The D&D Thirty Day Challenge: Day Two

Today's topic is "Favorite PC Race," which is pretty much a no-brainer for me.  I'm a sucker for elves, and have been since my first read-through of The Hobbit when I was thirteen.  Or maybe when I was nine and discovered "Star Trek" (Vulcans are totally space elves).

Now, I am the first to note that elves have, on occasion, been terribly, terribly misused in D&D (see: "The Complete Book of Elves").  The literary traditions of elves can run counter to good game mechanics, and sometimes the traditions won out.We ended up with a lot of garbage that made elves too special.

And don't even get me started on the whole Drow problem.

Fortunately, the later editions of the game took this to heart, and elves are no more powerful than any other race.

My D&D career took a long break between the early 90s and the mid-2000s.  I played a little, but not consistently.  In 2006, I joined a local group (mostly to get out of the house, but they turned into a great bunch of friends), and began playing D&D pretty much to the exclusion of everything else on a regular basis.  When I started, they were using 3.5, and have since transitioned to Pathfinder (with a brief side-visit to 4e, which just didn't work for that group).  From that group, I helped found another that plays 4e on occasional weekends.

During the various campaigns I've played in over the past decade, I've played three elven PCs:  a 3.5 Bard (Laurelyn Starmantle), a Pathfinder Witch (Dusk), and a 4e Swordmage (Rashid).  Rashid is actually an Eladrin or, as we pronounce it in the game, El-Adrin.  The El-Adrin are blue-skinned desert-dwellers whose culture maps to Arabian Knights Baghdad.  Rashid is a teleporting nightmare and a blast to play.

(And yes, he does look a bit like Nightcrawler from the X-Men comics.  Because my love of elfy-lookin' folks isn't just in the fantasy genre.)

So, there you go.  Elves.