Elven Designs
December 20th, 2010
Creoso a’ Mori Noa. That, for those of you who don’t know, is apparently the best elvish translation of “Welcome to Dark Designs” (or, at least, the best one I could find in about 10 minutes. I’m sure there are better English-Elvish translators out there). Why am I writing to you in Elvish? An excellent question. For the record, I’m not typically the sort of person who puts a whole lot of stock into trying to speak “Elvish,” whether Tolkien or otherwise. I don’t want to say that that’s just a little too nerdy, even for me, but, at the end of the day, even though I appreciate some of the subtle ways in which language mirrors culture, values, and thought processes, and how ideas sometimes change in translation… that’s really nerdy.
No, the reason that I’m writing in Elvish is because it seemed like a fun and flavorful way to introduce the fact that today officially marks the beginning of Elf Week (unless, that is, you’re reading this sometime in the future, on an archive binge or something. In that case I’m sure you’re well aware that Elf Week ended long ago, and I encourage you to go check out some of the other articles this week, because they’re already up for you. I’m told that Masters and Minions was pretty fantastic.). It seemed a lot easier than fresh-baked lembas bread, or breaking one bone for every twig snapped underfoot, or an amazing display of archery or nature-craft. I considered just being especially arrogant, but I’m told that I do that anyway, so I wasn’t sure anyone would pick up on the difference. Speaking in Elvish just seemed to be the easiest way to get the message across.
So, we’ve established that it’s Elf Week, and that this is Dark Designs (which long-term readers will know is all about game design and, whenever possible, DMing), so clever readers will have probably already surmised that this article will be dealing with some design aspect of elves, as there’s really only so much to say about DMing elves. I’m sure Josh will have some great elven plot hooks for tomorrow’s Grave Plots (no doubt they’ll be made of mithral, or some other special elven super-metal). And, really, in your average game, elves aren’t that much different from anyone else: they’re not exceptionally more mechanically powerful than your other base races (in fact, I’d argue they’re among the least powerful of the PC races), and their longevity means absolutely nothing as PCs, both because the typical D&D campaign takes less than one in-game year to conclude, and because adventurers have dramatically decreased life expectancies, due to such occupational hazards as spiked pit-traps and hungry dragons. As for elf NPCs, elf communities, and elf cultures, these things typically vary from group to group anyway, and if there’s one thing the forums have told us consistently, it’s that you basically already know what you want to run and how you want to run it.
On the other hand, speaking of elf culture, and the fact that elf characters aren’t exceptionally more powerful than anyone else, I am reminded of an interesting argument I remember reading on some forum somewhere, which pertains quite a bit to game design. I don’t remember a lot of the details, but the argument went something like this: elves live a really, really long time. For example, according to the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook, the average elven adventurer begins his or her career at the ripe old age of 131 (give or take). For those of you who don’t have the strongest grasp of time, the longest that any human has been verified to live is about 120 years, meaning that your average elven fighter has more experience than any given human could ever hope to accumulate. Given that they’ve had a whole lifetime to train and prepare, shouldn’t the average elven PC start out with something like 20 class levels?
Now, the problems with the argument are clear enough from the get-go: that would just be broken, unfair, and, in the end, probably unfun. Elf characters would be so much better than everyone else that anyone who didn’t play an elf would basically be useless, dead weight. Most people would be happy enough to leave the matter closed at that (and, frankly, I would normally be one of them…) but this is Elf Week, so, why don’t we see if we can take a closer look?
The underlying theory to this argument is that time leads directly to experience. This is a false premise, on two different accounts. Firstly, from a mechanical perspective, things just don’t work that way: it’s killing monsters, completing quests, and, sometimes, sucking up to the DM that gets you experience (on the other hand, most people I’ve played with prefer to keep a bit more of a “fourth wall” between themselves and disbelief-suspension-destroying mechanics like experience, so it’s probably not a fair argument to say that those 130-odd years were wasted if the elf didn’t spend them mass-murdering monsters.). Secondly, and more relevant to the realists out there (who are likely going to be the only ones who really care about what an elf “realistically” should be able to do with 130 years of experience), age and experience are not the same thing.
Now, if you’re like me, then when you were a kid you spent a lot of time feeling that it was unfair that you didn’t get all of the privileges and rights that come with adulthood, because you weren’t old enough for them. “It’s stupid to set age limits on voting, driving, and drinking,” you would say to yourself, or, if you were as vocal as I was, perhaps to others, “being old doesn’t make you more responsible, or more wise.” Despite now being legally able to vote, drive, and drink (though hopefully never more than one at any given time), I still stand by that argument: wisdom, responsibility, and even experience are not directly tied to how long you’ve been alive. Some of them (wisdom and responsibility) have a tendency to increase with age, but this doesn’t mean that a person of age X will never be as mature or wise as a person of age X + 50. It depends on the people.
Experience follows a related, but somewhat different, principle. Unlike wisdom or maturity, you really can’t have experience without spending a certain amount of time to gain it. Your overall ability may be greater than someone with more experience, but in order to get experience, you do need to actually put in the time to gain that experience. That said, time is only one necessary component. You can spend all the time you want, but if you aren’t using that time wisely, learning or practicing something, you’re not really going to gain any experience. For example, if you spend all day frolicking and reveling in dewy glades, or what have you, you’re not going to get any better at wizardry or swordplay.
I don’t remember all the details, but I do have vague recollections about the section on elven culture in Races of the Wild. If my memory serves me, it talked about how elves spent most of their adolescence flitting from one thing to another, learning a smattering of everything from swordplay and sorcery to basket-weaving, poetry, and floral arrangements. The idea was that elves would sort of learn how to do everything, in part because they were flighty, fickle people who did whatever their hearts desired, in part because they had the time to do it, after all, and in part because of some convenient cultural beliefs about being self-sufficient, which sort of required that each elf be a kind of super-renaissance-man. This provides a reasonable enough explanation (for the average elf, at least: mileage in your campaign setting may vary) for why the average elf doesn’t have the benefits of 100 years of swordfighting experience: he hasn’t spent those 100 years swordfighting, he spent them doing all kinds of random things.
The problem with this theory, however, is that there’s still no support for it, mechanically speaking. You want your elf to be an expert poet, basketweaver, historian, philosopher, and whatever his class lets him do? Unfortunately, it doesn’t really pan out that way, because he doesn’t actually have any better ability to do any of those things. Sure, you can say that your character’s good at painting, but anything you make with Craft (painting) or Perform (paint) isn’t going to be better than anyone else’s.
Still, some extra skill points aren’t exactly as unbalanced as 20 levels, meaning that if you wanted to, you could probably represent the elves’ vast experiences with some tweaks to their racial traits. For example, instead of elven immunities or low-light vision, elves might gain an extra 8-12 skill points (at first level only), which could only be spent on non-class skills. Optionally (preferably, really), you could spend these skill points to have starting ranks of up to 3 or 4, instead of just picking 12 skills to have 1 rank in. Alternatively, you could let elves treat all skills as class skills, or give them a bonus (+2-3, or maybe their Intelligence?) to each skill they don’t have ranks in, etc., etc.
And that’s it for today. Join me next week, when I’ll be talking about some exciting upcoming changes for NNW. In the meantime, make the most of the time you have.