Why I don't want to modify Elves and Dwarves

#1

My issue with modifying/removing dwarves and elves is that the PC's may want to play them.

In my campeign setting there is no real wonder of the elves/dwarves because they're so intermixed with humans that they're a common enough thing to see. I think that should be the case in any game unless your world has a lot of segragation.

If you want the PC's to have a tolkenesque respect for elves, bring in grey elves, and let some elven NPC tell the party how amazing the grey elves are. You can do the same with dwarves.

If you want mystery, that race should be something new, and hasn't been on the plane for long. Add a new species of your own creation, or something obscure from the Monster Manual. Then come up with why they've just recently arrived on the prime material. Anything that has been arround for centries isn't going to have too many secrets.

I use a mostly standard game setting because of the huge ammount of infromation that would be "common knowledge" amunkst the people of the world that would have to be distributed to the players who are allready framiliar with the way the world works in most games.

If you start deviating too far from the standard setting, you'll have players who are peeved at their inability to predict what is going on. A wizard should know, for instance, that the plane of fire is uninhabitable unless you have special protection. If in your world, it is habitable then you need to explicitly tell him that before he constructs any plans arround it

The rest of the questions are good though :-)

Why I don't want to modify Elves and Dwarves

#2

All depends on your campaign and especially on your players. Everything you described doing with a different race could just as easily be done with elves and dwarves.

I personally use a human heavy world with all the other races being fairly rare. If elves and dwarves are as common as humans then they turn into humans with different bonuses and you don't play them as they are. You lose a lot making them common in my opinion.

Yes, the players may play the dwarf well or the elf, but when you go to town then they turn into a human, as in everybody in town treats them equally so they might as well be human. That, to me, takes away from the purpose of playing a unique race.

Taking away the 'standard' setting (which is not standard in my opinion) could change around the whole roleplaying experience and add a new level. Then they would have to actually think about how to play their character depending on their race instead of just using the race as an extra + in dexterity or whatever.

Why I don't want to modify Elves and Dwarves

#3

I, personally, am in favor of removing the "Standard Tolkien Setting", or changing it around. The regular D&D formula never seemed that interesting to me.
D&D is based a lot on Tolkien, right? And Tolkien's elves were almost demigods. They were quasi-mythical, talked about but never seen by common eyes. The dwarves were similar, if not quite so impressive, but still folkloric in stature (I mean social stature, not size).
In my settings, if one of the players is an elf or dwarf, and they just stroll into a village like they're human, they're met with fear, amazement, even worship (occasionally).

Why I don't want to modify Elves and Dwarves

#4

I like the idea of making them role play their race. None of the DM's I've had have made that an issue, so I've not experianced it. I think it would be rather neet to actually make a diferentiation.

It is mostly a need to define.........

#5

Think of it this way: Think about all the difference between people in one area of the world when compared to others. Greeks vs Turks, Northern Californias vs Southern Californias. Texans vs Oakies. English and French. Now these are differences of the same species. Imagine if other species where thrown into the mix?

In most cases, you just need to properly define the world and the people in it. If the GM bothered to set up their world properly, people from different areas would have different opinions and values... just like the real world.

Each region should have a thumbnail sketch of what the "people" are like in the region, and what opinions they generally have.

So in the Elven lands of Foresthold, they tend to treat humans as we would treat 5 year olds... cute, but not good for anything really and live in the endless now of all the immortal elves. The Elven folk in Cliffhold, a mere 200-600 miles away, live in "human time" and work with their humans. (The change in attitude has to do with the fact that Human's pragmatic adaption to situations and not requiring ritual and tradition allowed them to save Cliffhold from falling away into the sea). If any Elf travels to Forthland they will be treated as a novelty- like we would treat a 8 foot fuzzy giant alien, as no elves grace that island continent. If they travel to Secondland and Thirdland, they will be treated with some honor and respect, as these lands know that they are somehow related to the Elven Emperor (though on Thirdland, they will not make concession for Elven time, unless the Elf can prove they are a High Elf).

How to the players get to know that? The GM just creates a world pack.
http://www.rpgcitadel.com/guild/index.php?topic=378.0

This allows them to pick and choose the opinions, and players to know what to expect from others when they play another race.
This way, if the players do not "roleplay" or react to the way the world is, you can dock them experience points or appropriate mechanism.

Why I don't want to modify Elves and Dwarves

#6

Cultural boundries are a nice toutch. Wouldn't they break down in a high-magic world though? Teleport sorta ruins isolation.

Teleport is the only reason I allow there to be something even remotly resembling "common" - a tounge spoken by nearly everyone. The elves in my game all speak the same elvish, etc. It doesn't feal very logical for isolationists like dwarves and such to all speak the same language.

Why I don't want to modify Elves and Dwarves

#7

There you go again, draco.
I can see that you are obviously a D&D trained player.

Why I don't want to modify Elves and Dwarves

#8

Cultural boundries are a nice toutch. Wouldn't they break down in a high-magic world though? Teleport sorta ruins isolation.

Teleport is the only reason I allow there to be something even remotly resembling "common" - a tounge spoken by nearly everyone. The elves in my game all speak the same elvish, etc. It doesn't feal very logical for isolationists like dwarves and such to all speak the same language.

How many people actually teleport around the country? Do they have permanent gates around that anyone can use? Probably not. Nope, the number of gate users would be a pitance when compared to the population on whole. The number would be similar to those who flew on Jets in the Early 60s... i.e. the elites and the rich.

The cultural differences are still here today, given 50 years of highspeed travel AND TELECOMMUNICATION. Traditions and ingrained beliefs take a while to set up and longer to remove.

As for common... I have a three word answer LATIN and FRENCH (French replaced by English since 1980s). In earlier times a Latin speaker could be understood by someone in just about any area of the world. Not only was it the language of Religion for about half the world, it was used by those in the Western Asia and Europe as a trading tongue. After the 1600s French was the common tongue of Europe and North Africa (and parts of the Americas), though Latin was still strong until 1880s. Asia had Manderine Chinese, which like Latin someone with any education would be able to speak (to some degree) anywhere in Asia since 3000 BC on.

Dwarves probably speak variations of True Dwarvish. The same situation occured with High German and Low German (or Manderin Chinese vs all the local dialects). All the langauges are based off the high language. The regional dialects use different pronuciation and some different words. A German speaker can understand someone speaking another dialect of Low German, most of the time. When Germans from different areas speak, they usually shift into High German. So your Dwarves probably do the same thing... and should get Deep Dwarvish and Regional Dwarvish langauges for free.

You are probably going, but these are not like common. You are right. Common is a "convenience" a total fiction that has no place in a realistic world. No language has managed to obtain enough commonality and dominance (not even English, though we are getting there) that Common or Trade Talk does. Most Gamers do not want to bother with actually trying to communicate with people, so common tongue/ tradespeak was a convenient game bit that DnD threw in.

Note: If magic is tied to the mystic sylables that must be uttered, wizards and magic users have the core of a common tongue that any culture that has magic has access to. So if Ti-Na-Govah is "Creates fire" Govah becomes the common word for Fire and Ti'na becomes the common world for Create or Creation.

Why I don't want to modify Elves and Dwarves

#9

I use a really high magic world, so teleport is kinda common.

I actually call Latin "common" and most people speak it, but in small towns or when talking to peasents they may have trouble, as they've moved arround quite a bit.

Does anyone else think learning new languages is way too easy?

Why I don't want to modify Elves and Dwarves

#10

In D20, yes. In other, more realistic game systems, no.

If you don't like Common existing, why do you use it? Force people to use various languages. They do in the real world.

Also, even with a huge number of gates, do peasants go through? Do people have to pay for this privilage and how much does it cost in comparison to how much normal people make? If everyone can do it, then why is anyone living in unpleasant areas? And who is making and maintaining these gates? Don't they need to make a living? So is gate travel like air travel in the 60s or air travel in the 90s/00s?

Either way, there are huge differences between areas of the world. Just travelling to Canada (for an American) is like stepping into an alternate world, where things seem really close to the way they "should be", but are different in odd ways (color of money, flavors of Potato chips, milk comes in plastic bags, and tons of other little oddities). An American Travelling to England or Hong Kong or Japan (all places where they speak English) are all different despite years of highspeed travel AND TELECOMMUNICATION. Unless you have tons of telepaths passing messages, you can't have the "speak effect" of telephones, telegraphs, and television. These have done more to make us one Mono-culture than any amount of travel.

If Gates are easy to do, then the world should be terrorized by small gated commando forces. No walls can stop them (though anti-gate spells can, though that stops the advantage of being able to gate). Units gate in, kill/ steal/ etc, then gate out. Standing armies are useless. And if they can magically hide where they came from, you can't gate back to get them because you don't know where they came from.