@unique stephen: I’m not sure what your points amount to or to whom they are addressed.

Personally all this half-elf, half-dragon, half-demigod(quartergod?) makes me sick (not in a racist way). It’s all the fault of meta gamers trying to get every power they can possibly have from the word “go”. I realize Tolkien talked about halfelven in his books. If your world is based on a creationist perspective where sex is a magical process in which any being can produce offspring with any other being (i.e. the Greek minotaur) it makes sense.

I prefer to use biology to make my worlds have some kind of sense to them. It’s not a race thing, because elves and humans aren’t different races, they are different species. I don’t believe in half-vulcans because it is to improbable that two species that developed on different planets could conceive any viable offspring.

When a horse is crossed with a donkey to make a mule, it is tough like a donkey with the larger size of a horse, though not quite as large. The great disadvantage of this cross in that the “mule” cannot usually produce viable offspring. As a world creator I might translate this into a cross of an elf and human. The offspring’s size will be somewhere between a human and an elf, with a reduced form of elven beneficial physiology and a reduced form of a human’s versatility. However, instead of sterility, the offspring will also have deformed ears that are considered unattractive by elves and humans.

That’s all just my opinion. It’s my world, so I’ll do as I please.

Now, in the case of magic and whatnot, not to mention game balance, this doesn’t necessarily hold true. But in this case, I’d agree that the half-elf getting a good piece of the human parents’ adaptability (skill points) as well as a reduced degree of the elven parents’ resistances and skill bonuses, without getting the feat or all of the elven bonuses, is a much more fair deal.