PDA

View Full Version : Emotional Elf



Welknair
2010-12-08, 11:26 AM
How do you explain a female Grey Elf who is more effusive than she should be? I'd rather not have her be a human or Half-Elf who got brain-swapped with an evil Grey-Elf. That's what my player is currently considering as a backstory.

The character is a mid-level Wizard and was a bit of a rebel in the academy.

gbprime
2010-12-08, 11:27 AM
Why do you need a justification? Exceptionally emotional people can come from any culture or race.

Grelna the Blue
2010-12-08, 11:34 AM
She could easily just be the data point on the far right of the bell curve for Grey Elf friendliness, but if that explanation doesn't satisfy you could use some RP explanation. Perhaps she was either muted or imprisoned for a length of time while younger and is making up for lost time. Perhaps she is deeply insecure about something and this is a coping mechanism. Perhaps when she got her naming gifts from the fairy godmothers, one of them gave her the gift of gab (that could also conceivably have come from the wicked fairy they forgot to invite).

Brain transplant just seems a little...extreme...for something like this.

Welknair
2010-12-08, 11:40 AM
Brain transplant just seems a little...extreme...for something like this.

Technically it would be a conciousness transplant, not a brain one, but yeah. My thoughts exactly.

The problem is that she's not as aloof or reserved as most Grey Elves are supposed to be. However, that's actually nice for the party. I think I'll just go with the outlier theory.

hangedman1984
2010-12-08, 01:22 PM
Racial generalities are far from universal, in dnd just as in real life there are always exceptions

Azimov
2010-12-08, 01:25 PM
Perhaps her emotional nature is why she is an adventurer? If she finds all of her grey elf kin to be stuffy and dull then that is certainly a good reason to go travelling. Adventurers are never the normal everyday members of their race, and everyone needs a motivation to leave home.

Psyren
2010-12-08, 01:27 PM
I thought Elves were only reserved with outsiders.; and even then, according to Races of the Wild, it's more out of a desire to give people their space unless asked for help, rather than true aloofness.

KillianHawkeye
2010-12-08, 07:55 PM
Maybe she grew up with one of the less stuffier elven subraces? Or even lived among humans for a hundred years or so?

HunterOfJello
2010-12-08, 08:07 PM
The background information for all the races in d&d are just starting points for characters. They exist to help you better mold and create your own characters.

An aloof Gray Elf is no surprise at all. A Gray Elf who is openly emotional and often effusive would be somewhat of an outsider.

This can be a reason that the Elf has become an adventurer in the first place, she doesn't fit in with her own kind. Another option is that this particular Gray Elf was raised around a different race or community and not among other Gray Elves. If she's evil and known as a rebel, she could have been raised by the same race or community that killed her Gray Elf family and kin.

~

Many of the most fun characters to play are ones who go against your normal expectations of that race. Half-Orc Wizards, Halfling Barbarians and Dwarf Bards can all be great characters who make interesting PCs and party members.

Coidzor
2010-12-08, 08:47 PM
Well, elves are women. Women elves have higher(or was it lower?) woman stats than other elves. Women are known for being emotional for reasons I don't rightly know.

So multiply the emotional multiplier of standard woman by whatever proportion of woman that your character is and go from there.

So if woman has a 1.25 emotional multiplier and your character is 1.71x a woman, then you get 1.25*1.71=2.1375 or 2.14 times the amount of emotion as would normally be indicated.

So just round that off nicely and you get twice the emotion.

As an added benefit, her actually quantifying her increased emotion relative to her fellows would be in keeping with the int-bonus nerdiness of gray elves...

ShriekingDrake
2010-12-08, 09:14 PM
How about that she was the daughter of a diplomat, who spent a great deal of time in far off places, so she was exposed to many cultures outside her own and if she wanted to have social interactions with people her age, she needed to be less reserved than she might have been living in her own community.