Humor, jokes, memes about TTRPGs
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.
An elf wrote this.
I spent thirteen years growing bonsai, fifteen pining over Loravindrel. That brought me into my eight year long emo-goth period which produced poetry I've since fed to the flames. For sixteen seasons after that I meditaed under a plum tree and swept the eight hundred and seventy two dozen and five stars. Six years I practiced the letter œ to master the uhm. Fifty seven years I spent in the arms of Madeleine and our oldest grandchild is about your age. And the last three seasons I've been chasing the south-western gale that robbed her from me decades too early.
Dude, what's even your job? How did you make a living for 106 years just sitting around?
Maybe he's a trust fund elf from some royal lineage?
To those whose lives flicker like a candle in the wind elves are royal and in their societies live free of want.
Well la dee da, fancy pants! I gotta make sure this ox stays in good health during the harvest so I can pay back the loan I got for said ox and getting my kids into college.
Don't even get me started on the pack of wargs what's been attacking my livestock! The ones we have took down don't even make good eatin' less you throw em in a stew. Had me bowels ravaged fierce from the warg jerky we's made, this candle coulda been blown out by a babe's fart that day!
Mom and dad have 900 years of savings in the college fund.
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.
I think I might be that kind of elf.
Sorta turns the AD&D mechanic on its head. And it makes more sense than the way it was done in AD&D - I like it!
Context: in AD&D, humans could “dual class,” which is similar to what you described - effectively retiring in one class and beginning to advance in another - and non-humans could “multi-class,” where they gained experience in two or more classes at the same time, leveling more slowly but getting the benefits of both classes.
Further context, assuming the ruleset governing the OG Baldurs Gate games was true to the tabletop (I know they sort of kludged AD&D and aspects of 3e together). As the above said, a dual classed human "retires" their original class, and then begins to advance in their new class, essentially starting over from level 1, with only the hit dice and HP of their original class rolled over (you cannot access any of the class abilities you learned while advancing your original class). However, once your new class level is superior to your original class level, you can now access both skill sets.
It's a very strange system, and I am curious what the fluff reasons surrounding it are, if anyone has any insight into that edition.
I remember it being especially bizarre because it basically means going through a large portion of the game with a more or less useless character soaking up xp, after which you either have a slightly less useless underlevelled character or one that's brokenly OP depending on how you planned out the combo. And if you dual class too late you just never get to that point and it's all drawback no benefit.
Elminster did it right. 1 level of fighter, 3 of cleric, 1 of rogue, and 15 Wizard, followed by 30 levels of Epic Wizard.
An elven midlife crisis.
1/10th life Crisis
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.
Cast thine undivided attention upon me, whelp.
"I'm sure you're too immature to appreciate this, but..."
I read the comment talking about New Vegas and then I misread this one as "Elvis" and for a few seconds it made sense to me.
Some mods let you play aa a ghoul, making you just as functionally immortal as an elf, if slightly less pretty.
So yeah, making fun of immortals for only being lvl 7 works in the Fallout universe too 😁
Just remember most normal people live their entire lives and never progress to level 1, any player character is an exception beyond normal humans, It’s like looking at a teenager and belittling them for not being a god yet.
Elves are probably like that ghoul, Calamity, from New Vegas. Every decade or so, she just picks a new name and job or she gets bored.
"Look, I took a gap decade or two, okay?"
Human discovers how to start a ~~bar~~ tavern fight in one easy step
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.
I don't think that necessarily takes away from the grandeur of something. If you want something truly ancient and out-of-touch, you can easily just set it 15,000 years ago instead of 1,500 and no player will bat an eye or even notice, and the elves' lifespan gives an easy 'this is why they remember and are still more knowledgeable with this ancient civilization than other races'.
It's also not any less awe-inspiring to have people who lived in an important time period. We still have living veterans of WW2, and WW2 is no less important or intriguing (as evidenced by the number of historian hobbyists who love to talk about all the details of WW2).
If you want something truly ancient and out-of-touch, you can easily just set it 15,000 years ago instead of 1,500 and no player will bat an eye or even notice
I am currently doing world building for a ttrpg campaign, and recently I did try to set an ancient empire 15,000 years in the past.
The basic idea was that empire A existed 15,000 years ago (them existing while the world was still covered in ice was important to the aesthetic), then they would be wiped out by empire B some time later, only for empire B to be destroyed by a great calamity. I wanted for there to be remnants of empire B still hanging around in the form of people who still worship a few of its god-kings and groups of people who still try to preserve its knowledge and maintain its infrastructure without fully understanding most of it.
The latter group was based partially on the Catholic Church preserving records after the fall of the Roman empire and partially on how the core of the Jewish religion was able to maintain a continuity of information and tradition over vast stretches of time even in the face of mass migration and social upheavals.
The problem was that I underestimated just what a vast gulf of time 15,000 years is. For one I was struggling to fill in all that time with events, and for two I realized that this knowledge preserving group would have had to existed for way longer than I was originally envisioning. Not only would they be older than the Jewish religion, they would be older than ancient Sumer. In fact you could take the entire history of the beginning of the Sumerian empire to the present day and fit it into that span of time twice over.
In the end I had to invent empire C, which refurbished some of empire B's infrastructure before collapsing themselves, as the actual origin for the knowledge keepers. And even with that I still had to move the timeline up by thousands of years.
It’s also not any less awe-inspiring to have people who lived in an important time period. We still have living veterans of WW2, and WW2 is no less important or intriguing
The problem with that is that it would really change the dynamic of how non-elf civilizations would develop. Unless the elves are extremely insular, and even then. How do you have a plotline involving the player characters needing to delve into an ancient tomb in order to discover whether or not the current ruling family are the legitimate heirs of the kingdom when you can just ask an elf? How does the world get into that situation in the first place when you can just ask an elf?
I have two friends who take turns running DnD 5e campaigns in a shared setting who have made elves entirely extinct for that reason.
"You go to ask your Grandpa about it. He tries to explain but is so fucking racist you can't even tell if he's still speaking common. In between gibberish that's probably old-timey slurs, you pick out something like 'follow the quest hook' and 'the dm already told you where to go'"
While it does mess with things when you're trying to get that kind of feeling it does open up new opportunities. Such as in a setting I was making there was an empire that collapsed around 100 years ago. That's long enough there aren't really any humans or other normal life span races people around to remember what it was like outside of stories. But the elves and other long lived races do remember and that can create very different attitudes between people about how they think about the empire and if they miss it's stability or are happy to be free of it on top of the differences that exist naturally between the different cultures.
"Yeah, I had to spend 50 doing your mom. And 50 before that for her mom, and her mom..."
This can go very dark, very quick.
"Nah roundears I wrapped it up"
Yeah this is a primary reason I hate elves being so much longer lived than humans
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.
That's because you only see the levels of classes that are interesting to play. Most regular people are going to specialize in something that keeps them alive and has more use for the general public. Did you want to play a level 7 Dentist or a level 5 Pizza Chef? And feats like Least Painful Tooth Extraction for the Dentist or Perfect Toppings Distribution for the Pizza Chef?
How many hit die do those classes get?
Can a level 7 Chef take a meat 1d6 cleaver to the face? They should have at least 7HP even with bad rolls and no Con.