Elves have by lore distinct feature from the humans. Now in bg3 elves are not represented even correctly adding more "Diversity" to the race would be basically breaking the lore you may argue they look too much caucasian i say they really look way too much humans to start with.
As you see Elves have a bone structure of the face that is not caucasian at all in the pen and paper so in that Larian did the elves completely wrong.
If you want to make a character of elven heritage that have respemblance to a specific etnicy i would suggest you to make an half elf because they still have elven tracts but they retain featurers from the other other blood as well.
![[Linked Image]](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/55/b4/0c/55b40c721e37045c9bc9ec33140964e0.jpg)
I understand both sides of this argument. I think it would be great that elves in Faerun are depicted as an alien race that have these absurdly tilted eyes, really thin faces and pointed ears. The problem is that, especially in 5e, WoTC does not enforce these "rules" in their official art. So it's basically down to the artist on whether or not an elf looks like a creature from a different species or just a human with pointy ears.
Overall, I think the character creator needs to be expanded upon anyway. Where Larian wants to take to the character creator is up to them.
Actually that's not true at all. The imagine of elves in 5th edition still are following the bone structure the elves have supposed to have. Cut of the eyes. Long noses. In D&D and in faerun the elves are supposed not to look like humans there was a well made thread in forum that actually proved that.
![[Linked Image]](https://media-waterdeep.cursecdn.com/avatars/thumbnails/7/639/420/618/636287075350739045.png)
[Yes, if you turn off customization restrictions. By the way, sun elves have bronze skin, while forest elves have copper and tanned skin.
And I still don't see the point in introducing new faces for non-white elves. You can make a black-skin elf anyway.
So what's your complaint against people requesting that Larian add more faces that allow you to make an elf that appears ethnically black (or non-Caucasian)? If we already have the ability to turn off restrictions to make any colour combination, why not have that restriction enable more face options?
The fact that it has no justification in the lore. I have nothing against new faces (Although I would like this to primarily affect the dwarves), but I would like these faces to comply with the established canons.
If there were elves with black people facial features in Faerûn, I would not have written a word, but I do not remember that such elves existed in the setting.
And one more thing, I don't know if this is important for our discussion or not, but I do not approve of the ability to turn off restrictions on colors, this function annoys me a little... This is a subjective opinion.
It gives the setting more consistency those are racial distinct features if one dislike such feature why chose that race in the first place? It is not like everything must look varied as humans. Otherwise what could stop me to make a white skinned Ghitianky that looks like Jhonny Depp?
It makes the setting more coherent and it create diversity among the race that contains. If everything would look the same what is the point to make a different race from the humans. Let's just make all humans.
Pretending a not Human race to have Human tracts is quite well... A pretense.
1) How does it affect your enjoyment of the game that other people are given more customisation options that you are not required to use?
2) Are you against the current customisation options that allow you to make characters with any combination of skin, hair and eye colour?
1) Yes it does. As i play forgotten realms in both pen and paper and videogames since i was a child. Adding things that breaks the lore smash the credibility and the immersion the setting provides to me. Is not a necessary add on. What needs to be done in my opinion is move the current elven head in the half race elf. And then implement proper elven head. In the case of OP i think wild elves would be perfect to her. Also again adding human diversity of a race that again "Is not supposed to be human at all" is completely unnecessary and kills off the distinct tracts of that specific rest.
2)No really. I even used that feature to create my tiefling as my tiefling is supposed to be one coming from a regular fiend and not an Archdemon or Archdevil wich is perfectly in the lore. However from custom color palette to having elves with the bone structure to reflect different HUMAN RACE etnicy there is a whole lot of difference.
AH yes i can see that howver i never specified gaunted cheecks the main difference in the elves bone structure is the cut of the eyes and the noses. The first one and the last one and even second one had those. I can agree on the OP on just one thing. Currently elves in bg3 looks way too caucasian and they are not supposed to be. ((i would love to create a super lovely elven lady like in the last picture with chubby cheeks.))
2) You are not making any sense at all. What i said is the color wheel in the case of Tiefling is very useful. There is a large number of tiefling that comes from Asmodeus,Zariel,Mephistophele. However not all of them. A tiefling could actually be coloured like an human with distinct fiendish aspect.
I said I was dropping it and I really intend to but you seem to have missed the point. We're not talking about Tieflings, we're talking about elves. Currently you an make an Elven character with any skin colour, any hair colour and any eye colour. You can even give them all black eyes or a variety of demon eyes. When I asked you whether you were against this you said no, despite the fact that this is not in lore.
The only thing to conclude from this inconsistent position is that the lore you particularly care about is specifically one of ethnicity. It's not a great look, to say the least, that you apparently couldn't possibly cope with people being able to makenon-Caucasian elves in their own games but you're fine with the idea of creating a bright orange, carrot topped one. Kind of indicates where your specific issues lie, if it was all about Lore then you would have kicked up this much of a fuss when the game first released and you saw it came with the ability to turn customization restrictions off. If you're only complaining now that someone has asked for some non-Caucasian faces...well like I said. Maybe something for you to reflect on.
I won't define my statements like compaling. I am just giving feedback. TO be clear with you i would not have problem if those would be just tied to your character as i could chose to ignore that. I would have a problem tho if i would see in the game elven npc with Asian,African,Cacuasian,Latin faces because that would be absolutely lore breaking. I also think that developing something to add human diversity to a race that is not supposed to have Human ethnicy would be a waste of resources. I'd rather would instead they focus the development on made the elven heads actually elven.
Also you are starting to go in the zone of assumption there is nothing to assume my position is pretty clear and is not meant to offend anybody. Also do you want to make an elven char that has also a human Ethnicy? do it! That's what half elves are for.
Okay.
Not gonna talk about politics, not gonna be snarky.
(Okay, I don't exactly know where the line is between being "cheeky" and being "snarky", but I'm going to try.)But I am gonna dig into this some more.
First of all, +9999 to all of Braxton's posts. I'm with this person.Maybe we need to take off our choir robes for the Holy Church of The Lore™ for a minute, here. I've seen a few people use this idea of "The Lore™" to counter requests like the original poster's. I quoted a couple of you above, but you're not the only people who feel this way.
But what IS The Lore™? Forgotten Realms, and D&D as a brand in general, is an ever-evolving, ever-changing mishmash of the disparate ideas of hundreds of various creative minds. Ed Greenwood was the original creator of FR, but since then many, many other people have changed his original ideas. (And he no longer owns the IP, so he kinda has no authoritative say in it now.) But I'd bet any amount of money that if I asked Ed Greenwood, "Hey, can I have an elf with African facial features in Faerun?" he'd laugh and say, "Of course you can!"
From edition to edition, MASSIVE changes take place to the sacred "lore", often times COMPLETELY retconning huge chunks of the narrative underpinnings of the setting, and countless small details. Heck, the entire cosmology of the planes, the entire metaphysical basis of EXISTENCE in these realms, is completely re-designed with EVERY editiion.
In 1e, devils were devils, though they had little in common, mechanically, with the devils of today. In 2e, suddenly they were "baatezu", because of real world concerns influencing the designers to step away from a problematic term. They were from the "lower planes" and specifically a plane that embodied lawfulness and evilness. But then in 3e, hey look, devils again, and now they're from a new group of planes, the "fiendish planes", and their plane no longer has anything to do with law. 4e comes along and suddenly devils come from the Astral Sea, same place as the gods, and they're in the same category of creature as ANGELS. 5e, they're back to being "baatezu" but ALSO "devils", and hey, they're once again from the "lower planes" (but these are a different layout of planes than the old ones). Tieflings are almost totally unrecognizable from their earliest incarnations, as are dragonborn. And the list of these kinds of constant changes would be insanely long.
How exactly are we supposed to maintain some ironclad "immersion" based on setting consistency when the setting is never consistent in the first place? Sometimes they even change the lore WITHIN an edition. When even the people who write about the setting don't give a toss about their own previously-written lore, how are we supposed to take it seriously? Whatever it says now, in 5e, will probably be totally different in a couple of years, anyway. In short, there IS no "The Lore™".
This isn't Middle-earth, a monolithic setting that was (mostly) the work of one creator with absolute authority over it, and functionally became sacrosanct when he died. If you want a The One True Lore to worship at the altar of, Tolkien's world is a perfect place to do it. But that's not even remotely true for Faerun, which is about as constant as Lady Gaga's hairstyle.
And if the argument is "well only current 5e lore counts", then why are we posting old images from the 3rd edition Player's Handbook and pointing to them as though they're the Code of Hammurabi? One The Lore™ for all time (if it's convenient to whatever I happen to want).
The elves don't have some totally alien features that looks nothing like Caucasian people. They are clearly based on Caucasian people, and slightly modified. I know this is true, because for DECADES the only pictures of elves showed them with white skin. Because they were definitely based on white people originally. "These aren't Caucasian features, these are ELVEN features, see?" doesn't hold any water with me. And literally nothing about the narrative underpinnings of the fictional fantasy elf race changes if you draw a few elves with African facial features. The character of the elven people doesn't change. The history of the elven people doesn't change. The interests and talents of the elven people don't change. Elves do not stop being elves because they have a little different bone structure that happens to be different from how I look.
Let's not even talk about (by that I mean, "let's definitely talk about") the hundreds (maybe thousands?) of different artists' depiction of elves in hundreds and hundreds of official D&D products. If it's in a TSR or WotC book, it's official art. So ANY way that you've seen an elf depicted in ANY D&D book is a valid possible way that elves could look. And if that's the case (it is), then no, elves are not "supposed" to have any particular facial configuration, since they've been drawn a hugely varied number of ways by the "official" artists. You can't just cherry-pick a single, specific old image from two editions ago and say, "This is how they're supposed to be!" And that picture in the 5e PHB totally looks like a regular Caucasian person with very minor alterations to appear slightly more angular. Cut the games with this whole "here's ONE image that proves how elves are SUPPOSED to look, according to The Lore™" thing.
Bucket says that African facial features on elves has no "justification in the lore". It also has no explicit CONTRADICTION in the lore, either. We know there are places in Faerun where African-featured people exist (Durpar, Turmish, Mulhorand, Chult, etc.), so is it not possible that there are also elves in those places, who look as similar to the humans of their region as the "regular" elves where the "regular" people live do? If you saw an African-featured elf on the Sword Coast, could you really not just make the extremely easy mental leap of, "Oh, I guess she comes from a faraway land" or similar?
"Adding things that breaks the lore SMASH the credibility and the immersion the setting provides to me."
(I added the caps for style.) Okay, wow. I literally can't even respond to this line without creeping dangerously close to that "snark" category, so I'm just gonna leave it alone.
"Completely unnecessary", eh? For whom, exactly? For you, obviously, but the very post that you are responding to proves that it IS something important to SOME people. "This change does nothing for ME, therefore it is completely unnecessary." Interesting take.
Okay, hold the fish taco up. I think I found the part where all of this argument (the one about The Lore™ and such) really starts to break down here. "I wasn't talking about the cheeks". Really now? So The Lore™ is only binding when it fits the exact thing that you want to be true? You can't point at an image and say, "Here, before you, BEHOLD the one true appearance of elves!", and then go back and say, "Oh, but not those cheeks though. Just the other stuff." You think that an elf having a more African-looking bone structure would SMASH The Lore™, but chubby cheeks mystically do not? How does this make any sense -- oh wait, it's just because you LIKE the chubby cheeks. I'm sorry, but "chubby elves" obliterates my immersion and also retroactively ruins every memory I have of playing D&D for 30+ years. And just from looking at that picture, I think I have schizoaffective disorder now*.
* (Ha, psych, I already had it.)
This whole Cheeksgate debacle (as I shall now call it, precisely once) really puts every other argument you've made on shaky ground here. It almost feels like you're being disingenuous or something, but I can't say that for sure. "They have to look like THIS. Except for the cheeks, those can look like whatevs. But don't you DARE broaden that nose or the entire verisimilitude of Faerun is SHATTERED." Come on, are you being serious?
"I would have a problem though if I would see in the game elven NPC with Asian, African, Caucasian, Latin faces because that would be absolutely lore breaking."
(Cleaned that up just a bit for you.) Um, the game is already chock-full of elves with Caucasian faces. How is it possible that you don't see that? No really, I am genuinely asking. I feel like this has to be some kind of willful blindness or something?
![[Linked Image]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yc2vZzuSF7Y/maxresdefault.jpg)
If she was any more Caucasian-looking, her name would have to be Karen instead of Kagha. Please come with something better than this.
For my final trick, I'm just gonna drop a quote that is posted on the store pages for every older D&D book for sale online. They posted this EVERYWHERE. They being Wizards of the Coast. Creators of D&D and ACTUAL arbiters of The Lore™.
We (Wizards) recognize that some of the legacy content available on this website does not reflect the values of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise today. Some older content may reflect ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice that were commonplace in American society at that time. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. Dungeons & Dragons teaches that diversity is a strength, and we strive to make our D&D products as welcoming and inclusive as possible. This part of our work will never end.Helpful link so you know I didn't make that quote up:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/produc...--QuickStart-Rules-4e?src=also_purchasedThe Lore™? SMASHED.
Now that's a lot of words, so I'll just paraphrase: "We, Wizards of the Coast, have come to the wise conclusion that the societal impact of our work is actually a lot more important than strict pedantic adherence to whatever dodgy lore we might have come up with before (and we change it all the time anyway, lol), so we are quite nakedly disavowing some of The Lore™ because it no longer contributes to the kind of real world that we (Wizards) want to live in. In short, and we say this in our official capacity, fuck The Lore™."
But hey, what do I know?
