Author Topic: Immortal Elves  (Read 24350 times)

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Offline RandalThor

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Immortal Elves
« on: December 08, 2007, 04:47:14 PM »
This is one of the biggest game-setting problems I have had with RM:

                                    IMMORTAL ELVES

Yes, I know it was a carry-ver from ME, and is wickedly-cool-awesome man. But I feel that the thought process of an immortal being - even one that is still a physical entity - would be too alien to understand.

Of course, these games/settings/stories are being created by us, normal humans (as far as I know......... :confused:) so we can't create them to be understood unless we humanize them some-what. But just imagine, if you would, you are immortal. Some being that will be dead next week wants you to risk your life for it. "Uhhh... be right with you. Just a sec, my tea is almost done...wait. Where did you go? Oh, died of old age, huh? Too bad. Well, there's always next time."

Of course, you could always go with the totally random responses to reflect an alien mind-set. Just imagine the Confusion spell from the game-that-shall-not-be-named being expanded to encompass a myriad of responces:

GM: Barak, the elf stands with a twig of some plant in one hand and his longsword in the other. What do you do?
Barak's Player: I rush to the attack with my broadsword!!! Aaaarrrgggghhhh!!!!! (rolls dice)
GM (rolls some dice of his own): Ok. The elf dances away from your attack with an inhuman grace, and (rolls some more dice) quickly rushes in and plants a bit kiss on you - right on the lips!
Barak: Uuuhhhh...WHAT?!?!
GM: Then it does a complicated math problem in the dirt while simultaneously patting it's tummy.
Barak (Player leaves the table - and room): ..........


Ok, so I am really pushing it a bit, but I feel that having elves and other special beings having lifespans in the hundreds of years is enough. Making them immortal takes them too far away from the other, mortal, beings - which probably explains Elrond's and the other elves leaving Middle-Earth.

Sorry if this is a topic I have started before. I have a mind like a papermache (sp?) bear-trap - after the rain.
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Offline Rasyr-Mjolnir

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #1 on: December 08, 2007, 04:52:22 PM »
Quote
Ok, so I am really pushing it a bit, but I feel that having elves and other special beings having lifespans in the hundreds of years is enough.

You will notice that in HARP, elves aren't immortal.  ;D


Offline munchy

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #2 on: December 08, 2007, 04:56:52 PM »
You will notice that in HARP, elves aren't immortal.  ;D

Ah, pfff, they are ... elves ARE immortal, and that's it!  ;D
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Offline Defendi

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #3 on: December 08, 2007, 05:39:14 PM »
They aren't immortal in The Echoes of Heaven either, even in RM.  :)
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Offline Akai

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #4 on: December 08, 2007, 06:42:24 PM »
They ought to be immortal. I think it adds to their character overall. Elves shouldn't just be short, tree-nuzzling humanoids with big pointy ears and a centuries-long lifespan. They should be more like the Fae from old folktales: timeless, powerful, amoral, and perhaps just a bit mad as well. They should be more beings of spirit than flesh, having little in common with humanity beyond appearances. Makes them much more interesting as characters, IMHO, and a much greater challenge to play than yet another Legolas-wanna-be.
Conquistador there is no time, I must pay my respect
and though I came to jeer at you, I leave now with regret
and as the gloom begins to fall, I see there is no, only all
and though you came with sword held high, you did not conquer, only die
"Conquistador" --Procol Harum

Offline yammahoper

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #5 on: December 08, 2007, 06:56:59 PM »
Dear Sirs,

Elves Stink.

All elves should be dead, which makes the point of how long they woulda lived mute.

Sincerly,

Grundin Elf Killer
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Hells own Army
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die.

Offline markc

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #6 on: December 08, 2007, 08:53:53 PM »
 As a joke in a game the GM ruled that Elves are so perfect they do not go #2. Thier bodies are so advanced they convert all the solids into usful stuff or it is washed away by liqueds. He did it just because a prevous player hated Elves so much. But it sure did make us all laugh at the time.

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Offline David Johansen

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #7 on: December 08, 2007, 09:09:06 PM »
My players often labour under the misconception that I hate elves.  I don't, I just think they're far more interesting as human sacrificing, blood thirsty, fiends who live under hills and want to cut your heart out to apease their gods.

Offline Rasyr-Mjolnir

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #8 on: December 08, 2007, 09:48:09 PM »
While I was in the process of creating HARP, I would often bounce ideas and stuff others who I happened to be talking to.

One fellow, upon discovering that I planned on HARP elves only living 500 years or so, really kinda lost. He started complaining on how I was nerfing elves, and all sorts of other comments (he was a huge tolkein fan as well).

There is a problem with immortal elves.... They can have been around so long that they might have actually witnessed the historical events. And that could be a bad thing for a GM.

It was also a major factor in in regards to the timeline involved with Cyradon, as we did not want there to be anybody alive who was part of the what happened (or who was around at the time).

Additionally, I have actually seen immortality be abused. I know of one guy who abused the hell out of some optional rule that allowed a couple of skill ranks every 10 years or so. SO he made a 500 year old, 1st level character, who had skill in almost everything. Very abusive.


In concrete game terms, immortality doesn't really count for much cause it doesn't have much of a game effect, at least not in play....


Offline Marc R

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #9 on: December 08, 2007, 09:56:03 PM »
Generally, realisticly, an immortal would choose low risk choices. . .why fight a guy who'll be dead in a few subjective hours and risk getting hurt. . .a solo game with a smart PC playing an elf would consist of a lot of "And I wait". . .and likely they'd rule the world before you got done. . .

Most games wouldn't allow for that.

500 years is effectively immortal anyway. . .In doing the RLO calculations for CT we called immortal 1000 years in terms of calculations of value.

Consider the current world. . .do you think a person born at any single point in the world in 1507 would either have had an easy time surviving to 2007, or would feel in any way comfortable in this modern world?

How about someone born in 1007 living today?

They both represent almost absurd potential time frames. The only thing that lets me GM with races like that in frame is the fact that living from 0 AD to 1000 AD is almost as freaky as the examples above, but living from 7,000 BC to 6,000 BC isn't actually all that bad.
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Offline DonMoody

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #10 on: December 08, 2007, 11:41:44 PM »
They ought to be immortal. ... They should be more like the Fae from old folktales: timeless, powerful, amoral, and perhaps just a bit mad as well.

But doesn't that essentially delegate them to the realm of NPCs?

Not that that's a bad thing but ...

DonMoody

Offline DonMoody

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #11 on: December 08, 2007, 11:50:27 PM »
Consider the current world. . .do you think a person born at any single point in the world in 1507 would either have had an easy time surviving to 2007, or would feel in any way comfortable in this modern world?

How about someone born in 1007 living today?

They both represent almost absurd potential time frames. The only thing that lets me GM with races like that in frame is the fact that living from 0 AD to 1000 AD is almost as freaky as the examples above, but living from 7,000 BC to 6,000 BC isn't actually all that bad.

Unless you are talking about a member of a *very* static society that is *very* isolated from the rest of the world who is then 'tossed' into the 'rest of the world', in each of these cases, I do not see any 'comfort level' problems because the 'changes' the individual experienced would be gradual.
I mean, we're not talking about taking someone from 1507 and bampfing them into 2007.
They were born in 1507, were, more or less, 'grown up' by the mid 16th century, had a wide variety of experiences in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, all of which 'prepared' them for living in the 21st century.

The problem I have with immortal PCs, is 'Why are they doing what they do?'.
Why are they risking their immortal lives?
And even if they want to take such risks, why didn't they spend the last century or so training and accumulating wealth which is turned into items that increase their survival *before* they went out and risked their lives?
Unless they are a bit mad or bored with live (which might count as 'a bit mad'), individuals that 'live until slain' generally aren't willingly to take an action or pursue a goal that has a serious risk of 'getting slain' unless something *huge* is at stake ('huge' defined as 'stopping a rampant god', 'defeating the last lieutenant of the disposed rampant god', 'avenging my family/friend/name/...', saving the world, or the like).

DonMoody

Offline markc

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #12 on: December 08, 2007, 11:53:37 PM »
 One of the worst things I can think of is being imortal but being bedridden and feeble by 60. So you spend the rest of time being spoon fead and having people clean up after you. IMO that is the very hot place may talk about.

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Offline Skaran

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #13 on: December 09, 2007, 12:27:33 AM »
The longer lived and individual or race the more likely it becomes that an unnatural death will result. ;)
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Offline Marc R

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #14 on: December 09, 2007, 12:41:50 AM »
DonMoody

I'm going to go with two presumptions here:

That the immortal has huge hard drive space in their head. If it's not true, you'd get fuzzy/fade issues with old or unimportant data. . .like your 1,000 year old in 2007 has only vague recollections of the minutia of life in 1600. some Vampire fiction is written this way, with the immortal remembering about 100 years of their life, the rest only remembered via written diaries, which they read as if in the third person, having no actual recolections of the events in the diaries. Let's assume they can in fact remember a 1,000 year span like we can recall a 100 year one, so the fuzzy problem is limited.

That the immortal is immensely adaptable. . .Most old people get terms like "Set in their ways" applied to them for a reason. a minority of people truely adapt to a new world, mostly they die off, so the average population adapts to the new world. . .my parents have finally grasped e-mail, but they both wrote letters and knew how to type, both can hit record with the VCR and leave the house, but neither can program the VCR to go off at a set time regardless of how well it's explained to them. Neither has any real "gut" understanding of computers or an appreciation of 99% of the music written after 1970 either. Some old folks do adapt well, my boss is the same age as my parents, is a joyful technophile, is intimately "gut" familiar with computers, and even he falls short of "getting" conversations of a group of 40- year olds. There are exceptions that surpass him. . .

I don't have any problem with beleiving one single individual could be so exceptional as to have total recall of a lifespan measured in millenia and also so adaptable as to be able to fit in and keep changing to fit in, over and over and over again.

I find it less beleivable, but still can manage to imagine an entire race of such people.

The problem lies in mixing them with "normal" people. . .even a small ratio. . say 50,000 actual elves in the real world, who live such long, adaptable lives. . .I may be cynical, but I only see three possible scenarios.

1) The elves are in charge. An entire race of super beings, it wouldn't actually be too hard to take the long view and take over humans.

2) The elves are extinct. Humans may not be immortal, but we are the best killing machines on the earth. Ask the Cro magnons, or the Neandertals. . .they don't even exist on some small island, or in some sheltered valley. . .our ancestors utterly out competed with them and/or exterminated them. (this is also the logic behind #1, with the elves being the ones out competing or exterminating the humans.)

3) Elves and humans are seperate. For whatever reason, they keep their affairs seperated enough to not have 1 or 2 happen.

#3 is the standard fantasy world answer to the problem. . .I find it the least likely of the three, and likely only a temporary thing. (Even in Middle Earth, the elves eventually had to exit stage right.). . .it's fantasy, I can accept the least likely solution, or accept that the time frame we are looking at is the one gap in time where this weird seperated but still in contact situation exists.

But "realisticly", I don't see how the situation could last.
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Offline Akai

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #15 on: December 09, 2007, 02:24:20 AM »
I think the option of keeping them separate from humanity works best, and it can work just fine if you use the concept of Faerie. Again, they wouldn't be handled as just another variety of humanoid that parallels humankind...they are spirit beings, native to another plane of existence that intersects with the mortal world in places. Elves, and other of their kind, may venture over at times, but are limited in the ways that they can interact with mortals. They have odd weaknesses, such as being harmed by cold-forged iron, not being able to cross a line of salt, or being turned to stone by daylight. They handle immortality the way that they do because they are not human, they don't think like humans. Time means little to them....past and present tend to get mixed up in their minds. Human concepts of wealth and power might not mean much to them, so it really wouldn't be in their nature to use their immense age max out their skills. Perhaps they venture into the mortal world out of curiosity, or because somebody's cut a deal with them to lend some of their 'manpower' to help fight a crucial battle. So there'd be some reason for them to be hanging around humans. And as far as being afraid of death and being overly cautious....perhaps if an Elf dies its spirit just returns to Faerie to be reborn. Tolkien had a similar concept as well, with Elves returning to the Halls of Mandos upon being killed. Even bodily death is little more than an inconvenience to them, so they wouldn't fear death in the way that mortals do.
Conquistador there is no time, I must pay my respect
and though I came to jeer at you, I leave now with regret
and as the gloom begins to fall, I see there is no, only all
and though you came with sword held high, you did not conquer, only die
"Conquistador" --Procol Harum

Offline pastaav

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #16 on: December 09, 2007, 03:13:09 AM »
Two basic problem exist with the immortal elves...

1) Players what to start game as thousand years old elves...how else should they capture being a high elf. Solution if of course the answer that the other players would then want to start out as conan or gandalf instead of being a newbee. If entry level of the game is level 1 then your elf must be a young one.

2) Elves born at dawn of time have experienced nearly infinitly many things, making them great plot spoilers. Solution is to decide that elven memory is just as good as human memory. Unless the elf has spent DP on a piece of knowledge they can not remember it for more than a few years. The elven warrior might recall that his teacher told him the secret about the dungeons years back, but if he did not memorize it will be forgotten.
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Offline Akai

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #17 on: December 09, 2007, 03:44:43 AM »
Two basic problem exist with the immortal elves...

1) Players what to start game as thousand years old elves...how else should they capture being a high elf. Solution if of course the answer that the other players would then want to start out as conan or gandalf instead of being a newbee. If entry level of the game is level 1 then your elf must be a young one.

2) Elves born at dawn of time have experienced nearly infinitly many things, making them great plot spoilers. Solution is to decide that elven memory is just as good as human memory. Unless the elf has spent DP on a piece of knowledge they can not remember it for more than a few years. The elven warrior might recall that his teacher told him the secret about the dungeons years back, but if he did not memorize it will be forgotten.

So that's really up to a responsible GM to get out the old yard stick and rap some knuckles with a sharp retort of "NO!" when a player tries something so twinkish. But then, just because an elf is a thousand plus years old doesn't mean that he has spent all of that time building up skills, or even participating in human affairs enough to know much of anything.
Conquistador there is no time, I must pay my respect
and though I came to jeer at you, I leave now with regret
and as the gloom begins to fall, I see there is no, only all
and though you came with sword held high, you did not conquer, only die
"Conquistador" --Procol Harum

Offline Nejira

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #18 on: December 09, 2007, 05:03:51 AM »
I never liked the idea of an immortal race as Tolkien/RM elves. I got two reasons as to why not. The first is my feel of fantasy logic. If a race are immortal they shouldnt be availible for players for all the reasons listed by others before me on this topic. If a race are immortal there are also certain biological issues which arises. Reproduction would be at a all time low (the race doesnt need it as such), maybe they dont reproduce as other mammals do, and how do they get nutrient from? I agree with RandalThor (and the others) which claim it makes elves unplayable.

The second reason is a gamebalance concern. If a player?s character is 1000 years old, he could know a lot of ancient history as he was actually alive when it happened. And if he doesn?t have this information, whats the point in being so old.

Then we got the "I rather not" concern. I too feel that an immortal wont be so eager to jump down into a potential lethal fight, when he can just wait a while then his enemies are dead (unless they are other elves). Mortal beings have a drive to get things done, that I feel immortals wouldnt have. Of course I have absolutely no basic for this other than my warped sense of logic. How do you at both times play your immortal elf and participate in adventuring with the rest of the party.

At one point I had my own setting where I had elves (I like elves, just not Tolkien?s version) and even though they grew to great age they matured almost as fast as other mammals. An elf was considered adult when he had reached 30 years. They were no immortals and biologically were just as any other mortal mammal.
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Offline Balhirath

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Re: Immortal Elves
« Reply #19 on: December 09, 2007, 05:25:53 AM »
Hmm A 2000 year old Scholar or Magus? What a frightening thought for the GM, since they have the lowlevel spells (Study 1) to remember something that they have read with perfect recall and you can read a LOT of books in 2000 years.

I think that the greatest problem with Elves is that we as GM's and Players tend to look at them as immortal humans with pointy ears.. and they are not.
The best explanation on Elves that I have ever seen, is from a book where the Hero realise in a flash of understanding why the elves doesn't react like she thought they would: Elves are made for Harmony and they endure conflict only in brief encounters, resolving such discord quickly, in victory or defeat. Humans are shaped for conflict and in their brief mortal lives, humans meet challenges no elf could meet, learned strategies no elf could master and chose between good and evil in a way more direct and dangerous than any elf could preceive.
It is not cowardice or weakness that made elves withdraw from conflict again and again, it's the fact that they were shaped for another purpose.


For me that explains a lot of things.
An elf as a person can and will take part in adventures, mostly to wipe out a potential danger, but will otherwise tend to use negotiation and manipulation before taking up arms. However the concept of war and armies are not part of their mind as it is with humans. Oh they understand it, but on a distant scholar-like fashion. Kinda like the difference between a General and someone that are really good at playing tactical wargames.
Elves are good at tactics in small groups, but not as an army. (That is actually more or less like Tolkien as far as I remember. None of the armies in middle earth were ever commanded by elves.)

So in my opinion, Elves not only dont WANT to take over the world, They CANT, since Humans are not easily rule and armed conflict are sure to emerge. The one possible 'solution' to this is to have Elves as rulers and humans as Warlords, but history have learned us that said warlords sooner or later will dispose of the rulers and take the throne themselves. However it IS a possible solution.

In game play however, there's really not that bit a difference on Humans and Elves. At least as long as the GM does not allow characters that start out as 1000 years old, which I dont. And please remember that Elves mature in almost the same speed as humans (At least according to Shadow World :) ).
The problem comes with the connections such a char might have:
Human: "I wonder what happend here a thousand year ago? How can we find out?"
Elf: "I dont know, but lets go ask my uncle. He was 200 at the time and ought to remember that."

Ofcause the other way around is also possible. Some of you might have read The Wheel of Time where the long-lived Ogier comes into the world of humans with charts that are hopelessly outdated.
Elf: "I dont understand this. My uncle said that there was a bridge here!"
Human: "Yeah. See the ruins! That was a at least 200 years ago!"

:)

I'm new here, but have played RM2 on and off for 20 years. :)