying to hold an already fallen city. In the thread everyone seems to be dealing in absolutes: All elves live to be 1200 years old so why aren't they all epic level whatevers? I'm not picking on your theories Kyr (they just summed up everyone else's and had serious thought in your rebuttals) but your personal discipline has led you to a remarkable juggling of "classes" in your real life. But how many people have you seen in your martial arts training quit? How many failed teachers were there from your graduating class at school? How many people failed in bussiness that you know? Then ask yourself how many people can list all three of those as successful "classes" in their life. We think of D&D PCs and NPCs by what/who we interact with in the game but how many NPCs are there in the town that have no useful information?, no description? How many people do we not see in the towns that our characters pass through? This goes back to what you said earlier about real life with science making longer living people: the superelf isn't the problem; think of the damage a short thinking 1000 year old human can do. He strives and strives as if he will live a short time but instead will live forever, a race like this would be made up of all epic characters. How fast would we screw up our world then?
If you have a gaming mat (with squares or hexes) or use something like one you might try tossing it out. It seems like you have a group of long time players and the 3rd ed. rules have brought a lot of meta game thinking to the forefront by getting involved in "exactness". What I mean is, in the older versions GMs described a room with novel-like detail then if combat started they would give out the dimensions and how far away the bad guy is. With the 3rd ed. the bad guy is 10 squares away and the description and imagination is lost, the GM just puts the bad guy model on the map and everyone counts out ranges and movement by squares. Can the characters judge the distance that accurately? If they ask how far they are from their target you give it in "you think he is about..." or you clump it by saying he is at medium range (this gives the minuses/bonuses without the square count). It should never really hurt the characters (like they miss with a short range spell because the bad guy is one foot out) but it makes the players see the fight in their heads and not reduce the game to numbers. Tricky fights or scenarios use figures,without the grid still, to give general locations of cover and specific objects but again no squares to count. This might take some of the meta thinking out of the game side and leave it in level-up area where it belongs. Also the word "why" for the level-up area is great for reducing meta thinking. "Why does your barbarian want a level of monk?" Or "why does your orc barbarian want the finess feat?" these questions can be a way of curbing that meta thinking or at least channeling it. I am definitely one of those GMs who does not like to say "no" but "why" is a softer no that says "your meta gaming again." |