Post by trollageddon on Feb 10, 2022 16:38:18 GMT -5
I’m defining the problem as the level of misunderstanding about the status of elves in the game. The primary problem is memory hole, players not understanding the environment in which initial decisions were made that now affect staff action and content creation.
My thesis after trying to find a dozen ways to complain that there is actually nothing wrong. Fundamentally if something were going wrong then people wouldn’t want to play elves in the game. There’s actually a higher number of elves now than I’ve seen in my nearly twenty years of playing, despite the low turnout. I’ll note that Delerak’s fundamental position appears to be correct, for all the good that it will do us. Credit where credit is do.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m currently playing a city elf in the North. I’m having a miserable experience. The problem was that staff have taken an already restricted role, and made it even more restrictive. But plenty of people are having fun with this, despite the implied funnel. Pretty much everyone works overtime, breaking character frequently, to get you to join the Guild or one of the three more active Guild clones.
Anyway, how did we get here? While I was tempted to start with Wagner or even Beowulf, to remain within scope I settled upon Tolkein as a logical point of departure. I assume nearly everyone reading this will be well familiar with Tolkein, but Tolkein is fantastic. Perhaps this is why the first tabletop role playing games (e.g. Chainmail) and their successors followed Tolkein quite closely. One couldn’t have asked for a richer source of inspiration. Notable exceptions to this were Whitewolf Vampire and Palladium Rifts.
Even attempts to switch things up into wild west settings and cyberpunk settings typically started by cobbling the mechanics of the Tolkein D20 settings into a fusion setting that still maintained much of Tolkein’s source and aesthetics. Twenty years into all this by the 90’s the primary content creator in the market (TSR) knew that they needed to provide alternative content to their own Tolkein source material (Forgotten Realms) in order to bridge in emerging themes. What they came up with was Planescape (similar to Warhammer), a horror setting called Ravenloft and Dark Sun. Forgotten Realms was probably the winner in the group as Ravenloft was too difficult to DM for and nobody understood Planescape.
Dark Sun went on to provide the inspiration for Armageddon MUD. Shame on anyone who claims otherwise. Sanvean (I love you Sanvean) et al. have sometimes made the spurious claim that Dune was the inspiration for the game, but other than the great merchant houses nobody should bother to believe this. Armageddon is like 92% Dark Sun.
The genesis for Dark Sun as a Tolkein alternative was to combine pre-Islamic themes with a scifi feel. Nobody needed to care about the Knights of the Round Table or whether Boromir had any rightful claim to the throne of Minus Tiruth. However large parts of the game were modified to integrate various visual themes provided by macabre artist Brom.
The framers of the game were interested in including a lot of neat alien races like Thry-kreen and Aarakora, but were smart enough to retain familiar favorites like humans, dwarves and halflings. To prevent Dark Sun from being too similar to Shadow Run, the authors took the familiar Tolkein concepts and flipped them all on their head! Essentially the conventional fantasy races became their opposites.
Dwarves, affable, bearded and adventurous in Tolkein’s setting, became bald autists in Dark Sun. Elves, noble and reclusive philosophers in Tolkein’s setting, became dirty, impoverished thieves in Dark Sun. The one quality shared between Tolkein’s elves and Dark Sun elves was the clannishness.
It is somewhat unfortunate that the Dark Sun authors chose to impose upon elven characters a cultural taboo against riding. Even in the game rule book it was strongly implied that most elves could run somethinhg in the range of 90% as fast as a kank, and their more sluggish cousins could still run about 90% of this rate.
It was completely explicit in the rules that city elves (which I’m about to get to) could absolutely keep up with their mounted friends in wilderness running. The games were meant to be about a multiracial group of adventurers going out into the wasteland to have adventures. The rules were explicit that elves were not meant to slow the group down.
So the rule book presented elves as somewhat better adapted to the conditions of Athas than their human neighbors. Either better adapted to the depravities of the inner city or the harshness of the wasteland.
“Elves are all brethren within their own tribe, but regard all outsiders as potential enemies. There is no racial unity among the elves—an elf from outside the tribe is just as much a foe as a human, halfling, or thri-kreen. “ In other words, elves hate other elves who are from outside of their tribe.
The concept of city-elf versus desert-elf related to the upbringing of your character by that character’s parents. There are no city elf tribes and no desert elf tribes. It’s better to think of the city vs. desert thing as an enhancement. If you wanted city stats and city enhancements, you would have picked a city elf. That would have been the expectation at the time. If you wanted desert stats and desert enhancements you would have picked a desert elves. That is no commentary on your tribe. Either you were raised primarily in the city or in the desert. A city elf could have been the descendant of desert elves, and a desert elf the descendant of city elves. If anything, NPC weren’t seen as city elves or desert elves. The primary point of picking city elf vs. desert elf was to optimize your character.
A desert elf PC was still better at some aspects of urban survivalism than a human PC (such as being a crusty punk or a parkourite), and city elves were better at all aspects of wasteland survivalism than nearly any human, with the exception of riding.
The terms city elf and desert elf are not IG. To a human, an elf is an elf, a lowly criminal outsider. Not worth studying, chronicling or categorizing. If anything, a human would view a desert elf as below a city elf. Desert elves are the true red necks of Zalanthas. Urbanites don’t like them at all. They suffer the dual disadvantage of being both a red neck and an elf.
Here is where my narrative departs from mostly facts and highly supportable deductions, into deliberate fictions. The following paragraph is apocryphal, for the reason that I was not present in the dorm room when the ...Urbana University? students were having their seminal discussions and planning the game. I joined at least five years into the game’s tenure at a point where the game was already RPI. Fact checking would be quite welcome.
When the game started it was hack & slash. It was apparently common to sit with halflings and have ales in the Gaj. Wizards were overpowered and everywhere. As people started to complain about this, one has to imagine that someone finally got around to telling elves that no, you can’t ride kanks. At least not all the time. Presumably someone or other pushed back and said, “well, my character is an elf and should be able to keep up with kanks.” Isn’t that when desert elves were likely born? Desert elves were created and then overpowered to the point that it required karma to play them.
Now here is the point where I joined the game, so this analyst no longer needs to speculate about what happened. Puzzlingly, city elves were left alone as a zero-karma race. At some point or other someone complained because back then it was more common for people to use the mount skill to tame wild animals, and people that played elves thought that they should be better at this than humans (which the docs said they were) however they never blossomed at this because they were never able to boost their ride skill because of artificial staff restrictions. Besides this I mean that of course staff prevented through rule imposition elves from riding, but also prevented them from practice-riding to develop the capability to tame mounts.
At this point Delerak made his now famous rant about how terribly staff were handling the situation. In the opinion of this writer, staff handled it poorly yet not terribly. What frustrated the situation is that the shadowboard didn’t exist at the time. As we now know city elves shine in a few highly niche (what most players would call unplayable) roles, such as sparring partner (due to high wisdom), crusty punk or spy. But back in the day most people didn’t know this. So the arguments had by players about the situation was largely based upon misinformation.
Primarily people playing city elves at the time either played gangsters, Bynners or joke characters. Mostly gangsters and joke characters. Undertuluk was still a thing so there was a bit more for city elves to do and you were still allowed to play an elf from Red Storm. But here is what happened next, an artificial controversy arose on the discussion boards about whether or not city elves should be allowed to ride wagons or silt skimmers. No serious players were suggesting that city elves shouldn’t be allowed to do both those things. The docs made clear that this should be a matter of personal choice. However conservative elements on staff prevailed and this caused the rest of staff to fold and eventually ban both siltskimmer riding and wagon riding for elves.
Soon after this, on an unrelated note, clan membership caps were imposed. For a while it was difficult for elves to get into the Byn anymore.
So basically the only common role open to city elves was gangster, at a time when desert elf roleplay was poor and consisted primarily of raiding.
This persisted for years and staff ignored complaints. Eventually the shadowboard arose and people discovered that city elves were good for certain types of twinking.
A few months ago staff finally woke up and someone or other decided to improve elves, and the announcement came out. I was curious so I made a city elf. I’m not 100% sure what the improvement was but as near as I can tell they’ve made minor improvements that make it easier to play an elf if you’re in the Guild. I’m unhappy with the role I’m currently playing. If anything they’ve added some additional restrictions which I’m still trying to confirm.
My conclusion, however? The game isn’t broken. People still continue to play elves, which is the fairest metric I can think of as to whether or not they’re a worthwhile role. My purpose in writing this is to seek reform. I’m not sure that I could publish a single solution that would make everybody happy. Instead I just wanted to make sure that newer players and reformers were aware how much of the current set of problems relates to mere conservatism, legacy opinions, evolutionary design problems and denial about the primary source cannon for the present game.
My thesis after trying to find a dozen ways to complain that there is actually nothing wrong. Fundamentally if something were going wrong then people wouldn’t want to play elves in the game. There’s actually a higher number of elves now than I’ve seen in my nearly twenty years of playing, despite the low turnout. I’ll note that Delerak’s fundamental position appears to be correct, for all the good that it will do us. Credit where credit is do.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m currently playing a city elf in the North. I’m having a miserable experience. The problem was that staff have taken an already restricted role, and made it even more restrictive. But plenty of people are having fun with this, despite the implied funnel. Pretty much everyone works overtime, breaking character frequently, to get you to join the Guild or one of the three more active Guild clones.
Anyway, how did we get here? While I was tempted to start with Wagner or even Beowulf, to remain within scope I settled upon Tolkein as a logical point of departure. I assume nearly everyone reading this will be well familiar with Tolkein, but Tolkein is fantastic. Perhaps this is why the first tabletop role playing games (e.g. Chainmail) and their successors followed Tolkein quite closely. One couldn’t have asked for a richer source of inspiration. Notable exceptions to this were Whitewolf Vampire and Palladium Rifts.
Even attempts to switch things up into wild west settings and cyberpunk settings typically started by cobbling the mechanics of the Tolkein D20 settings into a fusion setting that still maintained much of Tolkein’s source and aesthetics. Twenty years into all this by the 90’s the primary content creator in the market (TSR) knew that they needed to provide alternative content to their own Tolkein source material (Forgotten Realms) in order to bridge in emerging themes. What they came up with was Planescape (similar to Warhammer), a horror setting called Ravenloft and Dark Sun. Forgotten Realms was probably the winner in the group as Ravenloft was too difficult to DM for and nobody understood Planescape.
Dark Sun went on to provide the inspiration for Armageddon MUD. Shame on anyone who claims otherwise. Sanvean (I love you Sanvean) et al. have sometimes made the spurious claim that Dune was the inspiration for the game, but other than the great merchant houses nobody should bother to believe this. Armageddon is like 92% Dark Sun.
The genesis for Dark Sun as a Tolkein alternative was to combine pre-Islamic themes with a scifi feel. Nobody needed to care about the Knights of the Round Table or whether Boromir had any rightful claim to the throne of Minus Tiruth. However large parts of the game were modified to integrate various visual themes provided by macabre artist Brom.
The framers of the game were interested in including a lot of neat alien races like Thry-kreen and Aarakora, but were smart enough to retain familiar favorites like humans, dwarves and halflings. To prevent Dark Sun from being too similar to Shadow Run, the authors took the familiar Tolkein concepts and flipped them all on their head! Essentially the conventional fantasy races became their opposites.
Dwarves, affable, bearded and adventurous in Tolkein’s setting, became bald autists in Dark Sun. Elves, noble and reclusive philosophers in Tolkein’s setting, became dirty, impoverished thieves in Dark Sun. The one quality shared between Tolkein’s elves and Dark Sun elves was the clannishness.
It is somewhat unfortunate that the Dark Sun authors chose to impose upon elven characters a cultural taboo against riding. Even in the game rule book it was strongly implied that most elves could run somethinhg in the range of 90% as fast as a kank, and their more sluggish cousins could still run about 90% of this rate.
It was completely explicit in the rules that city elves (which I’m about to get to) could absolutely keep up with their mounted friends in wilderness running. The games were meant to be about a multiracial group of adventurers going out into the wasteland to have adventures. The rules were explicit that elves were not meant to slow the group down.
So the rule book presented elves as somewhat better adapted to the conditions of Athas than their human neighbors. Either better adapted to the depravities of the inner city or the harshness of the wasteland.
“Elves are all brethren within their own tribe, but regard all outsiders as potential enemies. There is no racial unity among the elves—an elf from outside the tribe is just as much a foe as a human, halfling, or thri-kreen. “ In other words, elves hate other elves who are from outside of their tribe.
The concept of city-elf versus desert-elf related to the upbringing of your character by that character’s parents. There are no city elf tribes and no desert elf tribes. It’s better to think of the city vs. desert thing as an enhancement. If you wanted city stats and city enhancements, you would have picked a city elf. That would have been the expectation at the time. If you wanted desert stats and desert enhancements you would have picked a desert elves. That is no commentary on your tribe. Either you were raised primarily in the city or in the desert. A city elf could have been the descendant of desert elves, and a desert elf the descendant of city elves. If anything, NPC weren’t seen as city elves or desert elves. The primary point of picking city elf vs. desert elf was to optimize your character.
A desert elf PC was still better at some aspects of urban survivalism than a human PC (such as being a crusty punk or a parkourite), and city elves were better at all aspects of wasteland survivalism than nearly any human, with the exception of riding.
The terms city elf and desert elf are not IG. To a human, an elf is an elf, a lowly criminal outsider. Not worth studying, chronicling or categorizing. If anything, a human would view a desert elf as below a city elf. Desert elves are the true red necks of Zalanthas. Urbanites don’t like them at all. They suffer the dual disadvantage of being both a red neck and an elf.
Here is where my narrative departs from mostly facts and highly supportable deductions, into deliberate fictions. The following paragraph is apocryphal, for the reason that I was not present in the dorm room when the ...Urbana University? students were having their seminal discussions and planning the game. I joined at least five years into the game’s tenure at a point where the game was already RPI. Fact checking would be quite welcome.
When the game started it was hack & slash. It was apparently common to sit with halflings and have ales in the Gaj. Wizards were overpowered and everywhere. As people started to complain about this, one has to imagine that someone finally got around to telling elves that no, you can’t ride kanks. At least not all the time. Presumably someone or other pushed back and said, “well, my character is an elf and should be able to keep up with kanks.” Isn’t that when desert elves were likely born? Desert elves were created and then overpowered to the point that it required karma to play them.
Now here is the point where I joined the game, so this analyst no longer needs to speculate about what happened. Puzzlingly, city elves were left alone as a zero-karma race. At some point or other someone complained because back then it was more common for people to use the mount skill to tame wild animals, and people that played elves thought that they should be better at this than humans (which the docs said they were) however they never blossomed at this because they were never able to boost their ride skill because of artificial staff restrictions. Besides this I mean that of course staff prevented through rule imposition elves from riding, but also prevented them from practice-riding to develop the capability to tame mounts.
At this point Delerak made his now famous rant about how terribly staff were handling the situation. In the opinion of this writer, staff handled it poorly yet not terribly. What frustrated the situation is that the shadowboard didn’t exist at the time. As we now know city elves shine in a few highly niche (what most players would call unplayable) roles, such as sparring partner (due to high wisdom), crusty punk or spy. But back in the day most people didn’t know this. So the arguments had by players about the situation was largely based upon misinformation.
Primarily people playing city elves at the time either played gangsters, Bynners or joke characters. Mostly gangsters and joke characters. Undertuluk was still a thing so there was a bit more for city elves to do and you were still allowed to play an elf from Red Storm. But here is what happened next, an artificial controversy arose on the discussion boards about whether or not city elves should be allowed to ride wagons or silt skimmers. No serious players were suggesting that city elves shouldn’t be allowed to do both those things. The docs made clear that this should be a matter of personal choice. However conservative elements on staff prevailed and this caused the rest of staff to fold and eventually ban both siltskimmer riding and wagon riding for elves.
Soon after this, on an unrelated note, clan membership caps were imposed. For a while it was difficult for elves to get into the Byn anymore.
So basically the only common role open to city elves was gangster, at a time when desert elf roleplay was poor and consisted primarily of raiding.
This persisted for years and staff ignored complaints. Eventually the shadowboard arose and people discovered that city elves were good for certain types of twinking.
A few months ago staff finally woke up and someone or other decided to improve elves, and the announcement came out. I was curious so I made a city elf. I’m not 100% sure what the improvement was but as near as I can tell they’ve made minor improvements that make it easier to play an elf if you’re in the Guild. I’m unhappy with the role I’m currently playing. If anything they’ve added some additional restrictions which I’m still trying to confirm.
My conclusion, however? The game isn’t broken. People still continue to play elves, which is the fairest metric I can think of as to whether or not they’re a worthwhile role. My purpose in writing this is to seek reform. I’m not sure that I could publish a single solution that would make everybody happy. Instead I just wanted to make sure that newer players and reformers were aware how much of the current set of problems relates to mere conservatism, legacy opinions, evolutionary design problems and denial about the primary source cannon for the present game.
