Elves

[Sir Mathodius Black]

I just read LXG (league of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and one of the characters in it is am immortal.  Like the way fey are described, he is really laid back, and doesnt seem to care about much anymore simply because he has an eternity to see things happen.  it was some good insight onto how to roleplay and look at the fey in ROS.  Now in really understant why they lack those SA's.

[Jasper the Mimbo]

The LXG movie was surprisingly good. Stewart Townsend's portrayal of Dorian Grey (the immortal) was right on the money. Perfect Fae resource.

[Irmo]

There's a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that offers one viewpoint on where a potentially discrepancy between human thought and some fey thought might be. It obviously loses a lot in translation, yet I found the following, which strives to preserve the tone and meaning over literacy:
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I shudder with fear for the human word.
Everything they proclaim is so precise.
This is called Dog and that is called House,
and here is the beginning and there is the end.

I worry about their sense, their play with mockery,
they know everything that's been and shall be;
no mountain is still to them wonderful;
their gardens and goods border directly on God.

I want always to warn and resist: Stay away.
To hear things sing is what pleases me most.
You touch them: they are stiff and mute.
You cut to the ground everything that is dear.
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I.e. the conflict between a rational, calculating, classifying outlook at the world vs. an intuitive, empathic, outlook concerned with the individual properties of each thing rather than with what classifications it fits in, with the rationalistic, strictly defining view of the world which defines anything strange and incomprehensible (such as sorcery) as undesirable more and more confining the magical 'habitat' of the fey.

Where one side strives to do justice to each individual thing, the other takes similarity for equality and uses abstraction in order to facilitate assessment. This, in part, can also be seen as a consequence of lifespan: The shorter lifespan needs to go about assessing its surroundings efficiently and quickly, whereas immortality can invest the time to pay attention to the details.

Interesting to read is also Landauer's 'Skepsis und Mystik' where he talks about the 'killing, voiding and desolating abstraction'.

On the one hand, we have humans regarding anything they can't explain with superstition and loathing. On the other hand we have the fey who simply reply to any concerns by humans 'You don't understand' - not out of arrogance, but because the short-lived human really DOES NOT understand...he's like a little child which has a lot to learn and which frequently breaks things out of sheer lack of knowing better -only that this infantility is what the human takes for maturity, and considers it the measure of the world. The fey, on the other hand, had the time to watch every single leaf fall of a tree not only last fall, but every fall since the tree sprouted from a seed, and has understood the deeper levels of meaning behind it.

Thoughts?

[Nick the Nevermet]

I think you've stumbled onto one of the big problems in fantasy & sci-fi RPGs: how do you roleplay something that works off alien, inhuman logic?  This is the other side of the jam: on one side there runs the danger of making non-humans stylized humans (i.e. the Path of Star Trek), and on the other how do you, assumably a human, roleplay something that is not?  I mean, we have a hard enough time trying to roleplay people who don't have modern Western values.

I'm not an expert on how to deal with this, but there are definitely some 'cheats' out there, each with its own problems.

[Irmo]

I think you've stumbled onto one of the big problems in fantasy & sci-fi RPGs: how do you roleplay something that works off alien, inhuman logic?  This is the other side of the jam: on one side there runs the danger of making non-humans stylized humans (i.e. the Path of Star Trek), and on the other how do you, assumably a human, roleplay something that is not?  I mean, we have a hard enough time trying to roleplay people who don't have modern Western values.

I'm not an expert on how to deal with this, but there are definitely some 'cheats' out there, each with its own problems.

That's one reason why I tend to avoid having the likes of (pre-)first age Elves running around in third-age Tolkien campaigns, or having to portray someone like Galadriel for an extended period of time.... I think that 10,000 years and the likes old beings are so far removed from our lines of thought that it is next to impossible to portray them as anything but what could justly be called a mockery. With short blips, it doesn't show that much, but facing them over a long time, usually there's a plethora of lose threads showing that can unravel the suspension of disbelief easily if someone just bothers pulling one.