[Pathfinder] Elf Dragon Disciple

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I got the idea to make an elf bard who becomes a dragon disciple (black dragon, specifically) and part of me wonders if it's too "Mary-Sue."

"Oh I'm an achingly handsome, near-immortal being who plays magic music and is a decent swordsman and OH! I'm descended from a black dragon so I can grow wiiiiiiiiings!"

I just sort of have this hang up with roleplaying elves as they already kind of seem too perfect when compared with my usual fare of half-orcs, dwarves and tieflings, and adding dragon disciple just makes it worse. Am I overreacting?

[Honest Tiefling]

Ask your DM or fellow party members. If everyone is on board the Dragon Train, what's the issue?

And you could...Just make the elf ugly. I sincerely doubt most people really consider all elves to be automatically attractive. If they are, make them ugly anyway. Make them a passable, if unoriginal, bard with a nasally voice, greasy hair and overly angular features. Emphasize that while some performances are good, they're just not a master of the art. All of their compositions are just plain terrible.

[Particle_Man]

I think you could start on the path of the dragon disciple, mistakenly thinking that you are descended from a heroic copper dragon, and then have to deal with the fact that your ancestors lied (for good reason, see below) about their dark past, and your are actually descended from a particularly villainous black dragon - not "cool evil" but "unsympathetic disgusting no one is friends with this *******" type of chaotic evil.

So instead of Mary Sue, now you feel like you should go around apologizing (even atoning?), and (leaving aside the metagame freedom to stop advancing in DD, just roll with me here) you finds that you are *stuck* advancing as this black dragon dragon disciple, so the curse of your evil ancestry becomes more and more apparent with each passing week (or month, depending on how fast your advance in levels).

Oh, from a crunch perspective you might want to look at the feat prestigious spellcaster to keep bard spellcaster progression.

[Geddy2112]

I got the idea to make an elf bard who becomes a dragon disciple (black dragon, specifically) and part of me wonders if it's too "Mary-Sue."
Not unless you explicitly play it like this:

"Oh I'm an achingly handsome, near-immortal being who plays magic music and is a decent swordsman and OH! I'm descended from a black dragon so I can grow wiiiiiiiiings!"

Other than hard Tolkien style worlds, elves are not these paragons of beauty or all that immortal. They can be killed just as easy as another race, and although they live a long time, they are not immortal. Also, in most settings bards are not rare mythical creatures that wow and amaze people with magic music, just as much as any other caster is not going to scare or bewilder anything but dirt farming peasants.

Draconic bloodlines do not mean that you have to be a direct biological descendant of a dragon or are a half dragon or anything. Dragon blood in particular is the glitter of a fantasy universe-gets in everything and impossible to clean out. Also, again, this is not exactly unheard of so unless you Mary sue the hell out of it then don't worry.

[JNAProductions]

Just play it well. Be a nice guy-an ACTUAL nice guy, not a Mary Sue "I'm so nice, but I'll burn your family to the ground!"

[Psyren]

Just play it well. Be a nice guy-an ACTUAL nice guy, not a Mary Sue "I'm so nice, but I'll burn your family to the ground!"

Melt, surely - that variety breathes acid.



I just sort of have this hang up with roleplaying elves as they already kind of seem too perfect when compared with my usual fare of half-orcs, dwarves and tieflings, and adding dragon disciple just makes it worse. Am I overreacting?

Elves aren't perfect at all, they're quite flawed, especially in PF. When the world was reduced to barbarism during the Earthfall, the elves conveniently skipped out on all of it, leaving all the "lesser races" - including humans and their very own cousins, who would later become the Drow - to fend for themselves.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I'm well aware of this, and reading the relevant section of Inner Sea Races over and over and even talking with James Jacobs, who probably understands Golarion's elves better than anyone else, on his AMA thread on the official Paizo boards, I just don't GET the elf mindset. It's like "an elf's long lifespan colors everything they do and think" and I'm like "Okay, how do I roleplay that? How do I act to make an elf character different from just a kinda new-age-hippy human?"

And part of me just sort of wonders how Dragon Disciples fit into Golarion AT ALL. I don't think I've seen Dragon Disciple NPCs in any of the APs or Campaign Setting books...How do DRAGON DISCIPLES think?!

[Particle_Man]

Well most of your non-elf friends die on you pretty quickly, relatively speaking. It might be like a human moving to a new town every few years, but without telephones or internet so you are effectively cut off from the old crowd. Or maybe like living in a hospital/palliative care ward. Or like meeting people that have cancer and will be very likely dead within 5 years. Of course you can still be friends, even good friends, but there is a bit of sadness that tinges things, if you don't deliberately compartmentalize (maybe your bardic performances, and rehearsing such, is a way of coping -either to distract yourself from their mortality or to try to immortalize them in your songs, epics, poems, etc.).

If that is your angle, maybe you want to explore your draconic nature because dragons are also long-lived, and they might "get" you in a way that humans just can't?

[Psyren]

I'm well aware of this, and reading the relevant section of Inner Sea Races over and over and even talking with James Jacobs, who probably understands Golarion's elves better than anyone else, on his AMA thread on the official Paizo boards, I just don't GET the elf mindset. It's like "an elf's long lifespan colors everything they do and think" and I'm like "Okay, how do I roleplay that? How do I act to make an elf character different from just a kinda new-age-hippy human?"

I know you've played Dragon Age, Zousha - chat with Solas any time before Trespasser, he has all kinds of roleplay advice for you. A lot of what he describes could be easily applied to Golarion, and Kynonin in particular.

"Elvhenan was the empire... and Arlathan its greatest city. A place of beauty and magic, lost to time. We hear stories of them living in trees, and imagine wooden ramps, or Dalish aravels. Imagine instead spires of crystal, twining through the branches, palaces floating among the clouds. Imagine beings who lived forever, for whom magic was as natural as breathing."

"{Long life} was simply part of being elven. The subtle beauty of elven magic was the effect, not the cause, of their nature. Some spells took years to cast. Echoes would linger for centuries, harmonizing with new magic in an unending symphony."

Golarion's Aiudara ("elf-gates") also bear some striking similarities to Dragon Age's Eluvians.



And part of me just sort of wonders how Dragon Disciples fit into Golarion AT ALL. I don't think I've seen Dragon Disciple NPCs in any of the APs or Campaign Setting books...How do DRAGON DISCIPLES think?!

There's a bunch of them in NPC Codex, complete with backstory blurbs. Here you go (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/npcCodex/prestige/dragonDisciple.html)

[Dagroth]

Just because you're an Elf, doesn't mean you have to think like all the other Elves. Not all Elves are "Immortal lay-abouts". (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats)

Dragon Disciples, I would assume, could think lots of different things. "I'm the descendant of Dragons! That means I should rule!" or "I'm the descendant of an Evil Dragon... I should try hard to make up for that." or "I'm the descendant of a Dragon... I could become a bridge of understanding between Dragons and Humanoids!"

[Honest Tiefling]

I'm well aware of this, and reading the relevant section of Inner Sea Races over and over and even talking with James Jacobs, who probably understands Golarion's elves better than anyone else, on his AMA thread on the official Paizo boards, I just don't GET the elf mindset. It's like "an elf's long lifespan colors everything they do and think" and I'm like "Okay, how do I roleplay that? How do I act to make an elf character different from just a kinda new-age-hippy human?"

And part of me just sort of wonders how Dragon Disciples fit into Golarion AT ALL. I don't think I've seen Dragon Disciple NPCs in any of the APs or Campaign Setting books...How do DRAGON DISCIPLES think?!

Well, unless James Jacob is going to be sitting at your table and judging you, maybe you should go with what YOU think an elf with that long life span would do.

Or just be lazy and have the Elf spend so much time around mortals they think like a shorter lived race too. You want to live in the moment because your friends keep fading away, one by one. You could return to the other elves, but your character was raised among mortals and never really could connect to their own race. So you dabbled in magic, possibly even an evil bloodline just to find a way to stop your friends, your loved ones, maybe even a wife or husband, from dying before their time. They have so little time, but very rarely make it to a natural death. And their bodies become so frail and decrepit along the way...