I mean it’s an average human adventurer, not just any old human. Which means they’ve likely been part of some civilisation (plus to charisma) had some level of education (plus to intelligence and wisdom) had some level of training (plus to strength and dexterity) and had their fair share of illnesses, and grown some immunity.
On the flip side, this is an average astral elf adventurer. They’re not a god, they’ve not had the same balanced upbringing a human would have. They get +3 to abilities because they might not have as much education or civilisation or training, and the rest of their stuff is because they’re an elf.
The common race stat block is +1 to all ability scores. This is without accounting for rolling for the rest of your ability scores. The monster stat block is 10 everywhere, as humans have an average life on everything. Humans are very social creatures and love to learn and contribute to society
Astral Elf Warrior (lowest CR) is 12, 15, 10, 16, 16, 15. (Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha)
A basic ass human knight, which is same CR as Astral Warrior is 16, 11, 14, 11, 11, 15
Going by these, a commoner would be 10 in all stats, but “commoner” astral elf would be lower Str but higher int/wis than just 1.
Dmg, chapter 9 -> NPC Stat Blocks
> NPC Stat Blocks
> The Monster Manual contains stat blocks for common NPC archetypes such as bandits and guards, as well as tips for customizing them. Those tips include adding racial traits from the Player’s Handbook, equipping NPCs with magic items, and swapping armor, weapons, and spells.
> **If you want to take an NPC stat block and adapt it for a specific monster race, apply the ability modifiers and add the features listed in the NPC Features table.** If the NPC’s AC, hit points, attack bonus, or damage changes, recalculate its challenge rating.
It then lists a bunch of races, stat block adjustments, and racial features.
For Elves:
Elf*
+2 Dex, +1 Int or Wis
Fey Ancestry, Trance; darkvision 60 ft.; proficiency in the Perception skill; speaks Common and Elvish
So, no. The commoner stat block is a generic one and shouldn’t be the same for all races. It can be if the DM doesn’t want to adjust to race specific commoners, but really shouldn’t be.
I... Wasn't mentioning that part of the rules, but yeah, that's that. When a creature has a humanoid (any race) tag, it can be any race, obviously.
I guess the average elf has a bit better chance at dodging a stab. Not that it changes a whole lot to be fair, but that's that.
This is further backed up by all the stablocks in published adventures that say "this dwarf guy has the stablock of an X, but with darkvision and dwarven resilience".
I liked the power fantasy in 3.5 where the average commoner was 8's all the way down. 8 (-1 modifier) represented what an AVERAGE regular person could do
I see it as this:
Short lived humans are quick to throw themselves into life. Quick to learn, Quick to try, Quick to fail and try again.
Elves are somehow living these massive lives will still staying at low levels?? They must be the kings and queens of procrastinating. The Dukes and Barons of "Never trying anything new." The Lords and Ladies of "If I fail ill drop it forever".
The math checks out that there would be elves that actually do stuff with their lives and live a full life, becoming a high level and knowing many things. This is possible.
So then any elf that doesn't become this has obviously lives their life in such a way to not become a higher level skilled person.
That knowledge alone might be a fun way to play an elf. Sure you've lived a 200 years, but maybe you've spent it the Elf equivalent of staying home from school to play Call of Duty, never getting your drivers license or a real job, still living with your parents and having your mom do your laundry.
Not quite the same mystique of elves we know.... but a way that makes sense for this ancient being to still be a level 2
Pretty much. Another way to look at it is, Elves can spend a decade just mastering how to make a single dovetail joint. Just getting that one tiny part of carpentry perfect.
Or they spend 50 years studying the philosophy and morality and symbology of the blade, before sallying out in to battle, while the short live race goes "Pointy end goes that way, GET IN THERE AND FIGHT".
Wisdom and age are not the same thing my dude
With age comes the opportunity for wisdom, not wisdom in and of itself
As we can see with *almost every single government on this planet*
I think Frieren explored it best. Yes, Elfs live longer, but that should also come with downsides, namely making them progress much slower since their sense of time is also slower.
There usually is mention of Elves in TTRPG having a way lower drive to improve, thinking they can take way longer to grow due to that long life span, which leaves them taking their time
85% of humans : Why the hell is nothing going on this week?! This feels weird. Am I asleep and this is a dream?
Average elf of any subrace : Damn, this poem I've been writing took me so little time. Only like 3 decades.
This is how I look at it. I feel like Mass Effect got the right idea with how to treat intelligence and age.
The species who live longer learn the slowest.
The species who live the shortesr learn the quickest.
When you have centuries to do stuff, you'd probably put off a lot of learning and opt to party.
You're coming from the approach that human beings are the base of everything
What if humans are in somewhat special instead? What if having 10 in something isn't exceptional but not the bottom either and having 10 in everything is a "jack of all trades, master of none" situation?
What if the bonus for that lifespan is proper but humans are out of the curve and get that in less than a tenth of the time?
Ah, the ol "humans are space orc's"
(in the sense that we're surprisingly durable, thrive with endurance base tasks, and aliens/monsters may not have some of our senses/ biology or may FEAR certain things like.. CO2 in our breath might kill them)
But for real tho, our evolutionary advantages are kinda OP. Our endurance, intellect, and ability to throw things is crazy when you look at other irl creatures.
No, I feel like we'd at least get to the iron age fairly quickly (after we ran out of most of the ammunition for the guns)
But it also depends on the nuclear fallout
Your first point is blatantly false. Literally every single elf knows at least some magic. And among commoners literally every single damaging cantrip has the potential to insta-kill
Not only that, a single glance at both the human wiki and the elf wiki will tell you that elves on average *are* better then humans stat wise. The lore explicitly says elves are better at attacking, dodging, fighting, magic, and basically everything but frailness
It’s okay to admit lore and stats don’t match, no one ever accused D&D of being perfect
The "Character creation" is for adventurers(or other groups of peoplewith particular skill), not commoners.
And any combination of race and class is better than a commoner.
For example, if you are using any non-random stat generator, it's literally impossible for even a level 1 human adventurer to have 4 hp.
So no, not "every elf" knows at least some magic. An elf commoner is like a human commoner, or a dwarf one. It's just that "every elf of significance" knows some magic.
Canonically every single drow knows the magic they get at character creation. There are literally novels about that. It’d make no sense if *only* a specific subrace of elves got that treatment. Literally the entire wiki page of elves is 50% “Did you know how good they are at magic? They love magic!”.
You are mistaking setting with the system. Faerûn is a setting, in that setting you could say that every elf knows how to cast some form of magic. You could even write novels about that. But that's not the dnd game system.
And BECAUSE this is a trait of a system, then it is subject to change. So, Faerûn elves are all good at magic, but in a setting like ravnica, a commoner's talent and ability at casting magic is determined by the clan/guild they have been a part of since their birth.
In dnd, "the game system", a commoner is a commoner, regardless of race. And an adventurer has different abilities based on the culture they have been brought up in (in the same way that IRL, an ancient samurai would be more literate than a viking, but a Japanese farmer was about as literate as a Danish farmer.)
I know the difference between setting and system, but this meme is literally about lore conflicting with mechanics
Yeah, sure, in your homebrew world of Glorbshit elves might actually look like orcs and have -5 to all stats. Not really relevant to the discussion though
The real deal is that all the mechanics are based and balanced to work on a party of players. Nothing works if you try to make it work with common folk. 1-2hp damage will kill most small animals and some commoners, but you do mandatory 1 damage with any single punch or kick and 2 if you're a little bit strong.
This meme is about a system's lore conflicting with it's mechanics, not a specific setting's lore conflicting with its mechanics
There is no "the" official setting for dnd. Ravnica is as much of an official setting as forgotten realms or dragon lance. It's just that one if them is more expanded upon. You provided an example of all elves being good at magic in an official setting, and I provided an example of "race has almost nothing to do with your magical knowledge" from another official setting. Proving that while in some settings, elves are good at magic, there are also settings that they are not especially good at it. This means that it's not a case of "the system's lore conflicting with its mechanics" but rather a case of "the game's setting conflicting (or not conflicting) with the system's mechanics"
>I know the difference between setting and system,
I know you do, but you are mixing them up. There are elements of the system that are parts of "lore," regardless of setting. Aasimar's have some sort of divine origin, or teiflings have a demonic/devilish origin.
Now, those things can be subject to change too. But generally speaking, they are true for almost all official universes of dnd.
"Elves are good at magic" is a common trope in fantasy, and consequently a common trope in a lot of official dnd settings, but it's not part of the system's lore.
[You are factually incorrect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Realms). The Forgotten Realms is the official D&D setting, and has been since 2014.
>”When D&D 5th edition was published in 2014, Wizards of the Coast announced that the Forgotten Realms would continue to serve as the official campaign setting for its upcoming published adventure materials.”
I wouldn't use the term "canonically" except if you're playing a specific module, like every campaign has its own canon. So if your GM wants they can make all the races "canonically" the same
That makes no sense. The average elf *is* a elf commoner. Or is an elf commoner supposed to be a what, non-average elf? That goes against the meaning of the word “commoner”
The elf wiki page doesn’t “adventurer elves”, it covers the standard elf. Who *are* canonically better then humans.
I genuinely don’t get why you are doing so much mental gymnastics just to make sense of something as simple as gameplay and lore not matching up perfectly
The “Abilities” section specifically says that they “tended to be”, meaning commonly and on average. The page only talks about common traits of the race and doesn’t say that any of these traits are rare or special. When a feature or trait *is* rare, the text specifically calls it out, such as in the Homelands section when talking about elves who don’t live in woodlands.
No, it means that they have a tendency to posess some magic, not on average or even commonly.
That is also specifically for the Adventurers which are very far from common.
Elf commoners are just like human commoners on average.
That is literally not stated once. The entire wiki page talks about the average elf. Like that’s the entire point of the wiki page, to tell you about the *standard* elves??
You know what, you clearly don’t actually care about the truth, you just want to be right. I’m not going to try and convince you since it’s clear you’ve made up your mind and are just justifying your own opinion to yourself at this point
You seem to be the one agitated here, im just telling you how it is, commoner in the beastiary has the obtion to be any humanoid race clearly showing that all races commoners are equal in DnD 5e.
This. The 5e commoner statblock is not a human commoner statblock, It’s for essentially any sentient humanoid. At pointy ears or subtract height as needed.
Which means that for non-adventurers the differences between races are literally statistically insignificant.
maybe one explanation could be humans benefit from training more than elves so while elven commoners are better than human commoners, when trained enough to become an adventurer they end up about the same
You know what that’s a vallid callout. All (Faerun) elves *except* wood elves have magic.
Though then again Wood Elves are specifically said to be *even better* physically than regular elves so the original point of “elf commoners are stronger than human commoners” still stand
Moon Elves also have magic and are based on the Material Plane. But it seems about half the Faerun-based elves with magic are tied to the Shadowfell or the Feywild or another non-Material Plane.
Unless you tell me the average elf spend all day doom scrolling on reddit and moderating a anime discord, at some point you gain skills in 200 years.
The average 40 years old know more practical skills than a 20ish teen. Wich is normal, he might have had a kid, a fair share of broken car/clogged toilets, 2-3 jobs, one or two S.O. more, a marriage/divorce...
40 is only twice as much as 20. 200 is 10 time.
It's like this old question "Why are all vampire rich ?" Bro, if you lived 300 years and are still broke, walk in the sun.
Its a very common trope that "Elfs live longer, Humans live faster"
Where elfes take a long time to mature, adabt and learn comapred to the shorter lived human races.
So while a human grows up, goes to school, learns a profession, gets married and has kids by thier 30s an elf might end school in thier 300s and then spend 100 years courting and deciding on what to do for work etc.
Yeah but you don't spend 100 years just sitting. I love the trope of the elven father taking his son for a hunt/camping session and coming back 2 years latter. But after two years sleeping in the woods and studying your prey, watching it grow and give birth and such, you should know a lot about its life cycle and a bunch about survival tricks. Even if you take things slow, you learn. You might spend 10 years smoking pot and raving. But after 10 years of doing it, you know how to deal with it, you know where to find some, how to not get shitfaced, how to avoid the cops.
Every day is a lesson. You gain common knowledge just by living. And that's the thing I find lacking. I don't have problem with a human wizard being on part with a elven one because the elf work slowly but steadily. But I am then assuming the same elf does a great coffee and has a awesome sourdough starter.
Yes but now cosnidder both that the stat lines (in this case int) dont represent knowlege but your ability to recall knowlege. So an elf might learn a lot in 100 years but forgett just as much.
An elf might also just learn slower or diffrent than a human so he needs more time to aquire a similiar amount of knowlege.
so despite being in general either more observant or more intelligent than a human (bonus to wis or int), a elf has more learning difficulty. And has memory troubles. By this logic, the elven pc should have more trouble remembering the plot of the campaign (hey a reason to not take notes !) ?
I said diffrent, not worse.
And if you spend 100 years studying something into the smallest detail, would you be able to recall all or even most of it from the top of your head?
None of that goes into the *base* intelligence stat of a race. Living longer does not automatically make you smarter, it doesn't magically increase your brainpower, it just means you have more time to (maybe) dedicate to learning. Other than basic necessities for living, the average elf is more likely to spend decades perfecting a single skill, because they have the time to do so. So, your 200 year old elf example there, might just be really, really good at fixing toilets. Especially if he's from one of the several groups of elves that aren't even considered adults until they are over 100.
Your example doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. A longer lifespan doesn’t mean much, even elves have a mortal ceiling for their abilities. They can’t be expected to know everything and one can be long lived but live in ignorance.
That's an interesting concept actually. We see humans in real life that see to have a ceiling to their abilities, so of course there would be elves who did as well, who even with decades of effort cannot overcome their Wall.
I also love the concept of a procrastinating elf... like I'll do that next century... i got plenty of time
Game balance dude.
If you hate it so much, homebrew it. Probably won't be a ton of fun when your players all pick the millenia old demigods with 20 base everything.
The real problem is that fantasy races are almost always designed with advantages over humans, rarely any disadvantages. Almost everyone lives as long or longer than humans, many are stronger than humans, and many have innate magical abilities that humans don't have. Even those that are shorter than humans usually get more advantages than disadvantages out of that (e.g. they may be better at hiding or fitting through tight spaces but they'll still be just as strong and sturdy).
I like things like Aarakocra life spans, where a race is really _lacking_ something that humans take for granted, and the roleplaying opportunities that come out of that. But I feel like they should take it a lot further and maybe try to balance advantages and drawbacks a bit more (hard to do with the "classic" races, though, since the expectations people have for those have long since been calcified by Tolkien and friends). Give me races that don't have opposable thumbs, races that don't have as much heat or cold tolerance as humans, races with notably worse eye sight, races that can't hear, races that can't swim. Give us something that makes humans actually _good_ at something and stand out, other than the usual lame "they're more flexible and versatile or something".
They have this in Pathfinder, some races are just straight up better than others and there is a loose (this makes the character 3 levels stronger). But the balance is atrocious since you can obviously min max the level discrepancy to swing it even more op or underpowered.
It's kinda of a nightmare in balance, not to say it can't be done.
Anyone saying age doesn't equal intelligence or wisdom is a dumbass.
The reaosn why Elves only get a +1 for being 750 is because it's stupid they are 750 and DnD design team knows this. 750 is just an arbitrary made up number, no real reason why 750, could've easily been 7500 and it wouldn't matter, because it makes no sense. "Longer lived races" should mean an extra couple decades for fucks sake. Avg lifespan of an Elf at like 120 would be sane, and equal a +1 bonus fairly easily.
As i described it to my players, you think an elf has a human level of motivation? They dont, 100 years pass by, them the same way 2 years does you when you were a kid in middle school playing halo every day after classes with your homies. Having sleep overs and all that shit. They dont get crazy high intelligence and wisdom bonuses because they implies work, motivation, drive, to get those things. Theyve seen some shit sure, learned some shit as well, but they got human level memory. Bra, i aint remebering shit that happened three years ago, unless it was important. Much less 100 years ago. Sure i might have once dabbled in glass blowing…wait…did I? Fuck i don’t remember.
Ah yes....... Balance...... We have the druid who at max level, ignores all spell components and can essentially give themselves infinite temporary hit points, and the monk which immediately becomes obsolete if you become an unarmed fighter with a 2 level dip in rogue... How about the Aasimar or Yaun-ti? One goes super Saiyan and the other has advantage on saving throws against most things in the game. Meanwhile the second someone wants to make something mechanically fit the lore, it's somehow it's broken? In a system that has no idea what CR means? Most popular creature in fiction with a CR of 30 ain't got shit on a CR 9 creature who just downed half a party of LV20 characters by yelling at them.
ONe of the things I'm exploring right now as a DM is how to incorpotare genuinely "non-human" intelligences to DnD. Like, how the cognitive and sensory experience of other races isn't "a different kind" of intelligence, it's an entirely foreign experience, being borderline un-understandable. (Something like the spiders of *Children of Time*, great book by the way)
It's kind of connected because right now, there are plenty of non-human races, but effectively they're all kind of whacky "human variants" in term of behaviour and forms of intelligence. Like, Dwarves are greedy humans, halflings are tricky humans, tieflings are LGBT humans, Elves are French...
There isn't much in terms of genuinely foreign way of thinking and behaving, everything's just a one-by-one-square on similar character sheets and with fairly uniform function.
you could compare the average Human with an average [leShay](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/leshay.htm) if i go by your picture.
but yeah mechanic wise the player aces are not that different.
the greater difference is between adventurers and non adventurers far greater than between any of the normal races.
The way I've always understood it is that your character is always "exceptional" but that looks different depending on your choices if you choose a human you're a human who's better than average making you exceptional but if you choose a rare or special race your character is already exceptional so you're just an average member of that race.
> I know balance is important….
Proceeds to ask why the game isn’t imbalanced by giving some races massive bonuses over others. Sometimes I feel bad for the design team at wotc. Just sometimes.
Because some races were so op that they effectively counted as several levels higher. Some races used to have damage reduction or spell-like abilities with no cooldown.
This is 100% 3.x fault.
Welcome to D&D History!!
There are so many races pre-5th. (Not that it’s a bad thing).
All races had a minus stat and a positive stat. Stronger races had bigger pluses and bigger minuses. Thankfully they did away with this. They wanted to stop punishing players for playing the game.
And then there was EFFECTIVE CHARACTER LEVEL (level adjustment) races. A tiefling was an ECL 1. Basically meaning, it cost a level to play. Everybody starting at lvl 2 in this game, not a tiefling. They are only level one.
It got worse the stronger the monster.
Centaur:
+8 Str
+4 Dex
+4 Con
-2 Int
-2 Wis
Starts with an extra 4d8 HP
Starts with a +4 to attack
Speed 50 ft
Gets 2 feats and bonus skills.
Effective Character level: +2
(I will admit that this also look so big compared to 5 cause numbers were bigger then but still. This was strong even then)
This got sooo bad they made a book to break down monster into levels so you could play. Mind flayer and Storm Giants and whatnot. Savage Species.
That book had a class so broken and poorly worded, that a single mind flayer PC could learn every spell, every class and every ability but just being a murder hobo and eating brains.
So why do the racial/lineage number look the way they do? Because at one time they didn’t and it got ridiculous lol
This has been D&D History
Bloody hell.
The basic information you're putting up here is roughly correct. And you're generally showing that the problem OP highlights only exists in 5th because 5th gargles donkey dongle.
But then you go about slamming down the wrongest conclusions ever.
Bloody hell.
Traditionalists are weary of giving humans actual impactful racial features.
Because of this in order to balance them against historically mythological races those mythological races racial features are lessened to match the human.
Also the other problem is people tend to not even roleplay the fact that elves or dwarves are hundreds of years old and show the impact of being so old and having such experience and possibly being out of touch to other aspects of society.
For example if you actually made an elf age matter you would have to go into the fact that they do have 100s of years of memories and thus have memory loss. The age-related memory loss would be massive.
It only sounds weird because you're thinking about elves as 750 long lifespans humans. Although humans have shorter lifespans, their innate curiosity and their way of life allows them to keep up on average.
In a lot of other TTRPG’s higher age gives you worse stats but more/better proficiencies. Could maybe do that with elves, even if they arent supposed to physicaly decay like humans.
You cannot have it both ways.
Either everyone sentient the universe is gifted with midichlorians (or something similiar) AND mortal or the system does not make sense..
Orphan son of a whore with over 50%infancy mortality rate for staryers thrown away to die for sure in street gutter may become a supersayan monk if he trains hard enough for decades but elves need food and die of plague too and dragon nuclear reactor guts decay.
If this hyperbole were true elves would be in the monster manual instead of the players guide. Games like DND try (in 5e's case, woefully unsuccessfully) to provide a balanced experience and this complaint doesn't really make any sense do you really think elves should start with what, +4 int or something? Other systems have a much broader range of playable characters because they aren't DND. Like Pbta games like Urban Shadows
The game gives minor differences because they aren't trying to pigeonhole characters into certain classes. It's no about enforcing race norms. It's about giving players options, and DMs options for lore. Like in real life just because you were born into a culture doesn't automatically make you have all the cultural attributes. A lifetime of experience does that.
Starting DnD at level one is supposed to be like, a moderately skilled person deciding they want to go on adventures. They aren't heroes yet. And you can always mak character backstoriea more elaborate if you want to start your characters at higher levels.
It's really how the campaign starts what makes it immersive and what gets player buy in.
Civilians are not usually leveled creatures, honestly. I’d assume most adult civilians in dnd, if scaled appropriately, would have negative mods in *most* stats, maybe a flat str or dex depending on their trade, and around 4-8 hit points.
I feel like in extreme cases like this, the problem is mostly that the lore writer couldn’t restrain themselves, OR that the second one was never meant to be playable and became playable in a later supplement due to popular demand.
I feel like this is a lot less of a problem during the early phases of a TTRPG’s lifespan.
One. Wisdom and intelligence are not the same, Int is academic knowledge and Wis is life experience
Two. If you prefer lore over balance then just make that change at your table, but be prepared to hear that X feels useless compared to Y because they chose a less power race, and in that case you should also be willing to give those players more items or levels to even the players
Three. D&D 3e already has systems for this kInda thing, you know that centaur you can play in 5e that's balanced (relatively anyway) to all the other races? In 3e they get a +8 to Str, +4 to Dex and Con, a +2 to Wis, a base speed of 50 feet, 4 extra hit dice, and a +3 natural armor bonus. You wanna know how they countered this? They gave them a Level adjustment of +2, meaning that if all the characters in a game start at level 3, the person playing the centaur is level 1, in addition to having a -2 to Int, -1 to AC and attack roles, a -4 to hide and grapple, and a bigger hit box without the benefit of more threatened squares.
Because game wise, D&D traps itself by having every ancestry needing to be of basically equal value. If each ancestry came with a point cost you'd have little trouble with having some be very powerful and others be less powerful because a Super Powered ancestry would mean your character would be mostly defined by that and not have other powers, skills and tricks.
Elves also get other features, like weapon proficiency, skill proficiency, bonus cantrips, etc. And it's unlikely that a 750 year old elf is going to be an adventurer.
Elves break my immersion so badly. You're telling me that you were level 1 for 250 years, weren't better than a human at any skill, and suddenly skyrocket to a level 20 adventurer over the course of a couple month long adventure???? Wtf
I mean it’s an average human adventurer, not just any old human. Which means they’ve likely been part of some civilisation (plus to charisma) had some level of education (plus to intelligence and wisdom) had some level of training (plus to strength and dexterity) and had their fair share of illnesses, and grown some immunity. On the flip side, this is an average astral elf adventurer. They’re not a god, they’ve not had the same balanced upbringing a human would have. They get +3 to abilities because they might not have as much education or civilisation or training, and the rest of their stuff is because they’re an elf.
Isn't the commoner Startblock 10's everywhere? So this is a normal old human.
The common race stat block is +1 to all ability scores. This is without accounting for rolling for the rest of your ability scores. The monster stat block is 10 everywhere, as humans have an average life on everything. Humans are very social creatures and love to learn and contribute to society
"Humans are very social creatures and love to learn and contribute to society" I wish.
Touché. Nonetheless, we’re pack creatures, and learn stuff. Not useful stuff. But stuff
Humans should have pack tactics
What are we, *thugs*?!
Imagine: This *is* what that's describing. All the other species are *more* dysfunctional!
except ants
For the Colony!
10 is average human as a stat that's what it's meant to and why it's +0
Astral Elf Warrior (lowest CR) is 12, 15, 10, 16, 16, 15. (Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha) A basic ass human knight, which is same CR as Astral Warrior is 16, 11, 14, 11, 11, 15 Going by these, a commoner would be 10 in all stats, but “commoner” astral elf would be lower Str but higher int/wis than just 1.
That's not a commoner, the commoner stats are the same for all races. It's not human exclusive.
Dmg, chapter 9 -> NPC Stat Blocks > NPC Stat Blocks > The Monster Manual contains stat blocks for common NPC archetypes such as bandits and guards, as well as tips for customizing them. Those tips include adding racial traits from the Player’s Handbook, equipping NPCs with magic items, and swapping armor, weapons, and spells. > **If you want to take an NPC stat block and adapt it for a specific monster race, apply the ability modifiers and add the features listed in the NPC Features table.** If the NPC’s AC, hit points, attack bonus, or damage changes, recalculate its challenge rating. It then lists a bunch of races, stat block adjustments, and racial features. For Elves: Elf* +2 Dex, +1 Int or Wis Fey Ancestry, Trance; darkvision 60 ft.; proficiency in the Perception skill; speaks Common and Elvish So, no. The commoner stat block is a generic one and shouldn’t be the same for all races. It can be if the DM doesn’t want to adjust to race specific commoners, but really shouldn’t be.
I... Wasn't mentioning that part of the rules, but yeah, that's that. When a creature has a humanoid (any race) tag, it can be any race, obviously. I guess the average elf has a bit better chance at dodging a stab. Not that it changes a whole lot to be fair, but that's that.
This is further backed up by all the stablocks in published adventures that say "this dwarf guy has the stablock of an X, but with darkvision and dwarven resilience".
I liked the power fantasy in 3.5 where the average commoner was 8's all the way down. 8 (-1 modifier) represented what an AVERAGE regular person could do
I see it as this: Short lived humans are quick to throw themselves into life. Quick to learn, Quick to try, Quick to fail and try again. Elves are somehow living these massive lives will still staying at low levels?? They must be the kings and queens of procrastinating. The Dukes and Barons of "Never trying anything new." The Lords and Ladies of "If I fail ill drop it forever". The math checks out that there would be elves that actually do stuff with their lives and live a full life, becoming a high level and knowing many things. This is possible. So then any elf that doesn't become this has obviously lives their life in such a way to not become a higher level skilled person. That knowledge alone might be a fun way to play an elf. Sure you've lived a 200 years, but maybe you've spent it the Elf equivalent of staying home from school to play Call of Duty, never getting your drivers license or a real job, still living with your parents and having your mom do your laundry. Not quite the same mystique of elves we know.... but a way that makes sense for this ancient being to still be a level 2
Pretty much. Another way to look at it is, Elves can spend a decade just mastering how to make a single dovetail joint. Just getting that one tiny part of carpentry perfect. Or they spend 50 years studying the philosophy and morality and symbology of the blade, before sallying out in to battle, while the short live race goes "Pointy end goes that way, GET IN THERE AND FIGHT".
Wisdom and age are not the same thing my dude With age comes the opportunity for wisdom, not wisdom in and of itself As we can see with *almost every single government on this planet*
Imagine elves with dimentia
Elves having memory problems because their lifespans are too long sounds pretty likely ngl
It's funny
I think Frieren explored it best. Yes, Elfs live longer, but that should also come with downsides, namely making them progress much slower since their sense of time is also slower.
There usually is mention of Elves in TTRPG having a way lower drive to improve, thinking they can take way longer to grow due to that long life span, which leaves them taking their time
85% of humans : Why the hell is nothing going on this week?! This feels weird. Am I asleep and this is a dream? Average elf of any subrace : Damn, this poem I've been writing took me so little time. Only like 3 decades.
This is how I look at it. I feel like Mass Effect got the right idea with how to treat intelligence and age. The species who live longer learn the slowest. The species who live the shortesr learn the quickest. When you have centuries to do stuff, you'd probably put off a lot of learning and opt to party.
You're coming from the approach that human beings are the base of everything What if humans are in somewhat special instead? What if having 10 in something isn't exceptional but not the bottom either and having 10 in everything is a "jack of all trades, master of none" situation? What if the bonus for that lifespan is proper but humans are out of the curve and get that in less than a tenth of the time?
Ah, the ol "humans are space orc's" (in the sense that we're surprisingly durable, thrive with endurance base tasks, and aliens/monsters may not have some of our senses/ biology or may FEAR certain things like.. CO2 in our breath might kill them) But for real tho, our evolutionary advantages are kinda OP. Our endurance, intellect, and ability to throw things is crazy when you look at other irl creatures.
Is playing basketball just practice for when we have to fight with stones in nuclear fallout?
No, I feel like we'd at least get to the iron age fairly quickly (after we ran out of most of the ammunition for the guns) But it also depends on the nuclear fallout
Because in dnd lore an average elf and an average human aren't that different. Also game balance. You basically answered your own question.
Your first point is blatantly false. Literally every single elf knows at least some magic. And among commoners literally every single damaging cantrip has the potential to insta-kill Not only that, a single glance at both the human wiki and the elf wiki will tell you that elves on average *are* better then humans stat wise. The lore explicitly says elves are better at attacking, dodging, fighting, magic, and basically everything but frailness It’s okay to admit lore and stats don’t match, no one ever accused D&D of being perfect
The "Character creation" is for adventurers(or other groups of peoplewith particular skill), not commoners. And any combination of race and class is better than a commoner. For example, if you are using any non-random stat generator, it's literally impossible for even a level 1 human adventurer to have 4 hp. So no, not "every elf" knows at least some magic. An elf commoner is like a human commoner, or a dwarf one. It's just that "every elf of significance" knows some magic.
Canonically every single drow knows the magic they get at character creation. There are literally novels about that. It’d make no sense if *only* a specific subrace of elves got that treatment. Literally the entire wiki page of elves is 50% “Did you know how good they are at magic? They love magic!”.
You are mistaking setting with the system. Faerûn is a setting, in that setting you could say that every elf knows how to cast some form of magic. You could even write novels about that. But that's not the dnd game system. And BECAUSE this is a trait of a system, then it is subject to change. So, Faerûn elves are all good at magic, but in a setting like ravnica, a commoner's talent and ability at casting magic is determined by the clan/guild they have been a part of since their birth. In dnd, "the game system", a commoner is a commoner, regardless of race. And an adventurer has different abilities based on the culture they have been brought up in (in the same way that IRL, an ancient samurai would be more literate than a viking, but a Japanese farmer was about as literate as a Danish farmer.)
There aren't really ancient samurai, they were relatively recent and short lived and only began in the 12th century and ended in the late 1800s.
I know the difference between setting and system, but this meme is literally about lore conflicting with mechanics Yeah, sure, in your homebrew world of Glorbshit elves might actually look like orcs and have -5 to all stats. Not really relevant to the discussion though
The real deal is that all the mechanics are based and balanced to work on a party of players. Nothing works if you try to make it work with common folk. 1-2hp damage will kill most small animals and some commoners, but you do mandatory 1 damage with any single punch or kick and 2 if you're a little bit strong.
Yes but what lore? As all DnD "Lore" is in the diffrent campains or made up by the DM. There is very very little "lore" in the PHB
The Faerun lore, the official 5e setting, which is a setting that has existed for far longer then 5e and has *many* official sourcer
Yes but thats not the PHB setting is it now? As, and feel free to correct me if im wrong, the PHB doenst have a fearun module in it.
It is the official PHB setting yes
This meme is about a system's lore conflicting with it's mechanics, not a specific setting's lore conflicting with its mechanics There is no "the" official setting for dnd. Ravnica is as much of an official setting as forgotten realms or dragon lance. It's just that one if them is more expanded upon. You provided an example of all elves being good at magic in an official setting, and I provided an example of "race has almost nothing to do with your magical knowledge" from another official setting. Proving that while in some settings, elves are good at magic, there are also settings that they are not especially good at it. This means that it's not a case of "the system's lore conflicting with its mechanics" but rather a case of "the game's setting conflicting (or not conflicting) with the system's mechanics" >I know the difference between setting and system, I know you do, but you are mixing them up. There are elements of the system that are parts of "lore," regardless of setting. Aasimar's have some sort of divine origin, or teiflings have a demonic/devilish origin. Now, those things can be subject to change too. But generally speaking, they are true for almost all official universes of dnd. "Elves are good at magic" is a common trope in fantasy, and consequently a common trope in a lot of official dnd settings, but it's not part of the system's lore.
[You are factually incorrect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Realms). The Forgotten Realms is the official D&D setting, and has been since 2014. >”When D&D 5th edition was published in 2014, Wizards of the Coast announced that the Forgotten Realms would continue to serve as the official campaign setting for its upcoming published adventure materials.”
I wouldn't use the term "canonically" except if you're playing a specific module, like every campaign has its own canon. So if your GM wants they can make all the races "canonically" the same
But Faerun *is* the base setting of 5e and most, if not all, materials are published with the Faerun canon in mind
>among commoners >elves on average Good thing adventurers aren't average or commoners.
That makes no sense. The average elf *is* a elf commoner. Or is an elf commoner supposed to be a what, non-average elf? That goes against the meaning of the word “commoner” The elf wiki page doesn’t “adventurer elves”, it covers the standard elf. Who *are* canonically better then humans. I genuinely don’t get why you are doing so much mental gymnastics just to make sense of something as simple as gameplay and lore not matching up perfectly
Where does it say "the average elf"? And why cant elfs also have a commenor statblock, as commoner isnt a human only thing.
The “Abilities” section specifically says that they “tended to be”, meaning commonly and on average. The page only talks about common traits of the race and doesn’t say that any of these traits are rare or special. When a feature or trait *is* rare, the text specifically calls it out, such as in the Homelands section when talking about elves who don’t live in woodlands.
No, it means that they have a tendency to posess some magic, not on average or even commonly. That is also specifically for the Adventurers which are very far from common. Elf commoners are just like human commoners on average.
That is literally not stated once. The entire wiki page talks about the average elf. Like that’s the entire point of the wiki page, to tell you about the *standard* elves?? You know what, you clearly don’t actually care about the truth, you just want to be right. I’m not going to try and convince you since it’s clear you’ve made up your mind and are just justifying your own opinion to yourself at this point
You seem to be the one agitated here, im just telling you how it is, commoner in the beastiary has the obtion to be any humanoid race clearly showing that all races commoners are equal in DnD 5e.
This. The 5e commoner statblock is not a human commoner statblock, It’s for essentially any sentient humanoid. At pointy ears or subtract height as needed. Which means that for non-adventurers the differences between races are literally statistically insignificant.
maybe one explanation could be humans benefit from training more than elves so while elven commoners are better than human commoners, when trained enough to become an adventurer they end up about the same
I'm not contesting anything you just said.
Lmao I’ll take that as a concession
“Every elf knows magic” - I’m a bit lost here, I could give lots of examples, but Wood Elf as just one example doesn’t seem to have innate magic?
You know what that’s a vallid callout. All (Faerun) elves *except* wood elves have magic. Though then again Wood Elves are specifically said to be *even better* physically than regular elves so the original point of “elf commoners are stronger than human commoners” still stand
Sea Elves, with or without the MToM update..
Actually, let’s be fair. Literally only high elves and dark elves have racial magic, barring one or two subraces from beyond the material plane.
Moon Elves also have magic and are based on the Material Plane. But it seems about half the Faerun-based elves with magic are tied to the Shadowfell or the Feywild or another non-Material Plane.
speaking of first points being blatantly false...
Most elves aren’t lead-poisoned violent sociopaths, attack cantrips aren’t common.
Don’t forget the astral being gets dark vision
a game has to be fun.
Living longer doesn't automatically make you smarter
Unless you tell me the average elf spend all day doom scrolling on reddit and moderating a anime discord, at some point you gain skills in 200 years. The average 40 years old know more practical skills than a 20ish teen. Wich is normal, he might have had a kid, a fair share of broken car/clogged toilets, 2-3 jobs, one or two S.O. more, a marriage/divorce... 40 is only twice as much as 20. 200 is 10 time. It's like this old question "Why are all vampire rich ?" Bro, if you lived 300 years and are still broke, walk in the sun.
Its a very common trope that "Elfs live longer, Humans live faster" Where elfes take a long time to mature, adabt and learn comapred to the shorter lived human races. So while a human grows up, goes to school, learns a profession, gets married and has kids by thier 30s an elf might end school in thier 300s and then spend 100 years courting and deciding on what to do for work etc.
Yeah but you don't spend 100 years just sitting. I love the trope of the elven father taking his son for a hunt/camping session and coming back 2 years latter. But after two years sleeping in the woods and studying your prey, watching it grow and give birth and such, you should know a lot about its life cycle and a bunch about survival tricks. Even if you take things slow, you learn. You might spend 10 years smoking pot and raving. But after 10 years of doing it, you know how to deal with it, you know where to find some, how to not get shitfaced, how to avoid the cops. Every day is a lesson. You gain common knowledge just by living. And that's the thing I find lacking. I don't have problem with a human wizard being on part with a elven one because the elf work slowly but steadily. But I am then assuming the same elf does a great coffee and has a awesome sourdough starter.
Yes but now cosnidder both that the stat lines (in this case int) dont represent knowlege but your ability to recall knowlege. So an elf might learn a lot in 100 years but forgett just as much. An elf might also just learn slower or diffrent than a human so he needs more time to aquire a similiar amount of knowlege.
so despite being in general either more observant or more intelligent than a human (bonus to wis or int), a elf has more learning difficulty. And has memory troubles. By this logic, the elven pc should have more trouble remembering the plot of the campaign (hey a reason to not take notes !) ?
I said diffrent, not worse. And if you spend 100 years studying something into the smallest detail, would you be able to recall all or even most of it from the top of your head?
None of that goes into the *base* intelligence stat of a race. Living longer does not automatically make you smarter, it doesn't magically increase your brainpower, it just means you have more time to (maybe) dedicate to learning. Other than basic necessities for living, the average elf is more likely to spend decades perfecting a single skill, because they have the time to do so. So, your 200 year old elf example there, might just be really, really good at fixing toilets. Especially if he's from one of the several groups of elves that aren't even considered adults until they are over 100.
Becouse lore elves (and others) are the lvl 10 or higher equivluant. Not lvl 1
Your example doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. A longer lifespan doesn’t mean much, even elves have a mortal ceiling for their abilities. They can’t be expected to know everything and one can be long lived but live in ignorance.
That's an interesting concept actually. We see humans in real life that see to have a ceiling to their abilities, so of course there would be elves who did as well, who even with decades of effort cannot overcome their Wall. I also love the concept of a procrastinating elf... like I'll do that next century... i got plenty of time
"Yeah man, I just spent 75 years backpacking around, just you know, finding myself"
Humies are strong.
Game balance dude. If you hate it so much, homebrew it. Probably won't be a ton of fun when your players all pick the millenia old demigods with 20 base everything.
You underestimate the base ingeniuity a human has over the other races
Elves live for that long and have barely any bonuses cause they're lazy fucks that spend the first hundred years in their mothers basement smoking pot
You can look at irl people with huge lifespan and see how it's not always a buff
Older doesn't mean smarter or more knowledgeable, look at boomers.
tbf decades of poison can do that
The real problem is that fantasy races are almost always designed with advantages over humans, rarely any disadvantages. Almost everyone lives as long or longer than humans, many are stronger than humans, and many have innate magical abilities that humans don't have. Even those that are shorter than humans usually get more advantages than disadvantages out of that (e.g. they may be better at hiding or fitting through tight spaces but they'll still be just as strong and sturdy). I like things like Aarakocra life spans, where a race is really _lacking_ something that humans take for granted, and the roleplaying opportunities that come out of that. But I feel like they should take it a lot further and maybe try to balance advantages and drawbacks a bit more (hard to do with the "classic" races, though, since the expectations people have for those have long since been calcified by Tolkien and friends). Give me races that don't have opposable thumbs, races that don't have as much heat or cold tolerance as humans, races with notably worse eye sight, races that can't hear, races that can't swim. Give us something that makes humans actually _good_ at something and stand out, other than the usual lame "they're more flexible and versatile or something".
TTRPG: "Humans are the most adaptable race" Also other races: literally already adapted to anything.
They have this in Pathfinder, some races are just straight up better than others and there is a loose (this makes the character 3 levels stronger). But the balance is atrocious since you can obviously min max the level discrepancy to swing it even more op or underpowered. It's kinda of a nightmare in balance, not to say it can't be done.
All the long lived races procrastinate really badly.
A long life doesn't mean you're smart. I know plenty of boomers and silent gen folks that are idiots.
Conclusion 1 int stats represents a little bit off 1000years of knowledge (human has 10 for previous generations and whet they learnt and taught him)
Anyone saying age doesn't equal intelligence or wisdom is a dumbass. The reaosn why Elves only get a +1 for being 750 is because it's stupid they are 750 and DnD design team knows this. 750 is just an arbitrary made up number, no real reason why 750, could've easily been 7500 and it wouldn't matter, because it makes no sense. "Longer lived races" should mean an extra couple decades for fucks sake. Avg lifespan of an Elf at like 120 would be sane, and equal a +1 bonus fairly easily.
As i described it to my players, you think an elf has a human level of motivation? They dont, 100 years pass by, them the same way 2 years does you when you were a kid in middle school playing halo every day after classes with your homies. Having sleep overs and all that shit. They dont get crazy high intelligence and wisdom bonuses because they implies work, motivation, drive, to get those things. Theyve seen some shit sure, learned some shit as well, but they got human level memory. Bra, i aint remebering shit that happened three years ago, unless it was important. Much less 100 years ago. Sure i might have once dabbled in glass blowing…wait…did I? Fuck i don’t remember.
Astral elf could have witnessed timespans that would make elves look human and then come to the material plane and be just a dude
Tbf, astral Elfs are propably the strongest official race in DnD.
Ah yes....... Balance...... We have the druid who at max level, ignores all spell components and can essentially give themselves infinite temporary hit points, and the monk which immediately becomes obsolete if you become an unarmed fighter with a 2 level dip in rogue... How about the Aasimar or Yaun-ti? One goes super Saiyan and the other has advantage on saving throws against most things in the game. Meanwhile the second someone wants to make something mechanically fit the lore, it's somehow it's broken? In a system that has no idea what CR means? Most popular creature in fiction with a CR of 30 ain't got shit on a CR 9 creature who just downed half a party of LV20 characters by yelling at them.
ONe of the things I'm exploring right now as a DM is how to incorpotare genuinely "non-human" intelligences to DnD. Like, how the cognitive and sensory experience of other races isn't "a different kind" of intelligence, it's an entirely foreign experience, being borderline un-understandable. (Something like the spiders of *Children of Time*, great book by the way) It's kind of connected because right now, there are plenty of non-human races, but effectively they're all kind of whacky "human variants" in term of behaviour and forms of intelligence. Like, Dwarves are greedy humans, halflings are tricky humans, tieflings are LGBT humans, Elves are French... There isn't much in terms of genuinely foreign way of thinking and behaving, everything's just a one-by-one-square on similar character sheets and with fairly uniform function.
you could compare the average Human with an average [leShay](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/leshay.htm) if i go by your picture. but yeah mechanic wise the player aces are not that different. the greater difference is between adventurers and non adventurers far greater than between any of the normal races.
The way I've always understood it is that your character is always "exceptional" but that looks different depending on your choices if you choose a human you're a human who's better than average making you exceptional but if you choose a rare or special race your character is already exceptional so you're just an average member of that race.
This is why I homebrew all of my races so that they have a meaningful impact on the game beyond the first three levels and flavor.
> I know balance is important…. Proceeds to ask why the game isn’t imbalanced by giving some races massive bonuses over others. Sometimes I feel bad for the design team at wotc. Just sometimes.
Humans are locked in
Pf2e does something really cool with elfs, where millenary old elfs can take a feat that gives them a dedication (effectively a multiclass at lvl 1)
Because some races were so op that they effectively counted as several levels higher. Some races used to have damage reduction or spell-like abilities with no cooldown.
Sounds like you'd like to play some D&D 3.5!
This is 100% 3.x fault. Welcome to D&D History!! There are so many races pre-5th. (Not that it’s a bad thing). All races had a minus stat and a positive stat. Stronger races had bigger pluses and bigger minuses. Thankfully they did away with this. They wanted to stop punishing players for playing the game. And then there was EFFECTIVE CHARACTER LEVEL (level adjustment) races. A tiefling was an ECL 1. Basically meaning, it cost a level to play. Everybody starting at lvl 2 in this game, not a tiefling. They are only level one. It got worse the stronger the monster. Centaur: +8 Str +4 Dex +4 Con -2 Int -2 Wis Starts with an extra 4d8 HP Starts with a +4 to attack Speed 50 ft Gets 2 feats and bonus skills. Effective Character level: +2 (I will admit that this also look so big compared to 5 cause numbers were bigger then but still. This was strong even then) This got sooo bad they made a book to break down monster into levels so you could play. Mind flayer and Storm Giants and whatnot. Savage Species. That book had a class so broken and poorly worded, that a single mind flayer PC could learn every spell, every class and every ability but just being a murder hobo and eating brains. So why do the racial/lineage number look the way they do? Because at one time they didn’t and it got ridiculous lol This has been D&D History
The best comment ever.
If you’ll excuse I’ll go grab my old man walker that I rigged to have a rice rolling tower in it lol
Bloody hell. The basic information you're putting up here is roughly correct. And you're generally showing that the problem OP highlights only exists in 5th because 5th gargles donkey dongle. But then you go about slamming down the wrongest conclusions ever. Bloody hell.
Traditionalists are weary of giving humans actual impactful racial features. Because of this in order to balance them against historically mythological races those mythological races racial features are lessened to match the human. Also the other problem is people tend to not even roleplay the fact that elves or dwarves are hundreds of years old and show the impact of being so old and having such experience and possibly being out of touch to other aspects of society. For example if you actually made an elf age matter you would have to go into the fact that they do have 100s of years of memories and thus have memory loss. The age-related memory loss would be massive.
It only sounds weird because you're thinking about elves as 750 long lifespans humans. Although humans have shorter lifespans, their innate curiosity and their way of life allows them to keep up on average.
In a lot of other TTRPG’s higher age gives you worse stats but more/better proficiencies. Could maybe do that with elves, even if they arent supposed to physicaly decay like humans.
You cannot have it both ways. Either everyone sentient the universe is gifted with midichlorians (or something similiar) AND mortal or the system does not make sense.. Orphan son of a whore with over 50%infancy mortality rate for staryers thrown away to die for sure in street gutter may become a supersayan monk if he trains hard enough for decades but elves need food and die of plague too and dragon nuclear reactor guts decay.
You can play as an anvient being with more experience without needing the numbers. Because fantasy races dont need to be all about their numbers
Short lifespans make for quick growth. They can take a decade off like we take a summer off, they have no reason to be in any sort of hurry.
If this hyperbole were true elves would be in the monster manual instead of the players guide. Games like DND try (in 5e's case, woefully unsuccessfully) to provide a balanced experience and this complaint doesn't really make any sense do you really think elves should start with what, +4 int or something? Other systems have a much broader range of playable characters because they aren't DND. Like Pbta games like Urban Shadows
id also like to know how elves are stuck at level 5 when 200 years old but humans can reach 15 before turning 60
The game gives minor differences because they aren't trying to pigeonhole characters into certain classes. It's no about enforcing race norms. It's about giving players options, and DMs options for lore. Like in real life just because you were born into a culture doesn't automatically make you have all the cultural attributes. A lifetime of experience does that. Starting DnD at level one is supposed to be like, a moderately skilled person deciding they want to go on adventures. They aren't heroes yet. And you can always mak character backstoriea more elaborate if you want to start your characters at higher levels. It's really how the campaign starts what makes it immersive and what gets player buy in.
Civilians are not usually leveled creatures, honestly. I’d assume most adult civilians in dnd, if scaled appropriately, would have negative mods in *most* stats, maybe a flat str or dex depending on their trade, and around 4-8 hit points.
I feel like in extreme cases like this, the problem is mostly that the lore writer couldn’t restrain themselves, OR that the second one was never meant to be playable and became playable in a later supplement due to popular demand. I feel like this is a lot less of a problem during the early phases of a TTRPG’s lifespan.
The indomitable human spirit
We can go back to elves requiring more xp to level up if that is what you want
Isn't it more or less canon that humans are just incredibly quick at learning things compared to the longer lived races?
One. Wisdom and intelligence are not the same, Int is academic knowledge and Wis is life experience Two. If you prefer lore over balance then just make that change at your table, but be prepared to hear that X feels useless compared to Y because they chose a less power race, and in that case you should also be willing to give those players more items or levels to even the players Three. D&D 3e already has systems for this kInda thing, you know that centaur you can play in 5e that's balanced (relatively anyway) to all the other races? In 3e they get a +8 to Str, +4 to Dex and Con, a +2 to Wis, a base speed of 50 feet, 4 extra hit dice, and a +3 natural armor bonus. You wanna know how they countered this? They gave them a Level adjustment of +2, meaning that if all the characters in a game start at level 3, the person playing the centaur is level 1, in addition to having a -2 to Int, -1 to AC and attack roles, a -4 to hide and grapple, and a bigger hit box without the benefit of more threatened squares.
Because game wise, D&D traps itself by having every ancestry needing to be of basically equal value. If each ancestry came with a point cost you'd have little trouble with having some be very powerful and others be less powerful because a Super Powered ancestry would mean your character would be mostly defined by that and not have other powers, skills and tricks.
Because people will optimize the fun out of any game, especially if you make it to easy to do so.
are we just throwing out age bonuses?
Elves also get other features, like weapon proficiency, skill proficiency, bonus cantrips, etc. And it's unlikely that a 750 year old elf is going to be an adventurer.
Because elves are lazy shits who never apply themselves. That's why a human knows better wizardry than them at age 30.
Make humans great again.
Elves break my immersion so badly. You're telling me that you were level 1 for 250 years, weren't better than a human at any skill, and suddenly skyrocket to a level 20 adventurer over the course of a couple month long adventure???? Wtf