Reminiscing on some old logs, and I suddenly thought to myself, "Mek, why can't dark-elves use swiftstrike?!"

So, that's all I've got. Why don't dark-elves have swiftstrike?

And, even if you can present a good reason (other than "we thought inherent faerie fire was just as good............ .... ... .. .") would you consider giving it to dark-elves now?

They have Faerie Fire.

Beyond that, I don't see a compelling reason to make elves and dark-elves more homogenous.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Technically,

Shouldn't they have levitation too?

Where did you get that idea? *boggles*

It comes from the RA Salvatore books. Dark elves could levitate.

They lost all their inherent powers under sunlight, away from their caves.

That would be pretty sweet if it was limited like that. But I dont know if the imps would want to go in that direction.

They've been claiming recently that intentional plagiarism of other people's intellectual property isn't their thing. Making the dark elves more Forgotten Realms -like would be just that.

What rp/ic physical explanation would cf use to give dark elves levitation?

Something that hasn't been attached to any dark elf mob in the history of cf.....


For someone to say "The should have this" just because a similar race has it in some stupid series of books about a completely different world with a completely different universe of physical and magical laws........yeah....that makes sense.

In AD&D 2nd ed Drow (or dark elves) Which by the way were cooked up by AD&D 2nd ed/RA salvatore could use faerie fire, and levitate for short periods of time. So if you guys are going to rant about stealing ideas well- then dark-elves themselves whom are weak in sun/weak vs mithril are from Forgotten realms entirely. Why not pay homage and just make them as they should be.

>In AD&D 2nd ed Drow (or dark elves) Which by the way were
> Why not pay homage and just make them as they should be.

There is no "should be." Dark-elves are a very common fantasy theme. There's a long literary history of fantasy, and putting undue emphasis on Salvatore would be as silly as putting undue emphasis on Harry Potter. Or think of it this way, in Tolkien's world elves are just flat out better than every other race, including being much tougher physically. And none of them are evil. Maybe we should take out dark-elves altogether because they don't fit with Tolkien's view. You see how silly that sounds? Just because Salvatore had one version of dark-elves, doesn't mean that CF has to have the same version.

If you're going to say that they have to be a certain way because they were in some random popular book, then you should feel the same obligation to go change elves to be in line with the old myths that most of our faerie creatures originate from. Dwarves written about in the 16th century poem "Das Lied vom Hürnen Seyfried" had giants in their service and one of them changed into dragon form. Really CF should pay homage and make dwarves as they should be! I mean, that's the seminal work on dwarves after all.

1) Actually, Salvatore just popularized the old 1st ed. D&D vision of dark elves. Credit Gygax or some of those old 1st ed. graybeards with that if anyone. Vault of the Drow, yo!

2) I'm not aware of any game but ours where dark-elves are burned by mithril.

3) Our dark-elves aren't especially weak in the sun.

Alright,

I agree with you Dae, I remember that book now. Anyways, I am going to try a different angle. Compared to about every other inherent ability I can think of...faerie fire is well....pittiful. Levitate would be much cooler ;)

Couple faerie fire with the legacy One With Shadows, and you'd have a pretty good ranger killer. Take polearm for added defense from ambushes.

Faerie fire has its uses. Levitation would just have more uses :-P

then less people would be playing arials for their inherent flight! Not to mention that then dark-elves would probably have like 1000xp penalty or something. Hooray for time sinks.

>then less people would be playing arials for their inherent
>flight! Not to mention that then dark-elves would probably
>have like 1000xp penalty or something. Hooray for time sinks.

I hope it's not entirely lost on you that there's a lot more, mechanically, to an XP penalty than a time sink.

>I hope it's not entirely lost on you that there's a lot more,
> mechanically, to an XP penalty than a time sink.

Something I am curious about: Does the XP penalty also influence commerce/observation/exploration XP gain/skill gain?

Well, I understand what you are saying. However, these races really are cut from the same die, so to speak (physically, at least). I think that dark-elves would actually be more likely to have something like swiftstrike, due to the higher dexterity.

My suggestion would be to have swiftstrike for both races, and then give them other inherents that are different (ala faerie fire).

The same applies to the giant races. I could see all of them having some inherent that applied to their great strength, and then all having different ones based on their particular race.

Right now if an elven warrior and a dark-elven warrior fought, with all other relevant statistics being equal, I think it would be hard to explain why the dark-elf could not do the same maneuver as the elf.

Pair a dark-elf against a high elf, and the inherents probably balance out the fact the dark-elf is better suited for combat. I don't know if you were around, but swiftstrike was given to elves because the few people who bothered to play them were routinely being fed to baby duergar in the form of those little Vienna sausages.

The thing I never understood from my old days playing tabletop carries over to CF: why would a creature who can see in absolute darkness learn how to create glowing lights around someone?

That's just weird.

In tabletop Dark-Elves not only could make faerie fire but also globes of darkness. So you put faerie fire around your victim then create globes of darkness so they couldn't see (even with infravision) but you can see them since the faerie fire would make them stick out like a sore thumb. Or something.

but our house rule was that no light source including faerie fire could trump that, although continual light could dispel it.

What a wonderfully geeky conversation to have, one that makes me reminisce of a time when I got the original D&D Basic rules boxed set that included dice and a wax crayon for coloring in the numbers.

That leads me to the next point, though: the NPC races of Underdark were much more powerful than the typical character races, and thus they could not fit into a standard game (although I suspect that every tabletop player in the heights of their geekdom played alternative races). I also suspect that to give dark elves Swiftstrike as well as their sexy dex and high intelligence would make them dominate.

Oh, right. I just always viewed faerie fire as an outline. So in a globe of darkness you just saw the pink outline which acted as a big glowing target for dark-elf blades. Since you can't really use faerie fire to navigate in a no-light situation. And if all else fails, it is easily explained away by the simple phrase 'It's magic!'.

Check out Bob Salvatore's books for a really good novelization of the resaonable tactics involved.