Quote from: Black Vulmea;933754Or it drives a really fun campaign.

Verily. But only when everyone is on for it.

If not then it can, and often will, very quickly become onerous. Or a total game killer.

I've been in ones where it was alot of fun. Ive been in ones, and GMed for players for whom it was anything but.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;933755The fuck they don't.

Dwarven forges need charcoal, dwarven mines need timbers, dwarven mills need running water.

Mines will absolutely fuck over a forest, consuming it and leaving behind acres of spoils, stumps, and sediment-choked streams.

Also conflict over mineral deposits too. Elves need gems, silver, gold and all that for their fancy jewelry, arms and armour. And in some settings there may be conflict over subterrene land too. Some of Tolkien's elves lived underground for example and he drew his ideas from older legends of elves under the earth.

I like the gonzo Tunnels and Trolls or Fighting Fantasy approach. A whole menagerie of sentient species all mixed up, but not so much Disneyland, instead there is a gritty or even pychedelic undercurrent. A lot of casual cruelty and violence, sometimes with racial (obviously, not real-world racial) conflict.

Quote from: AsenRG;933776Thanks, Estar:)!



I think that calling Jews "elves" should count as antisemitism, so no, thank you:D!

Unless I'm running Dragon Age, where their two culture as described in the book did strike me as Medieval Jew and Medieval Gypsy, but that's on the designer's conscience, not mine;).

I don't particularly think Elvish culture has anything to do with the Jewish people, but in the particular case described, where they are without a home and competing against skilled artisans, they match the pattern of history that Thomas Sowell describes as "middle minorities." A similar pattern emerged with the Lebanese in North Africa and the Chinese in Malaysia. Of lot of the things that have happened with Jews also happened with the North Africa Lebanese and the "overseas Chinese" - alternating between periods of success and persecution.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;933755The fuck they don't.

Dwarven forges need charcoal, dwarven mines need timbers, dwarven mills need running water.

Mines will absolutely fuck over a forest, consuming it and leaving behind acres of spoils, stumps, and sediment-choked streams.

True, but it all depends on where the Elves are living and how the Dwarves mine.  If the Dwarves have magic, earth or fire elementals, what have you, it might be easier for them to hew or shape the living rock without needing wood supports (or using stone supports).  Grow crystal formations or use mirrors to channel light instead of torches, use natural gas or coal instead of charcoal.  Use Geothermal power. The average Dwarven city might be thousands of years in the making.  Waste might be deposited deep below in underground rivers or caverns or even processed somehow with alchemy.  Humans don't live anywhere near where we mine generally, or the people running the company choosing the methods of mining live in a city somewhere, so turning the area around the mine into a festering shithole wasn't seen as a problem.  Dwarves, by necessity, will choose a different path unless shitting where they eat and calling it dessert is a Dwarven thing.  I doubt it.

Elves may or may not be affected by this, depending on how close they are.  Do the Elves live all across the surfaces of the Dwarven Mountains, then maybe.  If the Dwarves of Moria decide to hire the Woodsmen to go clearcut all of Mirkwood, then at some point, yeah, conflict.

Now if the Dwarves decide to stripmine the mountains like locusts and just shit the products out across the surface like an industrial dystopian allegory, then yeah, big problem, but that's more of a human thing.

Quote from: Omega;933781Also conflict over mineral deposits too. Elves need gems, silver, gold and all that for their fancy jewelry, arms and armour. And in some settings there may be conflict over subterrene land too. Some of Tolkien's elves lived underground for example and he drew his ideas from older legends of elves under the earth.

Agreed that it is setting dependent.  But if you're talking standard Tolkienesque D&D Races, Elves needing minerals and Dwarves needing wood is more of a trading thing than a direct competition thing.  The big defining difference between humans and the fantasy races is adaptability vs. specialization.  Humans are more like Orcs in that sense, we thrive everywhere.

Now if your setting has Mountain Elves, River Dwarves, Tree Gnomes and Ice Halflings, more power to you.  If the world is Athas or Glorantha, things obviously will differ.

But...niches, specialization, technology/magic, geography, etc. don't have to play out the same way they would between groups of humans.

Quote from: Ashakyre;933886I don't particularly think Elvish culture has anything to do with the Jewish people, but in the particular case described, where they are without a home and competing against skilled artisans, they match the pattern of history that Thomas Sowell describes as "middle minorities." A similar pattern emerged with the Lebanese in North Africa and the Chinese in Malaysia. Of lot of the things that have happened with Jews also happened with the North Africa Lebanese and the "overseas Chinese" - alternating between periods of success and persecution.

In "Cross-Cultural Trade in World History," Curtin refers to these as "trade diasporas"

Quote from: CRKrueger;933999If the Dwarves have magic, earth or fire elementals, what have you, it might be easier for them to hew or shape the living rock without needing wood supports (or using stone supports).  Grow crystal formations or use mirrors to channel light instead of torches, use natural gas or coal instead of charcoal.  Use Geothermal power. The average Dwarven city might be thousands of years in the making.  Waste might be deposited deep below in underground rivers or caverns or even processed somehow with alchemy.  Humans don't live anywhere near where we mine generally, or the people running the company choosing the methods of mining live in a city somewhere, so turning the area around the mine into a festering shithole wasn't seen as a problem.

While I could quibble with some of the details, it's a fair point that, depending on how fantastical your setting is, dwarves may have very different ways of managing resources.

You could adopt a chaos beastmen and/or mongrelmen model and have all the funny looking humans literally be funny looking humans because chaos mutates everyone. Dwarves and elves and centaurs and furries are humans mutated in utero by chaos. This leads to racism becoming solely about appearance because mutations don't always run in families before getting overridden by new mutations. It would explain why such diverse peoples can get along, since they have the same psychology, basic needs and interfertility.

On a related note.

The 5e Forgotten Realms book shows a couple of isolationist kingdoms/cities. And what happens when people try to isolate themselves in a VERY hostile environment. Dwarves seem the worst of it with elves a distant second. One example was a dwarven city that has traps set all over the place because they are so paranoid. And another that used to be a joint human/dwarf settlement untill the surface was razed and the dwarves here too have isolated the place.

Quote from: Ashakyre;933250a resource scarse society

Maybe it shouldn't be a resource scarce society?

Quote from: rawma;934090Maybe it shouldn't be a resource scarce society?

What are you getting at?

Quote from: Ashakyre;933886I don't particularly think Elvish culture has anything to do with the Jewish people, but in the particular case described, where they are without a home and competing against skilled artisans, they match the pattern of history that Thomas Sowell describes as "middle minorities." A similar pattern emerged with the Lebanese in North Africa and the Chinese in Malaysia. Of lot of the things that have happened with Jews also happened with the North Africa Lebanese and the "overseas Chinese" - alternating between periods of success and persecution.

Yeah, I know a bit about the Chinese in Southeastern Asia, but Dragon Age is so obviously based on Europe that it just makes sense to base them on Jewish people. Much to my chagrin, as I had to explain in a previous post that comparing Jews to any elves probably counts as antisemitism:p!

And of course, it's funny that I said that DA elves are split between Jewish and Gypsy, but nobody seemed to question the part about the gypsies;).

Quote from: AsenRG;934170Yeah, I know a bit about the Chinese in Southeastern Asia, but Dragon Age is so obviously based on Europe that it just makes sense to base them on Jewish people. Much to my chagrin, as I had to explain in a previous post that comparing Jews to any elves probably counts as antisemitism:p!

And of course, it's funny that I said that DA elves are split between Jewish and Gypsy, but nobody seemed to question the part about the gypsies;).

However you splice it, it's an interesting pattern of history would be fun, somehow, to bring to the table, whichever fantasy race it applied to.

Quote from: Ashakyre;934092What are you getting at?

If you want PCs and NPCs to have luxury items like racial tolerance, and you don't think it's possible in a resource scarce society, then maybe you should have a different game world that is not a resource scarce society. There are plenty of examples of various degrees in SF: Iain Banks' Culture, Vernor Vinge's Beyond, Farmer's Riverworld, the Federation of Planets come quickly to mind. Fantasy is even more likely to have such; no limit to what magic and gods can provide resource-wise (let alone enforce an otherwise unrealistic social order), and racial identity in a world with reincarnation might not even make sense to the inhabitants. And I've played in various games in which monetary rewards were moot; most often they were mission based with some patron providing for material needs, with the objective being successful missions, not profit.

Another "trick" to justify a racially coherent society is the gods. If the gods are split between Good and Evil or Law and Chaos, then the gods would have their clerics preach the wholeness of Red Team vs. the unholiness of Blue Team. Thus, the dwarf, elf and humans may not love each other, but certainly tolerate each other because the gods are tangibly real.

Even more coherence would be formed by a single pantheon worshiped by all the PC races.