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Thread: Playing an Elf

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    Pixie in the Playground
     
    Guild_Master's Avatar

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    Default Playing an Elf

    I have new guy at my table. He is not very big into fantasy. He is doing a terrific job playing at the table. At our last game he came to me with a problem. He said he doesn't know anything about elves and is having a hard time identifying with his character. I asked him if he had ever read or watched Lord of the Rings. He said he hadn't. I was at a lost as to what to tell him.

    Does anyone have tips, suggestions, or experiences they could share to help me explain what a elf character is suppose to be like?

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    The second chapter in the PHB is absolutely full of fluff about the standard races. That would be my recommendation for initially getting a feel for the races as a whole.

    Once he's gotten the gist of it, remember that an individual is...well, an individual. Exceptions to the cultural norm abound, particularly in the case of a PC. There's no need for a player to adhere to every last nuance if they don't want to.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Races of the Wild is your friend. Decent book, LOTS of fluff.
    Good grammar is hot.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Playing an elf:

    Step 1: Find an old guy.
    Step 2: Ask old guy what the problems are with today's youth.
    Step 3: Listen intently. WARNING: Possible health risk.
    Step 4: Act like the old guy constantly.
    Step 5: ????
    Step 6: Profit.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Depends on how elves act in your world, if you are using standard, then just use Races of the Wild, or the second chapter of the PHB
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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Well, I always play my elf as if they were the elves from WFB. A bit arrogant and having a cynical view of the other races.
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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Races of the Wild is your friend...IF you like that particular spin on elven nature. Personally I prefer the "refined and haughty scions of an ancient culture" aspect to the "carefree lovers of art and nature" aspect. I guess you could say I like Grey elves better than Wood elves.

    If you like the RotW model, definitely tell him check that out. If you prefer the other, I'm not sure what to suggest. It depends on his cultural references.
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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    If you're an elf, you've already lived for longer than most of the party will even if they die of old age. Everyone that doesn't have a lifespan over a hundred years is cannon fodder.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Quote Originally Posted by ZeroNumerous View Post
    Playing an elf:

    Step 1: Find an old guy.
    Step 2: Ask old guy what the problems are with today's youth.
    Step 3: Listen intently. WARNING: Possible health risk.
    Step 4: Act like the old guy constantly.
    Step 5: ????
    Step 6: Profit.
    Win!
    Try playing an Elf as the guy who's personally seen most of human history, and has a hundred interesting stories to tell about people and places that aren't there anymore.

    Failing the 'timeless tourist' cliche, I use a combination of Japanese samurai movie/Zen monk schtick and the Sithi of Tad William's Memory, Sorrow & Throne trilogy as my play prototype for elves.

    Never rush (you always have more time).
    Never lose your cool (you have a reputation to maintain).
    Elegance over expedience (beauty endures, the ugly is quickly discarded).
    Don't patronise the younger races (they have their virtues too).
    Last edited by bosssmiley; 2007-05-04 at 10:57 PM.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Quote Originally Posted by Jothki View Post
    If you're an elf, you've already lived for longer than most of the party will even if they die of old age. Everyone that doesn't have a lifespan over a hundred years is cannon fodder.
    Right, although perhaps not in the cannon fodder sense. An elf will be more inclined to take the long view. Plans with time frames in the decades wouldn't be unheard of.

    Also, on average, an elf has a decent respect for nature. They'd rather spend a night in a tree than a cave. Naturally, this and anything else typical of elves can be altered as the player sees fit, since adventuring PCs are already atypical.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Another thing to remember: For an elf, making friends with shorter lived races is potentially painful, as they will die far before you. Losing friends over and over to age is something that can cause aloofness (you don't want to get too close and hurt again) or enthusiams bordering on clingyness (you want to wring every minute of experience with them, living life to the fullest).
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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    My advice would be to tell him to watch LoTR. All standard D&D elves are based on the elves of the Professor. And, besides, it's the best fantasy series ever made, (IMHO the greatest movies ever made). If he doesn't like movies or doesn't have the time to watch one, CH 2 of the PHB is the way to go.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Quote Originally Posted by ZeroNumerous View Post
    Playing an elf:

    Step 1: Find an old guy.
    Step 2: Ask old guy what the problems are with today's youth.
    Step 3: Listen intently. WARNING: Possible health risk.
    Step 4: Act like the old guy constantly.
    Step 5: ????
    Step 6: Profit.
    ^

    I concur.
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    Pixie in the Playground
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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    This is a wonderful opportunity for you to think about your setting. Everything that's been mentioned above could make for excellent elf characterization, but as the DM, you have the blessing and curse of dictates the stereotypes and tendencies of any elvish cultures in your particular world. Is this a published setting, or homebrew? If the latter, have you thought much about what particular elvish societies exist? There's nothing wrong with the standard fluff, but I always think it's fun to sprinkle some specific quirks for flavor - maybe the nomadic hunter-gatherer elves in the deep forests are suspicious of Dwarves and their logging to fuel their furnaces, but the jaded elves from the degenerate fallen empire get along just fine, having employed dwarvish masons to build their towers for centuries.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Read about the Cerilian Elves from Birthright. They're immortal atheists who are either isolationist, arrogant sods, or psychopathic human-slaughterers.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    See, the camps on this are divided in two.

    1: People who think you just act old. 'Cause thats easy.

    2: People who suggest actually doing research.. Pfft.
    Last edited by ZeroNumerous; 2007-05-05 at 07:01 AM.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Tell this guy to act really jaded about the world, government of the "shortlives" and have open disgust of the half races (including outright rudeness to half-orcs, commenting on "how in the nine hells did your parents meet? and how can I go back in time to kill them") make the elf show superiority over everyone, including the liches "your existance is a mockery to life itself. how can you show such disregard for the wheel of life, death and rebirth. you are causing the world harm. what do you think you can acheive in your fleshless body")

    then try and get the elf to create some half drow and a fascination with spiders.
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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Well, being the elfs my favorite among the core races, I'll have a few councils to give you about them.

    1- Read The Hobbit, LOTR 1, 2, 3 and The Silmarillion. If that can't be done, watch some of it in the movies (even though it's not the same).

    2- Elves are noble and monkish. They remain calm and ponderated, even boring sometimes. The pleasures of the flesh (any of them, including eating exageratly (holy cow, how do you spell "exagerately"?)) are rarely praticed by them. They are wise (I belive, even, that in the core D&D the race elf is ill-constructed. It should gain +2 wis, +2 int, +2 des, +2 car, not loose cons and have at least a level ajustment of 2), as they have seen most of recent history.

    3- Elves may be arrogant, but it's not a rule. The elves with less wisdom tend to arrogance, elves with hight wisdom don't, but, still, they usualy can't avoid being seen like superior (hey, that might explay the Elves X Dwarfs thing!).

    4- Elves love the nature and the growing things, not like the halflings, but they see it as a part of the natural world and that, thus, must be preserved.

    I guess it's preety much that how I see the elven kind. Of course, in the cenario you are playing, they may be much different. That is the LOTR's elf.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    You're going to live forever, or at least it seems like it. There's no reason to rush. You're well aware of just how inexpressably wonderful it is to be an elf, and from there you can rub the non-elves' noses in it (gets old fast as a party dynamic, though) or carry the burden of your "total superiority" with quiet dignity such that your companions are never aware of or offended by your betterness-ness. Either way, you're convinced.

    Dwarves are all stodgy and boring. They might be respectable despite that, or they might be utterly unworth your time.

    Halflings are cute in the extreme, but you might have a little trouble taking them seriously. You don't quite know what to think of gnomes (who does?).

    Humans are a little disturbing and dangerous, and sometimes you have to fight your more negative perceptions of them as sort of a race of man-sized cockroaches, breeding, breeding, infesting, destroying, breeding, rushing pell-mell everywhere and taking everything in all at once, stopping to enjoy nothing, breeding, breeding... yet you might admire that very same zest for experiences as something akin to your fellow elves, if you have a more optimistic outlook. Their diversity is wonderous and apalling all at once, and if you meet some that you take a liking to, the shortness of their lifespan is tragically sad.

    Odds are very good (depending on the setting) that the elves used to be greater than they are now. You're proud of that past, maybe sensitive about the elves' continuing descent into obscurity. Maybe you're worried about being overshadowed, especially by humans. You're aware that elves might have cultivated a bit of mystique, and probably like playing to it.

    You might downright enjoy killing orcs, and you hate drow with an ugly, gut-felt passion. You enjoy kind of a mix of the finer, aristocratic things in life --wine, art, complicated swordplay, magery-- coupled with the simple pleasures of laying out under the stars, cloud-gazing, singing and dancing and frolicking in fields and streams.

    As an adventurer you're a little bit "humanized," less able to slow down and enjoy the typical pace of elven life, and you might be a little bemused if you realize that fact. You still might regard things like vengeance with an extreeeeeeeemely long-game attitude ("Yeah, well, let's see how his kids turn out"), but you also have a Very. Long. Memory.

    Someone (as an adventurer, that's probably you) should stand up to injustice so that everyone can go back to frolicking and being frivolous and FUN like they ought to, or at least doing whatever they enjoy. Because that's life. The pursuit of happiness, however you find it.

    You can jiggle the values a little so that your elf is more serious, studious, and arrogant, or maybe tolerant and accepting, with an urge to be carefree but a sense of duty keeping you out adventuring. Or even naive and frivolous, having fun out a-wandering until someone dies and makes you all sober and serious. Regardless, the above is what's at the core of elves, I think.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Quote Originally Posted by DomarSaul View Post
    Is this a published setting, or homebrew?
    It is a published setting but it is unique for D&D. Like SpiderBrigade said the elves are more "refined and haughty scions of an ancient culture". The majority of elves live in human towns and cities trying to integrate themselves. While some elves live in the few remaining crumbling elven citadels. My player’s elf is from one of the later and even belongs to a cult/splinter group trying to reunite elven kind and recapture the grandeur of their now legendary and romanticized golden age.

    I did add a little flavor that's not in the setting.

    The PC is former military and during one session a little culture secret kind of slipped. It was revealed that the elven warriors of this mountain range would at times be far from their citadel (supply lines) and would be deep in nearly barren land occupied by hostile goblinoid races. So the elven warriors would on occasion have to resort to eating the fallen goblinoids. Most of the elves felt it was a shameful survival act. Unfortunately some of the elven warriors acquired a taste for the "lesser" races. It is a dark secret of their military that only former field soldiers know.

    How's that for flavor?

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    While I'd normally recommend reading Tolkien's Silmarllion as it's the Great Big History Book Of The Elves, that book is a painfully hard read for the average person.

    If pressed for time, just tell him to watch Fellowship or Two Towers, they're the most elfy of the three movies.

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    Something to remember about elves and age...yes, they're over a hundred years old at game start. But they're still young! Old humans are nearing the end of their lives, and are decades into the long physical breakdown of aging. The hundred year old elf is going to live for centuries to come, and is just coming into peak physical condition. Its not very likely that a creature with most of its life ahead of it would be living in the past (their personal past, that is...their racial/cultural past is a whole different deal). Their aging structure supports enthusiastic (if perhaps less than urgent) concentration on the future over past or present.

    Also, though I don't know if this is clarified, I tend to assume that elves remain thoroughly childlike for a few decades. So at least to start with, while you might have met the great-great-grandparents of the human adventurer once, you probably don't particularly remember anything before his grandparents.

    It also seems likely that such a race would be better experienced than humans at overcoming/forgetting/outliving bad experiences and memories. The often-used image of elves as carrying a terrible burden of memories over-humanizes them...a species that often passes the 5 century mark will necessarily have greater resistance to the mental wear and tear of aging as well as the physical, whether this resistance is innate or taught.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Well, Ulzgoroth, I would go further and suggest that you don't remember the slightest bit about any of this poxy human's myriad ancestors, mainly because none of them did anything interesting to warrant your immortal attention. Naturally though, you'd be as likely to remember his great-great-grandfather, who pioneered the use of saddle stirrups, as to recall his second cousin once removed, who snuck into your elders' council chamber and was summarily executed.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    The good news is that however you play them, there's an elven subrace somewhere that's exactly like that :)

    Tolkien elves are serious elves. They're impressive, but D&D elves don't seem to pull it off very well because they're shorter than humans. There's a definite lack of toweringness. Tolkien's elves saw humans as irresponsible as children, and the height difference emphasized this.

    I wouldn't play my elves as old guys either. Growing old seems to be a human feature. Elves, by contrast, are forever young. They have an unbounded capacity to enjoy the world and admire beauty. This is also why it takes them a hundred years to get to level 1. First of all they're not in a hurry, and second they keep getting distracted by the pretty way the light plays through the forest canopy, etc.

    Another way to play elves is as beings that lack the emotional attachment that other races have naturally. They're classed as "Good" because they appreciate beauty and are not aggressive, but they do not love and fundamentally they do not care, and they have trouble understanding the concept of emotional suffering. They are motivated by reasons that make perfect sense to them but are inscrutable to humans, and they both live and die by a complex system of etiquette.

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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    In my campaign world elven culture is like that of an idealized ancient japan heavy steeped in a shinto like belief system. Most elves tend to be calm, collected, and spiritual, taking situations as they come and always trying to maintain their composure. Elves who have spent time in human lands are usually a bit jaded from their experiances there, and tend to find more pleasure in simple things then the fast paced glam and glitter of human life. Most elves spend most their lives in elven land prefering to stay away from human lands, not so much out of spite, but so that they might live in harmony with spirits.
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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Tell him to combine the personality of a Frenchman with the physique and lifestyle of a Japanese...
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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Hey, thats insulting, a parisian at least!
    Well, I dont like elves realy, pompous *******s that they are. Tell him to act like a steriotypal arrogant rich guy.
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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    Darn elves with their stupid trees. Always building stuff way up there instead of on the ground all right and proper. Always going on about there "long life spans" and "advanced culture". What have they contributed to the world eh? Bunch of flashy do-nothing spells and prissy "fine" wine. Give me a good old fashioned lager any day! And they act all aloof and look down on the other races, but tell me this. You ever seen a half-dwarf? O'course not! We dwarves stick to our own kind for those sort of things. ANd the day I see an elf with a proper beard is the day I hug an ork. Bunch of long-eared gits. *grumble* *grumble*
    First posted by Bosssmiley:
    Don't go blaming the other races! What's the one common factor in almost *all* the half-races? Yep, humans. It's us humans (at least the D&D world ones) that are getting into these situations in the first place. Some dungeon-crawling weirdos will stick anything in anything just to see if it feels nice... :P
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    Quote Originally Posted by turtleant120 View Post
    Darn elves with their stupid trees. Always building stuff way up there instead of on the ground all right and proper. Always going on about there "long life spans" and "advanced culture". What have they contributed to the world eh? Bunch of flashy do-nothing spells and prissy "fine" wine. Give me a good old fashioned lager any day! And they act all aloof and look down on the other races, but tell me this. You ever seen a half-dwarf? O'course not! We dwarves stick to our own kind for those sort of things. ANd the day I see an elf with a proper beard is the day I hug an ork. Bunch of long-eared gits. *grumble* *grumble*
    You poor thing you, living in your tight, confined underground caverns, squeezed in close with dozens of other short smelling little men, drinking your troubles away until that girl dwarves beard seems to go away(ironically, while dwarves have trouble telling their females from males, elves have trouble telling their males from females). How sad is it that even though dwarven kind lives hundreads of years, none of them can seem to develop something akin to proper art, or even master an arcane spell or two. And by the gods, have I never seen anyone or anything half as stubborn as a dwarf! Despite having lived underground in tunnels for thousands of years, dwarves favor warhammers and battle axes for self defense, weapons the require wide swinging arcs in order to be effective, no wonder you have some much trouble fighting off goblins and kobolds from your ancestral land, they at least have the common sense to use knives and spears in a tunnel enviroment. Us elves have long practiced the arts of sword play and archery, both endlessly useful skills in our forest homes, which, I might add, acually have clean air to breath which doesnt stink of mead.
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    Default Re: Playing an Elf

    A good start to playing an elf is assuming that your character feels he has gotten a wonderful gift (from gods/fate/whatever) in form a long life, immunity to several detrimental effects and otherwise superior lifespan compared to other races.

    NOTE: this doesn't mean the elves are "happier" than othe reaces. But they are usually more religious (not in fanatic sense, but in a healthy view on gods and serving gods). They might sometimes be arrogant but are also understanding. They tolerate a lot of things, but keep to their own.

    etc. etc. Being an elf is usually being at peace with yourself and with the world, something that other races find harder to achieve.
    Last edited by KIDS; 2007-05-06 at 08:14 AM.
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