For some mysterious reason my reply got deleted or lost in bot moderation hell so I’m going to rewrite my points.

I think you should write such as history and encourage you to do so.

I read a lot of what EGG cited as his influences and I think he was totally honest when he said JRRT was a secondary influence. His primary influences were indeed Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Robert Howard, Jack Vance, and H. P. Lovecraft. Obviously, the popularity of LotR was a huge part of what made D&D a success, but I think D&D elves are not particularly LotR influenced but are much more their own thing. They’re much more mortal, in general. Half elves are not uncommon, for instance.

I also don’t think that the Tolkien elves are particularly wizard-y, unlike, say, Gandalf, who clearly is one of the archetypes. (Nor of course is the spellcasting much like D&D spellcasting.) The two elves in what JRRT wrote who clearly have spellcasting abilities on-screen are Galadriel and Luthien Tinuviel. Galadriel’s demonstrated abilities aren’t all that flashy, but then again magic in LotR really isn’t, certainly not by the Third Age. She casts a scrying spell and clearly has a massive power over the land aided by her possession of one of the Rings of Power. It’s much more alluded to than clearly shown. Luthien’s power is her song and force of will, not her deep knowledge of lore from poring over musty tomes, which says “Charisma caster” to me. Luthien’s tale deserves to be more widely known.

With the desire to game balance all the races, it wouldn’t really work so well.

In a campaign I could see removing some classes or archetypes from some races. For example, making monks be a githzerai-inspired tradition would make them feel pretty special and unusual. If that’s too far a stretch, make things work like the bladesinger. Speaking of which, that would make a pretty solid gith race archetype.

Mearls always seems to lowball everything. I get why, particularly given how important organized play is to them, but still… lowball.

Gygax may have denied any strong influence from Tolkien, but I’ll be damned if I believe that the same is true of writers after him. Dave and Gary laid the foundation of D&D, but a staggering number of other folks have gone in other directions with it. Just to state the blatantly obvious for a moment, Gygax’s creative control over D&D is now much less than half of D&D’s lifespan.

This is a conspiracy to make me write the History of the Elf, isn’t it.

Oh I know the origins of it, I just question how it got stuck in place so much. The only kind of caster back in the old days was the wizard, so there it is. Charisma casting wasn’t a thing until 3E, really.

Gygaxian elves are strongly based on Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, among other sources. I think Tolkein’s elves are less of an influence than one might suppose. Certainly Gygax stated that Tolkien was less of a direct influence over him than were other sources. This is separate from whether LotR was important for the development and growth of D&D. It clearly was.

Elves as bards was kind of a trope, too, but they’re mediocre bards based on the rules in most recent editions.

Elves-as-wizards has its most definitive root in OD&D, when elves first show up as a race-as-class. Elves don’t act like bards or sorcerers because there ARE no bards or sorcerers – and then it became

If you’re going go to with one of the three original classes, some of Tolkien’s elves definitely pick up magic-user spells. I’m not sure what Gygax’s other influences were specifically for elves; if you want to argue for Melniboneans (which is a bit of a stretch with D&D’s goodly elves), the argument for magic-user over anything else only gets strengthened.

If you or anyone reading this has more background on this question, I’m going to need it when I get to the History of the Fighter-Mage series.

I really don’t like the “elves are wizards” thing much. I’m not 100% sure how that got stuck in place, but it has. Bards and sorcerers feel much better to me, I guess, and the stat setup really pushes that away. Some choices on the stat boosts would be nice.

Just reread Rich’s article. Can’t vote with Mearls on the Gith. Rich did a bang up job for sure.

The Gith they presented in the UA have basically the same stats as the lower-CR versions in the Monster Manual. That’s a little boring, but it makes sense, I guess. Those who choose to play a Gith character are mainly going to do so out of a desire to embrace the races’ lore and look.

It would be nice if PC Gith had some distinctive ability(s) beyond a handful of spells, but I’m at a loss to suggest what that might look like.

Came here to say exactly that about the Courts. Maybe that’ll make it into the next Fey article?