Quote:
Originally Posted by Nightshade
I think its a bad idea to underestimate the "Its just too damn much work" factor here, though; even people trying to create original game worlds have only so much time to put into that creation, and have to decide on priorities. Often monsters, especially non-intelligent ones, are a low priority on that because they're fairly detail intensive but not particularly core to the player experience.
And in the end, its sometimes lost anyway. If you have an intelligent non-human humanoid type in a world that has some elflike qualities, people are going to, as a group, see them as elves almost no matter what you do; even if you emphasize the differences, what will lodge in people's minds is "oh, they're barbarian elves who hate magic", but it'll still be "elves".
So I think some of this is almost inevitable.
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Some yes. But a lot of that depends on what effort (if any) is made towards fleshing out the species and culture. Traveler, and most of it's spin-offs, did a great job of making aliens seem, alien. On the other hand, Taslanta used to boast about all the races it had, and NO ELVES, yet had something like a dozen elf clones.
What I don't like is for every world to have "high" evles, who worhsip Corelleion Latherian, are proficnent with swords and bows, are a dying culture, proficient in magic, live for 600 years, etc.
Is there one D&D world, where the Evles are an expanding culture? Or where the Orcs aren't evil? Nope.
That's what I liked about RQ and the other BRP games. Aldrymi weren't the Tolkien (token?) elves, Trolls weren't evil, just different, and neither appeared in CoC or Stormbringer.