After thoroughly looking through the various campaign settings corresponding to D&D I have noticed that in each and every fictional verse the humans tend to be AT LEAST as good as the elves when it comes to matters of the arcane. If not better. If this is indeed by intention then what makes humans so innovative and pragmatic when it comes to sorcery and wizardry?
Humans seem to push magic further than any other race. Is it hubris? Most of the ancient Atlanteanesque civilizations were run predominantly by human magic and brought to ruin through their arrogance.
Andrew Jackson
>I've read Pathfinder and that's it.
Blake Williams
It's a side-product of fantasy races living in ghettoized theme parks.
Isaac Long
faster reproduction -> more opportunities for trial and error -> greater institutional knowledge
Aiden Thomas
There was a post on Veeky Forums a while ago where one theory was laid out which goes something like:
When an elf dedicates themselves to learning the magical arts, they are put in the care of an experianced master who personally guides them. They are taught to percieve and understant the flow of magic, becoming in tune with its behaviour and its role as part of the world. After years of careful study and meditation they then begin to influence it.
Meanwhile in human mage school: half of the first year evocation class have just blown themselves up, the other half can now cast fireball.
Hunter Rodriguez
Elves have a deeper connection to magic Humans pursue it to far greater lengths
Naturally this means elves are second best. The spark of magic isn't enough in D&D
Joseph Rivera
Because the players are humans in real life and as such humans have to be the most important part of any fantasy universe.
Jonathan Baker
The old vampire counts army book has insight on this, a necharch vampire fights his human apprentice and is amazed at how much he's mastered over such a short period of time. Basically the vampire thinks that because humans are mortal we have no choice but to achieve excellence in our life times. An elf or a vampire or any other long lived being has thousands of years to get shit done, we have less than 100
Jacob Hill
Because they have the least to lose and the most to gain when it comes to flooring the magical gas pedal. They don't have centuries to perfect the craft, they have to get to the endgame as soon as possible. When you're going to die between 30-70 that doesn't leave a lot of room for taking your time. It isn't hubris it's ambition.
Immortality is one hell of a drug to a short lived mortal. There's a reason why every lich is a human.
Jayden Allen
This.
Personally I believe humans should be THE most inferior race of all by default, but those who have the drive can rise up to be the complete best. Kinda like a "you have tons of potential." Human characters are those pushing the limits of the abilities of even elven mages and dwarven warriors, which is why extremely skilled humans are respected so much in fantasy settings.
Parker Reyes
It's this. If these kitchen sink settings would think themselves through they should end up with various elf mages ruling over other races. But they get forced into their little niches, so that humans can be the protagonist race.
Joshua Wood
To be fair, there are plenty of lore reasons for humans being better than elves at a lot of things. This includes magic.
it's also fantasy. Logic is rarely a factor.
Jaxson Bennett
>there are plenty of lore reasons for humans being better than elves at a lot of things Please don't hink that I want elves to be good at everything. This barely happens anyway. >This includes magic. Which is basically one of the niches they should be better. >it's also fantasy. Logic is rarely a factor. This is retarded logic and you know it. There is internal logic. Giving elves extra INT, making wizard their favored class for example but then making the best wizards humans goes against internal logic.
Joseph Cooper
I don't think any race should be inferior or superior when it comes to magic.
I like variety.
Joseph Peterson
Humans have been better at magic than the elves since the beginning of D&D, user. Hell, elves were originally entirely separate from Magic-Users with lower capabilities to even use spells.
Ed Greenwood did mention in one of his novels that humans are equal to elves regarding magic. Maybe even a bit greater.
Netheril was described as having better magic than Cormanthyr at both of their heights.
Jordan Ortiz
What should a plus INT race be good at when it's not magic?
Dominic Ward
It's a case of mechanics =/= lore
Starting statistics don't mean much in the long run either.
Aaron Campbell
>Humans have been better at magic than the elves since the beginning of D&D, user. You mean when elves were fighter-mages hybrids? But later on at least moon elves where the wizard guys with higher INT and wizard as their favored class. This is exactly what I was talking and OP complained about, there is an obvious discrepancy. These things don't seem thought out to favor humans.
Nicholas Johnson
>Netheril was described as having better magic than Cormanthyr at both of their heights. It wasn't described. It was flat out stated. The ancient Netherese actually looked down upon elvish magic.
Humans have always been absurdly talented with the Arcane.
Carson Richardson
>This is exactly what I was talking and OP complained about
OP here. I'm not complaining. I fully acknowledge that humanity outplays the elves when it comes to wizardry. I'm just genuinely curious as to why and the reasons for such.
I would also note that it's entirely thematically appropriate for humans having the potential to surpass the vast majority. So many authors having had the same viewpoint decades past.
Juan Bailey
>So many authors having had the same viewpoint decades past. Because they violently masturbate about how much of an awesome human they would be in fantasy lands for they write them to be this awesome.
Charles Lopez
>muh elves
Oh please. Have some humility. Elves are constantly and consistently portrayed as being awesome.
Chase Mitchell
It's not difficult to insert yourself as long eared, long living human or short, sturdy human.
Juan Price
Which makes it even more "awesome" when the Human protagonist inevitably outdoes and surpasses them.
Christian Williams
>muh elves Well, we are not talking about humans being sturdier than dwarves or stronger than orcs. But it's okay when they are better than elves, right?
Logan Moore
I believe the topic is about magic, not physical prowess.
Logan Johnson
You got your immortality and other perks, stop bitching so much.
Jaxon Murphy
It's literally a lore fact that humans match and often surpass the elves regarding magic.
Deal with it.
Ryan Gutierrez
And why did that one user then reply with >muh elves ? It's almost like we are on-topic here. I'm not bitching, I'm just pointing this discrepancy out. Elves still have their better DEX, being better mages is mostly for certain subraces, not for elves universaly. The immortality doesn't matter on the tabletop and also not really in the lore either when some 400 years old elf can be beaten by some 25 years old human, which is another discrepancy where the writers don't seem to think these things through.
Jonathan Cook
>some 400 years old elf can be beaten by some 25 years old human, which is another discrepancy where the writers don't seem to think these things through.
Not really. Elves mature at a much slower pace mentally. Though some authors have ditches this prospect.
Jason Rivera
Not just elves. Other long lived races as well.
Justin Cook
>Elves mature at a much slower pace mentally. They actually don't. It's certainly not reflected in the crunch. Aside from DSA maybe In FR they physically mature like humans, but are regarded as adults much later. I think it was 110 years. Doesn't mean they stay stupid teens in their first century.
Somewhat this only comes up when it's about elves. Never heard of anyone claiming that dwarves stay stupid for 100 years or so.
Julian Gomez
It's in various supplements. It's entirely canon.
The opposite is also canon. Authors can rarely decide as a group on what is right and what is wrong.
Aiden Foster
What for instance? Not that I'm not believing you.
Benjamin Ward
You're going to hate me for bringing it up, but.
R. A. Salvatore.
Joseph Kelly
>R. A. Salvatore being brought up
According to R.A. Salvatore's Dark Elf Trilogy, the Drow (and by extension, Elves) age physically at a similar rate for the first two decades or so of their lives, however they mentally mature at a significantly slower pace - while a 20 year old Elf is just as physically and cognitively sound as a 20 year old human, the Elf still has the naivete and whimsicality of a child, whereas the human is much more mature.
Dominic Howard
Elves distill their entire lives through some half decade or more, and Humans have to claw to keep a hold of 75 years sometimes, less if we're thinking in older conventions. The obvious difference in drive speaks for itself. Humans seek to improve themselves faster than elves, as they desire to be able to make use of that knowledge and skill within their slim lifetime. Elves have ages, and are content to while it away at their leisure.
So out of the gate, a Human might be better because he busted his ass to make it work for him. The elf might not be as comparable in the early game, but he has the advantage of time, and will eventually surpass the human in the more in depth aspects since he had the time to learn them.
The human will never have the patience to know what mysteries the elf will forget.
Jose Hughes
>half decade *half century, that should be. I think it's bed time now...
Jacob Ramirez
>Authors can rarely decide as a group on what is right and what is wrong. >tfw everybody ignored the bit in the Complete Book of Elves that said that elves mature both physically and mentally slower than humans
Robert Roberts
>So out of the gate, a Human might be better because he busted his ass to make it work for him. The elf might not be as comparable in the early game, but he has the advantage of time, and will eventually surpass the human in the more in depth aspects since he had the time to learn them.
This is assuming the human hasn't already extended his/her lifespan, which seems to be the case for every competent wizard.
Elves also develop rather slowly compared to humans. An immortal human is going to act more sagely than a long-lived elf.
Levi Clark
Age doesn't matter when comparing elves and humans.
A decade to a human equates to a century for an elf.
Kevin Green
>Meanwhile in human mage school: half of the first year evocation class have just blown themselves up, the other half can now cast fireball.
If this theory was correct then desert ISIS jihadis would have perfected F-35s by now. Fucking up disastrously is part of learning, but it's still just a small part and one that can set you back just as much as it can set you forward.
David Martinez
F-35s cost more than a wand per student
Mason Clark
>If this theory was correct then desert ISIS jihadis would have perfected F-35s by now. Flawed comparison. In the real world, accidentally blowing yourself, your goat, and your fellow Islamic extremists up doesn't create metal and jet fuel for engines from nothingness; parts and fabrication are required.
in a D&D world, magic comes from some seemingly endless font of ether that thousands of wizards from hundreds of races can all draw from each day with none of them ever finding the ley currents as used up as the hot water in a tenement building.
A better comparison for magical training would be learning to swim. Elves are the kind of people who spend time learning proper swim behavior, emergency procedures, and getting into a kiddie pool with swimmies on. Humans were the kids who were tossed in a pool. Survivors graduate and go on.
Noah Murphy
so they're reaaaaally slow learners?
Alexander Flores
This is why you don't have a gaming group.
Hudson Green
Have you tried something that isn't a generic shit setting? Plenty of settings have elves as vastly superior magic users, like Warhammer Fantasy.
Dylan Fisher
>Plenty of settings have elves as vastly superior magic users I wouldn't say 'plenty'
>like Warhammer Fantasy Unless dark magic is involved, of course. Humans can rival the high elves with that. Just look at Nagash. The Slann are also the greatest users of magic within the Warhammer universe.
Nathaniel Gutierrez
>generic shit setting
Is your idea of a great setting one wherein elves are the best at everything?
Fuck off.
Anthony Sanchez
Who says anything about elves being the best at everything, this is still about magic.
Jack Powell
To be fair, Netheril got to jumpstart themselves with the Nether Scrolls, which are basically the "how to be a magical demigod 101" of the setting.
Noah Watson
No, just one where other races aren't like the Klingon - built up to be amazing in their specialty but destined to always lose to humans when it matters.
Jonathan Johnson
And who else besides the Slann are able to cast high magic?
Jose Baker
Elves. In fact High Magic was for most of the game's history Elf exclusive.
Evan Edwards
ISIS Jihadis are great at shock tactics which is how they succeeded in so many battles, despite being on the back foot for years now and owning empty desert while being bombed 24/7 They utilise what they have there better than any of the forces fighting there besides intervening powers
Cameron Taylor
One possibility is for every elf magician there is a lineage of human magicians, which allows humans to have greater generation and diversity of knowledge.
Gavin Fisher
In Faerun this is mitigated heavily. The best casters have to be immortal to reach the ultimate ends of power, but immortality is easy compared to other settings. The Netherese and Imaskari wizards were thousands of years old before they got to level 30+, and the strongest surviving individuals are now tebs of thousands of years old (Larloch and the guy who becomes an elder brain lich).
In Darksun too becoming top tier takes thousands of years.
Landon Davis
In other words, NPC elves/elder entities often have access to DM fiat magic that makes them more powerful than their list of prepared spells would imply.
Julian Harris
Well that is hardly abnormal. 5E assumes that you have 70 years to make a top tier item, which is some crazy downtime.
Colton Green
please...please...do not take real world shit and try and superimpose it on Veeky Forums. it was awful back then, its still awful now.
Luke Roberts
Elves tend to view magic as an almost psuedo-religious calling. They are very careful in using magic and treat it with great respect.
Humans see magic as just another tool and believe that boundaries are meant to be pushed and broken. This means that human mages are often much more reckless and take dangerous risks, but at the same time also are able to compete with the greatest elven magics.
Jace Johnson
The elves were the first to acquire the Nether Scrolls, user. Even they didn't use it as well as the humans did.
Humans are just more impressive when it comes to magic, at least within D&D.
John Flores
>comes back
So many angry biased elfnards Human wizards are just so much better.
It's ok. Breath it in. Breath it all in.
Jeremiah Hall
how can elves compete?
Dominic Morales
also see: 3e, 4e, 5e, probably most RPGs
the exceptions are kinda obscure ones like Runequest where elves have like stat boosts to magic/int/etc and that's pretty much it
there's also a lot of them where magic is just a human thing
Eli Walker
Why should humans be better than elves at magic?
Well, why should elves constantly be portrayed as a race of superiors?
Julian Howard
The elves didn't use them as well as the humans because they were a lot more careful with them, and didn't have access to their full contents. They turned their set into a tree (put in Windsong Tower in Cormanthor, from memory), but they also explicitly never had the key to unlock the final chapter of the scrolls, the one with the greatest secrets of magic in it (including how to easily forge artifacts and similar). The Netherese did.
Netheril explicitly got them, used them, and proceeded to blow their load on spells so powerful that it needed the goddess of magic to continually work, unceasingly, to repair the damage they were causing.
Camden Thomas
Humans are generally obsessed with multitasking.
That means fewer of them become masters in anything they do because, y'know, they got other shit to worry about.
>isolating yourself from society to become some nose-picking hermit who waxes poetry about magical ebb and flow like walden
Mason Green
Cormanthyr was not the original elven nation to have employed the Nether Scrolls. Before the original elves (the ruins being salvaged by The Finder) were the original creator races, the ones responsible for the two sets of scrolls themselves.
Ironically the humans actually utilized the Nether Scrolls far more sufficiently than the actual creator races, the Terraseer involving himself in Netherese matters because of this.
Humans have always had the greatest potential for magic.
Angel Cooper
>That means fewer of them become masters in anything they do because, y'know, they got other shit to worry about
There's literally no basis for this anywhere in the upper echelons of the lore, whichever setting.
Jaxon Perez
The Imaskari never got their hands on the Nether Scrolls yet were arguably on par, if not greater, than the Netherese.
They chained and split a being capable of ending the entire campaign setting. That's something only Ao can contest, if even.
Their wizards challenged actual gods before even Karsus the Mad.
Jason Robinson
The elves didn't use the original set they had in Aryvaandar either though, as far as I'm aware, and the Terraseer in the Anauroch adventure is pretty clear that he explicitly gave the Netherese the secrets to unlocking the full scope of the scrolls as part of his experiment.
Imaskar didn't really have the widespread scope of the Netherese, did they? From memory they specialised in portal and extradimensional magic, creating, closing, barring communication, that sort of thing.
Dylan Reed
>Imaskar didn't really have the widespread scope of the Netherese, did they? Wrong. They ventured out into space and sought out distant races and worlds. Their influence was vast for a time.
>From memory they specialised in portal and extradimensional magic, creating, closing, barring communication, that sort of thing. Wrong again. They were the greatest Artificers the world over. They specialized in god-killing magics and actually mustered the power put up a barrier preventing off-world gods from entering Faerun. A god wall if you will.
They were extraordinarily powerful. Pandorym was just icing.
Funnily enough, Forgotten Realms isn't the holder for "most powerful wizards of the multiverse" That honor goes to Mystara.
Isaac Collins
Did they make the gods pay for it?
Jayden Ortiz
They sure did, friend. They sure did.
Dominic Perez
Weirdly, Imaskar probably didn't have 10th level spells, they'd have used epic magic to do all that mechanically. But that's really old stuff, and might not be canon any more. Comes out of an old sourcebook talking about how even the earliest tribes of the Raurin desert couldn't discover any 10th level spells, and decided they were in the realm of the gods. Which would add an interesting layer to the Imaskari conflict with the divine as duelling magical systems, using epic magic against 10th level shit.
Juan Anderson
The inconsistencies between Epic Magic and 10th level (and above) magic is rather annoying.
It was explicitly mentioned that the Netherese pushed magic further than any other nation and ditched Epic Magic all together. The other nations stuck with what they already knew. The Elves and the Imaskari sticking to Epic workings.
Kayden Peterson
>Funnily enough, Forgotten Realms isn't the holder for "most powerful wizards of the multiverse" >That honor goes to Mystara
You must be referring to the empire of Alphatia. The mago-monarchy run by an Empress and a council of one-thousand 36 level Wizards.
Yeah, they were jacked.
Eli Ramirez
Humans are the master race in D&D. Kind of hard for lesser races like elves to be better at magic when they can't even reach level 20.
William Thompson
If the potential is the same, even at a 4x slower rate, the Elf outpaces anything the Human can accomplish by the time he reaches 400.
Tolkien, Tolkien with serial numbers filed of(Eragon), Witcher and? Where else? Even in Norse myths they are mediocre as a higher race, alongside the Vaenir, Aesir, Dorfs, Jotun.
Dylan Murphy
Nice bait
Chase Stewart
in really old AD&D humans could be any class and had no level cap, as where other races had restrictions and level caps.
The level caps and restrictions never made sense to me personally.
Blake Morris
Elves do not have a bonus to INT. They have a bonus to DEX.
Tyler Fisher
>If the potential is the same, even at a 4x slower rate, the Elf outpaces anything the Human can accomplish by the time he reaches 400. This is running with the assumption that the human hasn't already achieved longevity or downright immortality, such as forming a phylactery and basking in lichdom.