I like to think Elves go on an adventure at around age 70-90, get really super cool, take 100 years off, and then completely forget all their amazing skills because they’ve been learning the language of bees or doing sequoia trimming as a hobby for the last century.
Would be a cute fluffy class feature to just assign the very old elf an exceptionally difficult but totally useless skill at near-master level, to help explain why the Legendary Warrior of Old is now swinging for the minor leagues.
I do like the idea that elves just change their entire lifestyle every hundred years or so. They spend 80 years as a warrior, then decided to take up magic and became a wizard for the next 80 years.
I also like the idea of a human village that accidentally built 4 statues of the same elf who kept saving them with different skills.
There’s a series of books called The Legend of Drizzt last time I checked (it’s changed over the years, and the first book wasn’t even supposed to be about him lmao) and in one of the books, our main character believes he has lost all his friends (not a spoiler, we already know who is okay and who isn’t when he thinks this) and so he goes off alone into the mountains to kill orcs and goblins and shit until he maybe dies. A couple of elves way older than him meet him at one point, and since this is really the first time he’s spent with elves long term since he left his underground homeland decades before, he doesn’t really know “how to be an elf”.
This is basically their philosophy.
Elves can live over a thousand years (one dark elf we know of is blessed by their evil deity and is over 5,000), but dwarves only about 2-400 years (I think?) and half lings about 100-150ish, humans standard 80.
Since you will lose 10 sets of “lifelong friends” at least, if they’re human, many elves choose to stick with other elves.
But those that mingle, tend to segment their lives into smaller chunks.
Don’t try to live your life all thousand years in one go, you will lose so much by doing so.
But if you think of your life as more “this is me now, I am very different from the person who wore this outfit 5 years ago, and this is who I will be for the next 100 years” then it becomes more manageable.
You never forget the friends and family you made in an old life, but you cannot carry your grief over losing them for the rest of your life.
Those that do end up sticking to their own kind, because it’s less painful. (and also superiority complexes)
I think there’s also a fun opportunity for the world to just evolve a lot in that time. Like, you were a wizard 100 years ago, but then spells were super different and way less powerful, so now you get to relearn the newer better spells and casting techniques. I imagine it’d be like learning to programming 50 years ago and then starting again now
Like, you were a wizard 100 years ago, but then spells were super different and way less powerful, so now you get to relearn the newer better spells and casting techniques.
That’s an interesting (and very Frieren-esque) bit of world building. But it does run contrary to the generic D&D settings/multi-verse, where the same set of spells have existed for centuries and across a multitude of worlds.
“When I was your age, you needed to know 9th level spells to cast fireball” is a cute crotchety one-liner. But it’s not going to make any sense when you find a 2,000 year old spellbook with Fireball at the appropriate 3rd level slot. The DM would have to do a whole mess of retconning of an existing setting / pre-written material to make it work.
I imagine it’d be like learning to programming 50 years ago and then starting again now
As someone who did learn programming roughly 40 years ago, there are definitely differences. But an if-statement is still and if-statement and a function is still a function. The libraries and syntax can change, but the basic commands are still fundamentally the same.
I would note that modern programming-as-analog-to-magic would be more akin to everyone having a magic wand in their back pocket to do a set assortment of 3rd level spells per day which they don’t even really need to think about other than the command word. Meanwhile, you’ve got this ancient elf flipping through a spellbook and spending an hour every morning re-memorizing a boutique list of spells nobody has thought to make a wand for in half a century.
Also a very interesting spin on a D&D-esque setting. But hugely divergent from printed materials.
My 300 year old gnome wizard has made it to level 20 six times now, mastering each of the schools of magic before returning to Candlekeep to study the next (and lose all his levels through decades of inactivity)
He’s on divination now, and assuming he doesn’t die during this campaign, he’ll finally master necromancy within the next century
While the “elves spend most of their long lives in leisure” explanation is kinda nice and Tolkien-esque, it doesn’t solve everything to do with their lifespan.
Imagine you have an event in your setting that took place 1500 years ago. That’s as far back in time as the fall of the Roman empire is from the modern day. In real life that’s a long enough time for multiple empires to rise and fall, for language to evolve to the point that speakers can no longer understand the previous tongue, and for people to change their religion and forget they were ever pagan to begin with.
Elves in DnD live 750 years. A 200 year old elf PC could reasonably say “wait what if my grandpa was there? DM do I remember my grandpa ever talking about this?”
This is a result of taking something that should be awe inspiring and making it mundane (letting people play as elves). And it’s not the only instance of that in DnD.
This is why I love the elves in Eberron so much. They have a strong culture of ancestor worship, and practice the only “positive” form of necromancy. Positive in the sense that it does not rely on magic from the world or others, only yourself and the object of worship. By doing so, they maintain a court of their deceased who continue to govern and advise the nation.
Sure, you can learn how to fight well with a sword in a few years, but it takes a dozen or more to learn how to fight exactly like the long-dead patriarch of your family line.
After spending decades learning how to be like one of their ancestors, they often go out into the world to walk the same paths.Now I have the idea of a level 7 elf wizard but he’s also like level 20 fighter and he just wanted to re-spec
It would be funny if, after a certain point in their life, elves learning one thing made them forget another thing.
It’s like Pokemon. You only get four skill slots.
Yeah this is a primary reason I hate elves being so much longer lived than humans
Why do you hate them because of that? I love them for that.
Because it makes a complete mockery of history, because it means they’re clearly completely incapable of learning anything in a reasonable timeframe (what were you doing for the last two hundred years? picking your toes???), because it means they cannot possible think like the humans playing them as they work on a totally different timescale, because elf culture would have to either be completely alien or stuck in the bronze age, and finally because it just rubs me the wrong way!
Elves just get really into coffee for a couple centuries. Their covid bread-making phase lasts until at least 2400.
I feel like elves would get into tea, dwarves would get into coffee
I was going to say no, dwarves drink beer, but then I realized that elves would absolutely be Insufferable IPA Guy.
What’s an appropriately Elvish way to say “Now listen here, you little shit.”?
Embrace the wisdom of the immortal’s experience, you little shit.
