Tuesday, January 22, 2013

The All-Elf Campaign?

Okay, so a little while ago I threw out some thoughts about doing an all-dwarf campaign.  Part of the idea of this was from the way Old School Hack, the original D&D, and similar games treat dwarves, elves, and halflings as classes rather than races.  It's an interesting design idea, making the non-human races classes, but personally I find it limits player choice way too much.  But anyway, jumping off from the idea of the all-dwarf campaign I thought I'd do a companion article on an all-elf campaign.

My impression is that the only real all-elf campaigns out there are drow ones.  Even though elves are popular as a player class I've noticed that there are a lot of elf haters out there as well.  That makes it tough to do an all-elf game (probably as tough as an all-dwarf game).  If you're planning a D&D-ish setting then you have to decide whether all the elves have to be from the same sub-type:

Eladrin (cosmopolitan "civilized" urban types)
Wood Elves (classic woodsy Robin Hood with pointy ears types)
Wild Elves (Xtreme Wood Elves, more mysterious and savage)
Drow

...or whether to have members from all of these groups thrown together.  Given the difficulty of getting an all-elf game off the ground in the first place it's probably better to let players play any sort of elf they want.  Plus that way you give players more choice (a biggie for me) and get more interesting combinations of characters in the party.

In the spirit of the all-dwarf campaign, only elves can have separate classes.  All other races (human, halfling, and dwarf) are race-as-class.  So using the classes in Pathfinder I'd go with:

Elves
Cavalier
Archer (Fighter, but must be bow-focused)
Ranger
Cleric
Bard
Druid
Sorcerer
Paladin
Magus
Oracle
Witch

Other
Human
Halfling
Dwarf


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