shouting

[Fatalmasterpiece]

DnD has dark elves too. Not just drow

 

Warning: incoming fantasy lore lesson

 

I'm not sure if you are a big follower of D&D or not. It's a strange creature. Originally there wasn't Wizards of the Coast's vanilla D&D. The game was owned by a company called Tactical Studies Rules and they started making D&D world settings in the 1980s. They published a lot of books for the game, and different game settings. The primary being the big three, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft and Greyhawk. Now, admitedly I am not an expert on the later two, but the former, Forgotten Realms, at least until the release of 4th edition, I was very very familiar with. Forgotten Realms was pretty much the flagship and is what most people think of when they think of pre turn of the century D&D. These original settings are where Gary Gygax invented the Drow, (as surface dwellers call them), or Illythiiri (as they are known to each other) of the contemporary fantasy game. This was long before your MMOs and fantasy video games or what have you, started copying dark elves due to their popularity. The "dark elves" of LoTR are quite different (actually referring to a single elf) and to go even farther back "Dark Elves" or black elves were synonymous with Dwarves, trolls and Svartálfar in Germanic and Norse Mythology, which Tolkien based his work on. So to a partial degree, with the work of many authors, the original TSR D&D Illythiiri are a pretty unique creation which a lot of people just ended up copying... :confused:

 

When Wizards bought the game in 1997 they made up this kind of generic D&D world based on a conglomeration of the big 3 settings. So a lot of stuff got imported in and Dark elves, or Drow or whatever were so popular, that Wizards took them and placed them in their generic D&D setting. Of course Forgotten Realms still existed and kept releasing books as a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast and the two Dark Elf races kind of coexisted under the same publishing company for now...

 

I assume your just speaking about oblivion here. In which case I'll agree, and so does bethesda. Todd Howard (in a podcast, or the GI rewind on TES) mentions how generic the fantasy aspects of oblivion were. He goes onto say that was a reason why they were excited about doing shivering Isles. He also says that they took this thinking into Skyrim. So hopefully we will see more unique encounters and what not.

 

Morrowind on the other hand I felt to be almost completly fresh compared to other fantasy settings at the time, even to this day. I'll even go so far as to say visually, the landscape and over all feeling from Shivering Isles was really just a rehash of parts from Morrowind. So I think it may be a little forward of you to lump all TES games together, when each game (mostly Morrowind/Oblivion) are night and day.

 

You make a really good point here and to be fair your right, I shouldn't lump all the games together.

 

However, for reasons I explained above in this long post, Morrowind wasn't that fresh (as far as races and lore go) to me since Dark Elves played a big role and were borrowed from so heavily. I explained before their striking similarities to the Drow so, beyond that it's up to the gamer to decide if he/she thinks it's a burden on the game's lore. That isn't to say I didn't really enjoy Morrowind and didn't play it for countless hours because I did, but it wasn't for the setting or lore, it was for the game, and for it's time, the groundbreaking abilities of it.

 

In your earlier posts it certainly seemed like you simply had beef with Bethesda for using ideas that had been used before. However, I can see that you have a valid reason for saying what you said now and I apologise for suggesting you were trolling.

 

I do have a beef with them, but it's the same way I have a beef with Steven King and some of his books. The guy is an amazing author and some of his stuff is just great. Some of it is not so good and heck, Rose Red is basically just a big rip off of The Haunting... that doesn't make me any less of a fan of his or make me try to troll his other fans. I just calls em like I sees em.

[CrayolaColours]

DnD has dark elves too. Not just drow

Really? I thought they were called Drow when underground, but ones on the surface were named dark elves. I could be wrong though. I haven't played D&D Since I was little.

 

Okay, now that you've explained, you make more sense. They did cheap out with some races, but I figure having familiar races was a good marketing strategy. It's almost like people coming up with new flavors for candy, if we can't relate to it at all, we're going to reject it, just like video games. If there were no familiar races, we wouldn't feel as comfortable. I don't know, maybe we would've been comfortable with different elf type characters, but I doubt us feeling comfortable calling it a fantasy without at least some common fantasy elements.. As it stands though, I like wood elves, and I'm happy they used them in-game.

[Fatalmasterpiece]

Not sure if my post clarified or if your still curious "Drow" is the name used by surface dwellers for "dark elves". They themselves call go by Illythiiri. This was true in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and thus carried over into modern D&D. The reason this may not be in your standard 3rd, 3.5 or 4th ed rule book is because Wizards chose to leave out a lot of the original lore when it homogenized it's rule books after buying the game. It is similar to how Americans call Germans, German, but they themselves are actually called Deutsch and the location Deutschland (I find it hilarious that Firefox doesn't recognise those as words >.>). However, a Drow, like Drizzt Do'Urden may just call himself a Drow since he is not part of the culture of Illythiiri any longer.

 

That's a really good analogy actually and you have a good point. I feel as if though the flavour of the candy is too familiar. That's preference for you though, not all are the same :blush: ...

[AurianaValoria1]

Here's something to confuse matters more....;)

 

In the Forgotten Realms setting, Dark Elves and Drow are different, but the term is used interchangeably between the two races. Check it out: http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Dark_elves

 

This discussion really puzzled me at first, because I thought I remembered "dark elf" as a term for drow, just as Fatalmasterpiece said. Then I also remembered my 4th edition Players' Guide (or Campaign Guide, I can't remember which) saying something about dark elves being a separate race.

 

Turns out, both are true! At least for FR...I don't know about the other D&D settings.

 

Anyway, I personally don't mind that the Elder Scrolls have some similarities with D&D. There's plenty of other areas that are not similar at all. And if the Elder Scrolls weren't similar to D&D in some ways, they would either be too similar to yet another fantasy book or game, or be so weird that some people would not be able to identify with them. That's what hooks some people into games...the ability to find something they can relate to, like CrayolaColours said. In addition, there's so many fantasy books and games out there now that it would take forever to find something that hadn't been used yet. Someone, somewhere, would draw a similarity to something.

 

A little bit of weird goes a long way. But that's just me.

Edited March 12, 2011 by AurianaValoria1

[ita]

Elves are ripoffs from old Norse and Germanic mythology anyway durr.

[Fatalmasterpiece]

@AurianaValoria1 ahhh that seems to be something just created the last couple years for 4th edition? So I wouldn't know nor would I consider it cannon since come 4th edition they decided to completely rework forgotten realms and kill a lot of it off. IMO they ruined DnD but... That's another discussion.

[huntsman2310]

i heard that they said it would be a completely different branch to the base magic system. as for what shouts you could do, there would't be ones that would conjure anything like weapons or creatures, it would be a bit silly