• starman2112@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    5 days ago

    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

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    23 days ago

    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.

    • cinnamonTea@lemmy.ml
      1·
      23 days ago

      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

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        23 days ago

        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.

  • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    1·
    22 days ago

    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.

  • Kayday@lemmy.world
    0·
    21 days ago

    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.

      • ReCursing@lemmings.world
        0·
        21 days ago

        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!