Times where you Can't Argue with Elves in Tabletop Games.
- The Sidhe in Changeling: The Dreaming are immune to being made to look like fools with magic, and if you manage to do it the mundane way, they get a big stack of bonuses to cut you back down to size.
- Dungeons & Dragons has an unfortunate history with this trope. The AD&D 2nd Edition splatbook "The Complete Guide to Elves", also known as "The Complete Book of the Master Race" in some DM circles, is still
something of an Old Shame for Wizards of the Coast for how far it goes into making elves very overpowered mechanically with only very slight (mainly roleplay) drawbacks, along with fluff that paints them as highly smug, supremacist bastards.- Averted with Celestials in the D&D 3.5 supplement The Book of Exalted Deeds, who are happy to debate the merits of Chaotic Good vs. Neutral Good vs. Lawful Good with anyone who can muster the nerve to argue with them.
- In second-ed D&D setting Planescape all planars saw themselves as inherently superior to primes (anyone from the Prime Material Plane, including elves). Toril, Krynn, Athas – it didn't matter where on the Prime you were from or which race you were until you proved otherwise you were Clueless and had no idea how the planes worked or what the answers to life were.
- Averted in Eberron. Elves in this setting are less likely to lecture you and more likely to cleave you in half with a giant two-bladed scimitar.
- Spelljammer at least calls the elves out on it. You'd be hard-pressed to find any non-elf in the setting who doesn't find the Elven Imperial Fleet completely insufferable.
- An amusing subversion are the tritons, a deep-water type of merfolk. Theirs is a long history of fighting horrible things in the oceans miles below the surface, and so have the usual arrogance of a Proud Warrior Race, but because these battles happen miles below the surface and there's little contact between them and land, no one knows or cares what the tritons are talking about, leading to a lot of bruised egos.
- Magic: The Gathering has a sort-of example in the fairytale-inspired "Lorwyn" setting, where elves were, for the first time, just as heavily black-aligned as they were green. In-story, they were so obsessed with beauty that they literally worshiped it, and their caste-system was determined by who was the most beautiful. Bad enough on its own, right? Well, because they were so beautiful, they considered themselves the de facto rulers of the entire setting, and actively hunted down and killed "eyeblights," creatures they deemed "too ugly to live", which included goblins (especially goblins,) and even disfigured elves. Granted, when Lorwyn was plunged into a Brothers Grimm-esque darkness and became "Shadowmoor," a setting which was decidedly less interested in looking pretty, this made their change in position all the more satisfying.
- Old World of Darkness zig zags between this straight and averting it. On one hand, the Kindred are, individually, superior to humankind: physically stronger, longer-lived, able to regenerate from non-fatal injury, and in possession of unimaginable powers few if any humans ever dare to match, and the supposed ways to kill them (garlic, stake through the heart, running water) are purely hogwashnote They've also been secretly controlling and manipulating human society for centuries for their own gain, for as long as there has been human society. On the other hand, vampires are by no means impervious to being killed with mundane weapons (it just takes a hell of a lot more damage to put them down for good), and humanity vastly outnumbers theirs, and many fully acknowledge that if humanity rallied against them in any sort of numbers, they would be wiped out completely. As a result, they carefully tend to The Masquerade, swiftly and severely punishing anyone who violates it, lest humans gain definitive proof of vampires and organize against them. In a way, it's a bit of a Deconstruction and smack in the face for universes such as The House of Night, from where the main page gets its quote, because it shows that while, true, the Kindred are individually superior to humanity, they can't really do much more than control the mortals from the shadows, because the moment they try to be more open about their hold on humanity, the result would be all of humanity rising against and overwhelming them.
- The elf Splatbook for Pathfinder really went out of its way to establish that elves are entirely more awesome than any other race.
- The Europans are the closest species Rocket Age has to elves, being immortal, psychic, technologically superior, and potentially the oldest species in the solar system. They tend to go on about this a lot the few times they even deign to talk to the other species, although they do send out anthropologists to learn more about them. However, the real reason you can't say screw you Europans tends to be... unpleasant.
- Shadowrun products address this issue from both sides, with a heavy dose of Lampshading. On the one hand, "elf-wannabes" abound among the humans of the Sixth World, slavishly watching human-bashing shows from Tir Tairngire and saving up for surgery to elf-ify themselves; on the other, actual immortal elves (leftover from Earthdawn) are depicted as callous, spoiled jerkass powermongers, who hold non-immortal elves in nearly as much contempt as humans. Ironically, ordinary elves who just want to get on with their lives find both the "wannabes" and the nobles every bit as distasteful as other humans do.
- Space 1889 weirdly inverted, this is many Martians’ opinion about how humans think that their ideas of Christianity, Progress, and Science make them superior. Extra points for some humans thinking that Martians resemble elves (there is very little elfish in their behaviour, though).
- The elves of Warhammer play the trope very straight indeed. The existence of the Elves' natural arrogance is thought to be a result of their exposure to the wild magics that have saturated the Warhammer world since the coming of the Old Ones. Elves are very resistant to magic, thanks to their natural affinity for it, but not completely immune. Rather than physical mutation and madness, such as humans might develop, this racial trait is the price Elves pay (just as the Dwarfs have been made universally stubborn and covetous for gold). But although they share the same basic psychological substrate, the three different kindreds of elves - High, Dark, and Wood Elves, express it in very different ways. Indeed, it might almost be said that the manner in which different elves manifest their race's natural sense of arrogant superiority is the defining feature of the different kindreds' cultures:
- The Asur (High Elves) behave with a kind of patronising paternalism towards the lesser races – they think that poor, feeble humans and dwarfs are constantly in need of their help and should be saved from themselves by High Elf intervention. They see the preservation of the world and the good things in it as a noble responsibility that falls on their shoulders alone because nobody else is up to the task. The fact that they're not always wrong on this just serves to reinforce their beliefs and rub everyone else up the wrong way.
- The Druchii (Dark Elves) are obsessed with conquest and domination, and their take on elven superiority is that elves are so much better than everyone else that they can and should take what they want. Elves deserve to rule the world, and the lesser races exist for them to enslave or murder at whim.
- The Asrai (Wood Elves) are fierce isolationists. They have little to no interest in the affairs of the lesser races and see little point in having any dealings with them beyond telling them to get out of their forests at the point of an arrow. However, there is something of a schizophrenic duality at the heart of the Wood Elves, and if they do find themselves dealing with others then they might just as easily act as patronising but kind-hearted as the High Elves or as callous and murderous as the Dark Elves.
- Naturally each of the three cultures takes a very dim view of the others. The High Elves think the Dark Elves are amoral monsters, completely at odds with the noble duty of their race. The Dark Elves think of the High Elves as weaklings, who forfeit their birthright to rule by showing anything but disdain for races beneath them. Both think of the Wood Elves as rustic nobodies whose superior elven potential is being completely wasted. For their part, the Wood Elves think the High and Dark Elves are engaged in pointless and empty pursuits by dealing with the lesser races at all, and collectively have a bit of chip on their shoulder for being left to fend for themselves. Only a rare few elves seem to exhibit a more enlightened, less arrogant approach to other races. The most prominent example is the High Elf High Loremaster, Teclis, whose attitudes appear to have been shaped by the fact that he is physically weak and prone to illness, and hence an uncomfortable reminder to other High Elves of a frailty they think their race above. In the novel Sword of Caledor, Teclis muses on the inherent attitudes of elves and thinks that the reason they always come out best in comparison with humans is that it's always the elves who set the criteria. Teclis became fond of humans after helping them win the Great War Against Chaos (it helped that he's the most powerful wizard in the world), and founded the Colleges of Magic in the human city of Altdorf, teaching human students. He is a rare exception, and he knows it.
- At one point in the Storm of Chaos campaign, the Empire were getting owned by Chaos Daemons, until Teclis turns up and wipes out an entire daemon army with one spell. The Grand Theogonist thanks him by calling him a Dirty Coward for using magic. At this point Teclis gets annoyed and decides to show why you Do Not Taunt Cthulhu by pissing off and leaving the Empire to fight Chaos alone (he knew they would win without him but decided to let the humans do the fighting and dying to teach them some manners).
- Oddly enough, the Dwarfs sometimes have shades of this despite Elves Versus Dwarves being a good summary of both races' relationships. The Dwarfs are annoyed by the elves but also look down on humans as weaker, less skilled, and making inferior beer ("badly made" and "human" have the same root in Khazalid), not to mention humans being so vulnerable to Chaos corruption (Dwarfs use runes instead of the winds of magic, a much slower and rarer process but at least it doesn't backfire)note . They are honorable to fault, however, and will come to the Empire's aid as needed because of an oath dating back to Sigmar.
- The Lizardmen of Lustria have this stance as they are the hand-crafted servants of the Old Ones, and pride themselves on still following a fragmentary interperetation of their "Great Plan". The "warmblood" races are either renegade creations of the Old Ones that need to be brought back into line, or mutations that will eventually be cleansed from the world when the time is right. The ruling Slann mage-priests, tens-of-millennia-old wizards ancient enough to remember the world before the arrival of Chaos, are among the few races that can posture like this towards the elves themselves — to hear them tell it, their geomantic web is the only reason Caeldor Dragontamer's Great Vortex (a magic sink in Ulthuan that protects the mortal world from daemonic invasion) remains stable.
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The Lumineth Realm Lords (light aelves) are somewhat prone to this trope, but it comes from a different place than the usual depiction of haughty, arrogant elves. The Lumineth used to live down to the worst stereotypes, being arrogant, stuck-up mages who constantly competed with each other for greater magical supremacy. This resulted in a Realm-spanning apocalypse called the Spire-fall that utterly destroyed their civilization as they lost control of their own magic. Teclis, the god of knowledge and magecraft, helped them rebuild their civilization with a greater emphasis on humility, discipline, and not reaching beyond what you can handle. Unfortunately, they now feel the need to share these lessons with "lesser" races (mostly humans and non-Lumineth aelves) in the belief that their newfound wisdom and humility makes them much better able to handle the dangers of magic than others, who really need to learn to stop reaching beyond themselves and listen to what the Lumineth are telling them. The novel "Godsbane" shows that not all Lumineth are like this, but the ones who aren't are viewed as dangerous radicals who will bring about a return to the reckless, undisciplined days of the Spirefall.
- The Eldar of Warhammer 40,000 play this trope straight in every dealing with the "lesser races". It often fails to work because the other races are either Always Chaotic Evil and Ax-Crazy or Xenophobes and inevitably tell them Screw You, Elves! with the biggest and nastiest guns at hand. Not that the Eldar are any better...
- First you have the Craftworld Eldar, who take their arrogance to the levels of "we're better than everyone else, so we're allowed to kill thousands of the lesser races to preserve the lives of a few of us" (though to be fair, everyone else in the setting has the same mentality). Next, you have the Dark Eldar, who take their arrogance level to "we're better than everyone else, so we're allowed to kidnap thousands of the lesser races and take them back to our inter-dimensional Wretched Hive city and brutally torture, rape and kill them because we need to eat their emotions and souls, and besides, it's fun". Yep. Unlike their Fantasy counterparts, however, while the Craftworld and Dark Eldar don't like each other, they recognize each other as Eldar and are fully capable of cooperating for mutual benefit without stabbing each other in the back. And then there's the Harlequins, a sect of space-elf ninja thespians dedicated to worship of the lost Eldar god Cegorach and thwarting the efforts of Chaos. Hilariously, these Monster Clowns who keep liquifying people and being mysterious and utterly terrifying for no reason, are also the least arrogant and xenophobic (being the most likely to ally with humans against Chaos) of the Eldar and thus the most likeable.
- One of the only, if not the only, Eldar who actually acknowledged that his race really isn't any better than the rest of the galaxy was a philosopher who had been given the title "the Perverse" because he considered the Orks to be the Only Sane Race. His reasoning was that Orks are thriving, have all their great questions answered, and live simple lives of eating, sleeping, and fighting (and occasionally looting or cobbling something together). Everyone else, especially the Eldar, are struggling to stay alive as well as facing a number of existential threats.
- Also not helping matters is the fact that one of the biggest of the many billions of skeletons the Eldar have in their closet is that their ancient ancestors created a new Chaos God by literally fucking them into existence, and in the process dealt a heavy blow to their own race. Suffice to say it's gonna be a long while before anyone lets the Eldar forget about that unfortunate little detail.
